The Free Software Foundation’s Bradley Kuhn believes the GNU General Public License has a positive effect on the software industry.
The GNU General Public License has a positive effect on the software industry. Vibrant software sharing defended by the legal protections of GPL inspires growth and advancement, just as publishing and sharing research results invigorates fields such as physics, mathematics and psychology. Software advances through incremental improvement. Paradigms shift, standards change, and methods are reinvented. Access to others’ results, both successes and failures, spurs rapid growth. The widespread adoption of Internet technology started from widely shared and incrementally improved free software. That process continues today.
The GPL does change the ethical implications of our development activity. Sharing software is encouraged; sharing improved versions of software is rewarded. The primary industrial mechanisms and business models for software – support, contracted customization and improvements for hire – thrive and are equalized under this model of freedom. Software is now, as it really always has been, a service rather than a product. The GPL lays the ground rules, ensuring that no particular developer or company holds power over any other, and no one controls the software users.
The other side by Chris Sontag
Debate the issue with Sontag and Kuhn.
Users face a free marketplace. A vendor who distributes under GPL does not lock you in to their product. If you don’t like your contractors, you fire them and hire new ones. You have the source code, and the means and rights to modify it, so you can do the work in-house. Software companies can be held accountable by their customers and must actually show the value of the expertise that they add to the software.
Most industries that are primarily intellectual in nature, such as software, law and auto mechanics, thrive best as a market for experts. Information about the field is publicly available, taught in universities and swapped among practitioners. But experts who can leverage their knowledge into clear results for clients move to the top. Activity of experts under the umbrella of GPL forms a meritocracy, and yields a shared commons that profits all.
Admittedly, some business models don’t function in that meritocracy. The model whereby you bamboozle the world into running your proprietary software and extract an exclusionary licensing fee from each individual – who cannot fix bugs, make improvements or adaptations or get support services from anyone but you – has already begun to collapse. Trade-secret proprietary software, based on keeping knowledge away from users and programmers, now fails the test of business effectiveness as well as ethical propriety. A new IT economy, properly based on software engineering’s scientific roots, has emerged. The GPL underpins that new economy, as it puts users, developers, customers and academics on equal footing to improve and profit from the shared commons.
Success in this new industry will not be determined by exclusionary licensing deals, but by the ability of your software engineers to understand and improve the commons. The GPL creates a fair and competitive software industry that functions as a scientific endeavor, not a snake oil sale.
Kuhn is executive director of the Free Software Foundation, a charitable organization in Boston. He can be reached at bkuhn@fsf.org.
