The end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st have been marked by an intense debate on how computer software should be managed, marketed and distributed, especially since the internet allows it to be copied easily and cheaply so that it reaches the whole world.
On the one hand, there are the defenders of free software or the commons , the institutional order that favors exploitation rights belonging to a group or a specific community, far from the profit motive of the creators. On the other, there are capitalist investors who opt for closed software that can only be accessed through an economic subscription.
Bill Gates thought he was stealing
In 1976, a young Bill Gates yearned to get rich selling personal computer software , and branded hackers and free software advocates thieves with these harsh statements: “Most of you are aware that you steal the software you use. Hardware has to be paid for, but software can be shared. What difference does it make if the people who created it don’t charge for their work? “
His angry criticisms were directed, above all, at the users of the so-called collaborative software exchange that was taking place at that time in university technology centers such as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Carnegie Mellon University or Stanford University.
Richard M. Stallman , however, was a young hacker working in the MIT Artificial Intelligence laboratory who was unwilling to accept that red line. For him, there were things made of atoms and things made of bits, and they couldn’t be treated the same way.
The ‘software’ is not ‘hardware’
The idea is that one thing can be stolen and the other does not depend on the nature of the thing itself. If an object is made of atoms and is subtracted, that object disappears, it can no longer be used by the owner . But if it is made of bits, by subtracting what is actually made is an exact copy, that is, the owner does not lose anything, it is not actually stolen. It is as if we use one candle to light another : the result is two lit candles. Nobody loses anything.
Therefore, Stallman did not believe that software should be paid for as hardware was paid. Because, to a large extent, what you paid for when buying hardware was its rare nature: there was one unit, it was sold, and then there were zero units. However, the same business model could not be applied to a good that was not scarce, but practically infinite: the marginal cost of each exact copy of software is almost zero .
The only way to maintain the same business model with software was to create an artificial scarcity , that is, if there was the possibility that everyone could have software for almost zero cost, that good was not granted because the way of remunerating the creator of the software was based on a business model conceived to deal with atoms, scarcity.
As Jeremy Rifkin explains in his book The Zero Marginal Cost Society : “The positions of Gates and Stallman could not be more opposite: for Gates, free software was theft; for Stallman, it was freedom of speech. “
For that reason, Gates sold, unit by unit, his Windows operating system, but Stallman asked the collaboration of the best programmers in his environment to conceive the GNU operating system, composed of free software that any user could obtain, use and modify. Two years later, Stallman would create the Free Software Foundation and formulated a system to license the use of this kind of software, which he called the GNU General Public License (GNU-GPL), also known as copyleft , that is, the alternative to copyright .
As Rifkin points out, Gates is one of the richest people in the world , partly thanks to his scarcity-based business model, but, simultaneously, “GNU / Linux is used in more than 90% of the 500 fastest supercomputers in the world. world, in many of the most important companies and even in integrated systems such as tablets and mobile phones ”.
Perhaps there is no better model than the other and they should coexist and compete so that we all win. Be that as it may, the debate continues to this day .
