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#+TITLE: Free Software: A Shining Example of Nongovernmental Externality Control
#+DATE: <2023-07-30 Sun>
#+TAGS: Praxeology, Economics, Free Software, Libertarianism
One of the most common arguments against anarcho-capitalism alleges the absolute necessity of coercion in provisioning public goods, or preventing tragedy of the commons. There are obvious theoretical rebuttals from an Austrian perspective (how does the /state/ know what is a "public good?"), but for the sound rhetorical strategy of engaging your opposition on his own terms counterexamples are required—ideally, ones more concrete than medieval Iceland. The absolute /dominance/ of the Free Software movement, with 77% of web servers, 71% of smartphone/tablets, 100% of top supercomputers, and 38% of embedded devices using operating systems in approximate compliance with its principles [fn:1], means it should live near the top of the Austro-libertarian rhetorical toolkit.
* The Economic Problem
Charging for a program almost necessarily entails concealing its source code and legally restricting how the software may be used, modified, and shared. For if the user pays for the source, and copyright or contract does not restrict what he may do with it in-hand, the demand for that product and the fact that copying is nearly cost-free together mean he has an incentive to distribute what he has acquired at a much lower price, as he need not recoup the capital its creator invested up front.
The non-technical minarchist might wonder what the problem is. But there are two:
- the means of legally restricting user behavior amount to intellectual property law, and so are incompatible with a Rothbardian theory of property rights and contract law;
- technical users prefer having a program to having the experience of running a program.
The first should need no explanation. However, exactly what a technically-competent user means by "having a program" probably does. The Free Software Foundation ties all this up in its eponymous term, "Free Software," defined thus:
#+begin_quote
...
“Free software” means software that respects users' freedom and community. Roughly, it means that the users have the freedom to run, copy,
distribute, study, change and improve the software. Thus, “free software” is a matter of liberty, not price. To understand the concept, you
should think of “free” as in “free speech,” not as in “free beer.” We sometimes call it “libre software,” borrowing the French or Spanish word
for “free” as in freedom, to show we do not mean the software is gratis.
You may have paid money to get copies of a free program, or you may have obtained copies at no charge. But regardless of how you got your
copies, you always have the freedom to copy and change the software, even to sell copies.
We campaign for these freedoms because everyone deserves them. With these freedoms, the users (both individually and collectively) control
the program and what it does for them. When users don't control the program, we call it a “nonfree” or “proprietary” program. The nonfree
program controls the users, and the developer controls the program; this makes the program an instrument of unjust power.
...
A program is free software if the program's users have the four essential freedoms: [1]
- The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose (freedom 0).
- The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
- The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help others (freedom 2).
- The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others (freedom 3). By doing this you can give the whole community a chance to benefit from your changes. Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
A program is free software if it gives users adequately all of these freedoms. Otherwise, it is nonfree. While we can distinguish various nonfree
distribution schemes in terms of how far they fall short of being free, we consider them all equally unethical.
...
#+end_quote
While not excluding the operation of the market process, this nevertheless presents a "market failure:" users who share these values of the Free Software Foundation desire software with the described liberties more than software without, but providing said liberties makes it difficult for the market to price it "correctly." A price makes it less valuable. This appears, on every level, to be a case where the neoclassical economist would identify a dead-weight loss, and perscribe some tailor-made state intervention.
But, possibly due to government's eternal and absolute technical incompetence, this intervention never materialized. And free software outcompetes commercial software in every domain, save markets that are both older than widespread free software and whose users desire only the experience of running programs (to name it: the desktop/laptop space).
How?
* The GNU Solution
The FSF's founder, Richard Stallman, ran into the problems of commercial software at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab in the 70s. He characterizes its initial state as a "software-sharing community," where "[w]henever people from another
university or a company wanted to port and use a program, we gladly let them. If you saw someone using an unfamiliar and interesting
program, you could always ask to see the source code, so that you could read it, change it, or cannibalize parts of it to make a new program."[fn:2] Commercializing interests, exploiting extensively intellectual property priveleges, brought about the demise of this perceived utopia, tearing apart the society of the AI lab. Stallman responded by "building his own," from the ground up: an operating system and then a philosophical, social, and political movement, with the end of promoting the kind of environment surrounding software that was lost at MIT.
It is this GNU operating system, based exclusively on freely-licensed software, written by Stallman, the wider GNU project, and others entirely, whose derivatives dominate all serious computing in the current day. Not only did the non-state, entrepreneurial solution to the externality work, it /outcompeted/ its commercial alternative in a market that, if anything, had state actors hampering it (governments funding nonfree software startups, buying and using nonfree software, etc). The software, rather than being written to be sold later, is funded /ex ante/ or /ex post facto/, via crowdfunding or donations either to individual maintainers/projects or to foundations that organize such development. These donations come from individual users, politically-motivated idealists, or corporations whose bottom line depends to some extent on such projects. Lots of development is uncompensated, and are projects that a person develops primarily for personal use or interest and simply chooses to share for the benefit of others, at no cost to himself (indeed, often at a net benefit to himself: having users helps test the software, baazar-style development means that development responsibilities may be delegated, and prominent open-source maintainership is an excellent recommendation to prospective employers).
A hard example for interventionists to chew on, indeed!
* A Pragmatic Lesson: Copyleft
Free sofware contains an additional lesson for libertarians: that of pragmatism. Stallman sought to establish a particular end in a legally-hostile system; ordinarily, there would be nothing preventing someone from copying, modifying, and redistributing the fruits of the project's labor under nonfree licenses, frustrating that end.
So, he chose to exploit the legally-hostile system to prevent this practical harm to freedom, restricting users' freedom to make others less free. Most of the GNU code proper is licensed under the GNU Public License, which contains so-called "copyleft" provisions, mandate that derivative works be licensed under the same terms. Copyleft uses copyright to destroy copyright, so to speak.
Often, libertarians fall into myopic fixations on the ideal free society, to the neglect of the reality that the fastest realistic path to it almost certainly will involve some stopgap policies that, in isolation, would be unacceptable on libertarian terms [fn:3]. Taking a page out of copyleft's book, adopting instead additudes and policy perscriptions that celebrate and optimize for any increase in freedom, even if strictly incompatible with ideals, would go a long way towards securing libertarian ends.
* Footnotes
[fn:3] Dave Smith calls this "being too autistic."
[fn:2] [[http://www.gnu.org/gnu/thegnuproject.html][About the GNU Project - GNU Project - Free Software Foundation]]
[fn:1] TODO: insert relevant sources of the Wikipeda page "Usage share of operating systems".
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