Freedom vs openness

Freedom vs openness

Eric's thesis of why people write free software is summed up in one of his essays, I forget which. He says that it is simply a natural consequence of human creativity: wrap the Internet around a mind and software flows (by analogy to electromagnetism: wrap a magnetic field around a conductor and current flows). As though it were a natural law.

I think he's only got part of the picture. I think that many of us are motivated to create and contribute free software by the very ideals embodied in the GPL. The GPL may be the most widely used license in the noosphere by historical accident, but I suspect not. Most of us know in our gut that, in a large enough crowd, there will always be some arsehole who acts selfishly and spoils it for everyone. Maybe that arsehole will be me, given a big enough incentive. Game theory is all about this. The GPL keeps the arseholes on a leash. The BSD license and its ilk do not.

Openness is a virtue. For example, the government of the U.S.A. is one of the most open in the world, in the sense that much of its process is documented and publicly available (disclaimer: I'm not American). That openness means that it's hard for the government to reduce the freedom of its people, but the openness itself is not enough. People also have to be active in their defence of their freedom.

Here's a natural law of human growth: to gain something, you must sacrifice something else. To gain freedom, you must sacrifice the comfort of ignorance and apathy (at least). To gain free software, apparently we must sacrifice its absolute exploitability. Hence the GPL. This is the point that Eric seems to miss.