Independence Day
Free and Open Source software has been hailed as the key to universal digital accessibility

By Prasid Bannerjee
We’ve all had our experiences with ‘unregistered’ software versions, and have at one time or the other carried the tag of a ‘pirate’; perhaps due to the unauthorised copying of music, movies, software - or even class assignments, for that matter. At such times we’ve often wished - “Why aren’t things free? Why do we have to pay - especially if the lack of ability to pay hinders our academic or mental growth?”

Richard Stallman, a computer science student at MIT, held similar opinions, and started what we know today as the Free Software Movement. This was not to promote illegal copying, nor was it intended to rob innovators of their intellectual property rights; the free software movement’s raison d'etre was to allow developers and volunteer developers to leverage the power of what we today call ‘crowdsourcing’. It was with this intent that the Free Software Foundation (FSF) was founded in 1985.

This eventually gave rise to Free and Open-Source Software (FOSS), which is software that is liberally licensed to grant users the right to use, study, change, and improve its design through the availability of its source code. In the context of Free and Open-Source Software, 'free' refers to the freedom to copy and re-use the software, rather than to the price of the software. The FSF suggests that to understand the concept, one should “think of free as in free speech”.

FOSS is an inclusive term that covers both free software and open source software, which despite describing similar development models, have differing cultures and philosophies. Free software focuses on the philosophical freedoms it gives to users, whereas open source software focuses on the perceived strengths of its peer-to-peer development model.

This doesn’t sound like a fair business, does it? Well, it seems some perspective is in order. According to a recent survey of 1,000 CIOs of employers across the US and UK, over 76% of large organisations use free software across the organisation, and about 51% are planning to deploy more free software in 2011. The servers of the White House operate on free software, and more than 80% of Internet servers - that bring to you the World Wide Web - across the globe are based on free software.

The availability of the source code helps users determine the best configuration for their usage, customise it according to their need and even distribute it; a flexibility that Microsoft, Apple, or Adobe can’t even dream of offering. The original creator of the software asks for only one thing ‘credit when due’ in the spirit of the Goo Goo Dolls song I just want you to know who I am.

Collaborative development has been a norm since long before the Internet, and it was always philosophically-inclined to defeat monopolies, which, as their opponents claim, are ‘a fundamental aberration from the concept of freedom’. Right from sharing designs and processes during the automobile boom in the United States, to the development of the Internet protocols by the ARPANET, the sharing of information has only led to development that no corporation can accomplish individually.

No reference to free software is complete without mentioning Linus Torvalds, a Finnish computer engineer, who developed an operating system and licensed it under the free-to-modify licence known to the computer industry as the GNU General Public License. What this essentially meant was that anyone could open the hood and tinker around to make the engine work like a small car or a monster truck. This brought to users immense freedom in the way they wanted to use the software. Moreover, with growing support to free software development and distribution, online forums were active and prompt in solving all kinds of usage issues and development problems. It is free software that led to the .com boom in the late 1990s. Open source allowed young developers to set up Internet companies on shoestring budgets as they usually did not have money to purchase licensed software. Almost all Internet start-ups that are household names today started operations with free software running on their systems. They not just used them, but also developed them further and put them out for use again - as usual, for no charge whatsoever.

It is the philosophy of free information that led to the subsequent evolution of free email, through Sabeer Bhatia’s Hotmail and multiple other free services that we use today. Facebook, Twitter, and above all, Google, all offer services that are free to the users. Here, the infrastructure is essentially supported by advertisement revenues. These models are different in concept to FOSS, but the underlying philosophy is the same. The height of free information is Wikipedia, which doesn’t even earn revenue but works on donations and the contribution of volunteer programmers who bring to you information and services just because they believe that information is the fundamental building block of what we would want to call a truly free world.

1969: United States vs IBM ruling that termed bundled software products anti-competitive.

1969: The Internet is born, after a decade of open development through RFCs (Request For Comments).

1976: Bill Gates, in his Open Letter to Hobbyists, terms ‘sharing’ as ‘stealing’. This marks the strongly assertive arrival of proprietary software and sets the tone for the following decades.

1970-1980: Evolution of Internet communities like Usenet and UUCPnet. These advocate and facilitate online sharing of source code

1983: Richard Stallman launches the GNU Project to write a completely free operating system.

1985: The Free Software Foundation is set up and The Free Manifesto is written by Richard Stallman.

1989: The first version of GNU public license is published.

1991: Linus Torvalds releases the Linux kernel, effectively completing the GNU Project.
1990s: A number of Linux distributions, prominently Debian and KDE, evolve the concept further.

Late 1990s: The .com boom is fuelled by systems running on open and free software.

1998: Netscape releases its source code, which later became the foundation for Mozilla Firefox.

1999: Sun Microsystems releases Open Office.

2002: MIT launches its OpenCourseWare project.

2007: The Java development toolkit JDK is released as open source

2008: Google’s new mobile OS - Android - is released.