The-Source.com

Michel Bauwens over at the P2P Foundation has an interesting article up entitled “Is free software private property?:

In a 2003 essay, BENJAMIN HAK-FUNG CHIAO makes the startling claim that FOSS is actually Private Property, not in the legal sense, which creates a fictional Common Property, but in a economic sense, as individuals and companies can effectively exclude others from using it, thereby achieving one of the key characteristics of private property.

Premise: We have it and can control how you get it

The main thrust of the article is that Open Source companies could exclude people from using Free Software. The specific hypothetical being Red Hat increasing the inconvenience of downloading an .iso – technically they are meeting the obligation of providing the source, but they are adding “hurdles” to make it not worth the effort.

The basic point holds – a company could ostensibly pretend to be Open Source-friendly but take all sorts of “extra-license” measures to work around “the spirit of Open Source”.

Why would a company do that?

Consider a company like Red Hat, well-respected and considered genuine in its commitment to Open Source. Imagine, what would happen if Red Hat did try to fiddle with download access: not only would the community nerd-rage with the intensity of a million exploding blue LEDs, not only would Red Hat suffer a credibility hit of biblical proportions, but someone would just put up a torrent and work around the problem.

Imagine More

Well, what if Red Hat took a different tact? What if, say, Red Hat simply didn’t accept any community contributions to Fedora, ever? And, what if Red Hat didn’t contribute to anything except Fedora? And, what if Red Hat forbid its developers from even looking at any other Linux distro code?

Would you still think of Red Hat as an “Open Source Friendly” company? Would you hold them up as a standard for other Open Source companies or projects to emulate?

Would you try to make excuses about how Red Hat is really supportive of Open Source?

Silly, right? Red Hat doesn’t play games like that – because they aren’t pretending to be Open Source-friendly. Red Hat has created a business around respect and understanding of Free and Open Source Software.

Quiz: Guess Who?

Now, imagine if there were a company that had a “fully open source” Python project where:

• The Python community can’t contribute to the project
• Project developers can’t contribute to the Python project
• Project developers can’t even look at source code of Python

If such a project existed it shows that Mr Chiao’s claim that “FOSS is actually Private Property” is not so “startling” after all. In fact, it might show that some corporate lawyers either got there before Mr. Chiao – or at least agree with him.

Now, apply those same questions:

Do you call this an “Open Source Friendly” company? Do you hold them up as a standard for other companies or projects to emulate?

Do you try to make excuses about how Microsoft is really supportive of Open Source?