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04.08

Opinion: Free Software and the Future of Information Technology

By Eben Moglen

Less than thirty years ago, Richard Stallman founded the free software movement, dedicated to the principle that the free sharing of knowledge embodied in executable software was an ethical imperative. Stallman's vision, though derided as impracticable, inconsistent with economic reality, or even — in Microsoft's harshest rhetoric — as a cancer afflicting the American Way, has transformed the global software industry, and is at the very heart of the most important developments in human society since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution.

Stallman's conception of free software — that knowledge about how computers work that should be as free to copy, modify and redistribute as the recipes we cook with — drew deeply on the Western tradition of free speech and open science, but it also marked the beginning of a new, globalized version of the spirit of Yankee Ingenuity, the Hacker Ethos. The idea of hacking — the virtuosic and ironic redeployment of technology to achieve unexpected or contrarian purposes — is more than an updated Americanism, though it descends from the optimistic, equalizing spirit that, as the great historian Perry Miller noted, continuously characterizes the American approach to technology from before the founding of the Republic. Hacking is a 21st century ethos, which celebrates the lightweight, socially conscious, freely shareable properties of technical knowledge, the medium in which it works.

What the movement begun by Stallman bequeathed to hacking was the passionate commitment to freedom as both an attribute and an objective of technology. An unfree program "subjugated" users, said Stallman — robbed them of knowledge about how to improve their situation, prohibited them from sharing their discoveries, disabling both creativity and the civic sensitivity to others' needs. Hacking became about helping people share in freedom. John Gilmore, one of the founders of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said the network understands censorship as malfunction, and routes around it.

All very well, but what happened next required more than free software. Stallman’s other great invention was a legal structure for achieving "copyleft," a hack in which copyright law was used not to prohibit but to require sharing. Stallman’s GNU General Public License, known all over the world as "the GPL," created a knowledge commons, using a legally innovative form of copyright license, which required that all redistributed modified versions of programs in the commons be shared on the commons' terms. This commons, it soon transpired, was actually a near-optimal social structure for the production of software, achieving extraordinary levels of capital equipment formation with minimal investments. Soon major information technology vendors and users began exploiting the benefits of this commons. The Free Software Foundation's carefully-designed structure of dispute conciliation almost entirely avoided the costs of litigation that beset the proprietary software market, while nonetheless keeping the rules of the commons more or less fully in force.

We are now in the period I call "copyleft capitalism," when firms throughout the broad reach of the global economy began to enjoy scaled effects of copyleft capitalism. Inexpensive powerful communication devices for mass distribution in less wealthy societies — like the One Laptop Per Child project's extraordinary XO laptop, which will far surpass the iPod as the iconic tech object of the early 21st century — will be among the most important fruits. A profusion of applications based on vast data assemblages, like those now provided by Google, will be another.

More importantly, organizations of every kind and scale will benefit from increases in productivity and reductions in cost made possible by innovations occurring in commons. At the largest end, Google, the greatest of recent corporate success stories, reflects from its core the ethos of hacking, as Microsoft reflected from its every facet the principle of proprietary ownership of ideas. But, to take another example, MIT's open courseware, which carries the institution's curriculum to humanity throughout the net, will everywhere reach young people striving to improve their surroundings by innovative engineering at the immediate scale of farm, village or housing block. And not only physics is thus mobilized — the free software of peer-to-peer telecommunications, which soon makes obsolete the concept of "telephone company," allows artists, musicians, poets, designers and other culture workers to find their way to the world.

The idea of freely sharing the executable layer and the knowledge embedded in it, placing all the code in a self-protecting commons with simple rules that all producers can be expected to observe, has proved economically transformative, with far-reaching consequences. The engineering achievement of Stallman cannot be judged fully, however, unless we measure the success in convincing the copyleft capitalist that freedom must be an attribute of the web we are building around humanity. The net can be an extraordinary web of knowledge through which we can all put our heads together to solve our hardest problems, or it can be a system of surveillance and control that will exceed anything ever attempted by the worst of despots. Technology alone doesn't determine social outcomes. The message of the free software movement is that we can evolve the rules out of our commitment to human liberty.

Eben Moglen is Professor of Law and Legal History at Columbia University Law School and Founding Director of the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC). Professor Moglen has represented many of the world's leading free software developers, both prior to founding SFLC and continuing with his work there. Professor Moglen earned his PhD in History and law degree at Yale University. Comments may be submitted to todaysengineer@ieee.org.

Opinions expressed are the author's.