Re: <nettime> Interview with Richard Stallman in New Left Review (September-October 2018)

[Carsten Agger <agger@modspil.dk>]

On 11/1/18 7:02 AM, Brian Holmes wrote:

On Tue, Oct 30, 2018 at 5:17 PM Frederick Noronha <fredericknoronha@gmail.com> wrote:

The 'freedom to afford software' should be actually included as the Fifth Freedom of the Free Software Campaign worldwide. As things stand, the outrageous pricing of software (notwithstanding the FOSS challenge) has made it unaffordable to maybe 80% of the world's population. Talking from an Indian context, it has been sometimes roughly calculated how much a license fee would cost in terms of the income of an average person, or even a middle-class person.

People are excluded by the pricing (apart from the Freedom aspect). Many millions more.

 This is a great thread, and to my mind the above statement is the most important one in it.

It *is* very important that all software necessary in our daily lives be available free of charge, in state of the art quality.

That was also an early value of the Ubuntu project - being, not incidentally, founded by an entrepeneur from South Africa.

It's important to remember, though, that "free as in beer" can never replace "free as in freedom". For a philanthropist to sponsor the development of proprietary software, withholding the source code and denying the right to fix bugs and redistribute, can never be a worthy cause. That would be like facebook's restricted Internet, that they wanted to impose on India's poor, all over again. Software *must* be free as in the four freedoms.

But, the fifth freedom that Frederick stipulates is more or less a consequence of the first four. If I develop some software and sell it under the GPL for $10,000 a pop, there's nothing to stop you from buying a copy and put it on your server for anyone to download. 10,000 people could give you one dollar each to support the initiative. So once free software exists, its market price will, if it's popular, quickly tend to zero.

But it still makes sense to *sell* free software - and that's because software doesn't create itself. Software development is (speaking as someone with 22 years of experience in the field) difficult, error-prone, time-consuming and thus expensive.  So whereas the software should be gratis, the developers' time shouldn't. Unpaid volunteers, whether they be idealistic activists, hackers just having fun or a mixture of both, can't be the base of the infrastructure of the future - and that's what we want free software to be: *all* software should be free software. That means selling the idea *and* selling the ideas, the individual development projects, to the companies and authorities that need new software.

And that is, of course, to a large extent what's already happening. That's what I've been doing at work for seven years now, writing software under free licenses for paying customers.  And that's also how many of the largest projects are run, by professionals who get paid. Not all, but even many of those run entirely by volunteers are run of people with a background as IT professionals. A professional infrastructure, ready to use for all of humanity, will not be built by amateurs.

So yes: Software should be available free of charge - and, on the other hand, those who can should take part in its funding, because with no funding it won't happen.

Freedom that leaves no one out has to be organized collectively. That's not easy, there were major flaws in most efforts so far, but in an era when capitalism is showing its own fatal flaws, it's time to try again.

I agree completely! There needs to be a firm democratic control on the funding process I mentioned before.

Best

Carsten

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