@@ -4,6 +4,55 @@ If you take an apple from a shop, it’s one apple less for someone else. This e
On the other hand, some economical goods are "non-rival". A toll for crossing a bridge, for example. If you manage to sneake under the barrier and cross the bridge without paying, are you stealing something? In fact, if nobody notices it, nothing has changed in the world. There’s no victim. It might be illegal and/or immoral but it is clearly not "stealing".
Different countries have different laws regarding the copy of non-rival goods. France and many countries have "droits d’auteurs", patrimonial rights were the author is recognized perpetual rights on a work. Anglo-saxon countries use, instead, the notion of copyright. Copyright was initialy invented in England as a way to censor books and ban the printing of non-approved books. It evolved to become the "right to copy" a non-rival good, a right that could be sold and transfered.
Computers have always been rival goods. In fact, there were so big that nobody could possibly imagine stealing them. Software was seen as the instruction on how to use the computers. At first, every single program was done for one single computer and it was not even imaginable to think that the program could be useful somewhere else.
Slowly, software became more and more complex and the idea of "portability" appeared. Maybe we could share how we use our computers and use the same software. UNIX was built with this exact philosophy.
Software were not seen as economical goods in the same sense as instructions to use your dishwasher are not something sold. It seems obvious that if you write instructions to use your own dishwasher, that you paid, you would never sold them. But it could be useful to share them with someone having the same or a similar dishwasher. Programmers were thus sharing without even thinking much about the business of software. Business was, after all, selling computers. And the more software, the more people will be encouraged to buy computers.
In 1976, Bill Gates tried to fight this philosophy by instituting software as a real business.
But how could you sell something than could be copied nearly for free? If you sold it once, the first customer could copy it and pass it to friends.
Hence came the concept of license.
A customer will never buy a software. A customer will never own a software. She can merely buy a license to use it. A license is a contract. In this contract, the customer agree to pay some money in exchange for the ability to use the software under certain conditions. The seller may impose conditions to use the software. For example, it could be said that the software cannot be used on a Tuesday. The example is absurd but this could be part of the contract.
In the 1980’s, the United States recognized that software code could be copyrighted, exactly like the content of a book. When this happened, every software vendor suddenly said that they never intented to "sell" the software but only "license to use it".
One of the most popular condition that quickly arose was that users were prevented to copy the software, to modify it or to distribute it. Software became proprietary and, for the first time in the history of computing, people started to use software they could not modify or copy.
When he was refused the code to the new printer, Richard Stallman understood that computer users would be divided into two groups: programmers and users. Users that would not understand anything because they could not, even if they wanted to.
He also understood that programmers were only programmers inside their own little company, they would become powerless users of all other software. They could not cooperate anymore. They could not share anything. They would become lonely.
Richard Stallman had a hard time making friends when he was young. Computer nerds proved to be a way for him to be part of a community. He didn’t want that community to be ruined.
He could not fight back the fact that software could be copyrighted. But he knew that a license was a contract. And that you could always write your own contract.
So he imagined a contract that would give you the freedom to modify and redistribute a software. In fact, he even managed to write that contract in a way that would guarantee that the software stay "free".
This contract was called the General Public License (GPL) and software that respected the freedom of the users were called "Free Software".
According to RMS, a "Free Software" had four basic freedoms:
1. The right to use how you want it
2. The right to study (requiring the source code)
3. The right to modify
4. The right to redistribute
The 4 freedoms of Free Software are extremely important. If you don’t have those four freedoms, you will quickly hit arbitrary limitations. Those four freedoms are, in facts, only a clever way to explicit the "right to use the software with full control over it".
The GPL not only provided those 4 freedoms, it also ensured that those freedoms would be preserved by stating explicitely in the conditinos of the contract that should the user redistribute the software to someone else, she should provide those same freedom to that other person. This is the concept of "copyleft" were the only restriction you have to agree is… to not create any restriction. You have all the freedoms on the software except the freedom of taking away some freedoms for others. You cannot use a GPL code in a proprietary software. If you do, the proprietary software would automatically be "contaminated" and become GPL.
Some license would soon appear that would be Free Software but without guaranting the freedom. Examples include BSD and MIT licenses that
The word "free" should be understood as in "freedom", not as in "free beer". That’s why the french/spanish world "libre" is often used to clarify the meaning. FLOSS means : "Free and Libre Open Source Software".
It is important to note that nothing prevent to sell free software. As long as you give those rights to your customers, you can sell the software. Richard Stallman himself earned a living for multiple years by selling copy of Emacs, at a time were Internet connections were rares. You would send him money and an enveloppe and he would send you a disk with the software.
But "Free Software" was often confused with "Freeware", softwares that are proprietary but distributed freely (often as a limited version of a paying proprietary software). People building Free Software were looking for a clarification.
Some hackers managed to find the word "Open Source".
Eric Raymond and Bruce Perens coined the term Open Source hoping that this would convince the industry that Free Software was not only for moneyless kids and punks. There was a real business behind it.
Since the start, Richard Stallman really worried that the word "open source" would hide the fact that Free Software were about freedoms, not about technicalities. By hiding the word "free", we would loose the freedoms.
In insight, he was perfectly right.
Eric Raymond was famous for writing an essay called "The cathedral and the bazaar" in which he defended that software was so complex that you could not make it with only a few persons. That making it open source forced to write good software, that bugs would eventually be found, that people would contribute brilliand unexpected patches.
