Collectivism in computing

However distasteful, Microsoft's machinations over the years to establish and wield monopoly power don't discredit the concepts of economic self-interest and private property. Nor does Apple's wonted milking of closed-platform cash cows or Google's opaque (if not evil) exploitation of search. For the most part, the success of ruthless, self-serving concerns like Microsoft, Apple, and Google affirms rather than calls into question the soundness of capitalist principles. The wealth these companies generate, along with the manifest utility of their products, attests to the efficacy of free enterprise

Yet a bizarre collectivism permeates the computing zeitgeist. Enlightened zealots—programmers, academics, bloggers, conference presenters and attenders, setters of IT standards—yearn for a post-proprietary utopia in which all software is free. "Free as in speech," they emphasize, not "free as in beer." But the distinction is tenuous

Computer programs are the direction of programmers' intelligence to the solving of problems or the creation of something useful. Software may be copied to physical media but in essence is an intangible intellectual asset. Software "free as in speech" is software free to be inspected, tampered with, duplicated, applied to any end. Purveyors of software "free as in speech" effectively disclaim ownership rights to the very essence of their creation and blissfully, it seems, condition the public to underappreciate the value of software and of intellectual property in general

Software "free as in speech" becomes, over time, if not software "free as in beer" then software so cheapened as to be unprofitable to invest in. The freedom-fighters' argument that software stripped of all proprietary controls may still be sold for a price—that it need not be "free as in beer"—ignores a slippery-slope condition that would imperil capitalism itself in a predominantly knowledge-based economy

How do these collectivists justify their repudiation of property rights and old-school capitalist selfishness? What ever happened to free as in enterprise?

Free-software advocates are principled characters, seemingly. They assert that programmers of necessity must explore and dismantle, must operate unconstrained, to do their jobs properly. You want applications that work, don't you? You want soundly designed, efficient components, don't you?

You want continuous innovation in software development, don't you?

If so, the reasoning goes, you must give developers the freedom they need. Obstacles to the sharing of information, to the understanding of methods, or to the accessibility of operational features must be eliminated. Otherwise you'll end up with software built on bad decisions. You'll end up with software hard to maintain, hard to enhance, hard to reuse. You'll end up with software that annoys and inconveniences users.

If you would let crass commercial motives corrupt the sacred process of developing software, if you would let people build walls around what they themselves create and set their own terms as to its use, you're clueless. You're a Neanderthal. You don't understand that closed-source, proprietary software is by definition bad software. You're part of the problem.

It's a fashionable ideology.

The virtues of open source and open platforms are trumpeted nonstop, often with cogent populist rhetoric. It doesn't take much to make a believer out of John Q. Public, who loves feature-rich freebie products and the imagery of walls coming down. Collectivist sentiment, often dripping with elitist self-congratulation, abounds in blog posts and IT articles—and, notably, among readers' comments to blog posts and IT articles. Open-platform programmers esteem themselves as discerning "engineers" and "architects" but deride Microsoft- or Adobe-platform developers as brainwashed hacks who swallow whatever their corporate masters feed them.

Profit-seeking companies, too, cultivate the software-wants-to-free dogma, albeit with serpentine duplicity. Each wants the entire computing universe, save for that tiny fraction representing its own proprietary interest, to be ever freer, ever more open.