Whether FS or OSS, community matters

In fact, it is not only in governments and developing countries that the importance of community is apparent. Every nation is composed of communities formed around religious beliefs, shared hobbies and interests, political necessity, and all kind of other grounds. In these communities, the benefits of being able to share software, to customise or have customised software for their particular needs, and to be free as a community from the influence of any particular software producers is a great opportunity.

Associated with Free Software is also the ability to influence, contribute to, or join the communities that produce the software you can use. Not only can entire communities, as in the internationalisation cases, link up with communities that they benefit from, but individuals and companies, should they want to, can do so too. Whilst the idea of your average Web-browsing, document-writing computer user contributing to the Linux kernel may sound absurd, simply providing the ability for such a person to file a feature request or ask a community of developers and supporters for help is enormously empowering. It humanises software, and takes the user from being a passive consumer who must put up with what he is given to being a potentially active user who can exercise a degree of power over what he is given, both in terms of actually changing particular features, and in terms of influencing the development agenda.

The freedoms ensured by Free Software also enable new communities to form, for example locally based cooperative volunteer support groups, or Linux User Groups (LUGs) for short. The more the public is able to share and cooperate without destroying the software "industry" entirely, the more citizens will gain in terms of participation in communities, increased opportunities with information technology, and of course all of the "pragmatic" benefits. So long as Free Software doesn't undermine the ability of the public, including business, to make software and make it usable for everyone, it is morally superior to proprietary software, and leaves us with no reason to keep proprietary software. Where proprietary software is necessary, that may not be the case, but I don't want to get into a discussion as to where it might be necessary.

In highlighting these cases, I am not trying to suggest that Open Source as a philosophy denies the importance of community, but that those who attack Free Software advocates like Richard Stallman for talking about cooperation and community are quite wrong. Community matters, more in fact than considerations of stability and cost, because in the long term, whilst Free Software will enable communities and deliver the quality of products citizen-consumers require, proprietary software will further divide and polarise communities and inhibit the potential of information technology for the public. Considerations of cost and stability will continue for as long as software is produced, but considerations of community are central to the direction of information technology in society.

Whether or not you can sell this vision to the average consumer over a shop desk, it matters. If the community behind Free Software forgets this in its rush to spread the software, and we confuse the goal of freedom with the goal of popularity and market share, it fails. Until those who disagree with Free Software advocates understand that this is our position, criticisms will fall on deaf ears.

- posted by sankarshan @ 1/14/2004 08:59:00 PM