It is well understood that free and open source software (libre software) stands for freedom as in “free speech”, not as in “free beer”. More specifically, free software is defined as any software that guarantees these four freedoms

• The freedom to use the program for any purpose.
• The freedom to study how the program works, and change it to make it do what you wish.
• The freedom to redistribute and make copies so you can help your neighbor.
• The freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements (and modified versions in general) to the public, so that the whole community benefits.

These four freedoms guarantee that the user can make a fully informed choice; given they, or someone else, has knowledge of programming, they may study the code, and obtain full knowledge of how the software works.

This, however, means that the code itself must be accessible, which comes with the implicit consequence that somebody well versed in programming might get the code, and use the software as they may, without paying. In this sense a consequence of free (libre)¹ software (or rights-preserving software) is also gratis software (or zero-cost software).

For the above reason, libre software has been massively adopted by programming communities; not only does it liberate the user by ensuring that they may make a choice based on full information, it also provides extra securities; rather than needing to place trust on the developer(s), you can trust the product itself. Security bugs and issues are found more easily, because more people are looking over the code, and the project is, in theory, constantly being audited; the project may organically grow because people take a natural interest in it, and become a communal effort rather than a personal one.

It also is seen as a collectivising movement. Since the implication is that libre software has to provide access to the full source code for the four freedoms to be upheld, the implication of the capacity of others to use said code without providing any financial compensation means that businesses are typically disincentivised from using or creating libre software. Governments and other bad faith actors also typically prefer to make or use proprietary software, since making and using libre software would leave their misdeeds exposed.

For this reason a more “lenient” software movement rose to prominence, that of open source software, which is also called permissive, because it permits the developer more freedoms, at the expense of the freedoms of the user². Open source software, although it does provide the user some freedoms, mostly cares for the developer experience, and the end-user is secondary³.

This in turn allowed corporations to see open-source software in a more friendly light, and reinforced the idea that there is an ideological and political distinction between open-source vs libre software; open-source is typically seen as corporate-friendly and capitalistic, whilst libre software is considered the collectivist/communist/anarchist option. If we look at this from a classical liberal viewpoint however, we might see a different story, and realise that libre software is the foundation of a free market of software.

legal plunder and lawful defence #

In 1850, French economist Frederic Bastiat⁴ wrote a book called The Law⁵, in which he tries to argue that the rule of the Law is to guarantee and preserve the rights of the majority. In his argument, he says that since the government is comprised of people, then the government itself has no more rights than those that people individually have; the rights to life, to liberty, and to property.⁶

“Life, liberty, and property do not exist because men have made laws. On the contrary, it was the fact that life, liberty, and property existed beforehand that caused men to make laws in the first place. What, then, is law? As I have said elsewhere, it is the collective organization of the individual right to lawful defense.”

In this regard, the role of government is exclusively to protect these very rights; anything that the government does that goes beyond the simple task of protecting the rights of the people is a degeneration of the law.

“The law has placed the collective force at the disposal of the unscrupulous who wish, without risk, to exploit the person, liberty, and property of others. It has converted plunder into a right, in order to protect plunder. And it has converted lawful defense into a crime, in order to punish lawful defense.”

We see in the above quote the root of the matter; lawful defence, insofar as it is defence that does not remove from the rights of others, is being subverted, in favour of plunder, so that others may exploit the individual, as well as the property of the individual, and in doing so reduce the capacities of the individual to exercise their liberty. In this sense, legal plunder, as Bastiat calls it, is nothing more than the erosion of the rights of the individual for the benefit of another, and because the law ends up perverted by the very people who seek to erode the liberties of others, lawful defence is seen as a detriment, and oftentimes opposing plunder is made illegal.

copyleft #

It is on this that libre software takes a stand, where the open-source movement doesn’t; libre software acts as an extension of good law; it protects and reinforces the rights of the user. Meanwhile non-libre software aims to plunder the user; it deducts from the user’s rights.

The way the rights are preserved is through a type of license called copyleft, called so because it forces not only the developer to provide the entirety of the project in a way that respects user freedom, but also any other developer who might build upon it and make their own modifications and distributions of the software. In essence it forces, in a viral way, all derived software to be as respectful of the user’s rights as the original version. It promotes user freedom at the detriment of the developer.

"[…]
5. Conveying Modified Source Versions.
You may convey a work based on the Program, or the modifications to produce it from the Program, in the form of source code under the terms of section 4, provided that you also meet all of these conditions:
[…]
c) You must license the entire work, as a whole, under this License to anyone who comes into possession of a copy. This License will therefore apply, along with any applicable section 7 additional terms, to the whole of the work, and all its parts, regardless of how they are packaged. This License gives no permission to license the work in any other way, but it does not invalidate such permission if you have separately received it.
[…]"

example of non-copyleft abuse #

In order to see why copyleft is so important to the preservance of user freedom, and how libre software acts as an extension of the righteous purpose of the law, as per classical liberalism, and why open-source and proprietary software permits legal plunder, I need to quote a very strong historical example.

MINIX is an operating system first released in 1987 by Andrew S. Tanenbaum, as an open-source clone of the Unix operating system, specifically targeted at low-power devices. Because it was licensed with an open-source license without a copyleft provision, a company, namely Intel, copied the code (ie forked in the proper terminology) and developed their own derivative operating system. Due to the lack of any copyleft clause that would force Intel to respect user freedom, by allowing the users to study and/or modify their derivative work, nobody, apart from the engineers that maintain it, know exactly what it does and how it works. The issue arises from the fact that this custom version of the MINIX operating system is run on the Intel ME, which is a small chip that exists in every Intel CPU for the past twenty years, and this operating system has full access to everything that happens inside of a computer that includes it. This includes the capability to control the computer; even if the computer is turned off, as long as it is connected to a power source (e.g. an outlet or a battery), it may even turn the computer on without user knowledge or consent. This control over the user system, alongside the inability of the user to study the MINIX operating system running inside of Intel ME, is enough of a reason to call it malware or spyware. It is a piece of code that is running without the user being able to give explicit and informed consent, and most of the time without even the user’s knowledge. It is legal plunder.⁷

It is exactly this form of plunder that copyleft in libre software prevents, and in doing so creates a unique and interesting dynamic.

the free market of software #

Exactly because it allows the user the maximal freedom, i.e. the ability to make fully informed consensual decisions concerning the software they wish to use, it forms the foundation of a free market of software; the voluntary exchange of goods and services. In classical liberalism, the term market is not restricted to use only in the exchange of goods for currency, but also includes any voluntary exchange of ideas and services, in a non-interventionist, fully decentralized manner. Besides, the concept of a free market does not axiomatically carry a preferred method of transaction; monetary exchanges, cryptocurrencies, barter, donations, everything is appropriate, with the only prerequisite being that an exchange is conducted on a voluntary premise for all participants, which necessitates transparency and full knowledge of the good or service provided; a free market of software requires copyleft in order to exist, and copyleft cannot function outside of a free market.