GNU – A Virtual Communist Manifesto

07/01/2006 Written by Mohit Joshi + SyS64738' introduction

SyS64738’s intro­duc­tion: You know Zone-​H being a source of “unre­stricted infor­ma­tion”. In this spirit, we want to pub­lish an arti­cle writ­ten by a young Indian about the neg­a­tive sides of the open source move­ment. It’s a dif­fer­ent point of view from the com­mon one, if we pub­lish it doesn’t mean we auto­mat­i­cally agree with it but being so “alter­na­tive” definetly deserves to be reported. Up to you the con­clu­sions, the author is there and avail­able for con­tacts. The arti­cle is divided in two chap­ters, the author promised us to deliver a third part once ready… happy reading! SyS64738’s intro­duc­tion: You know Zone-​H being a source of “unre­stricted infor­ma­tion”. In this spirit, we want to pub­lish an arti­cle writ­ten by a young Indian about the neg­a­tive sides of the open source move­ment. It’s a dif­fer­ent point of view from the com­mon one, if we pub­lish it doesn’t mean we auto­mat­i­cally agree with it but being so “alter­na­tive” definetly deserves to be reported. Up to you the con­clu­sions, the author is there and avail­able for con­tacts. The arti­cle is divided in two chap­ters, the author promised us to deliver a third part once ready… happy reading!

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GNU – A Vir­tual Com­mu­nist Man­i­festo Chap­ter 1 : From Cra­dle To The Grave

In the begin­ning there was man. Man cre­ated machines. And great­est of them was the com­puter. To inter­act with these pow­er­ful things he cre­ated soft­ware – to con­trol and dom­i­nate them. Then some­thing hap­pened. No, machines didn’t take over and we were not trapped inside Matrix.

Many peo­ple saw this devel­op­ment as a per­fect busi­ness oppor­tu­nity. They orga­nized them­selves into var­i­ous groups or com­mer­cial orga­ni­za­tions and started com­ing up with bril­liant ideas on how to bet­ter inter­act with these machines – how to cre­ate bet­ter soft­ware. These groups patented the ideas they devel­oped which were sub­se­quently sold in mar­ket for profit.

The soft­ware so devel­oped came to be known as pro­pri­etary soft­ware. The rights for devel­op­ment, debug­ging, improve­ment and dis­tri­b­u­tion were reserved with the devel­op­ers. So the devel­op­ment com­pany would hire the best brains it could get and develop or main­tain its soft­ware. The improve­ments car­ried out were released as dif­fer­ent ver­sions that were named/​numbered accord­ingly. Merg­ers and acqui­si­tions were also com­mon and in some cases were part of expan­sion and improve­ment policy.

If you are a cap­i­tal­ist (like me) all this will seem very nor­mal and pro­duc­tive to you.

Now as the years pro­gressed the need for inter­ac­tion among the machines grew. This led to the birth of the Inter­net. Inter­net solved a lot of prob­lems (and cre­ated many new ones too). In Thomas Friedman’s words – It cre­ated a flat world. Most impor­tantly it brought down the com­mu­ni­ca­tion costs. Now devel­op­ers from dif­fer­ent geo­graph­i­cal loca­tions were able to work on the same project and com­mu­ni­cate with their col­leagues any­where on the planet. Thus the trans­ac­tion cost decreased.

Right from the begin­ning of the com­put­ing era there was a new cul­ture in mak­ing. Many call it the Hacker Cul­ture. Ini­tially restricted to aca­d­e­mic cir­cles, it involved tech­ni­cians who sim­ply wanted to fid­dle with the exist­ing soft­ware. But since the rights of the pro­pri­etary soft­ware was gen­er­ally reserved with their devel­op­ers some of them started design­ing their own soft­ware. This was also the result of inef­fi­ciency present in some of the exist­ing software.

The growth of the Inter­net gave a big boost to hacker cul­ture. It enabled hack­ers to share their codes with every­one else. This shar­ing and col­lab­o­ra­tion ensured con­tin­ual improve­ment of their soft­ware. Apart from this a lot of secu­rity related bugs (flaws in com­puter program/​code) also started sur­fac­ing and it was becom­ing increas­ingly dif­fi­cult for the soft­ware com­pa­nies to remove them on reg­u­lar basis. All this made it quite clear that the cur­rent busi­ness model (of pro­pri­etary soft­ware) wasn’t ade­quate any­more. Thus it was from neces­sity – to pro­duce effi­cient soft­ware – that Open Source move­ment was born.

Eric S. Ray­mond proves this point quite nicely in his famous essay “The cathe­dral and the bazaar”. Accord­ing to him, given a large num­ber of peo­ple, soft­ware devel­op­ment could be very effec­tive. Hence a large pool of beta testers can indeed find bugs much faster and even­tu­ally fix them. Fur­ther­more, he laid down rules that soft­ware uti­liz­ing bazaar model must fol­low to max­i­mize its gains. More­over, he makes it fairly clear that one can­not code in bazaar style from scratch. The bazaar model offers max­i­mum gains while test­ing, debug­ging and improv­ing the soft­ware rather than design­ing it from the ground up. Thus a suc­cess­ful “bazaar style” soft­ware must have a coor­di­na­tor (who may or may not be the orig­i­nal designer) who is not only a good designer but has lead­er­ship qual­i­ties and is capa­ble of keep­ing his beta-​testers con­stantly stim­u­lated. So we had sci­en­tific method of increas­ing effi­ciency and pro­duc­tiv­ity but the chal­lenge to absorb it into a prof­itable busi­ness model remained.

So what did com­pa­nies do to turn these events into busi­ness oppor­tu­nity? Well, as you might have guessed every­one tried dif­fer­ent things – some (read Microsoft) resisted it and went into war mode. Oth­ers like IBM devel­oped bet­ter pro­pri­etary soft­ware over the open source soft­ware and rein­vested part of their prof­its in devel­op­ment of open source. Many more ideas flowed in which ranged from mere polit­i­cal gim­mick to very pro­duc­tive ones. I’ll have to write a dif­fer­ent essay to cover that. For this one I’ll focus on a very dif­fer­ent trend or rather a move­ment (as some may call) called GNU.

GNU is a recur­sive acronym for “GNU’s Not UNIX”. Some devel­op­ers (though they were more of politi­cians) felt that Open Source move­ment is all about achiev­ing tech­ni­cal and eco­nomic objec­tives. They wanted to give this move­ment a moral and eth­i­cal angle – to take it from prac­ti­cal­ity to ide­ol­ogy. Hence a new move­ment called Free Soft­ware move­ment or GNU move­ment was born.

At the moment I am unable to think of more appro­pri­ate quote than this – The only thing we learn from his­tory is that we never learn from it. To induct moral stan­dards, to accuse every com­mer­cial orga­ni­za­tion of monop­oly and cry out for free­dom of peo­ple is best trait a com­mu­nist can show. I am NOT say­ing that we should not con­sider ethics, no orga­ni­za­tion is monop­o­lis­tic and free­dom is unnec­es­sary. What I am say­ing is that these things can­not be achieved by ide­al­ism like com­mu­nism. His­tory has repeat­edly shown that these things are best left to mar­ket forces – which is one of the biggest demo­c­ra­tic forces. What is essen­tial to make these mar­ket forces effec­tive is ade­quate com­pe­ti­tion. When cus­tomers have options to choose from, they will them­selves opt for most eth­i­cal com­pany and that in itself is true free­dom. The monop­o­lis­tic com­pa­nies will be forced to change their habits or loose busi­ness (that’s what is hap­pen­ing to Microsoft). This is exactly what open source move­ment was ini­tially about – chang­ing cus­tomers into co-​developers – that is before com­mu­nist dri­ven Free Soft­ware move­ment took over.

Many devel­op­ers con­sider the two move­ments – open source and free — to be same. Although at times the two do seem to be com­ple­men­tary and striv­ing for sim­i­lar goals but that’s sim­ply not true. Free soft­ware move­ment has not given open source move­ment moral­is­tic over­tones – it has made it a com­mu­nist movement.

Chap­ter 2: The Great Soft­ware Robbery

In last chap­ter I sum­ma­rized the jour­ney from pro­pri­etary to free soft­ware. Now I will dig deep into how this free move­ment became closely asso­ci­ated to communism.

Open source move­ment, as I said ear­lier, was born out of neces­sity to cre­ate effi­cient soft­ware. Although hacker cul­ture existed before, the open source model was first suc­cess­fully adopted in devel­op­ment of Linux. Some do argue that the com­mer­cial ven­dors (even SCO) never under­stood that UNIX was a busi­ness oppor­tu­nity or that there was any mar­ket for it and now they acknowl­edge the mis­take. So had any of these ven­dors seri­ously con­sid­ered mar­ket­ing UNIX at a com­mod­ity price, there would have been no Linux. But that is no longer the real argu­ment because it is more or less an estab­lished fact that Linux is good piece of soft­ware at least as an alter­nate to expen­sive UNIXes in uni­ver­si­ties and research depart­ments — if not for com­mer­cial purposes.

The mod­er­ate suc­cess of Linux attracted a lot of eye­balls. Some thought of it as mag­i­cal soft­ware that would rid them of tyranny of the Microsoft. The best thing about open source was that peo­ple thought that they would be doing what they like to do rather than what their bosses tell them to do. This did sound very promis­ing to indi­vid­ual devel­op­ers who lacked other resources (like cap­i­tal) because this made them believe that if they had a good idea (design), all they had to do was write a par­tial code and a large com­mu­nity will turn it into a won­der­ful piece of soft­ware. Though some real­ized that main devel­oper or co-​coordinator needs to be a good leader so as to keep things smooth (read bazaar rules), all this seemed attain­able. Since it was nec­es­sary in this model that source code must be avail­able to all, to ensure this, var­i­ous licenses were for­mu­lated. One such license was GNU Gen­eral Pur­pose License (GPL).

GNU GPL became the most pop­u­lar license because of whole free­dom phi­los­o­phy woven around it (read GNU Phi­los­o­phy). GPL is one the best cases of viral licens­ing, enforced by its clause 2b, which reads:

You must cause any work that you dis­trib­ute or pub­lish, that in whole or in part con­tains or is derived from the Pro­gram or any part thereof, to be licensed as a whole at no charge to all third par­ties under the terms of this License.

In plain Eng­lish this means that if devel­oper uses any code from the GPL’d soft­ware then his new soft­ware will also fall under GPL license. Thus the num­ber of GPL licensed soft­ware increased at expo­nen­tial rate. And accord­ing to GNU phi­los­o­phy this pro­vided free­dom to every­one. This may be true in the per­fect world but that’s not where we live in. Human beings are dri­ven by lust for power and greed.

The GNU phi­los­o­phy (and GPL – Its mode of imple­men­ta­tion), put for­ward by Richard Stall­man has a very stark resem­blance to com­mu­nism. It may be thought of as its vir­tual avatar. To find why, read on.

Thomas Fried­man in his book “The World is Flat” did say that glob­al­iza­tion has enabled big com­pa­nies to play small and small com­pa­nies to play big. It has lev­elled the play­ing field and this has been due to increased col­lab­o­ra­tion and shar­ing between var­i­ous groups and individuals.

GNU GPL instead of lev­el­ling the play­ing field actu­ally cre­ates an illu­sion that the entire devel­oper soci­ety is equal, in sense that they all have sim­i­lar goals and objec­tives. Hence the same reward for every­one – ego sat­is­fac­tion. What they need to under­stand is that money is not just a reward, moti­va­tor or a neces­sity but in fact abstrac­tion for work. Peo­ple value dif­fer­ent things dif­fer­ently and that is why trade is healthy. That is why a devel­oper who has a fam­ily to sup­port would like to make profit from his soft­ware while another who is researcher at a uni­ver­sity would feel con­tended with good grades and peer recog­ni­tion with­out wor­ry­ing about profits.

Pay­ing devel­op­ers roy­alty or com­pen­sa­tion for their work is not only fair but also ulti­mately a great lev­eller (of play­ing field) because it enables peo­ple to acquire what­ever they value more. Some peo­ple think of GNU GPL as an exem­pli­fi­ca­tion of glob­al­iza­tion. Let me put a warn­ing sign here – 

“The col­lab­o­ra­tion and sharing

with­out mon­e­tary compensation

will not aid in globalization

but rather communism”.

Not only does FSF (Free Soft­ware Foun­da­tion) falsely believe in equal­ity of devel­oper soci­ety (in terms of goals and objec­tives), it com­mits the same mis­take while view­ing con­sumer soci­ety. It fails to acknowl­edge require­ments of dif­fer­ent sec­tions of soci­ety. What I mean is, though price is always a fac­tor, it may not always be the decid­ing fac­tor. Pri­or­i­ties of peo­ple (or con­sumers) dif­fer. For one sec­tion of peo­ple user-​friendly nature of soft­ware may be of prime impor­tance while other may value after sale ser­vice and sup­port. By voic­ing con­cerns of a lim­ited sec­tion of soci­ety and claim­ing it to be need of entire soci­ety is the worst mar­ket­ing tech­nique imaginable.

To make mat­ters even worse, apart from its inabil­ity to acknowl­edge dif­fer­ent objec­tives within the devel­oper and con­sumer soci­eties, it com­mits the blun­der of mis­in­ter­pret­ing all cus­tomers as co-​developers. Thus it believes in ONE big soci­ety. Sub­ha­sish Ghosh explains this point nicely in his essay “A Cri­tique of GNU phi­los­o­phy (II)”, which explains:

One of the most pri­mary rea­sons of fail­ure for Karl Marx’s com­mu­nist the­ory was the basic all-​important implicit assump­tion of ‘human labour as a com­mod­ity pos­sess­ing both mar­ket and exchange value’. Stall­man seems to exceed even Marx in this respect of base­less syn­thetic assump­tions. Com­pa­nies or indi­vid­u­als cre­ate soft­ware with a basic motive. The motive of using someone’s intel­lec­tual prop­erty (or of a col­lec­tion of peo­ple) is using the com­mod­ity (or arti­cle of inter­est) and the effect pro­duced by it as an imme­di­ate result. It is here where the dif­fer­ence lies. Microsoft Word pro­gram or vi (in Linux) is same in terms of func­tion­al­ity since they both allow an end-​user to write down his/​her thoughts. The effect is the same in both cases. How he/​she achieves the end result is the most impor­tant, not his/​her intrin­sic abil­ity of mod­ify Word or the vi edi­tor. Thus, being able to fix or adapt the pro­gram is an exter­nal addi­tional choice, not an imme­di­ate intrin­sic choice avail­able to all mankind. Stallman’s whim­si­cal phi­los­o­phy of free (open-​source) soft­ware seems to hover around this very basic mis­taken under­stand­ing of life around us.

So due to this incor­rect model of co-​operation put forth by FSF, small-​time and low bud­get devel­op­ers, who do not have ade­quate resources, often end up using GNU GPL. They are sub­se­quently forced to give up one thing that could have stopped their project from being low bud­get, their intel­lec­tual prop­erty rights, now for­feited by the GPL virus.

Thus the GNU phi­los­o­phy, like com­mu­nism, harms very peo­ple it claims to pro­tect and breeds enslavement.

To prove they are not com­mu­nists, FSF gen­er­ally makes a very lame excuse stat­ing that (unlike com­mu­nism) they are not so much in favour of equal­ity but rather free­dom. FSF repeat­edly claims that pay­ing for soft­ware takes away one’s free­dom. This is def­i­nitely not true because sale of a prod­uct implies com­mit­ment to and respon­si­bil­ity for that prod­uct. It is the choice of the cus­tomer whether to buy spe­cific soft­ware or not. It is not forced upon him. Instead we should be argu­ing how to pro­vide ade­quate com­pe­ti­tion. This should have been the real dis­cus­sion but FSF wrongly made it a “free­dom debate”.

Some defend free soft­ware on grounds that if some­one buys pro­pri­etary soft­ware but is unable to pay for patches and updates in future he’ll be stuck. That’s why, they say, free soft­ware is so lib­er­at­ing. My opin­ion is, though it may be jus­ti­fied to pro­vide free patches/​upgrades for home users but for com­mer­cial users, it makes no sense at all. When a com­pany buys pro­pri­etary soft­ware, it makes an invest­ment. Now it is respon­si­bil­ity of devel­op­ers and man­age­ment of this orga­ni­za­tion to pro­duce profit from it and rein­vest in future upgrades. If they some­how fail to do so then it is the orga­ni­za­tion that is to blame, not the pro­pri­etary software.

FSF in gen­eral is also opposed to get­ting rich – at least by pro­gram­ming. Here are a few lines from GNU Manifesto:

The real rea­son pro­gram­mers will not starve is that it will still be pos­si­ble for them to get paid for pro­gram­ming; just not paid as much as now…

In the long run, mak­ing pro­grams free is a step toward the post-​scarcity world, where nobody will have to work very hard just to make a liv­ing. Peo­ple will be free to devote them­selves to activ­i­ties that are fun, such as pro­gram­ming, after spend­ing the nec­es­sary ten hours a week on required tasks such as leg­is­la­tion, fam­ily coun­sel­ing, robot repair and aster­oid prospect­ing. There will be no need to be able to make a liv­ing from programming.

FSF argues that they are not against peo­ple mak­ing money. They say that peo­ple are free to make money by dis­trib­ut­ing or redis­trib­ut­ing free soft­ware and through after-​sales-​support and ser­vic­ing. If you had been read­ing care­fully, you would real­ize what FSF is say­ing is very much self-​contradictory. Accord­ing to them the whole con­cept of free soft­ware was good because peo­ple were able to do what they love and have nat­ural tal­ents for — that is cod­ing. Now they are ask­ing peo­ple to do some­thing they may not be nat­u­rally wired for. To be suc­cess­ful in busi­ness of dis­tri­b­u­tion, ser­vice and sup­port – skills other than pro­gram­ming are essen­tial that may or may not be present in the same indi­vid­ual. There­fore it is very likely that some other per­son pos­sess­ing these skills will reap ben­e­fits with­out ever both­er­ing to pay the pro­gram­mer who has no intel­lec­tual rights. Thus maybe few smart indi­vid­u­als may ben­e­fit but a large sec­tion of soci­ety will find itself help­less. A crude way of cor­rect­ing this may be cor­po­ra­tions, which may orga­nize pro­gram­mers and nec­es­sary man­agers. But no such orga­ni­za­tion can sur­vive for long with­out profit motive and only on dona­tions. Thus we come back a full cir­cle to right where we started – the pro­pri­etary soft­ware. (If you are think­ing about likes of Red Hat, those are cases of cor­po­rate embrace that I will dis­cuss in chap­ter 3 – to be released shortly.). Cor­po­ra­tions are more suc­cess­ful than indi­vid­u­als not only because they can mix tal­ents but also because they can bet­ter define vision, goals and objec­tives and have abil­ity to stick to them in order to pro­vide long term support.

Another belief that the above state­ment from GNU Man­i­festo focuses on is that with the imple­men­ta­tion of new tech­nol­ogy, old pro­fes­sions are bound to become obso­lete (Read “The Com­mu­nist Baker Jesus”- by Helgi Hrafn Gun­nars­son for more on jus­ti­fi­ca­tion of Free soft­ware on these grounds). Since the new tech­nol­ogy promises pro­duc­tiv­ity, loss of pro­fes­sion is in fact accept­able. This argu­ment is gen­er­ally used to prove that FSF is not so much labour friendly and is cap­i­tal­ist, not com­mu­nist. Also Thomas Fried­man did say that in glob­al­ized econ­omy some pro­fes­sions will become obso­lete but the new tech­nol­ogy will itself cre­ate new pro­fes­sions, thereby such tran­si­tion is ben­e­fi­cial in long run. If this was indeed the case with soft­ware indus­try, FSF might have been right. But the fol­low­ing argu­ment proves them wrong. First they are using lit­i­ga­tion not tech­nol­ogy to make a pro­fes­sion obso­lete. More­over, pro­gram­mers are not really becom­ing obso­lete, as their require­ment will still be there. So they are actu­ally being enslaved not erad­i­cated. Had it been the case that devel­op­ment of AI (Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence) had reached a level that pro­gram­mers were no longer nec­es­sary, every cap­i­tal­ist would have sup­ported it and it would have been respon­si­bil­ity of pro­gram­mers to upgrade their skills accord­ing to new envi­ron­ment. But the cur­rent argu­ment by FSF is not cap­i­tal­ist ideology.

Now to con­clude, the free soft­ware model and espe­cially GNU GPL is seri­ously flawed. It is not a cap­i­tal­ist ide­ol­ogy or exem­pli­fi­ca­tion of glob­al­iza­tion but com­mu­nism. The only thing that has been accom­plished by its wide­spread use is enslave­ment and rob­bery of soft­ware that has cost may pro­gram­mers dearly.

All this does not mean that open source soft­ware is com­plete non­sense and must be revolted against. There is much good that it can lead to – which I will describe in chap­ter 3. But all devel­op­ers, espe­cially indi­vid­u­als must be very care­ful about whichever license they choose — based on what they value the most and their pri­or­i­ties — or it may end up destroy­ing their livelihood.