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It’s about more than software

Graeme Philipson, Information Age

17/06/2004 08:12:51

He was visiting the city council to try to talk them out of their decision to mandate open source software for the city’s IT infrastructure.

His visit was to no avail. Despite offering a substantial discount if Munich stayed with Microsoft’s products, the council decided in May last year to move its 14,000 desktop clients to SuSE Linux and OpenOffice.

At around the same time, half a world away in Thailand, Microsoft dropped its prices by 85 per cent. It broke its long-standing policy of standardised worldwide pricing to meet a challenge from Linux TLE, the Thai language version of Linux. For two years now most PCs in Thailand have been shipped with Linux rather than Windows, a result of the government’s “People’s PC” program, which offers subsidised PCs to Thais at very low prices.

Microsoft is worried. In his annual letter to employees last year, Steve Ballmer spoke at length about the challenge from open source software in general, and Linux in particular. “So-called ‘free software’ is the latest new thing,” he wrote. “We will rise to this challenge, and … we will show that our approach offers better value, better security and better opportunity.

“Getting broad, consistent innovation requires coordination across many technology components. In the event of needed enhancements or fixes, the Linux development community, no matter how well intentioned, simply cannot advance Linux the way we can – and must – innovate in Windows. Some other vendors sell against integration. We see and deliver unique customer value because of integration.”

Blah blah blah. Expect to hear a lot more of this blather from Microsoft. Not only is Microsoft’s profitability at stake – open source challenges the way the software industry works. The battle is ideological and philosophical as much as it is about money. Though, ultimately, that is the issue – it is precisely because it is about ideology that it is about money. Microsoft is worried, not so much because Linux and other incarnations of the open source movement are competitors, but because of the sort of competitors they are.

SCO, which recently launched a quixotic attack on Linux by farcically claiming it used bits of Unix code, said it best. SCO president Darl McBride has accused the open source movement of being communist, an affront to the American Way.

And so it is, if the American way is the pursuit of profit at any cost. Microsoft paints itself as the champion of the free market, though we have seen in recent years just what Microsoft means by “free”. It is becoming increasingly obvious that the real reason that Microsoft is worried by open source software, and the real reason Ballmer went to Munich, is that it sees open source software not just as a competitor in the marketplace, but as a competitor in the mind.

The movement is growing. The governments of China, South Korea and Japan have announced that they are planning to develop Linux-based open source alternatives to existing “proprietary” (read “Microsoft”) solutions. The Japanese government alone has announced it will spend over 1 billion yen (more than $100 million) on developing a Japanese-language open source operating system.

Microsoft’s predictable response to these announcements has been to say that governments should stay out of the software business, and let the marketplace determine which software should win. Microsoft’s type of marketplace, that is. Microsoft has a very different view of the world, one that revolves around making vast amounts of money from software. Open source does not work that way.

There is little doubt that the open source software movement has anti-capitalist elements. But despite what Darl McBride (an arch-conservative Mormon) says, it is not communist. True, it has its own manifesto, the well known tract “The Cathedral and the Bazaar”, written by the movement’s very own Karl Marx, Eric Raymond (http://catb.org/~esr/). It’s a work in progress, constantly updated as Raymond sees fit, in the open source tradition.

Its first three words throw down the gauntlet: “Linux is subversive.” You can’t get much more direct than that. The title of the document comes from Raymond’s idea that open source software is like a medieval bazaar, an untidy agglomeration of merchants and stalls and thronging people, compared to which the standard method of building software is like a stately cathedral, planned out well in advance and built over time to exacting specifications.

That’s not quite true, of course, but the image is a striking one. You don’t have to dig around the chat rooms and bulletin boards of the open source community very deeply to find a deep vein of anti-establishment emotion. Little wonder those champions of the free market in Redmond are worried. There is subversion in the air, and profits are at risk.

The current argument over copyright, intellectual property and music downloading is part of the same Great Debate. Copyright protects the old-world capitalists, and it is being subverted by technology. The vast majority of downloaders have probably never heard of the great 19th century French anarchist thinker Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, but they just might have heard his famous slogan “property is theft”. To these people, intellectual property is theft, and by downloading a song they are simply liberating it.

It is becoming increasingly clear that the whole notion of intellectual property and copyright are outmoded in the digital age. The business models based on them belong to the Golden Age of capitalism, which is now behind us.

Communism proved a dead end, and socialism and social democracy, on the 20th century model, are little healthier. A bit has been written about how the information revolution has been one of the key factors in discrediting the left over the past 20 or 30 years, but very little has been written about the threat it also poses to the traditional capitalist model. The vastly greater flow of information and ideas wrought by the information age is challenging the very foundations of society.

Most people don’t realise that yet. But Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer do.

graeme@philipson.info