The trend of late for almost every IT-related company is to embrace “Open”. Companies are virtually falling all over themselves to show how “open” they are. It’s funny (and a bit rewarding) to watch, but it does present a real problem to many companies: how to  pretend to be open when you really, really, want to stay “closed”?

Strategy: Forget it and FUD

We see the full force FUD attack tactic from dead-man-walking companies like Nominum and SirsiDynix. They simply reject Open Source and choose to FUD it out. Not a winning strategy for a couple of reasons:

  1. You are basing your business strategy on lies.
  2. You are praying your customers are stupid.

Interesting in a sense, I suppose – but long-term this is Obvious Fail. Hence the second tactic, one that seems to be gaining lots of traction:

Strategy: Pretend Closed is ”Almost Open”

Although it makes about as much sense as pretending salt is “whiter pepper”, all sorts of people are caught up in pretending that Closed is just another side of Open, or that “sort-of-open” is the same as “Free and Open Source”.

You’ve got the EU Interoperability Framework flim-flam on “openness”, and you’ve got Novell out there preaching “Open or Closed, it’s all the same – a win for the consumer”.

The desire to lay things out on a continuum, or to present Open/Closed as two sides of a coin ignores the fact there is a very fundamental difference between Free and Non-Free software. (I move here to “Free” and “Non-Free” specifically because there is such an attempt to re-define Open to somehow be compatible with “Non-Free” and I want to draw in starker lines.)

Of course, Closed Source (and so-called “Mixed Source”) companies are going to downplay fundamental differences but Free is a state of being: Either the software is Free or it is not. It isn’t “partially Free”, it’s not Free. It isn’t  “almost Free”, it’s not Free. Not Free can never be the same “win” that Free can be for the user, simply because it is not Free.

Is The Metaphor Here Yet?

You see, non-Free software is a detour on the way to Software Freedom. Sometimes you might have to take a detour to get to where you need to go, sure. But you’d rather not, and no one save perhaps a roadside vendor or two pretends that the detour route is just as good as the desired route.

One does not choose not Free Software out of desire but one may settle on a not Free solution out of immediate necessity, but that actually a limited-term compromise. It’s not a matter of arguing that not Free software can’t be useful or should never be used; it is recognizing that not Free software is a detour, a distraction, something that increases the time it takes to reach the desired destination.

The only advantage the not Free choice can offer is that it temporarily “beats out” the Free choice in some other area – that is, it must compensate for its lack of Freedom through other offerings. If two products are identical,  who would choose not Free over a Free?

There might not yet be a bridge built over a lake we need to cross, and so we are forced to choose a long-way-around detour. But once the bridge is built, the detour is no longer needed.

Free Software is building bridges.