A Secret Story About Ethics and Sustainability
This is a story about ethics and sustainability, and a story about computers and software. We don’t normally think of computers in terms of ethics and sustainability, so this might be suprising. I reveal a big secret at the end, so I hope you’ll take the time to read my story.
Maybe you’ve heard the word Linux before?
Linux is often used as the name for an operating system.
What is an operating system?
For a moment, consider a computer to be like a house.
The operating system is like the walls and stairs and wiring inside a house, that make it a place you can live in, instead of a useless lump of metal and bricks. Its a collection of small software programs that work together so you can do basic tasks like print things or copy photos from your digital camera onto the computer.
The physical things that make up a computer, called ‘hardware’, are like the foundations and walls and roof of a house. Its not just the computer, its the screen and keyboard and mouse, and printer, and even the digital cameras. Without software, hardware is useless lump of metal and plastic.
But you need more than walls and stairs and sockets inside a house to make it a home. You need things inside the house that you use every day to do things, like the beds and ovens and televisions. Big programs that are complex and used to do certain jobs are called applications. Examples are the programs you use to write letters, or manage your music and photo collections.
There is a very blurry line between the operating system and applications. This changes over time - what was a distinct application a few years ago becomes part of the operating system - as its all just software programs, afterall. This is kind of like the way you can move into a furnished apartment, because over time it has collected common things everyone needs.
There is a relationship between the physical computer hardware, and the operating system software and the applications. The three need to be closely knit to work well together - a television isn’t much use without a house and home to watch it in.
When you visit a website, you use an application called a ‘Web Browser’. This application software uses the operating system software to access the Internet. Its like the relationship between the oven and the the gas pipes in your house when you’re cooking.
Now probably your computer runs an operating system called Windows, probably your word processor is called “Word” and your spreadsheet is called “Excel”. These pieces of software are written by a company called Microsoft. Probably you’ve heard of them, and the founder Bill Gates who used to be the richest guy in the world.
Here’s the first part of the secret: During the last 20 years, another operating system and all kinds of applications have been written, which are Free Software.
What is Free Software?
Free Software is software you have freedom with, first and foremost in the way you have freeom with free elections, free labour, free markets and free speech, and perhaps as in without paying money.
Today the Internet means that getting copies of lots of things - software, music, films, books, pretty much everything really - is now possible without paying money, so probably you won’t have to pay money to get copies of Free Software. Free Software is just honest about the Internet like that. (Here’s a great 30 minute talk by a science fiction writer about “Internet Ready Business Models” if you’re interested to learn more about this)
In fact, there is so much Free Software out there, getting hold of some isn’t a problem, its chosing the best stuff. (This is happening to everything thanks to the Internet, and is called the “Long Tail” effect.)
So taking the time to learn about it, download some, use it, then install it for someone and help them use it - these are all valuable services which people are happy to pay for. In this way Free Software is very pro-business - though it sounds a bit paradoxical to say you can charge money for Free Software, in fact as much as you can, it makes sense once this distinciton is made.
But most software companies aren’t honest about the way computers work. At a conceptual level, all computers do is copy and modify information, and all the Internet does is make it easy to copy information between computers.
Most software authors try to pretend computers don’t work like that, and that the Internet doesn’t exist. (Cluetrain) They try to stop you sharing copies with your friends - dividing people.
Sometimes they try to force this, by writing applications that will stop working if you share a copy but don’t pay the authors for a license to use the copy legally. Not cool.
Other times, applications don’t try to stop themselves being shared. There is a logic to this: The owners realise that its not legal to use unlicensed software, and so while people get away with it at home, they’ll get used to the software and recommend it to businesses, like the one where they work. Because businesses have to act within the law, the business will then have to buy licenses.
But this isn’t so much about the license fees, as the restrictions of a license in the first place - both explicit and implicit. The implicit restrictions aren’t obvious, unti the licenses are no longer being issued. When companies do very bady, they go out of business, and when they do very well, they get bought out. Often when proprietary software companies are bought out, its to use their underlying technology in another project, and the software you’ve come to rely on simply halts. This is one of the most inadvertent ways that proprietary softrware holds its users helpless.
An common explicit license restriction is on studying the software to see how it really works. Consider for a moment software that you don’t have freedom with, but didn’t pay any money for a copy of. The people who write it are the only people who can change it and improve it, from non-technical changes like translations into your local language, to large changes to make it interoperate with other software. Interoperation with other software is often underestimated, but ‘network effects’ are very powerful, and if someone or some business figures out a combination no one else is working on, there’s great opportunity in that.
Its like a big car corporation trying sells cars that have the bonnet welded shut - and stop independent mechanics and car dealers from running businesses. Not cool at all - in fact, unethical.
Over the long term, this is where the unsustainability of proprietary software comes in too. When the people who write non-free software stop improving it - and eventually they will, because as individuals they move abroad, or do something different now, or as business change focus, or go bust, or get bought out - you are really stuck. If you can copy it to a new computer at all, you can’t legally run it on any more computers than you have at the moment. You can’t get someone else to fix it when your new computer works differently to the old one. You are divided and helpless.
An unethical company that writes non-free software only has to pay for people who know how to program to write the software. After that, there are hardly any costs at all in making copies of their work, compared to say a car company that manufactures cars once its engineers and designers have done their work. An unethical company can then trick people into treating software just like a physical product, which can’t be copied and shared or easily improved.
In 1984 the GNU Project was started to create Free Software, to inspire a community of people to make it happen, so that you could use a computer using only Free Software and not be divided and helpless.
This was obviously a really big project, but the GNU Project founders had been using computers for 15 years already - since 1969! - and had experienced the annoyance of unethical and unsustainable software first hand already.
Now here, in 2006, this has largely been achieved!
So what does this have to do with “Linux”?
Well, the GNU project passed an important milestone when it was possible to run a normal computer using 100% Free Software, in 1991. After 8 years of writing the pieces of GNU on proprietary operating systems, the GNU Operating System was lacking one final component to run a computer with only Free Software.
In 1990 a student wrote such a component, for fun and to learn, and called it Linux. You know how old bridges were built, around a scaffold in two columns that were joined with a keystone that dropped into place?
Linux was like the keystone dropping into place to complete the system.
People were so excited that Linux could be combined with the GNU system to let them run their computers using only Free Software, attention was shifted away from the GNU system, and after a while the whole system became known as just Linux.
The people who combined GNU and Linux gave their complete systems their own names - like “Red Hat”, or “SUSE”, or “Debian”, or “Ubuntu” - but these are all basically the same system.
So its more honest to call the operating system GNU+Linux so both the Linux project and the GNU project get fair mention :-) This is a simple habit to adopt, and does a lot to raise awareness of why GNU+Linux is simply better than MS Windows - because it is ethical, respecting your right to share with your friends and neighbors - like the spirit of FreeCycle! :-)
Freedom to improve software, plus the Internet, equals lots of people improving things at once - so Free Software tends to be more powerful and more reliable that non-free software.
You may have heard of “Open Source”, which describes the way reliable and powerful software can be made quickly and easily, but because it doesn’t pay attention to freedom and ethics, hides the reason why Free Software is just plain better.
In the mid 1990s, the computers that used the GNU+Linux system became as powerful and reliable as most other computers. Antisocial, unethical people then began to write non-free software for the system, which kind of defeats the whole point, in a way.
By advertising the system as “open source Linux”, and hiding the GNU Project and the ideas about freedom, they tempted people to not think about software ethics and sustainability.
Almost all version of the GNU+Linux system, like Ubuntu or SUSE or Mandriva or Red Hat, contain non-free software.
I hope that by telling this story, people will want versions of the system that use 100% Free Software, and will not be tricked into accepting unethical and unsustainable software. One such version is gNewSense
The A Secret Story About Ethics and Sustainability by David Crossland, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.
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