In any intellectual field, one can reach greater heights by standing on the shoulders of others. But that is no longer gen-erally allowed in the proprietary software field—you can only stand on the shoulders of the other people in your own com-pany.
The associated psychosocial harm affects the spirit of scientific cooperation, which used to be so strong that scientists would cooperate even when their countries were at war. In this spirit, Japanese oceanographers abandoning their lab on an island in the Pacific carefully preserved their work for the invading U.S.
Marines, and left a note asking them to take good care of it.
—Richard Stallman
Software is a science: you reason, you create a hypothesis in the form of source code, and then you test the hypothesis by running it
on a computer. Some think software is an art because well-written software has a certain elegance to it. But one could say the same about many of the best mathematical proofs or formulas in physics.
Elegance does not make science into an art, it is simply an embodi-ment of Einstein's “As simple as possible, but not simpler.”
Linus Torvalds summarized the similarity between free software and science as thus:
Science may take a few hundred years to figure out how the world works, but it does actually get there, exactly because people can build on each others' knowledge, and it evolves over time. In contrast, witchcraft/alchemy may be about smart peo-ple, but the knowledge body never “accumulates” anywhere. It might be passed down to an apprentice, but the hiding of infor-mation basically means that it can never really become any bet-ter than what a single person/company can understand.
And that’s exactly the same issue with open source (free) vs proprietary products. The proprietary people can design some-thing that is smart, but it eventually becomes too complicated for a single entity (even a large company) to really understand and drive, and the company politics and the goals of that com-pany will always limit it.
Even the word “university”, man's place for shared study, derives from the Latin universitas magistrorum et scholarium, meaning “a community of teachers and scholars.” Universities were long under-stood to be places where people were placed together to learn from each other.
Unfortunately, today, proprietary software has spread from the corporate world to universities and other public institutions. If cor-porations want to hoard their scientific advancements, that is fine, albeit short-sighted, but our public institutions should not be follow-ing suit! Not only Stanford's robot-driven car, Stanley, but also a ton of other proprietary software is written by public institutions today.
Just unleashing our public institutions towards free software will greatly increase the pace of progress, without even accounting for the software funded by corporations.
Some think of free software as a Marxist idea, but science has always been public because it was understood that giving the knowl-edge away would spurn further innovation, and because the scien-tist needed some shoulders to stand on in the first place.
Corporations were created not to hoard knowledge but to take the advancements in science and apply them to practical uses. There still is plenty of opportunity for competition and free markets, even if all of the advancements in science are freely available.
Scientists' work is reviewed by peers, published in journals, and discussed at conferences; the exchange of new snippets of knowl-edge between participants is fundamental to further progress. This even allows for competition to be the first to discover something, or put the advancement to commercial use.
With proprietary software, we've created something outside the classically accepted model of scientific research, and even worse, it has become a very dominant model in private and public institu-tions. Letting one company own an innovation in science might pro-vide it an incentive to sell better products, but it limits the many other people who could use that advancement in other ways.
Science is not all knowledge. Science is not a business, a service, or a product. And to the extent that it took science to make a prod-uct, patents were created to protect ideas that were easily copied but not easily invented or discovered.
One could even argue that patents are not necessary to stimulate progress because the challenge someone has when going up against GE's light bulb idea is the infrastructure to produce and distribute such a product, and the knowledge gained in doing all of this. An old line in business is that the one who wins is “the firstest with the mostest.” Large companies have economies of scale and satisfied customers that any newcomers would have to overcome, even if they built a better product.
Economies of scale are great for the free market because they are a powerful driver of increased efficiency and quality, but they also mean that to defeat someone you need to be more than 10% better.
The need for breakthroughs to defeat incumbents is good for the free market because it forces newcomers to think big. Fortunately, transformative technologies come along frequently enough that no incumbent is ever truly safe.
Because software is a science, making it freely available may hurt proprietary software companies, but it will help every other type of company.