Being brave¶
Choosing free software isn’t the easy way. It makes our life more complicated. You need to consider the challenges and then decide bravely how to react to them. This will require measurable additional effort. You need to find trustworthy partners because you cannot do everything yourselves. But all these challenges are worth the effort.
Choosing free software means that you need to be brave because you leave the mainstream. Some people believe that managers should be rather careful than brave. I don’t fully agree with this. Here are some thoughts to hopefully encourage you. Being brave does not mean to be careless. There are situations where a brave decision needs to be done.
Digital sovereignty¶
The sovereignty of a nation is inalienable [1]. With the increasing impact of software on our daily lives, free software is the only choice if we want sustainable peace.
Free software is to computers what democracy is to society. Free software means democracy, proprietary software means dictatorship and slavery. Proprietary software means that you are either a slave or a master, free software means that there is no master and no slave.
The most important advantage of Free software is to avoid vendor lock-in. This is still very difficult to sell. The breakthrough of free software is not yet achieved. Normal managers still prefer a proprietary system over a sovereign system because that’s cheaper and more comfortable. We all tend to value comfort over sovereignty.
Some people just shrug when I tell them that avoiding vendor lock-in is more important than their comfort, or that I will rather grow potatoes than accepting to write non-free software. My Lino project exists only because I am crazy enough to believe that open solutions will become the norm some day. I agree to say that this day might not be very soon.
Free software is a common good¶
It’s not enough to publish your software under some free license.
The long-term question with free software is: who is going to care for it?
It seems that nobody feels responsible for things that belongs to everybody.
While Free Software gains popularity because of its technical and strategical advantages, its administrative and commercial challenges become more visible. Having the source code free and open is not enough. A software product is more than its source code, it also consists of developer resources, user documentation, training material, configuration files, installation tools, promotional documentation and a legal infrastructure.
Managing and controlling all these things for a software product with more than 25 users is more work than a single person can reasonably do. There will be a community around the product, which is more than the developers who write the source code.
The legal entity that controls the community of a software product is what I call the product carrier. And a product carrier, like every organization, needs a business model.
As long as that business model is based on the idea of increasing the profit of a limited group of humans (the owners or shareholders), we will remain in the vicious circle that leads to vendor lock-in or hijacking. A permissive free software license leaves the door open to such endeavour. An example is explained in 2021-12-12 Why I no longer use the MIT license for new projects
Even the GNU Affero General Public License (AGPL), probably the most protective Free Software license there is, cannot fully protect a software product from getting hijacked. An example is what’s currently happening with WebKit Internet browsers (explained e.g. in 2021-11-28, Bozhidar Batsov, Firefox is the Only Alternative)
If we want Free Software to be sustainably free, we must consider the whole product as a common good. And we must govern the product as such. We must realize that software development is a res publica, a common issue, and as such needs to be governed in a transparent and democratic way. It becomes a public infrastructure, similar to roads, railways, water distribution systems, school buildings. That’s why Free Software belongs to the competence of public authorities.
Footnotes