The mailing list in the office was flooded yesterday with the news of parts of MS Windows source code having been leaked onto the internet. The Open Source forum must be celeberating :) Its always been an age old battle between FSF and microsoft. We have fanatic FSF supporters, and you have a powerful corporate lobby backing source code protection. Being in the software industry, and a software developer myself, I often get asked if I am anti-mircosoft, if I am not, then it is deemed that I automatically endorse their policies. It amazes me how people can think in black and white about this.
Microsoft and FSF represent the ends of the spectrum. Each of them have their problems. If the whole world were to be dominated by Microsoft, they wouldnt hesitate in forcing us to eat the products they endorse, and trying to take control of what we watch on TV, or listen on our radio. Of course, not to mention the number of times we will have to restart all of the machines and systems that ran on Mircosoft software.
Having said that, FSF isnt exactly our saviour either. If the world were to go FSF way, then programmars wont be able to make living, atleast not the way we do now. It is a really good idea to disseminate the source code along with the software for reasons obvious. But then, how does the person who is developing software make a living. You cannot afford to be a part time developer, it simply wont scale in the economics of today and the sheer demand for such services will render this model of software development ill-equipped to service the needs. The arguement often quoted if favour of FSF is that research is often shared with the world, the it is the this shared knowledge that other build upon for advancement of science and mankind. But in case of research, it is often funded by the government or corporates that cannot afford their engineers/scientists’ time on a project whose result may or may not be ecnomically viable. For obvious reasons, it is not easy for software development to work on this model. So FSF at its radical extreme may be the solution after all.
The main argument in favour of FSF is the monopolistic practices of corporates like Mircosoft. It is not a very good idea to let corporates decide our life style, what we read or what we listen to. But that’s exactly what they are trying to do. RIAA has been trying hard to control piracy by inserting protection mechanisms on the CD and mp3 players to ensure that “illegal” copies of the song cannot be played by them. This is just one of the ways in which the industry is trying to control our experience. They attempting to deny us our freedom. Our freedom to choose what we want, and how we like it. Just like we can buy the ingredients and cook what we want, we should be able to do the same with software, take the software that we need, and be able to customize it to suit our requirements and add features to it if we need to. This is what Free Software Foundation stands for.
So what we really need are ethical practises from the corportates, and laws to ensure that these ethics are respected and adhered to by the industry. What we need are softwares that are more reasonably priced, and not audio CDs that cost Rs.10 to make but are sold at Rs.200. What we need is a flexibility by the industry to allow expansion of any software’s feature set and customizability for one’s need. If this is done, then we might see an end to the war we witness over the net almost everyday
P.S: Click Here for Windows source-code ;)
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