Comment Articles

My response to Richard Stallman

John Carroll ZDNet.com

Published: 12 Jan 2004 13:30 GMT

There are a number of people in the open-source pantheon, among them Bruce Perens and Eric Raymond. However, Richard Stallman, as author of the GPL and one of the most prolific authors in the open-source movement, certainly fills the role of Zeus. Perens and Raymond serve many purposes, though a number of their recent writings seem aimed at channelling the open-source community's ire towards an enemy (usually Microsoft, who is portrayed as an evil Zelig that they inevitably see standing in the shadows in photo opportunities with open-source critics). Stallman, however, rarely dirties his hands with such things, leaving him free to operate in the ethereal realm of open-source philosophy.

Stallman serves his purpose well, even if I often disagree with him. What motivated me to write this response, however, were six simple words included in his recent article: Free software does not mean "gratis".

Anyone who has followed my ZDNet writings knows that I am sceptical about open-source as a foundation for revenue generation. If you are writing a utility that is designed to be used for free, as in gratis, then open-source is a great model to drive usage. In fact, that's what I did with my CLR Proc Container freeware, a product from which I had no intention of generating any revenue (though I used an MIT open-source licence so that both proprietary and open-source developers might adapt and extend it). If you are trying to generate revenue, however, you are fighting against a structural issue in your business model, one that gives the recipe by which you made your product to competitors as well as consumers. The problem is deepened through use of a GPL licence, which is currently the most popular open-source licence.

In short, most open-source (and all GPL) software is of the free, as in gratis, variety, because the source code is available for all to see. Furthermore, Stallman's encouragement to replace proprietary software with free alternatives would complicate matters for makers of open-source software, as it would remove one of the few areas from which open-source software generates revenue: licensing the code to makers of proprietary software.