Open Source and Free Software – A way out of Intellectual Property Transgression

Andre Griffith

Last week we examined the implications of intellectual property in general and those implications with respect to information technology in particular.  Some themes that came out were the collective disadvantages to individuals, firms and the country at large from the widespread theft (or unauthorised use, where such use is not explicitly illegal) of intellectual property.

Tomorrow September 20 will be celebrated worldwide as Software Freedom day which has been celebrated on the third Saturday of September starting from the year 2004.  This event makes it opportune for us to examine one of the solutions to the vexing question of intellectual property with respect to Information Technology and that is the use of either free or open-source software.

Open source software and free software are commonly confused and indeed the distinction is often itself a confusing one.  Perhaps the least confusing distinction I have come across is the one which says that open source is a software development methodology, while free software is a social and political movement.  The Open Source school of thought stresses that the advantages of open dissemination, distribution and collaboration on software development lead to sounder and more reliable products giving more value to the users.  The Free Software movement however argues that users of software should have complete freedom to do whatever they wish and ought not to be restricted in anything they wish to do with their software, including modifying, redistributing it etc (exactly the same thing that open source users do).  In an attempt to avoid confusion with the popular and natural perception that the free software movement is all about “software you can obtain for a price of zero”, this movement tries to summarise its philosophy by advising us to think of free software as analogous to “free speech as opposed to free beer”.

As an interesting aside, I recall a BBC feature, where it was related that an entrepreneur with limited resources possessed mineral exploration rights to a number of properties and a series of surveys had produced for him, information about the characteristics of the various exploration blocks.

  Now the normal model is that such information would be proprietary and would be kept absolutely secret.  However, instead of using his limited resources which would not have taken him very far in actual exploration, this entrepreneur placed all of his highly sensitive information in the public domain, on the Internet and invited anyone to tell him for a reward of 1M USD, where his most likely actual deposits were.  On the basis of harnessing the knowledge of all available and interested parties, that entrepreneur was able to actually identify actual deposits and to float a successful public offering of the company for a sum in the region of 100M USD.  Although, this example does not subscribe in essence to the “free software” school, it most certainly does exemplify the “effectiveness of open collaboration/development ethos” of the “open source school.

Regardless of the differences in the schools of thought, in many cases, the practical result of the matter is that coming out of both schools is a wide array of extremely powerful, reliable industry-strength software that is available absolutely free of cost to anyone that wishes to use it.  The power in the open-source and free software is a power of harnessing the knowledge of every person on the globe who has expertise and is willing and interested to participate (for whatever reason) in the betterment of the product.  Many people would be familiar with linux, the legendary free Unix-like operating system now in its seventeenth year, that runs on ordinary personal computers, and less so with Apache, the open-source web server that runs most of the websites on the Internet.  Linux is widely used in private and public sectors alike in entities ranging from Amazon to the United States NASA.  Just ten years ago, the big proprietary hardware vendors IBM, Sun Microsystems, Hewlett Packard, Digital Equipment Corp (DEC) and others all had their own lines of mini computers that ran their own proprietary variants of the Unix operating system.  Obtaining one of these systems could set you back you back in the region of $250,000.00 (green money mind you).  The continual penetration of the Linux operating system has all but eliminated these proprietary machines as a line of business for these giants.  The result, incredible value for the consuming public which has an industry strength, ultra reliable platform to run their most sensitive business applications for a fraction of the price of proprietary alternatives.  We say a fraction of the price as opposed to free since although the price of the software would be zero or nominal, many companies make a good living from providing support for some of these systems.

The proof of the pudding is in the eating, and many of the big guns in the proprietary software world are indeed lining up to eat.  All of the giants above, now support Linux on their hardware.  MySQL, a powerful open-source database has the potential to do to the database market the same thing that Linux has done for the Operating System market.  The company that developed MySQL has been acquired by Sun Microsystems for 1 billion USD.  Sun Microsystems, by the way some years ago, made its proprietary Solaris Operating System open. The Open-Source community is warily watching Sun to see which way it goes with the product.  In 2007 Citrix Systems Inc., the clear leader in so-called “virtualization” software acquired XenSource, an open-source virtualisation company for 500M USD.  While true adherents of open source and free software may have some intuitive discomfort with the big numbers thrown around above, my objective in dwelling on them, is to make the point, that products of incredible value, have been produced by these movements after all, the global leaders in the IT business are not going to throw billions of dollars in the free market at worthless products are they ?  The incredible thing is that these products are out there freely available by permission of their developers thus you don’t have to (and you really should not) pirate proprietary products.

The alert reader of this series would rightfully ask me to square this consideration of open source and free software with my thinking on the lack of appreciation of the value of IT systems that is occasioned in not paying for them.  To this I say firstly, that not paying for something is distinct from stealing it. In the presence of an appropriate Intellectual Property framework, the latter would be accompanied by penalties that would rationally, be considered part of the price of the choice to pirate.  The second argument goes right back to the very first article in this series where it was argued that it was the ability to extract value from the systems is what really makes the difference between successful and unsuccessful companies in their use of information technologies.

Are proprietary systems dead ?  Not in my view.  Although there exists a wide body of open-source products, In many cases, open source products may not be available, the business may not be comfortable with the support model, or the network of users (an important consideration where sharing of information is necessary) may be small.  My advice to prospective acquirers of software would however be, to ascertain whether open-source or free products fit for your purpose exist, before extending your search to proprietary software.