Freedom 05: cost-Free

From Hackstop

The GNU Project specifies and defends four software freedoms with the GPL:

Freedom 0 - to run a program, for any purpose.

Freedom 1 - to study how a program works, and adapt it to your needs.

Freedom 2 - to redistribute copies of a program so you can help your neighbor.

Freedom 3 - to improve the program, and release your improvements to the public, so that the whole community benefits.

hackstop.org adds the fifth freedom, to bind the GNU freedoms:

Freedom 4 - to not charge for the program, as computer programming is language* and not commodity. (Freedom 2 x 2).

In common parlance, fully free software is 'free as in speech' and 'free as in beer': cost-Free.

*language = shared communication

- symbolic conveyance of meaning between autonomous parties - a definitively social asset

In the case of free*nix, free/libre is also cost-free - admitting charging for the inordinate level of skilled service required to provide and maintain this software. Expecting customers to pay twice to have FOSS can never succeed. *Nix market growth - and perhaps long-term market viability - depends upon this simple realisation.

Extended rationale

All software will inevitably become free, which makes accelerating free distribution the logical activity now. Why? Many reasons:

i) Artiface. Corporate power has used law to impose monetary charge for something that is not tangible, consumable product - software sale or lease is exploitative injustice. Software-based services are real, however. Injustice seeks remedy.

ii) Virality. In the same way that Windows® has become 95% dominant in the PC home user market largely through unpoliced, 'license-free' copying, so too do we need Free and Open-Source Software spread. A mass, supportive user base will do most to ensure FOSS still exists in ten years' time vs software patenting.

iii) Media and transport costs. The oil price blowout is irreversible, with competing international demands affecting all plastic products - like CDs, which should not be wasted. Electronic distribution is best, but payment for purely digital product is too much to ask from trust unseen. Rampant inflation, copying, and overproduction will gut the software market, before crashing the global economy.

iv) Commodity collapse. Transport costs mean trade in all actual commodities will become prohibitively expensive, contributory to a global depression. Commodity code will inevitably be devalued in this through labour glut, then lose all value by competition from cheaper producing nations and consumers' sheer inability to pay.

v) It has long been predicted: "Information wants to be free." Commodity data was a short-term phase of technology proving, gone into oversupply now. As surely as print rebuilt the world of language and nations, so too will the Internet homogenise it (on binary). All barriers to community - after market - will fall.

vi) Need. Maximised free communication can bring about world peace, whereas commodity trade cannot - it embodies economic disparity, conflict's cause.

vii) Contribution. Only full communication will prevent World War III. The industrial machine knows no regulation but profitability - based on irrational drives like fear, egoism, envy and speculation - collapse, and regeneration via mass industrial destruction. With shared telecommunications widespread now, we are at the dawn of a new era of humanity. Conscious collective planning is the option previously lacked in preventing World Wars, with the people all involved and educated in participatory co-responsibility.

viii) Precedent. Ubuntu Philosophy has already reached this conclusion, as practise. [1] (https://www.ubuntulinux.org/ubuntu/philosophy/document_view)

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