Whether a no-nonsense business strategy or an act of good faith to the developer community, Netscape's bold move last week to free the source code of its browser is a prime-time endorsement for no-cost, build-it-yourself software.
"We drew on all the internal knowledge we had from working on these projects in the past," said Netscape's Marc Andreessen of the decision. "It just made so much sense."
But "free software" is an ambiguous term - there is a difference in meaning between the cultures of PC-based proprietary systems and the Net-centric UNIX worlds.
Free software has nothing to do with the shareware or freeware programs - distributed without their source code - long familiar to users of PC proprietary applications. Nor is it public domain, which can be exploited by corporations or other entities to produce their own proprietary derivatives. In the Unix culture, free software is about being able to share, reproduce and even modify a program's source code, the instructions which define it.
As proponents of free software often point out, while this software can be free-of-cost - that is, gratis - the real issue is about freedom, or human liberty. So it is really freed software.
This freed software is steeped in the hacker culture from which it was born. The philosophical implication of the Hacker Ethic is that information should be shared, so that everyone can benefit from it.
To this end, Richard Stallman may have pulled one of the greatest hacks of all time by creating not a work of software, but a legal document: his 1983 invention, the GNU General Public License, proposes the idea of "copyleft," where the author of a copyrighted work then gives away the restrictions of being able to reproduce or modify the work.
Since then, many works have been copylefted under the GNU GPL and similar licenses - most visibly with GNU/Linux, a UNIX-like operating system which runs on many different hardware architectures. Development of the Linux core was originally begun in 1991 by a solitary Finnish hacker using then-available copylefted software tools, but as Internet connectivity exploded throughout the '90s, an international contingent of programmers contributed - making GNU/Linux a complete, world-class operating system with all the trimmings, the first to be developed entirely via the Net.
The advantage of this new, subversive development model is described in Eric S. Raymond's paper "The Cathedral and the Bazaar."
"[W]hile coding remains an essentially solitary activity," Raymond wrote, "the really great hacks come from harnessing the attention and brainpower of entire communities."
The Net's community of developers, Andreessen said, are "an order of magnitude" greater than the number any vendor - even Microsoft - can muster. "We knew the amount of energy you could potentially tap into if you could do something like this," he said.
Indeed, the majority of the world's programmers don't work for commercial software companies, said Robert Young, co-founder and CEO of Red Hat Software, Inc., a popular vendor of Linux products.
"They're developing software to work on their own organization's internal goals," he said.
He gives the example of a lone NASA programmer who writes a driver to control radio telescope pointing devices - a program that would not have a great market in itself. But if this driver is instead released freely and cooperatively with others, Young said, the entire pool of freed software will benefit.
And since the wealth of the freed software pool cannot be decreased, the users of freed software will always be richer in this respect.
"It's about society as a whole," said Russell Nelson, president of Crynwr Software, a freed software support and development company. "Freed software is a big win for society in general."
One such benefit is that freed software does not withhold secrets, and this unconditional honesty means that the software is open to the public, warts and all. Since many programmers will then be familiar with its inner workings, support can be gotten nearly anywhere - unlike proprietary systems, where support can only be obtained from the original programmers.
"The greater reliance your business puts on proprietary software, the greater at risk your business is," said Nelson. "The only mission-critical software is freed software."
This openness also does wonders for the system's security.
"By allowing the public to go through the source code, a more secure product is made available," said Kit Knox, a co-maintainer of the rootshell.com security resource. "When source code is not available, a less secure product is created," he said.
The motivation in the creation of freed software is different, too - authors are motivated first and foremost by the desire to create, not just for a paycheck. This means that authors of freed software don't view their works as mere "products."
But it does not mean that money cannot be made from authoring freed works. In fact, the success of freed software shows the paradigm shift of software development, with potentially far-reaching implications for the software industry.
Young attributes Red Hat's profitability to what he calls the ketchup model: "In a bottle of ketchup, all you have are freely-distributable ingredients," he said. "Effectively, you can make something that looks and smells an awful lot like Heinz ketchup in your kitchen sink without so much as bending anyone's copyright or trademark rules."
But the reason why Heinz dominates the ketchup market, and why nobody bothers to make ketchup in their kitchen, is because of brand management: Heinz provides a high-quality, consistent product at a reasonable price, as do popular Linux distributions like Red Hat and Debian.
Young said that Red Hat expects to sell over 400,000 copies in 1998 - and because it can be shared, and is available for download at hundreds of ftp sites, that number represents only 10 percent of the total number of Red Hat copies in use.
And as time goes on, we can expect the world's store of freed information to grow exponentially. After all, as R. Buckminster Fuller observed the same year that Stallman invented copyleft: trying to stop this apolitical and amorphous phenomenon of cooperative networking will be like trying to stop the waves of the ocean.
