Why Software Should Be Free (2002)
Edit: I rewrote this to add a lot of substance.<p>This was written in 1991. The world was very very different then. The Internet was small. Hardware was commodity. Most of the power in the industry belonged to proprietary software vendors like Microsoft and there was a danger they would totally monopolize the future.<p>Things have changed quite radically. Today hardware has been effectively de-commoditized, on one hand by the escalating difficulty of building a high quality machine and on the other hand by vertically integrated cloud vendors whose hardware becomes &quot;special&quot; by virtue of its location at a highly connected secure data center. The Internet is also huge, and it has made network effects powerful and has created a new form of closed called &quot;SaaS.&quot;<p>Today software is commoditized, hardware is proprietary, and SaaS is where the power is centered. Everything depends on the cloud. Much of the software that powers the cloud is open source, but that doesn&#x27;t matter. Having source or being able to run your own copy is irrelevant if the value is in the centralized network location of the runtime and the fact that the cloud has all the data.<p>RMS&#x27;s strategy for freedom is obsolete. If software is totally free and un-owned, all the power belongs to the owners of physical capital and SaaS systems that leverage that capital to create network effects around centralized <i>instances</i> of software.<p>SaaS is more closed than commercial software ever was. I can still run a 1980s proprietary application in a VM on my own system, but I cannot run 2008&#x27;s Facebook or Google. SaaS operators have total visibility into everything we do and the power to rescind capabilities at any time. It&#x27;s a pure panopticon. Today we need open and liberated <i>runtimes</i> more than we need open and liberate <i>source</i>.<p>Those of us who care about privacy and freedom need to change strategies to cope with a changing world, but the problem is that RMS&#x27;s views and the views of others in the 1990s FOSS movement have been dogmatized and transformed into a religion.<p>It&#x27;s not a religion. It&#x27;s a strategy, and one that <i>was</i> largely successful at checking the power of Microsoft and other commercial software vendors. The trouble is that it&#x27;s a strategy that also undermines the economic sustainability of software, thus handing all the economic power and muscle to those who control other aspects of the stack. Those other aspects of the stack now rule us by virtue of the golden rule: &quot;he who has the gold rules.&quot;<p>The FOSS movement is fighting the last war.<p>What we need is a new model that hopefully can retain the openness of free software but that recapitalizes the software layer and allows the center of gravity to shift more toward the physical and economic edge of the network. I was hoping for a while that cryptocurrency would furnish this, but it was taken over and destroyed by scammers. Some are exploring &quot;source available&quot; licenses like the BSL, but that feels like a stopgap to me. There has to be something that preserves the freedom of open source at the individual level while restoring revenue streams to software and limiting the ability of the for-profit cloud to exploit FOSS to create its silos.