There is a strong common ground among the Libertarians and Communists and that is Open Source movement. Communists do not accept “Intellectual Property” rights such as copyrights and patents as their general rejection of any kind of property rights. Libertarians do not accept “Intellectual Property” rights because they refuse to acknowledge “Intellectual Property” as any kind of property at all, and copyrights being an artificial monopoly created by the government.

I understand that not all Libertarians reject IP rights, but this article is not another debate about the rationality and morality of copyrights and patents because we have had those debates in past (For copyrights, and Against copyrights arguments).

Speaking for myself I do not stand for the Intellectual Property rights, because I believe that acquiring the so called “intellectual property” does not devoid a person of his labor. The only thing that person is devoid of is opportunity to earn the money he could have made using the government awarded artificial monopoly on the information. Information should be free to share and without any kind of physical coercion or threat of coercion. This is why Open Source movement represents an important front of Libertarianism. Why would companies like Microsoft, RIAA, MPAA, Penguin Publishers, Barnes and Nobles support an Libertarian society when their business is clearly enabled by the Government’s coercion. Currently software, music, and books piracy is the most successful civil disobedience movement against the government’s aggression on your property rights. It has nothing against the creators of the content which is shared against it, but it is a very successful backlash from the market to demonstrate that copyright as a model is a complete failure.

Open Source

Coming to the issue of Open Source, it is a way by which market can actually demonstrate that these information related services can be provided to the people without requiring the institutionalized aggression of the government. The seeming success of Open Source software movements which have pushed the successful Operating Systems such as Linux, Web Browsers and Email clients such as Firefox and Thunderbird, and a Web blogging platform like WordPress on which this website currently runs is a clear demonstration of success of Open Source movement.

Skip to ‘The Linux Paradox’ if you know what Open Source means
Open Source is a belief that a software should be first of all be free(as in freedom and not as in free beer) to be modified upon, to be rebuilt upon, and to be distributed. Open Source in fact literally is a very restrictive term applicable to softwares because they have a source code from which a binary code can be generated which can be distributed to the end user, and opening the source code means providing the source code of the software too, to the end user and giving him full freedom to modify it in any way, rebuilt his own software and distribute it freely without any restrictions. But over the time Open Source movement also comprises attempts to allow a book/music/song/lyrics/images/movies to be distributed freely and modified upon. Technically this branch of open source movement is called “Creative Commons” movement, under which anything is free to be modified, edited, used for commercial purposes or non commercial purposes(or a combination of these things).

To make any software into open source currently you must claim a copyright on the source code and then release it under many of the numerous open source compatible licenses(most famous being GPL), and distribute its source code with the binaries of the software.

The Linux Paradox

Now lets talk the real stuff. I am going to mainly focus on Linux but these things are equally applicable to any open source software. I am coining this term “Linux Paradox”, to imply the paradox which currently Linux faces in terms of its development and its adaptability. Any Open Source software heavily relies upon the industry acceptance, that is if everybody in the industry is using the open source software, then there is no way a proprietary software can beat it, because no single individual in the industry has to contribute it all in its development. For example if a fully developed software like Linux was to be developed from scratch by a company then it would take millions(even billions) of dollars in its development. But since Linux has the labor of numerous programmers and companies, there is almost no cost to build something similar with additional features from scratch.

When Amazon had to develop an OS for their ebook reading device Amazon Kindle, they did not have to write an OS from scratch purely for that purpose, rather they just used Linux kernel 2.6 and build their own features around it or modifying into it. Similarly when Adobe had to launch an IDE(Integrated Development Environment), a programming editor for their new Flex technology they didn’t have to develop something from scratch rather they just made a plugin for an already famous open source IDE called Eclipse(although its a shame that they made Adobe Flex Builder closed source).

It becomes difficult to beat Open Source software when it has the same starting point as any other proprietary softwares, but when it comes beating an already established industry accepted software like Microsoft Windows, its penetration into desktops is about 1%. Most of the people who despite of having the technical caliber to deal with any issues arising with desktop Linux, or who might benefit more by using Linux do not use Linux because of many applications or device supports they might need which they can only get from Windows.

Since the market acceptance of Linux is really less, most application developers and device manufacturers do not bother supporting Linux, and since they don’t support Linux, the users don’t use Linux thereby market acceptance never rises.

This is my friends a paradox. The paradox is not only there for Linux but for any Libertarian movement where you wanna remove the government’s aggression. The paradox being, that a Libertarian movement which an actually benefit more number of people, just does not get acceptance because the general public is currently being benefited from the government’s aggression.

Even if you start your own private police force tomorrow serving only the people who want to take your services voluntarily, you will not be able to get many clients, because since most of the people still go to the state police, even the most avid supporters will have to go the state police. One very good example of “Linux Paradox” will be the Free State Project in the coming time.

The Communists

In this issue I don’t really have much against the communists, except that they have hijacked the Open Source movement and turned it into a non-profit-non-monetary movement. By communists I don’t really mean the believers of worker’s paradise as proposed by Karl Marx, but it represents the people who believe that Open Source software movement means there should not be any demand or requirement of money from the part of the programmer. In simple words that if any programmer who works on an Open Source movement talks about money, he is immediately shunned. It is a common practice in the Open Source world that the only way you can actually contribute to an open source software is by actually coding the software(or provide bug reports, usage statistics etc etc). Anyone who donates money must do is if they are using the software for commercial purposes and making money off it.
Because of this culture, most of the non-programmers out there feel like they cannot do anything to actually contribute to the Open Source software. If they really like a software, they must learn to program, then understand the code and then contribute to it.
If you like linux you can jump in and program on it. If you cannot spare the time to program(or do not have the required programming skills) you can take part in reporting the bugs, providing support to other users etc etc. If you cannot even do that, then you can just stand by and just use the software and promote it as much as possible. Because of this most large commercial software companies don’t even look at Linux because they know that there belongs the group of the people who are least inclined to pay for the software.

The Libertarians

The Libertarians here are referred as the people who actually understand the meaning of freedom, non-aggression and have right economics principles. The Libertarian definition of an Open Source is, any software which is free from the use of physical coercion period. In simple words, if a software is developed without the help of any physical aggression(that is without using any copyrights, patents, anti-trust lawsuits etc etc) and if it does not use any form of aggression to distribute or to make money then it is a legitimate form of Libertarian Open source software. Of course this excludes taking copyright for the purpose of preventing government aggression against itself, and then releasing it as open source.(That is you may distribute a software under no copyright, but then that means if someone else claims copyright on it, they can prevent further distribution of that software, that is why the initial copyright is required).

The Libertarian concept of Open Source software is division of labor. That is, not everybody is a programmer to work on the every software they actually use, just like not everyone is a farmer, barber, baker, yet they wanna use the services of a farmer, barber, and a baker. If you like a piece of software, its true that you can use it without paying anyone anything, but if you wanna contribute your labor into the software, you can do that by donating money(or in other words by buying the labor of the core programmer on that Open Source software).

Take for example if you like a piece of open source software, and you wanna work on it, or contribute to it, but since you are not a programmer yourself, what you can do is donate the amount of money you make in the number of hours you wanted to donate. For example if you are a wheat farmer and you earn $25 per hour, and you wanna contribute 5 hours worth of labor to that software then you can give $125 to the open source software, and it will be used to buy the labor of a more apt programmer.

The best pieces of Open source software are managed by an individual or a limited group of people working full time, than a 1000 people working 2 hours a week. On the top of that if this Open Source development is done by hiring programmers to work full time from a country which has a cheaper labor costs like India or Philippines then your labor can be even more usefully converted in programming man hours.

The best example of this is an Open Source Software called Ardour (a digital audio workstation) which is an amazing piece of software for working on creating sounds and music. There is a full time programmer working on it, and his salary is about $54K per year($4500 per month), and although you can take part in the programming, the whole project is best dealt by that individual, so he invites donations from the users on a monthly basis. About 267 people have already committed to give about $2150 on a monthly basis and as of today(30th of May) he has met 95% of his monthly goal which is pretty good.

If this model can actually be copied by other Open Source softwares this could be really a great boost to non-properietary software models.

Solution

Take for example if you wanna give 2 hours every week working on your favorite open source software application. Then you should put down that time(say the last two hours of friday, i.e. your last weekday), and you put on a button like this:
Working for Open Source(click on it to buy it, the proceeds go towards the running of this website),
and you work your same job, except the amount of hours you put in your job wearing that badge you give earnings from that time to the lead programmer of the open source project you wanted to work on.

If you are an insurance salesman, it cannot be expected that you program for the Operating System you use, but at the same time the proprietary software developers make you pay for the software using coercion irrespectively. Because of that the proprietary software will always have an edge on its competing open source software. But by a clear understanding of division of labor the Open Source movement can benefit a lot.