In a similar way, the issue of copyright and software licences (that is, "Free" licences vs. proprietary licences) isn't really about copyright and licencing; it's about freedom. The complication is that both sides of the debate believe that they are arguing on the side of freedom.
On one hand, there is the idea that something belongs to whoever made it; they should have the freedom to decide who uses it and what it's used for, and to charge money for their work if they like. If they build a chair, or write a song, or some software, or paint a painting, then they are free to either give it away or sell it. (Or chop it up and dance on the pieces, if they prefer— the point is that they are in control of what they do with it.)
On the other hand is the idea that someone who buys something should have the freedom to do whatever they want with their purchase- to shorten the legs on a chair, to copy a song from a CD to their iPod, to use a piece of software on their computer at work as well as the one at home, or to change how it works so that it works better for them.
The debate tends to focus on either the rights of the user and the rights of the creator (whether that's a designer, software developer, artist etc.) It rages about which is "right" or "best", and I don't think that there's a resolution that suits both sides— it's too broad a subject for a "one size fits all" solution— so I'm not going to try to look for one. I'm also not going to address issues such as DRM (where technologies are used to restrict what can be done with a digital file— such as the restriction to only play music on authorised devices) and closed source software and reverse-engineering; they are complicated topics which warrant their own posts. Instead, I'm going to try to approach it from a slightly different angle- from the perspective of ownership.
The Concept of Ownership
This planet has - or rather had - a problem, which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movements of small green pieces of paper, which is odd because on the whole it wasn't the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy.
From "The Hitch Hikers' Guide to the Galaxy", by Douglas Adams
Money isn't a "real" thing; it's a human creation— an abstract representation of the ownership of something. It dates back to the earliest days of the development of human society (possibly as early as 100,000BC), and is without a doubt an invention that has played a key part in the development of society.
By trading for something with an intrinsic value (such as rare metals, cows, food grains etc.), people were no longer reliant on a "coincidence of wants"- that is, that a buyer would happen to want what a seller was selling at just the same time that the seller happened to have something the buyer wanted, and was willing to trade. With money— a portable and durable representation of ownership— you can sell your fruit when it is ripe, then use the money to buy wheat when the wheat harvest comes in. Money made all commodities become more liquid, and allowed for scarce or perishable resources to be better distributed among the community. Money provided an incentive to trade with your neighbours— for example, to sell on some of your food before it rotted, so that you could eat later in the year.
But money is still an abstract concept. First, a system of something valuable (such as metals, cows or food grains) became representative of a unit of value (the shekel referred to a specific volume of barley in ancient Babylon.) With this system, metal coins were established to have a particular value beyond that of the metal itself (which could be melted down and used to make weapons or tools.) The next stage in the development of money was purely representative money- where the money itself would have no intrinsic value (such as with paper money), but would represent a set value backed up by a figure of authority. Around 330BC in ancient Egypt, warehouse receipts would function as representing a quantity of grain in a warehouse, and could be used for trade. The same basis system is still in use today; the Bank of England's notes carry a "promise to pay the bearer on demand the sum of" the value of the note.
Intrinsically connected to and predating the idea of trading— probably predating human society itself— is this idea of ownership; of something belonging to someone. Somewhere along the line, some soft, shiny yellowish metal in the ground became somebody's metal, before being turned into someone's coins, and then into a governments gold reserves, being represented by some banknotes in circulation. (Actually, the first money is thought to have been red ochre rather than gold, but the point's the same.) A farmer might grow enough crops to feed himself and his family, as well as to provide the seeds for the next seasons crops, and still have enough left over to sell. By doing the work to produce crops— or any other goods— he can make money.
The Tragedy of the Commons
"So you think that money is the root of all evil? Have you ever asked what is the root of money? Money is a tool of exchange, which can't exist unless there are goods produced and men able to produce them. Money is the material shape of the principle that men who wish to deal wlth one another must deal by trade and give value for value. Money is not the tool of the moochers, who claim your product by tears or of the looters, who take it from you by force. Money is made possible only by the men who produce. Is this what you consider evil?"
Ayn Rand
The "tragedy of the commons" is a social trap that involves a conflict over resources between individual interests and the common good. The classic example is of a number of farmers keeping cattle on a common patch of land. It's in the interests of each farmer to have more animals on the land- they can sell them, sell the milk etc. While each additional cattle brings benefits to the individual farmer, there is a penalty— the quality of the pasture they live on is degraded. However, the degradation of the quality of the pasture is spread equally amongst all the farmers; the benefits for the individual farmer for having an extra cattle will always outweigh the costs for the individual. However, what's best for the individual is obviously not always the best for the greater good.
The same principle applies quite clearly to subjects like environmentalism; where factories pump waste into the atmosphere, decreasing air quality for everyone on the planet. Or to see the principle in action on a smaller scale, just watch people step over a piece of litter in a public place— even the same people who care enough to go out of their way to put their own litter in a bin.
The idea behind the theory goes as far back as Aristotle who said "That which is common to the greatest number has the least care bestowed upon it".
Ownership of Ideas
What they did was sell invisible things. And after they'd sold what they had, they still had it. They sold what everyone needed but often didn't want. They sold the key to the universe to people who didn't know it was locked.
From "The Wee Free Men", by Terry Pratchett.
Before the printing press, there was simply no need for the abstract concept of ownership of an idea or copyright protection. The work needed to copy a book (for example) involved writing the entire book out again by hand, and before the printing press made the widespread availability of texts a reality, literacy was so low that very few people would have been able to read the copy anyway; copying books simply wasn't a profitable venture. Stories weren't something people read on their own- they would be told, or acted out as a play. The important factor of a story wasn't who came up with the story first, but who was best at telling it. (It is speculated that the works attributed to authors such as Homer and William Shakespeare weren't actually written by the individuals in question; in the case of Homer, it's widely agreed that the poems are the result of the oral tradition; stories, poems and songs that were passed on through generations before being written down in the unchanging form that survives today.)
However, the invention of the printing press meant that texts could be copied cheaply and quickly. It also meant that written works were more easily made and distributed, which in turn led to a significant increase in literacy. Not only was there now a way to cheaply copy written works, but there was also a growing market that would be interested in buying them, and an increasing value in the texts themselves. Along with the shift from an oral tradition to a written one that came with the increase in literacy, the idea of "intellectual property"— ownership of an idea (or more accurately, the expression of an idea) was starting to take shape.
However, the first copyright law passed was in England and had nothing to do with the rights of the author, but was a means of controlling publishing; a Royal Charter was given to the printers guild in 1556, granting them a monopoly on the use of printing presses in order to prevent 'offending' (ie. Protestant) texts from being circulated in Catholic England (as well as the right to confiscate or destroy unauthorised printing equipment or printed works) but eventually moving on (in 1710, under Queen Anne) to give certain rights exclusively to the author— specifically, the right to copy, modify or distribute their works for fourteen years (renewable once), after which the work moves into the Public Domain.
However, this made the idea of ownership much more complicated. If you held the copyright then you could sell something, while at the same time keeping hold of it and still having it to sell again, with little additional work involved. In addition, there was the possibility of selling a modified version of someone else's work, ruining the market for the original goods (such as in Wheaton vs. Peters, where Richard Peters published an abridged version of Henry Wheaton's court notes— the case led to copyright laws covering derivative works, as well as the original works themselves.) Also, copyright laws were national, rather than international; it was possible to cross a national border and legally copy foreign works, then import the copies back into the country of origin.
However, although the cost of creating copies was quite cheap, it relied on heavy and expensive equipment that was beyond the reach of the general public.
Digital Communication and the Information Age
The situation of suddenly changing values is being echoed today with the introduction of computers and digital communication, an increase in computer literacy and the creation of the internet. The photocopier in the 1950s, followed by home video in the late 1970s and early 1980s set the precedent for copying media for personal use. The landmark legal case of Sony vs. Universal Studios in 1984 ruled that it was "fair use" to record television broadcasts to be watched at the viewer's convenience— a practice referred to as "time shifting." Similarly, the practice of taping music became commonplace— either from the radio, or from purchased tapes and CDs.
In the space of a few decades, computers have become commonplace in the office and in the home. In the same way that what we now see as valuable "intellectual property" were first freely available (in the form of the oral tradition— stories being told and passed on), then became more valuable as technology replaced the oral tradition with written copies of texts (which turned them into a physical commodity that could be traded with), computer software has gone from being something that, broadly speaking, was something that was given away with computer hardware so that it could be used properly, and later became a very valuable commodity that is used by millions of people on a daily basis.
Free Software and Software Licencing
Proprietary software is built on the principle that the software is owned and maintained by it's publishers, and that it's users are granted permission to use it under certain conditions. Free Software (that's "free" as in "freedom") works on the principle that everyone who uses it owns the software; the software is covered by a licence, which grants the rights that copyright law usually gives to the author (to copy, reproduce and modify the software) to anyone who receives a copy of the software— often under the restriction that the same rights must be passed on to any subsequent recipient.
With Free Software, where the software itself is owned by the community; by everyone who uses it. It would appear at first glance that the Tragedy of the Commons would apply; without the drive for competition that capitalism provides with the incentive of money and profits, there should be little reason for anyone to work on it. However, it's clear from the development of Free software that this isn't the case.
The majority of email servers and web servers— applications which need to be reliable and secure— use open source operating systems as well as open source mail and web server applications. It is tried and proven to bwork effectively and effeciently; because when it's found that it doesn't, it can be quickly fixed or improved without waiting for the publishers to deem it profitable.
Unlike the examples of the farmers sharing grazing land, or chemicals being pumped into the environment, the costs and benefits of Free software development aren't shared in the same way; in fact, it's the reverse. While the costs are shouldered by the individual (the cost of development), rather than by everyone in the community, because improvements can be shared with the community, the benefits are multiplied by every user, rather than being purely reaped by the individual; if one programmer has a problem with a piece of software and does the work to solve their own problem, the rewards can be reaped by everyone who uses that piece of software. If one user finds a bug or potential security vulnerability, the patch can be shared with everyone. (With the internet, this can happen across the world incredibly quickly.)
A conflict comes when different people view the same thing in different ways; when a piece of software is viewed as a tool by one set of people and a commodity by another.
If you're thinking of software in terms of a tool, as something that you can use, and someone else gets a copy of your software, then you haven't actually lost anything. You still have what you had before, and you can still use it in the same way as before, and if the new users create improvements, or fix bugs, then you're actually better off.
However, if you're thinking in terms of the value of scarce commodities, then you have lost something; value. If you had written and owned a the only piece of software in the world that could perform a particular, vitally important task, you could probably sell it for a large amount of money. Alternatively, you could sell licences to use it for a limited period of time, and rig the software so that it wouldn't work for more than, say, a year, when you could make people pay for it again and make more money over a longer period of time.
On the other hand, if you gave a copy of the software away to someone else, then you no longer own the only existing copy; it's value is slightly diminished, as that's a copy that you could have sold. If that copy was then copied a thousand times and given away, then it would be far harder to sell your "original copy" at the same price.
But how does it pay the bills?
The royalty paid to us, the manual, the tape and the overhead make it a break-even operation. One thing you do do [by copying software] is prevent good software from being written. Who can afford to do professional work for nothing? What hobbyist can put 3-man years into programming, finding all bugs, documenting his product and distribute for free?From an Open Letter to Hobbyists, Bill Gates, February 3, 1976
The break-even operation that Bill Gates spoke of in 1976 went on to be a $44 billion multinational corporation. Meanwhile, work done by programmers doing "professional work for nothing" has eclipsed the 3 man years the early Microsoft put into programming, debugging, documenting and distributing Free software.
A 2006 study found that it would cost around €12 billion to reproduce the existing code base of Free/Open Source Software, a figure representing around 131,000 real person-years of programmers time.
Of course, the €12 billion figure is what it would cost to reproduce the existing code base, based on the rate of earnings of suitably skilled programmers and a proprietary software development model. A significant part of the reason that this huge code base exists, however, is the fact that the code itself hasn't been assigned a monetary value in such a way; if the code was being sold instead of shared, there would have been an incentive for the programmers to withold their own improvements until they could find a buyer, rather than to freely donate and/or share. The financial costs would inevitably be passed on to the project itself, and the progress of the projects would have been dramatically slowed down.
Last year, HP said that they were finding areas where they were using Open Source solutions to be more profitable than those using proprietary software. The open source MySQL database allows users to pay for a licence that allows them to keep their source code private. Red Hat, a company dedicated to open source software, had a 2006 revenue of $278.3 million. Novell (another distributor of the GNU/Linux operating system) have a revenue of over $1 billion. Even though the software itself is freely available, there is still plenty of money being made in providing services relating to the software— distributing, supporting or installing, for example.
Using open-source software, companies providing a software-related service (such as web hosting providers, developers and designers) can provide and support open-source based services to their clients without them incurring a licencing fee as they can give, rather than sell the software. (Some "free" licences prevent the software being sold for an unreasonable cost— ie. for more than the actual cost of distribution, preventing unscrupulous individuals from profiting by selling software that is freely available to unware customers.)
While it's unlikely that distributing or supporting open source software will create another giant corporation in the way that selling proprietary software created Microsoft, it seems equally unlikely that another company based around sellingn proprietary software could do the same again. Meanwhile, there are hundreds, if not thousands of profitable companies providing open source-based business solutions, as well as other projects- such as the One Laptop Per Child project, which aims to provide inexpensive (~$100) laptops, built around Free software, to developing countries for use as education resources.
In addition, the Free Software code base is still growing; it doubles in size every 18-24 months, and is projected to continue for several more years. Despite the involvement of multi-million dollar corporations, around two thirds of this code has been contributed by individuals (around 15% is contributed by firms, with another 20% contributed by institutions); not by profit-motivated corporations, but being shared by coders fixing personal problems (or as open-source activist Eric Raymond describes it, "scratching their personal itch") and sharing the solutions with the world.
[...] already talked about Free software and the commons (and still with a few more things to say about it in the future), I thought it would be worth [...]
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