Kieran Healy

Free Software = Socialism = Death

A breathtakingly ill-informed column from David Henderson over at Techcentral Station on the evils of free and open-source software.

Socialism is dead and buried, right?

Well, not quite. Utopian communes are actually thriving in cyberspace, designing software that is sometimes as good as the best from Silicon Valley. And market economists like me are scrambling to understand how unpaid volunteers working through the Internet can possibly compete with some of the most successful software companies in the world.

In fact, says Henderson, “one might well ask whether Washington should be encouraging the distribution of software under license terms that make it virtually impossible for for-profit software makers to incorporate government research in their own products.”

Who is responsible for this appalling state of affairs? Someone must be to blame. Ah, I know:

[S]ome programmers with a taste for the counterculture or an aversion to corporate life have gone their own way. They have chosen to write software collectively for no pay and then publish the source code and allow anyone to use and modify it for free…

Collective! No pay! It’s communism, I tell you, spread by evil commune-dwelling “counterculture” types too lazy, drug-addled and hairy to get a real job. Those people should pay their debt to society and go out there and do something productive instead of sitting around all day smoking weed, eating pizza and writing high-quality software that they make freely available to people without cha—- um, never mind. Lets focus on the role of the government instead.

But allowing taxpayers’ money to be used to promote the GPL … is another story entirely… [I]t artificially reduces the potential return to government investment in research. Imagine where we’d be if pharmaceutical companies had not been allowed to use government research, and the development of drugs based on that research had been left to non-profits or government agencies. Thousands of people would be dead who are now alive, courtesy of some of today’s “miracle” drugs.

And imagine where we’d be if taxpayer-funded computer software was made freely available to taxpayers who wanted to use it, and the applications and standards developed in them were kept open. Think of the negative consequences! I mean, teenagers or young children might be able to freely download and learn to use the same industrial-strength software development environments used by computer professionals—- stuff that twenty years ago was only available to people working at places like Bell Labs and MIT. That might lead to more innovation and—- um, never mind.

What should happen, of course, is that these innovations should be freely available mainly to entrepreneurs who could then turn them into closed-source products they could restrictively license—- sorry, I mean sell—- at very high prices. That’s the cycle of innovation, folks. And if you want a clear argument for why I’m right, just remember that when you download free software, you are killing pediatric cancer patients. If you had bought Windows ME instead, your computer might now be dead, but those children would still be alive.

The General Public License amounts to an insidious attack on a hybrid system of public and private enterprise for developing software that has served us well. Washington has no business joining the free software conspiracy.

Remember: laissez-faire means that companies should always be able to appropriate and privatize the products of government-funded research. So, do not join the “free software conspiracy,” that large international community of politically heterogenous people, including many right- or libertarian-leaning professionals, who write code in a public and transparent way, subject it to peer review, and release it under a wide variety of licenses that share a commitment to open software code and standards—- um, never mind. I mean, do not join the “free software conspiracy,” that sinister cabal of countercultural socialist ideologues who meet in secret to write software with poisonously open licenses that they foist on unwilling users through illicit and propagandist means, all the while causing the deaths of seriously ill children.

Actually, free or open software IS evil. But probably not for the reasons that you may think people are saying so.

Relative to the background population, an extraordinarily high number of free software central figures are openly socialists. (This is something you can easily verify for yourself).

I have personally corresponded with some of the more well-known open-source advocates, and when I have pointed out the socialist aspects of it, the reaction is pretty uniformly “So what?”

I think what is particularly deceitful about free software is the notion that it’s a bunch of highly skilled people donating their time freely to the creation of cheap, readily available, high-quality software.

Early on, something about free software didn’t add up to me. Having worked in the software industry for over 25 years, I am quite aware of how expensive it is to develop software. It is simply not possible to do in the publicly declared model of how open software is supposed to be operating. How are these people earning a living? Some of the them are openly living quite well, and that money has to be coming from somewhere.

Randomly selecting a few open software engineers who were relatively widely known, I did some research to find out how it was they actually made their living. A relatively small percentage simply work for regular commercial companies in their day job and then work on free software in their own time. In other words, they are drawing a livelihood from the very industry that they’re damaging.

Most of the major notables are, in fact, paid to work on free software. But they’re simply not paid as regular employees of the companies that are subsidizing them. Sometimes they are funded by government grants (and frequently not the United States government) and sometimes they are funded wholesale by corporations that have a vested interest in damaging the competition by software “dumping”. If a company openly flooded the marketplace with below-cost-of-production-software, they would be subject to antitrust violations. By actively damaging their competition by ruining their competition’s marketplace indirectly through the “legitimately” fronted open software organizations, such companies perform their industrial sabotage indirectly and yet just as effectively.

Socialism doesn’t really work, regardless of how much certain people wish that it would. Open software engineers are actually well-paid dupes (or more likely, are well aware of what they’re doing), actively working to destroy one of the few industries that America still controls. They don’t even have the decency to actually do it for free like real socialists (and like the lying PR claims they are doing); they’re being well-paid to do the damage they’re doing. Look into it yourself and see how the well-known open software engineers are managing to pay their bills.

Some advice for mindnumbingly stupid people such as yourself: anytime you think you see some form of socialism actually working, take the time to look a little closer. You’ll inevitably find that there is something deeper and more complicated going on and that the socialist system is being artificially supported one way or another by some group that has a vested interest in doing so.

I can never decide what angers me more, people arrogant enough to attempt to foist socialism on the rest of us or the people stupid enough to believe that it would be a good thing and that it might actually work. The only reason this game is working at all is because of the unique peculiarities surrounding software. The only resource being openly subsidized is human resource hours which are notoriously difficult to track. If some hardware equivalent of the jerk face open software organizations tried to pull the same stunt, they’d rapidly go out of business because of fabrication costs. Software is one of the only products out there who’s fabrication costs can effectively be reduced to hours spent.

SCA