The New York Times recently editorialized about Linux and open source software, exuberant that an operating system “written and updated by volunteer programmers in a communitarian spirit, and available for free” might challenge Microsoft’s Windows and result in major savings in computer costs.
The paper also exulted that governments such as Germany and China are pushing Linux, and it urged everyone, including U.S. agencies, to join them so as to foster competition.
The NYT view has some gold. Competition is always good. And the Linux backers have hold of an important truth, which is that persuading a lot of smart people each to devote a small part of their time to an effort can produce impressive results. They are also right to think that opening up computer code to the eyes of the whole programming community can be extremely productive. Microsoft itself sees increasing virtue in this idea, and is developing “shared source” to open up code to scrutiny while the company keeps firm hold of the pen.
But the NYT misses in some ways. First, none of this is “free.” Software is a complicated industrial product requiring continuing re-creation and support, and money to support it must come from somewhere. Linux programmers are not street people who sleep on steam grates so as to indulge their passion. They are supported, often handsomely, by universities and IT companies. Even this support is not sufficient to keep Linux going, and hardware companies, notably IBM, are now pouring billions into it. There is nothing wrong with this; IBM has good competitive reasons in that it wants to dish Sun and Microsoft. But the movement is not the folk song army depicted in the NYT.
If IT companies, universities, and IBM want to donate the fruits of their labor to computer purchasers, including governments, that is their privilege. But we have just gone through a half a decade in which the business model was “give it away,” and it did not work. In the end, software might be bundled with hardware, or vendors might give away software tied to a services contract – both are increasingly common -- but the code writers will want pay for producing it, which means money must ultimately come from the users somehow.
A second problem is the creation of applications for Linux. The General Public License that controls the program’s distribution can be paraphrased as “thou shalt not charge for this program and its source code shall be public.” This license is also viral; if you write an ap for Linux, and incorporate any code covered by the GPL, then your ap is also subject to the GPL, and it too becomes open source and free.
True open source believers think that this is just fine -- all aps should be open and free. But it is not clear that the freeware spirit, or the IT/university willingness to subsidize, runs deep enough to provide anything approaching the number of aps available for Windows, where good old reliable greed creates an incentive for developers. The Linux community is moving toward proprietary aps, but it is chancy. Writing aps without incorporating some operating system code is difficult, and those who want to engraft proprietary aps onto Linux are taking a legal risk.
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