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What's so great about free software?
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It may not be marked on your calendar, but today is Software Freedom Day 2008:
"Software Freedom Day (SFD) is a worldwide celebration of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS). Our goal in this celebration is to educate the worldwide public about of the benefits of using high quality FOSS in education, in government, at home, and in business -- in short, everywhere!"
If you're not familiar with Free and Open Source Software, here's an in-a-nutshell description:
FOSS is just like any other software, with the important exception that its creators have chosen to license it such that anyone can copy the software freely, access its source code, and morph it into multiple new (and often better) forms.
Beyond the basic attractiveness of "free" as a price point, the openness of free software delivers all sorts of worthwhile benefits. In observance of SFD 2008, I'm going to share one of my favorite FOSS attributes with you.
Free and open source software doesn't actively frustrate my efforts to do what I want to do because those interests may conflict with the software's makers.
That's not to say that free or open source software developers lack self-interested reasons for building their works the way they do, but free software licensing acts as a check on the more annoying expressions of those interests.
If an open source application imposes the will of its developer on its users in an obnoxious manner, other developers are free to cut out the obnoxiousness, and release the software in an improved form. Non-free (aka proprietary) software lacks this mechanism, so unless users can convince the developer to change their goals or to soften the expression of those goals, the software won't get any less obnoxious.
Take, for instance, a proprietary application that's probably more known than loved: Apple's iTunes.
A few years back, my wife needed a clip of a song for some project that she and her pals were working on. We think, "Ah ha! We'll buy the song on iTunes."
So we buy the track from iTunes, and copy the file over to our computer for editing, but we can't edit it because the track we just paid a buck for was encrypted, and readable only on iTunes.
We could use iTunes to get at the track in the way we needed to, but the workaround was poorly-documented, circuitous, and wasteful. We could burn the track to a disc, rip that disc into a regular, playable, editable MP3 or WAV file, and then toss that stupid one song CD into a landfill.
Of course, Apple didn't make iTunes obnoxious just to cheese us off. The roadblocks that iTunes threw up before us were the result of Apple's negotiations with the record companies, a requirement for Apple's music store business. That's great for Apple, but I want my computer to take orders from me, not from Steve Jobs and Co.
A piece of software cannot serve two masters, and even when it's running on a computer that you own, and dealing with media that you have rightfully purchased, Apple remains the master of iTunes. If you don't like it, you can buy music from a DRM-less source (which I now do) and to manage your tunes (and your iPod) from software that's free not only to acquire, but free to serve your needs above those of its maker.
DRM and iTunes is an easy target to pick on, but if you take a close look at much of the proprietary software we depend on, it's not hard to find the places where your needs are placed behind those of its maker.
When given the choice, I'd always prefer the software option that puts my directives first. Fortunately, and thanks to free software, there's a large and growing set of software situations in which you do have that choice.
Happy Software Freedom Day!
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