Losing My Religion (again)
It appears that I am losing some of my faith and enthusiasm for free software, and I didn't even realize that I was religious in this way.
I never intended to become a free software zealot, and I do not self-identify as one. I am not a software developer, and I do not contribute that much to the movement, and I make my living as a Windows administrator. But many people see me as "that KWLUG guy" or "that Linux guy", and there is truth to those accusations.
I probably would not have gotten into Linux if it had not been for UNIX, and I would not have gotten into UNIX if it had not been for my university lab environment. But once I bought my first computer in 1998, I knew that I wanted to be running Linux on it, and I decided to go with Debian because I had read that it was "political", and I had aspirations to be an activist. It seems that I make all major life decisions without thinking very much, and this was no exception. But boy howdy did Free Software change my life.
Over the years, I bought into the free software ideology -- or at least those parts of the ideology that were personally beneficial to me. I appreciated the low price of my operating system, I appreciated that I had access to the same powerful software used "professionally", I appreciated that so much good information existed about my software (thank you, public mailing lists; thank you, bug trackers), I appreciated the verbose debugging message much free software offered (contrasted against the black box of proprietary software at the time), I appreciated being able to configure my systems to suit my eccentricities (thank you, xscreensaver backgrounds), and I appreciated the good feelings I got when I contributed a bug report that led to some software improvement. But all of this appreciation was pragmatic, not ideological -- or so I thought.
Earlier this year, I was ingesting my mandated dose of government-funded messaging (namely, TVO The Agenda podcasts) when I listened to an interview with Jaron Lanier. As far as I can tell, Lanier's argument is that giving away things without getting paid for them is immoral. It is immoral to make posts on Facebook without being paid for them; it is immoral to give away our demographic data; and it is immoral (although well-intentioned) to participate in the free software movement. The argument goes like this:
Income inequality is a problem: a few people are getting very rich, and the middle class is getting destroyed
At the same time, middle-class people contribute all kinds of value to the Internet, in the form of demographic information, pictures, social networking posts, and free software.
All that valuable information is sucked up by organizations with giant computers. Those giant computers use that data to make lots of money for themselves, without giving money to those who actually create the value. At best they offer users gratis services ("Join Facebook! It's free!")
Therefore, we should demand to be paid (somehow) for the value other people get from our work. If (hypothetically) you read this blog post and (even more hypothetically) you gain some insight as a result, then you should be paying me (somehow).
Therefore, giving away stuff for free is immoral, because it is bankrupting the middle class and making those who have the most giant computers inordinately powerful.
It is an interesting argument, and I can't shake the feeling that Lanier's analysis is more right than wrong. What really distinguishes Lanier's argument from other sob stories about the immorality of free software is the giant computer effect: Our intention in giving away our efforts was to make it accessible to the world, but the ones who take the most advantage of this are the powerful, not the poor.
Although Lanier focuses on user-generated data more and free software less, I think the free software movement is culpable for this state of affairs in many ways:
The terrible and irritating ambiguity of the word "free" makes everybody think that software should have no cost, and has created the expectation that on the Internet nobody should have to pay for anything. So when these giant companies offer their services, we as consumers demand that they be gratis, and we do not look closely at the strings that are attached.
After understanding the free software definition, the first thing people want to know is "How does anybody get paid?" It is true that nothing in the free software definitions explicitly prohibit paying for software (and in fact putting restrictions on commercial use makes the software nonfree, at least in the Debian world). But it is also true that as soon as one person purchases some free software, they are permitted to redistribute that software to everybody else for zero cost. So it is very difficult for people who actually put value into the product (namely software developers) to make a living, which is why Joey Hess is living on poverty wages despite being an amazing programmer who has contributed enormous amounts of effort to free software.
People have discovered a few monetization schemes that are widely accepted in the free software movement, sustainable for the developers, and somewhat profitable. Sysadmins writing software is one; Drupal web developers writing modules is another; Red Hat's business model is a third. But these examples are few and far between, and it is not even clear whether they can be sustained for long (for example: nobody wants to work on Drupal core modules, because customers for websites won't fund that work).
The end result is that we keep good programmers poor, which means that they stop developing free software and do other things. It feels to me that Lanier's criticism addresses the heart of this conundrum; if free software programmers are contributing value to society (and they clearly do) then maybe they should be making money, but they aren't.
Free software really isn't about freedom for software. Software isn't people; it is weird to give it "rights" and "freedoms" when we prohibit such rights for other non-people, such as animals. Rather, free software is mostly about giving the users of free software a lot of rights, while restricting the creators of software from imposing limitations on those programs. That has further established a culture of entitlement that keeps programmers poor.
Many of the organizations (if not most) that run the giant computers that suck up everybody's data are built on free software (although few are free software themselves). Google uses Linux and Python extensively; Facebook is written in PHP; webservers everywhere use the LAMP stack or free software competitors like Nginx. Would these giant computers be as profitable if the barriers to creating that infrastructure were not so low?
I do not think that Lanier has all of the answers. His solution to the problem is basically unionization, which requires a solidarity and class consciousness that I do not see happening (and which I am not even sure is desirable). Also I think that imposing fees on the usage of works currently given away for free will slow down innovation considerably. His proposed testbed for micropayments is the 3D printing universe -- basically, he hopes that nobody will give away design specifications for 3D objects without getting paid for them. Fair enough, but he chose a pretty bad example. We might have had widespread 3D printing twenty years ago if it had not been for patents. Patents are not the same as micropayments, but I think the principles are similar.
The big surprise for me when listening to Lanier's interview were my emotions. I felt angry and defensive when he criticized the culture of sharing and the free software movement, even though intellectually I could see the value of what he was saying. I've been through that wringer before with environmentalism, and it's a pretty bad sign. It means my heart is aligned with one side of a debate and my brain is aligned with the other side. Now I get to live with the uncomfortable (often paralyzing) tensions, perhaps for the rest of my life. I felt somewhat uncomfortable in promoting Software Freedom Day this year; will I even want to promote such events in the future?