“A spectre is haunting the software industry–or at least the
part of it controlled by Bill Gates and his fellow moguls. It’s
called the Open Source movement; its basic proposition is that
proprietary software (the kind created and sold by companies like
Microsoft) is a flawed idea. For some Open Source activists this is
about technology; they are convinced that proprietary programmes
are less reliable, less stable and more bug-ridden than programmes
which are communally owned and created through the cooperative
efforts of hundreds, even thousands, of dedicated hackers. Other
Open Source adherents believe that their software is not only
technically better than anything produced by Gates & Co., but
also that it is ethically superior. For them, the notion that
programmes should be “owned” by individuals or corporations is as
odious as the idea that humans could be owned and traded as
slaves.”
“The term “Open Source” is a recent euphemism, coined by the
pragmatic wing of the movement to ease acceptance of their ideas by
big business. They felt that “free software” sounded too
frightening. In fact the movement dates back to the early 1980s
when Richard Stallman, an MIT researcher, developed the idea of
free software. “Think of free speech, not free beer,” he says.
Users ought to be free to modify programmes to meet their own
needs. The only way to make that possible is to distribute
programmes in their original code, rather than the binary form in
which proprietary software comes. This is why my Microsoft Internet
Explorer is not free in Stallman’s sense: although Microsoft gave
it to me gratis, I am not free to alter it, because I only have the
binary code. The source code is locked in Bill Gates’s safe…”
“Until recently, most people–even in the industry–knew
little about the “free software” movement. Its adherents were
regarded as pony-tailed relics of the pre-Microsoft era. The
intellectual property rights embodied in proprietary programmes had
created global corporations like Microsoft and Sun Microsystems,
and made huge personal fortunes. Free software belonged with
caftans and the Grateful Dead on the scrapheap of
history.“