Free Open Software

In the physical world, if i make a great chair, there's one great chair. If someone else wants one then even if they have a blueprint, someone has to make it. In the world of computers, if i make a great program, it's trivial to make enough copies for everyone on the planet, *and* others can improve on it!

And yet, we are using our legal/economic system to take away these marvelous, democratizing features. I get very sad when i think about this, because there's enough inequalities in the world that are difficult to overcome. Here's an arena where things could be otherwise, and we artificially prevent it. I want everyone to have access to the same great, ever-improving software.

Software released under "free" or "open source" licenses is free to be copied and modified, and must remain under such a license, guaranteeing that folks will be able to take advantage of the copyable & modifiable nature of software.

A little more explanation:

(I am not a lawyer, and this is surely incomplete and inaccurate in some ways, but the gist should be correct)

Copyright law gives anyone who writes software the right to release it under a license which specifies exactly how others may use it.

Many software creators (Microsoft, Oracle, Apple, ...) license their software in a "proprietary" way, limiting the user from modifying it or even looking at how it works (some have likened this to selling a car with a sealed engine compartment), and certainly making it illegal for users to give away copies.

A creator of software could release it into the public domain, or under a very open license. Unfortunately, this allows others to create derivative works and release them under a proprietary license, thus in a sense 'enslaving' the software.

In 1984, Richard Stallman had the idea of bending copyright against it's typical usage and developed a copyright license (the GPL -- General Public License) that lets anyone who has the software do whatever they like with it, *except* releasing derivative works under a proprietary license. This 'locks' the software free. See http://www.fsf.org/philosophy/free-sw.html

More recently (mid-late 1990s), the idea gained new currency, reformulated as "open source" (see http://www.opensource.org/ ) with the emphasis on the improved quality of software that is possible when it's worked on by a large number of people, and there is freedom for groups to "fork" off new projects (as free/open licenses permit). Real world examples include much of the software that runs key parts of the Internet, e.g. domain name servers (BIND), web servers (Apache), e-mail servers (sendmail), and more famously the LinuxOperatingSystem? and the NetScape/MoZilla line of web browsers. Also see The Cathedral & the Bazaar.

The LankaSoftwareFoundation organizes and promotes free/open development of software in SriLanka.

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