Why Software Should Be Free - GNU Project - Free Software Foundation (FSF)

The existence of software inevitably raises the question of how decisions about its use should be made. For example, suppose one individual who has a copy of a program meets another who would like a copy. It is possible for them to copy the program; who should decide whether this is done? The individuals involved? Or another party, called the “owner”?

Software developers typically consider these questions on the assumption that the criterion for the answer is to maximize developers' profits. The political power of business has led to the government adoption of both this criterion and the answer proposed by the developers: that the program has an owner, typically a corporation associated with its development.

I would like to consider the same question using a different criterion: the prosperity and freedom of the public in general.

This answer cannot be decided by current law—the law should conform to ethics, not the other way around. Nor does current practice decide this question, although it may suggest possible answers. The only way to judge is to see who is helped and who is hurt by recognizing owners of software, why, and how much. In other words, we should perform a cost-benefit analysis on behalf of society as a whole, taking account of individual freedom as well as production of material goods.

In this essay, I will describe the effects of having owners, and show that the results are detrimental. My conclusion is that programmers have the duty to encourage others to share, redistribute, study, and improve the software we write: in other words, to write “free” software.(1)


Why Software Should Be Free - GNU Project - Free Software Foundation (FSF)

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Ubuntu 14.04 LTS: the cloud platform of choice, due on 17th April 2014

Image
Canonical today announces Ubuntu 14.04 LTS will be released on 17th April 2014, bringing a new level of reliability, performance and interoperability to cloud and scale out environments with support and maintenance for five years. “Ubuntu is the primary platform for cloud – public, private or hybrid. In this release, our third LTS with deep roots in cloud, we raise the bar for efficiency and orchestration at scale. That’s why businesses are adopting Ubuntu as they move to the cloud computing era,” says Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Ubuntu and Canonical. Global enterprises including AT&T, Bharti, Bouygues Telecom, British Telecom, China Telecom, China Unicom, Cogent Communications, Comcast, Deutsche Telekom, Korea Telecom, NEC, NTT, Numergy, Orange France, Time Warner Cable, Turk Telecom, Verizon and Yandex, as well as leading web scale services such as Netflix, Instagram, Hipchat and Quora are all building next generation services on Ubuntu. “Time Warner Cable (TWC) is running Ubun
Read more

New Pop!_OS Update Makes (Some) Computers Faster

Image
A small update rolling out to the Ubuntu-based   Pop!_OS   distro could make a big impact on system performance. Pop!_OS now enables  zram  support by default — and to  quote Sytem76  themselves the feature  “actively compresses memory in the background, increasing the amount of free memory your system has available. This results in increased FPS in games, or faster simulations and compiler runs.” Pretty nice, eh? Instead of moving infrequently used data to a separate swap partition on disk (which is slow), zram compresses data, and keeps it in RAM (which is faster). On systems with lower amounts of RAM available zram allows more available memory to be used for runnings apps and games. Though I’m yet to try it on Pop!_OS, zram is something I use on several devices as  Fedora enabled zram  a few years back. Though I don’t come bearing any graphs to back the enthusiasm up, it’s something I definitely  think  I feel the benefit of, even for basic computing needs. Still, it’s not just thos
Read more

Ubuntu’s New Installer is Shaping Up Nicely

Image
  Ubuntu’s been working on its   new OS installer   for a couple years, now it looks like the upcoming Ubuntu 23.04 ‘Lunar Lobster’ release will finally ship it by default. The latest pending  Ubuntu 23.04 daily builds  use the reworked installer by default, and is expected to power the default install experience of the Ubuntu 23.03 beta in March. Thing is, despite the fact the installer is built using an entirely different toolkit ( Flutter ) and now leverages the Ubuntu’s  server-based  Subiquity  and  Curtin  efforts, it doesn’t look  that  different to the existing one. In fact, if no-one told you the installer was rebuilt you’d probably never tell. The new installer was available to test in previous versions of Ubuntu using a special ‘canary’ ISO, and is also  available as a Snap  app you can run (but shouldn’t) on an existing Ubuntu install. Now the Flutter-based front-end has filtered out in the official daily builds — so let’s go hands on to see how it performs! Ubuntu’s New In
Read more