Why is Open Source free?

Question

It is widely accepted that Open Source also means free of charge. In particular, the "Open Source" definition by the Open Source Initiative states that Open Source, in addition to access to the source code and other criteria, means free redistribution. Their given rationale is:

By constraining the license to require free redistribution, we eliminate the temptation to throw away many long-term gains in order to make a few short-term sales dollars. If we didn't do this, there would be lots of pressure for cooperators to defect.

I don't understand what they mean by this "temptation" and "pressure".

Can someone elaborate or provide an example of why is Open Source software expected to be free?

Answer 1

If there were no restrictions requiring free distribution, imagine the following scenario:

You are a coder working on an open-source project. One night, you have a brilliant idea. It's a wonderful way to improve the project to do something incredible it's never done before.

You spend fifty hours writing code. When you're done, you take a look at your new product, built on untold thousands of man-hours of others' work, and realize that people would pay for your version. Maybe even pay huge sums of money. It's that good.

What do you do now? Do you charge for a forked version of the original? Or do you give away all the effort you just put into changing the work of others for free?

It's hard to say "no" to money. So the temptation is removed by requiring that you contribute your changes back to the community for free - that way, everyone gains in the long run, but you personally lose the "short-term sales dollars" (to quote the excerpt you posted) for being the first to have an idea.

Answer 2

There's nothing with Open Source that says you can't also charge a fee for distribution, or even support or something like that. The goal is to keep the source available for everyone to use, learn from, and otherwise keep in the public interest.

Answer 3

The value in software development is the service provided by the developers to update and maintain the software. If you want to profit from the creation of open-source software, you can either:

Find someone to pay you to extend or create open-source software:

• A company that backs the open-source software directly (e.g. RedHat, Mozilla)
• A company that is building on top of the open-source software (e.g. a software company that wants to add features to an IDE)
• Write or extend some open source software for your own benefit, advertise and write about it before releasing it, then have people in the community donate money towards you releasing it (called "ransoming" or "assurance contracting")

Find someone to pay you to provide services on top of open-source software:

• Write articles, tutorials, screencasts
• Consulting services
• Support

Answer 4

It is widely accepted that Open Source also means free of charge.

And this is inaccurate. Just because people think something is so, doesn't make it so. Open source means "free" as in "freedom," not "free as in beer". This is an extremely common analogy made about open source software.

In particular, the "Open Source" definition by the Open Source Initiative states that Open Source, in addition to access to the source code and other criteria, means free redistribution.

Free redistribution does not mean free distribution. You can charge a fee in many of the licenses they have approved. It means whoever gets a copy of your program has licensed it in such a way that they are not allowed to then make money off your product.

I don't understand what they mean by this "temptation" and "pressure".

Temptation is referring to the fact that making money is tempting. Making money off work that you have done is tempting. However, open source is based off a cooperation, and is an agreement that all of us benefit. This is the concept behind the public domain, as well, something which has been backed by law for a very long time.

Pressure refers to the fact that if some people make money, others will be tempted to make money as well. Another problem is that people who are making money put pressure on open source advocates and contributors to abandon the open source model. For example, many companies release marketing material and give interviews stating that the open source model is dangerous (patent infringement concerns), bad long term, failing, bad for customers, not any cheaper, etc. This is commonly referred to as spreading FUD (fear, uncertainty, doubt).

Can someone elaborate or provide an example of why is Open Source software expected to be free?

Why? That is up to the decisions of the people who will distribute software by the license, or contribute to open source projects. See my example of the public domain, and potentially read up on the history and rationale behind it.

If you mean how it is enforced, read some of the licenses. If you do not understand them, and have a business reason to consider open source, hire a lawyer practiced in software licensing. Lawyers can be hired to enforce it, as well.

This person is a well known open source advocate, who also has become rich off of proprietary software. His business model has worked very well:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_D._Carmack#Free_software

Part of his strategy was to use dual licensing. This is not something that your question mentioned, and could potentially be a boon to business.

If you want a different model of redistributing source code, check out Microsoft's Shared Source.

Answer 5

I think cooperators has the meaning explained in The Political Economy of Open Source Software. Simply put, the cooperators are the people contributing to any particular open source project. My explanation here is not from the document so corrections are welcome.

By constraining the license to require free redistribution, we eliminate the temptation to throw away many long-term gains in order to make a few short-term sales dollars. If we didn't do this, there would be lots of pressure for cooperators to defect.

The options considered for an open source license were either free redistribution or non-free redistribution. In the second case, "short-term sales dollars" will be gained by the original distributer. However, let us see what is the effect on the open source project.

To have a successful large scale open source project, a lot of cooperators are needed. If a particular cooperator, let's call him X, does not have the right to distribute the project code coupled with his modifications then he is less likely to contribute. Also, the reachability of the project will be a lot less. This will affect the reputation of X, which is probably as important to him as it is to a lot of open source contributors. Again, a good incentive for X to contribute to open source is that he needs this particular software. His future is more insured by his ability to fork the project if needs be. But he can't if redistribution is not free.

All in all, suddenly the incentives for X to contribute are greatly diminished while the risks grow. As the economy of open source projects goes south, he is likely to defect, in the sense of leaving the open source ecosystem.

The end result is that open source projects would not be sustainable beyond a certain scale of community if the license allows non-free distribution. In essense, many long-term gains will be lost.