Free Software : The Practical Perspective

Well today's post is about the philosophy of computing.

And I in no way am an expert on this, its just what i see after a very short career in software field, may be my views are wrong but this i what i have understood so far. So please bear with my ignorance in case i am wrong.


The good versus evil debate has been raging since Richard Stallman started the “Free Software Movement” at the MIT lab.

Before starting off with the article i would like to make it clear that “Free Software” and “Open source Software” are two completely different things. Free software is always free, non free software is seen as a social evil, on the other hand Open source software is not always free.

As specified by RMS is his essay “Why Free Software is better than Open Source”

The fundamental difference between the two movements is in their values, their ways of looking at the world. For the Open Source movement, the issue of whether software should be open source is a practical question, not an ethical one. As one person put it, “Open source is a development methodology; free software is a social movement.” For the Open Source movement, non-free software is a suboptimal solution. For the Free Software movement, non-free software is a social problem and free software is the solution.


Now coming back to the article, RMS in an interview in the Documentary "Revolution OS" says free software is a way of living in the society,small children are taught in schools to share their lunch with others, good neighbours help each other, its a way of living in harmony with the society.
I completely agree with RMS here, but only on a philosophical level, what he suggest here is a perfect condition of a perfect society, but the society is not perfect. every thing cannot be shared. you don't share your money with others, software is a way of earning money for people, programmers earn their living with it.

Don't get me wrong , I myself use Slackware and Ubuntu on my machine, and the proprietary drivers provided by ATI for my graphics chip works better than the opensource alternative, so i use the ATI ones and have no problem in doing so.
What RMS is preaching is a world altering philosophy, but as it happens with every other radical preacher, it will not be accepted by the masses, unless until by some unseen trend in market makes software profits redundant.

And i am also staunchly opposed to the closed sourced corporation like microsoft n googles of the world, Opensource movement seems to be the correct way to go right now. We have to attain a balance and live with the necessary evil, the need to earn money.