letter to the editor

On Free Software

[Editor's Note: I received this as private email from Matt, who is a freshman at MIT. He consented to publishing it.]

Dear Rob:

On reading the latest Microsoft trial news and all, I keep hearing about how Linux is so great. I went over to <www.slashdot.org>, a site that appears to be for and by open-source software (OSS) fanatics, and the things they say absolutely disgust me.

It was always my impression that most Linux fans simply disliked Microsoft. That's okay. But what's not okay, in my mind, is that they seem to go much further than that. They don't just dislike Microsoft. I may be generalizing unfairly, but it seems that these OSS fanatics are opposed not only to specific companies' products but to the entire idea of capitalism.

They keep referring to how OSS represents freedom, how they are paving the way for a world in which capitalism will become obsolete. One went so far as to say that capitalism would be dead in 50 years simply due to OSS ideology. To me, OSS looks like a step backward, not a step forward. These OSS tenets seem just like those of communism all over again, just under a different, more lucrative name and a new breed of supporters. Freedom? Yeah, the freedom to work really hard on something and get no rewards beyond hacker pride and the idea that you've contributed to a "good cause."

I was always under the impression that OSS fans liked Netscape. Well, obviously not. They were attacking the new Netscape/AOL/Sun alliance as if it was Microsoft. It's not Microsoft that they target, it's all corporations. This, despite Netscape having actually released its source code for its browser.

One person referred to a future in which people wouldn't work for money but for love and fame and such things. Well, if that's the future, and that's their idea of progress, you can count me out of that future! Working for love and fame is only going to work for about a week before you realize that you can't feed or clothe yourself and sure as hell can't live the "good life"! Certainly no gigantic houses with racquetball courts, swimming pools, or 10-foot widescreen TVs!

I'm tired of OSS fans; maybe they should win, just so they can see how bad their future is. In particular, since a lot of them work day jobs and do OSS as a hobby, I think it would amusing to watch them drive their own companies out of business with their free software and then have to beg for change on the streets: "Starving Linux developer. Will work for food."

Remember the Halloween memo? They all treat it as if Microsoft was being unreasonable in being scared of OSS, that it was proof of their theory that corporations are inherently oppressive of "freedom." Well, maybe it's just me, but I would have thought that there would be a lot of people out there who would completely empathize with Microsoft. People ask how they can compete against Microsoft, but competing against Microsoft is incomparable to competing with the Linus Torvalds of the world, who (1) don't want to make a profit from their work and (2) don't have to pay their "employees." If I were Linus Torvalds, I'd be hitting myself really hard for somehow managing to make a product used by millions of people and yet somehow having managed to not get rich off of it.

Did I mention that it appears they want to make intellectual property illegal (or
at least some of them do)? I bet they wouldn't be so enthusiastic about a change like that if they actually thought it through and realized that it would mean that there would be zero incentive to create intellectual property, since everyone would just rip it off. First effect, no more media companies. TV would die. Radio would die. The commercial parts of the Internet would die. Many books would never be published. Then no more software companies. What company would want to create a software program they had no rights to? Red Hat and others have a working business model simply because they don't have to create Linux. Others do it for them, and they sell support. But if Red Hat had to develop Linux itself, they'd be bankrupt in six months.

In other words, their prescription for freedom of information would certainly free information to be used by all, but it would also backfire and make it so that no one would ever want to generate new information!

Making this all the more real and frightening to me is the fact that MIT is the place of origin of OSS, and that its students seem to be the biggest proponents of it around. There are a horrifyingly large number of Linux fanatics among the students here.

If this is the way our economy is going in the future, count me out of it. Give me plain old capitalism any day.

Matthew Craighead
<[email protected]>