[Off-Topic] Free Software: An Exercise in CAPITALISM

A sentence I said in my previous article may have struck some people as odd:

“The basis for this is the open source world — the largest capitalist experiment in software, and a living example for everyone of what a Laissez-faire Free Market looks like. The best place to maintain and improve technology commodities.”

By the principles of “Free” Software’s freedom, many wrongly attribute the open and free code world as being a great “socialist” experiment. It isn’t — it’s absolutely capitalist. It’s Laissez-Faire, Laissez-Passer; I’d go further and say it’s almost a real Free Market, the capitalist utopia — which doesn’t exist today and many believe only existed in the first 20 years of the 20th century in the US.

As C|NET reported in “Open Source: It’s about capitalism, not freebies”:

“The trick is to use open-source software as a means to an end, not an end in itself. Open source is a means of cheap distribution, a way to get software in the hands of potential buyers for little or no cost. It’s a way to make software experimentation social and less risky, because users can try before they buy and because they can customize (or pay someone to customize) the software to their needs at a lower cost than proprietary software.”

Or in this other C|NET article “Sorry, socialists: Open source is a capitalist’s game”:

“[Sarah] Grey writes that ’there are alternatives to capitalism.’ She’s right. Unfortunately, open source is not one of them. Open source is the essence of Free Market Capitalism.”

Most people have very distorted ideas of why “capitalism is the evil empire of tyrants” or why “socialism is justice, equality, and democracy for all,” when in reality it’s exactly the opposite.

By the way, a notion many people don’t have is that you’re either a defender of socialism or a defender of freedom. Both are diametrically opposed.

Let’s see how the Free Market and individualistic interests are the only path that leads to a positive side effect: the possibility of really making a difference in “social causes.” Through capitalist principles, not socialist ones.

The principle? As I said in my previous article:

“I never live for the sake of another person, and I never ask any person to live for my sake. I only accept voluntary trades for mutual benefit.”

What is Free Market in Free Software?

Let’s understand:

A “Free Market” is the conduct of transactions without coercion.

I can use a free software for free — that’s the license its owner gave me. I can contribute parts of code to that software, without coercion, by my own choice. The owner of the software has the right to accept my contribution or not, based on whatever criteria they want.

Software is private property, copyright, of its authors. Having “open” code does not make it public domain, and you can’t claim rights if the software doesn’t have a license that gives you that privilege. Whether to enforce that copyright is an exclusive right of its owner.

Laissez-Faire is the minimal or near-nonexistent intervention of a governmental or regulatory entity. No entity controlling supply and demand. Leaving the dynamics of that market — who supplies, who buys, the currency, and the prices — entirely in the hands of its participants. Trades are voluntary, and whoever wants to contribute code has to convince the others of its merits based purely on the currency of “technical competence.” At least that’s the “ideal” — in the real world there are obviously social and political pressures in some cases.

Convincing others is about demonstrating, with results, why your idea has value. The moment you think the others should support your “cause” because you’re sure it has value and “whoever disagrees is an idiot and deserves to die,” you’ve just devalued and done a disservice to your cause. If you can’t convince others of your value, it’s not the others who are dumb or prejudiced — it’s probably you who were incompetent.

“Coercion is the realm of Tyrants.”

“Trying to regulate other people’s property through coercion is the realm of Tyrants.”

“Prices” doesn’t refer merely to financial transactions with currency, as it would in a Capitalist Economy. “Value,” the more general term, can be determined by anything that has supply and demand. What sets that “price” is competition.

A Free Market has unregulated competition. Because of this, a truth often left unsaid when discussing free software is that for every 1 (one) famous project like PostgreSQL that exists, dozens of others tried and died, either because they weren’t as good, or because they failed to convince others of their merits. For every Linux distro that succeeds, hundreds of others failed or live merely in a small niche — which by itself is value enough for many people.

They die, because there’s no “regulatory agency” trying to keep them artificially alive, much less caring whether there was some social agenda behind them. And that’s fair, because either justice is really blind, or it isn’t justice — it’s just vigilantism and coercion.

And the price isn’t the value of the code that comes in, but how much it’s worth to a programmer to have their code involved in a famous project. It’s an inversion of values compared to commercial companies: normally a programmer is paid in money to produce proprietary code. In a free software project, it’s the programmer who has to “pay” — with their free time and their ability — to have their code accepted in a famous project, because they receive some value as a return.

Free Software = Private Property + License of Use

As Jeff Atwood from Coding Horror reminded us in “Pick a License, Any License”:

“Because I didn’t explicitly indicate a license, I implicitly declared a copyright without explaining how others could use my code. Since the code is unlicensed, I could theoretically enforce the copyright at any moment and demand that people stop using my code. Experienced developers wouldn’t touch unlicensed code because they have no legal right to use it.”

How do you test private property in a free software world? I can, at any moment, delete my code from a public repository I created. It happened recently with the controversial case of Leftpad, which broke many people’s projects. “Broke the Internet” as many exaggerated.

Agreeing or disagreeing with Koçulu or Kik is irrelevant. Koçulu exercised his right: he destroyed his own property and that’s legitimate. It’s his property, he does whatever he wants with it, no matter who claims otherwise or how much damage it may have caused. Was the situation bad? Then let’s learn how to create a more robust environment without removing the private property from its author. And following the example, one possible solution was the change in NPM’s unpublish policy.

The Ruby community had an episode like this. Of course, it was much smaller, with much less consequence or repercussion, in 2009, with Why’s disappearance. By the way, did you notice that back then any “whining” in the Ruby community was quickly called “Ruby Drama”? Did you notice that nobody talks about that anymore? Because “dramas” became so common and so banal in every community that it stopped being seen as exclusive to the Ruby community. As evidence, the last tweet from the @rubydramas account is from 2013.

And when there’s conflict, the famous “fork” cases can happen, where a project can be cloned and a second community can end up forming if the criteria make enough sense and the result is really better. A recent example was the Node.js fork into IO.js, the period of transition and negotiation, and the result of merging them back under the leadership of the new Node Foundation.

There have been several forks that succeeded, like Webkit from KHTML, Ubuntu from Debian, OS X itself from BSD.

Projects Must Be Allowed to Fail. And Nothing Can Force Their Success.

In a Free Market there are no guarantees of success — there are only guarantees that you can try.

Free Market is “fair” (as in “blind justice”) and, as a consequence, isn’t egalitarian or “moral” depending on your personal point of view. By the way, “point of view” is necessarily biased and personal, not objective, which is why it doesn’t serve as a parameter for justice. To understand this, watch The People vs. Larry Flynt. You can completely disagree with Larry Flynt, but that doesn’t mean you can condemn him. And by not condemning him, it doesn’t mean you support what Flynt says or does.

Success in code, in general, doesn’t depend on any personal characteristic of its authors, only on the technical merit of the result of their code. The beauty of code is that it’s anonymous, devoid of personal qualities or political agendas. Even if it ends up temporarily devalued because of political ties, the fewer affiliations a project has, the better its chances of surviving in the long run.

Just because you created a project and opened its source, it means absolutely nothing. Much less that it will succeed, no matter your good intentions, no matter your story, no matter your affiliations.

That’s exactly the best part of the Free Software world, because competition, individual interests, ensure that there will be a few that go very well, many that will have little or no traction, and most that will simply disappear from existence and from people’s memory.

An example? Does anyone remember the Symbian mobile operating system from Nokia, which was proprietary and in its dying days announced they were going to open its source in an attempt to gain some traction? Very little, much too late.

Free Market is the economic manifestation of (Darwinian) Natural Selection in Nature, which I already explained in a screencast/talk. The software that has the best characteristics and that keeps mutating and adapting to the demands of the environment is the one with the best chances of reproducing (being used and distributed) and being selected to survive. There are more projects dying every day than thriving. And that isn’t a flaw or failure of the system — it’s the guarantee of its robustness.

Apache HTTP has been losing more and more ground to NGINX. MySQL has been losing ground first to other more competent RDBMS like PostgreSQL and then to NoSQL like MongoDB, and now even to forks like MariaDB. Mozilla Firefox has been losing ground drastically to Google Chrome. Perl lost ground to Python and several new languages like Go.

“Socialist” Free Software is a Paradox

In a “socialist” world we’d necessarily have the decay of software.

Since all property would be a monopoly of the “government” entity, there would be no competition, only an incentive for collusion, cartel, and monopolies. Every bad project — if it served someone’s political agenda — would stay alive, despite another being technically better. The choice wouldn’t be the user’s, but the controller’s. There would be no accidents like leftpad, but it would be worse: there’d be so much garbage that the free software world would simply lose relevance.

Without benefits to volunteers like: self-promotion, exercising their technical skills on challenging projects, distributing their software freely, feeding their ego and vanity metrics — no programmer of real technical capability would waste their time making the effort. Worse: if in a socialist government the government arbitrarily decreed that everyone should contribute to a certain project for some “social good,” nobody would give their best — they’d only do the minimum to fulfill some “quota.”

When there’s no competition and no supply and demand derived from value, there’s no more innovation. Innovation comes from an individualistic desire to solve your own problem in your own best way, regardless of what others claim. That’s why the free software world starts with the famous sentence:

“Every good work of software starts by scratching a developer’s personal itch.” - Eric Raymond, The Cathedral and the Bazaar

Innovation is naturally transgressive. Innovation is naturally competitive. When someone invents a factory robot, they’re eliminating jobs, so to many people Innovation is also anti-social. Uber really kills the jobs of taxi drivers. Airbnb kills the jobs of brokers. An ATM kills the jobs of bank tellers.

In software, do you think the Hurd guy was happy with Linux? Do you think the Symbian guy thought Android was cool? Do you think the Clipper guy was happy with Java? Do you think the MySQL guy is happy with PostgreSQL? If those people are resistant to market dynamics, they’re left behind and, honestly, are worth less and less and probably will lose their jobs too. Unfair? No, absolutely fair.

Innovation is anti-socialist because it ends the need for brute labor force, and intellectual work is necessarily individual, because there’s no such thing as a “collective mind,” just as there’s no “collective stomach.”

A proprietary software isn’t necessarily bad because it’s not free. It’s bad when it represents a monopoly. For example, if Windows had really been the only option, we would have witnessed the decay of technology. In the long run it wouldn’t have been good even for Microsoft itself.

Microsoft was a de facto monopoly. We can debate forever whether it really was or not, whether its judgment was fair or not. But the advent of free software, particularly operating systems based on GNU and Linux, and later the advent of the commercial Internet, which decoupled the need for native software installed locally, broke that monopoly. With or without the Department of Justice, the monopoly would have been brought down by pure market dynamics. Not in the short term, but in the long term.

Imagine if, in an alternative dystopian future, Microsoft had convinced the federal government that Windows was so essential to national security that it would be in the nation’s benefit to support and maintain its monopoly?

Everything would have stopped. To this day we’d be using Pentium 100Mhz (because, who needs more speed?), running a derivative of Windows 98 (because, why create an NT or 2000 if 98 already does the job?), with dial-up Internet (because, who needs broadband?), where only a few professional consumers would be using it (because, what does the general population need computers for?).

If someone with the head of the 80s and 90s had been decreed as the reference for “morality” and “social need,” why choose to evolve anything? Leave things as they are. Changes make the population suffer, people lose their jobs, lose their security and stability — well, Innovation is about insecurity and instability.

Don’t create email, that could hurt postal workers’ jobs. Don’t create websites, that could hurt people who work in paper printing factories. Don’t create free software, that could hurt people who work as government programmers.

That’s what happens when you place decisions that should be the market’s into the hands of an individual or even an entity. It naturally becomes tyrannical and despotic, because that’s the only stance popularly accepted as “morally correct.”

Every dictator, every tyrant, has the same speech: “for the good of the population,” and the inverse is also true: anyone with the speech of “for the good of the population, no matter the means” wants to become a tyrannical dictator.

Tyranny and the End of Free Software

A situation that’s started to become common is the attempt to expropriate private property for tyrannical benefits, using any social cause as an excuse. Again, to be clear, there’s no fault in the social causes themselves, most of which are legitimate, but rather in those who self-appointed themselves as illegitimate representatives.

It’s very easy to take someone else’s accomplishment and appropriate it in the name of a “greater cause.”

Don’t fool yourself, this is simply theft. And it doesn’t matter how many support this kind of thing — which is very easy in this world of social networks. Theft is wrong, always — there are no justifications.

Picture a scenario: you’re a developer who wanted to solve a problem and created a piece of software. Since you thought others could help evolve your solution, you made it available as open source. For 20 years many developers benefited from that code and helped improve it. It’s the story of hundreds of free software projects.

Now, in the name of various causes, no matter which, someone intervenes and, by sheer social pressure and propaganda, labels everyone who’s been working for years as true anti-social pariahs. The specialized media — always on the lookout for controversy to attract more readers — reports it exactly that way.

And with the advent of Social Networks, for reasons that have nothing to do with the technical merit and the value that open source code once had, you see its contributors exposed and automatically judged and condemned as perverse, anti-social criminals.

The project’s owners eventually give in and, for a brief period of time, the project is forced to run under despotic intervention, where their identities, pasts, careers, and private lives will be under constant scrutiny. No longer their code, but their personal opinions. No longer their code, but their attitudes. No longer their code, but their appearance.

As a consequence, if that intervention continues, the value of the project drops drastically. There’s no more value the volunteer programmer can receive — on the contrary, participating has become a “liability”, so the correct reaction is to stop participating. One by one, those who were really producing code begin to disappear. And that’s a perverse way of taking a property and removing its value.

This has already begun to happen — we haven’t yet had cases that went so far, but it’s what happens when you add a political layer on top of a project that was purely free. That’s how you destroy a Free Market — by giving political power to those who don’t agree with voluntary trades, only with removing properties from those who they “judge” don’t deserve them, to give to those they “judge” do.

I posted about this in 2011 if you’re interested.

“I am an architect. I know what is to come by the principles on which it was built. We are approaching a world in which I cannot permit myself to live. My ideas are my property. They were taken from me by force, by breach of contract. No choice was given to me.”

“They believed my work belonged to others, to do with as they pleased. They claimed me without my consent — that it was my duty to serve them without choice or reward.”

“Now you know why I dynamited Cortlandt [low-cost housing]. I designed Cortlandt. I made it possible. I destroyed it. I agreed to design it for the purpose of seeing it as I wanted it. That was the price I gave for my work. I was not paid. My building was disfigured at the whim of others who took all the benefits of my work and gave me nothing in return.”

“I came here to say that I do not recognize anyone’s right to a single minute of my life, or to any part of my energy, or to any of my achievements — no matter who claims it!”

“It had to be said: The world is perishing in an orgy of self-sacrifice. I came here to be heard in the name of every independent man still left in the world. I wished to dictate my own terms. I do not care to work or live for the sake of others.”

“My terms are: a person’s RIGHTS to exist for their own sake.”

This is a warning of the worst case that can happen.

Conclusion

This whole exposition is to strip away the false “social” varnish so commonly associated with free software.

Does it mean that if someone contributes to free software purely because they believe it will bring benefits to social causes, that’s a bad thing? Of course not — as I said, each one volunteers because they get some benefit out of that exchange. For some, the payment is simply the feeling of helping someone. Some like to trade their code for conscience. Many do this outside of software — it’s called “donation” or “volunteer work.” And obviously there’s no problem precisely because it’s still a voluntary exchange.

Now, solving the world’s problems is something extremely complicated. It’s extremely complicated even to start explaining. Even people who are in it with great dedication have difficulty getting the results they’d like.

Bill Gates is famous for having the vision of positively influencing actually solving the world’s problems, and he has the best warning for our generation of programmers — that, regardless of social class, possessions, race, or gender, we have access to the Internet and enough resources to give ourselves the luxury of being “Drama Queens” in irrelevant social media discussions about “saving the world.” And who’s outside this circuit, actually executing instead of just talking?

“Great, go to the Infosys centers in Bangalore, but step out of the oasis and go just 3 miles a little farther out and look for the guy who lives without a toilet, without running water … The world isn’t flat, and PCs aren’t, in the hierarchy of human needs, in the Top 5.” - Bill Gates

Are you committed to trying to turn a private property (a free software project) into a political platform for a supposed “social cause”? Think again. You’re probably wasting your time in more ways than you imagine.

To wrap up, I’ll give an example of a real case that was reported to me — but removing names and details to protect those involved:

A: - Man, nobody gives a chance to my [minority].

B: - Don’t say that — why don’t you help me solve these problems on this open source project, then you can give a talk about it.

(after some time … A disappears, B gets tired of waiting and calls C, who helps solve the problems and earns the speaking spot)

A: - See, B, you’re part of the oppressors who don’t give space to people like me, and you preferred to give the opportunity to C, who doesn’t even need it and is part of the oppressors.

And before you disagree because this is about Ayn Rand concepts (a lot of people don’t like her, I don’t know why), don’t be an idiot and judge an idea because of its author — judge the argument that was given on its own merit. Many criticize me because they think I “follow” Ayn Rand, and they couldn’t be more wrong: Ayn Rand was simply the only one who put into writing exactly what I always thought and how I’ve always acted since I can remember. It could have been any other person.

By the way, in the same way, I’m not a “follower” of Bastiat, Friedman, Hayek, Menger, or any other. I lead my life on my own terms, by principles I defined years ago myself, and these references are just that: references.

I consider it an insult to my intelligence to simply be labeled as a follower of someone, and I don’t respond well to “Ad Hominem” or other types of fallacies.

“Voilà! In view, a humble vaudevillian veteran cast vicariously as both victim and villain by the vicissitudes of Fate. This visage, no mere veneer of vanity, is a vestige of the vox populi, now vacant, vanished. However, this valorous visitation of a bygone vexation stands vivified and has vowed to vanquish these venal and virulent vermin vanguarding vice and vouchsafing the violently vicious and voracious violation of volition! The only verdict is vengeance; a vendetta held as a votive, not in vain, for the value and veracity of such shall one day vindicate the vigilant and the virtuous. Verily, this vichyssoise of verbiage veers most verbose, so let me simply add that it’s my very good honor to meet you and you may call me V.” - V for Vendetta