A spectre is haunting the proprietary software industry: Free-Libre and Open Source Software (FLOSS).
Karl Marx would have been elated at the success of FLOSS today as a subversive and alternative to the global behemoths of proprietary software. As little as ants would be but equally hardworking and persevering, as diverse as workers may get to be, the FLOSS community across the world has rewritten the rules of intellectual contribution and technological growth. They have broken the shackles that tie them in respective nationalities and units and have created a new chain formed from intellectual and autonomous solidarity. They have created a business model so powerful and so transcendent that this has forced even proprietary software to adopt it in its own way.
Any primer on the software industry in the world today would tell you that the industry was dominated by corporate units. For example, in the most important operating system and word processing/office applications business, Microsoft Technologies has had a huge monopoly. This has been buttressed by a variation of ‘license raj’ that allows code written by Microsoft to be available in the form of high ‘APIs’ or keys that are available for licensees to buy. In essence, users are denied access to proprietary software’s code base and all one gets to have is the ability to ‘consume’ the product without having the ability (or only having a limited and constrained one as defined in the copyright license) to alter the product to their choice.
Free and open software on the other hand makes a qualitative leap by allowing the consumer to build upon/alter and improve the product. The success of operating systems such as GNU/Linux, internet browsers such as Mozilla Firefox and office applications such as OpenOfficeare and other FLOSS applications has meant that the user not only has enough choice on the product to consume, but that he/she has the power now to become a product developer since the source code is available. The availability of the source code comes with a license too, albeit of a philosophically and instrumentally different kind: a ‘copyleft’ license. This license does not come with a negative freedom aspect of preventing users to do something outside the license, but actually comes with a positive freedom that enforces users to keep the software ‘open’.
There are some basic differences between the ‘free software’ and ‘open source software’ streams. The former harps upon the philosophical notion of liberty in using and modifying software, while the latter talks about the fundamental leap in performance because of the advanced community-oriented business model that ‘open source’ provides.
Despite such distinctions, however, very few software products exist that are exclusively ‘open’ and not free or vice versa. The success of the free and open source movement was seen particularly in the collaborated effort that went into designing an OpenDocument Format (ODF) standard for word processing and electronic office document applications. This standard was arrived after nearly three years of toiling by the developing community across the world, which included individuals and other big companies specialising in enterprise applications such as Sun Microsystems and IBM. Now the ODF standard is widely accepted as an Office standard and has been adopted by Open Office, Google Documents and other applications. The presence of a unifying standard made the job of users using various applications easier. These multiple applications could communicate to each other sparing a headache for the users to have to face the problem of incompatibility of various application file formats even though they performed one single documentation/word processing function. Evidently this affected the monopoly strength of office applications offered by the biggest software company in the world, Microsoft Applications.
The logical thing to do would be to adopt the ODF standard for Microsoft Office products keeping the philosophy of universalisation intact. Yet, Microsoft chose to introduce its own open source standard OpenOffice Extensible Markup Language (OOXML). The logic that Microsoft provided was that the presence of many standards helped foster the free market as has been the case in other areas such as Picture Readers. The adoption of OOXML as a universal and full international standard, however, hit a roadblock as a majority of countries affiliated to the worldwide standards body, International Organisation for Standardisation decided to reject it in September 2007. OOXML still had a lifeline thrown in the form of a ballot resolution process that gave the countries another chance to review their decision based on Microsoft’s responses to their complaints made in September 2007. The most important complaints were the fact that the standards document was unwieldy and cumbersome and also fact that OOXML was not truly ‘open’ and was written in a manner to continue the monopoly status of Microsoft in the market. The ballot resolution process is to come out with a verdict next month holding in the balance the acceptance of OOXML as an international standard.
In the meantime, in another blow to proprietary software, Microsoft was fined a huge amount of $ 1.3 billion for having violated anti-trust laws by a European Union (EU) court. Such setbacks have had an unintended effect: Microsoft recently affirmed to make available several sections of source code interoperable with open source, signalling a change in philosophy to a gradual acceptance of the open source policy. Open source advocates and others have, however, reacted with cautious optimism but seen in the light of things, it is clear that the subversive called the open source movement has had a tremendous effect on the way the industry is run.
Not long ago, advocates of the proprietary software model were calling the open source movement as ‘communist’ and ‘market-unfriendly’. But the relative cost-free nature, liberating outlook and transparency offered has made open source hugely popular. In India, for example, FLOSS advocates have been successful in getting a state government announcing statewide education and use on FLOSS. FLOSS makes immense sense for resource constrained governance bodies in India as well as help creating myriad developer communities in a participative model.
The challenge remains for FLOSS evangelicals to take forward the process of educating the populace in the country to be familiar with basic programming and application usage skills. This requires the state to play an active role to facilitate this process.
Monopoly and proprietary software have an advantage in influencing state and governmental institutions because of their large market base and ready capital. Unscrupulous ways of influencing state governments have persisted in India, for example, where executives of proprietary software cajole government heads to promote their brands in lieu of some form of charity given. FLOSS activists must overcome this huge challenge in order to get their philosophy accepted and model implemented for the good of people who are still on the barren side of the digital divide.
Karl Marx would have been elated at the success of FLOSS today as a subversive and alternative to the global behemoths of proprietary software. As little as ants would be but equally hardworking and persevering, as diverse as workers may get to be, the FLOSS community across the world has rewritten the rules of intellectual contribution and technological growth. They have broken the shackles that tie them in respective nationalities and units and have created a new chain formed from intellectual and autonomous solidarity. They have created a business model so powerful and so transcendent that this has forced even proprietary software to adopt it in its own way.
Any primer on the software industry in the world today would tell you that the industry was dominated by corporate units. For example, in the most important operating system and word processing/office applications business, Microsoft Technologies has had a huge monopoly. This has been buttressed by a variation of ‘license raj’ that allows code written by Microsoft to be available in the form of high ‘APIs’ or keys that are available for licensees to buy. In essence, users are denied access to proprietary software’s code base and all one gets to have is the ability to ‘consume’ the product without having the ability (or only having a limited and constrained one as defined in the copyright license) to alter the product to their choice.
Free and open software on the other hand makes a qualitative leap by allowing the consumer to build upon/alter and improve the product. The success of operating systems such as GNU/Linux, internet browsers such as Mozilla Firefox and office applications such as OpenOfficeare and other FLOSS applications has meant that the user not only has enough choice on the product to consume, but that he/she has the power now to become a product developer since the source code is available. The availability of the source code comes with a license too, albeit of a philosophically and instrumentally different kind: a ‘copyleft’ license. This license does not come with a negative freedom aspect of preventing users to do something outside the license, but actually comes with a positive freedom that enforces users to keep the software ‘open’.
There are some basic differences between the ‘free software’ and ‘open source software’ streams. The former harps upon the philosophical notion of liberty in using and modifying software, while the latter talks about the fundamental leap in performance because of the advanced community-oriented business model that ‘open source’ provides.
Despite such distinctions, however, very few software products exist that are exclusively ‘open’ and not free or vice versa. The success of the free and open source movement was seen particularly in the collaborated effort that went into designing an OpenDocument Format (ODF) standard for word processing and electronic office document applications. This standard was arrived after nearly three years of toiling by the developing community across the world, which included individuals and other big companies specialising in enterprise applications such as Sun Microsystems and IBM. Now the ODF standard is widely accepted as an Office standard and has been adopted by Open Office, Google Documents and other applications. The presence of a unifying standard made the job of users using various applications easier. These multiple applications could communicate to each other sparing a headache for the users to have to face the problem of incompatibility of various application file formats even though they performed one single documentation/word processing function. Evidently this affected the monopoly strength of office applications offered by the biggest software company in the world, Microsoft Applications.
The logical thing to do would be to adopt the ODF standard for Microsoft Office products keeping the philosophy of universalisation intact. Yet, Microsoft chose to introduce its own open source standard OpenOffice Extensible Markup Language (OOXML). The logic that Microsoft provided was that the presence of many standards helped foster the free market as has been the case in other areas such as Picture Readers. The adoption of OOXML as a universal and full international standard, however, hit a roadblock as a majority of countries affiliated to the worldwide standards body, International Organisation for Standardisation decided to reject it in September 2007. OOXML still had a lifeline thrown in the form of a ballot resolution process that gave the countries another chance to review their decision based on Microsoft’s responses to their complaints made in September 2007. The most important complaints were the fact that the standards document was unwieldy and cumbersome and also fact that OOXML was not truly ‘open’ and was written in a manner to continue the monopoly status of Microsoft in the market. The ballot resolution process is to come out with a verdict next month holding in the balance the acceptance of OOXML as an international standard.
In the meantime, in another blow to proprietary software, Microsoft was fined a huge amount of $ 1.3 billion for having violated anti-trust laws by a European Union (EU) court. Such setbacks have had an unintended effect: Microsoft recently affirmed to make available several sections of source code interoperable with open source, signalling a change in philosophy to a gradual acceptance of the open source policy. Open source advocates and others have, however, reacted with cautious optimism but seen in the light of things, it is clear that the subversive called the open source movement has had a tremendous effect on the way the industry is run.
Not long ago, advocates of the proprietary software model were calling the open source movement as ‘communist’ and ‘market-unfriendly’. But the relative cost-free nature, liberating outlook and transparency offered has made open source hugely popular. In India, for example, FLOSS advocates have been successful in getting a state government announcing statewide education and use on FLOSS. FLOSS makes immense sense for resource constrained governance bodies in India as well as help creating myriad developer communities in a participative model.
The challenge remains for FLOSS evangelicals to take forward the process of educating the populace in the country to be familiar with basic programming and application usage skills. This requires the state to play an active role to facilitate this process.
Monopoly and proprietary software have an advantage in influencing state and governmental institutions because of their large market base and ready capital. Unscrupulous ways of influencing state governments have persisted in India, for example, where executives of proprietary software cajole government heads to promote their brands in lieu of some form of charity given. FLOSS activists must overcome this huge challenge in order to get their philosophy accepted and model implemented for the good of people who are still on the barren side of the digital divide.
