Let the 1s and 0s out! (Version 3)
One really dangerous idea has to be the GPL, and now a new version is about to be released — it’s in draft form at the moment. Simon Phipps and Danese Cooper have written up notes from a presentation on the draft.
For those new to this area (and who haven’t stopped reading yet) the GPL (General Public License, US spelling) is an amazing innovation. The idea is to let software roam free. If people are free to develop the software they use then the world becomes a better place — or at least a place with better software. The opposite would be where only one company is able to develop your word processor, say, in which case it is usable only by those who can afford it, and they are beholden to the word processor’s keyholders.
The GPL achieves the freedom by not only providing a software licence that opens up the software to anyone, but also by insisting that even if you extend that software the result is itself free in the same way. So if I make a nice free sentence editor, and you turn it into a wonderful word processor, then your word processor is as free as my software which you built it on. Or to put it another way: my sentence editor can’t be locked up inside your fancy word processor.
The fact that the freedom of my software infects your word processor (because you chose to build it round my software) led one Microsoft exec to famously denounce the GPL as “viral”, and another, even more extremely, to call it a “cancer”. Big corporations — indeed, most small corporations — would love to take others’ work without having to open up their own. Big business doesn’t tend to love the GPL, although there are exceptions.
In another life I had the job of proposing that free software was actually a good business investment. Back then, and still now, but in a smaller way, I had an idea of my own. I planned to write a rabidly right wing text on how the GPL was the ultimate in libertarian economics — the GPL not only opens up the marketplace, it forcibly keeps it open. Entrepreneurialism is rigidly enforced, preventing monopolisation and skewing of market. Frankly, I’m not sure I would ever pull this off, but it would be great to try to take on very big businesses on their home territory.
