Richard Stallman
The Harm Done by Obstructing Software
Consider for a moment that a program has been developed, and any necessary payments for its development have been made; now society must choose either to make it proprietary or allow free sharing and use. Assume that the existence of the program and its availability is a desirable thing. One might regard a particular computer program as a harmful thing that should not be available at all, like the Lotus Marketplace database of personal information, which was withdrawn from sale due to public disapproval. Most of what I say does not apply to this case, but it makes little sense to argue for having an owner because the owner will make the program less available. The owner will not make it completely unavailable, as one would wish in connection with a program whose use is harmful.
Restrictions on the distribution and modification of the program cannot facilitate its use. They can only interfere. So the effect can only be negative. But how much? And what kind?
Three different levels of material harm come from such obstruction:
Fewer people use the program.
None of the users can adapt or fix the program.
Other developers cannot learn from the program, or base new work on it.
Each level of material harm has a concomitant form of psycho-social harm. This refers to the effect that people’s decisions have on their subsequent feelings, attitudes and predispositions. These changes in people’s ways of thinking will then have a further effect on their relationships with their fellow citizens, and can have material consequences.
The three levels of material harm waste part of the value that the program could contribute, but they cannot reduce it to zero. If they waste nearly all the value of the program, then writing the program harms society by at most the effort that went into writing the program. Arguably a program that is profitable to sell must provide some net direct material benefit.
However, taking account of the concomitant psycho-social harm, there is no limit to the harm that proprietary software development can do.
Obstructing the Use of Programs
The first level of harm impedes the simple use of a program. A copy of a program has nearly zero marginal cost (and you can pay this cost by doing the work yourself), so in a free market, it would have nearly zero price. A license fee is a significant disincentive to use the program. If a widely-useful program is proprietary, far fewer people will use it.
It is easy to show that the total contribution of a program to society is reduced by assigning an owner to it. Each potential user of the program, faced with the need to pay to use it, may choose to pay, or may forego use of the program. When a user chooses to pay, this is a zero-sum transfer of wealth between two parties. But each time someone chooses to forego use of the program, this harms that person without benefiting anyone. The sum of negative numbers and zeros must be negative.
But this does not reduce the amount of work it takes to develop the program. As a result, the efficiency of the whole process, in delivered user satisfaction per hour of work, is reduced.
This reflects a crucial difference between copies of programs and cars, chairs, or sandwiches. There is no copying machine for material objects outside of science fiction. But programs are easy to copy; anyone can produce as many copies as are wanted, with very little effort. This isn’t true for material objects because matter is conserved: each new copy has to be built from raw materials in the same way that the first copy was built.
With material objects, a disincentive to use them makes sense, because fewer objects bought means less raw materials and work needed to make them. It’s true that there is usually also a startup cost, a development cost, which is spread over the production run. But as long as the marginal cost of production is significant, adding a share of the development cost does not make a qualitative difference. And it does not require restrictions on the freedom of ordinary users.
However, imposing a price on something that would otherwise be free is a qualitative change. A centrally-imposed fee for software distribution becomes a powerful disincentive.
What’s more, central production as now practiced is inefficient even as a means of delivering copies of software. This system involves enclosing physical disks or tapes in superfluous packaging, shipping large numbers of them around the world, and storing them for sale. This cost is presented as an expense of doing business; in truth, it is part of the waste caused by having owners.
Go to: Damaging Social Cohesion
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