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This summer marks the 10th anniversary of the email exchange that set in motion the writing of Free as in Freedom: Richard Stallman’s Crusade for Free Software and, by extension, the work prefaced here, Richard Stallman and the Free Software Revolution.
Needless to say, a lot has changed over the intervening decade.
Originally conceived in an era of American triumphalism, the book’s main storyline – about one man’s Jeremiah-like efforts to enlighten fellow software developers as to the ethical, if not economic, shortsightedness of a commercial system bent on turning the free range intellectual culture that gave birth to computer science into a rude agglomeration of proprietary gated communities – seems almost nostalgic, a return to the days when the techno-capitalist system seemed to be working just fine, barring the criticism of a few outlying skeptics.
Now that doubting the system has become almost a common virtue, it helps to look at what narrative threads, if any, remained consistent over the last ten years.
While I don’t follow the software industry as closely as I once did, one thing that leaps out now, even more than it did then, is the ease with which ordinary consumers have proven willing to cede vast swaths of private information and personal user liberty in exchange for riding atop the coolest technology “platform” or the latest networking trend.
A few years ago, I might have dubbed this the “iPod Effect,” a shorthand salute to Apple co-founder Steve Jobs’ unrivaled success in getting both the music industry and digital music listeners to put aside years of doubt and mutual animosity to rally around a single, sexy device – the Apple iPod – and its restrictive licensing regime, iTunes. Were I pitching the story to a magazine or newspaper nowadays, I d probably have to call it the “iPad Effect” or maybe the “Kindle Effect” both in an attempt to keep up with the evolving brand names and to acknowledge parallel, tectonic shifts in the realm of daily journalism and electronic book publishing.
Lest I appear to be gratuitously plugging the above-mentioned brand names, RMS suggests that I offer equal time to a pair of web sites that can spell out their many disadvantages, especially in the realm of software liberty. I have agreed to this suggestion in the spirit of equal time. The web sites he recommends are DefectiveByDesign.org and BadVista.org.
Regardless of title, the notion of corporate brand as sole guarantor of software quality in a swiftly changing world remains a hard one to dislodge, even at a time when most corporate brands are trading at or near historic lows.
Ten years ago, it wasn’t hard to find yourself at a technology conference listening in on a conversation (or subjected to direct tutelage) in which some old-timer, Richard Stallman included, offered a compelling vision of an alternate possibility. It was the job of these old-timers, I ultimately realized, to make sure we newbies in the journalism game recognized that the to