DailyRadical

Large companies use their monopoly control to impose de facto standards. In itself standardisation is a very positive thing. When buying a new computer, it makes sense to have all the necessary software available without any further costs. It also helps that computers use the same formats so that documents, audio files etc. can be exchanged without problems. The negative aspect of this kind of standard is that the selfsame companies use these proprietary standards to further reinforce their monopoly. A significant part of the world economy now depends on these standards (Microsoft Word documents being the prime example of this) and the critical decisions are made by private companies who have no accountability at all.

This is where technology becomes political. The only power that is able to effectively promote open standards and free software in general is a political power. Right now the problem is that many open source projects are rather amateurish and end up nowhere because of lack of financing. Often (though certainly not always), hobbyist projects simply cannot compete with the commercial, closed and proprietary software that has thousands of professional programmers behind it. At this stage, for example, it would be very hard for most graphic designers to switch over to free software as in this domain it is simply not up to scratch yet. Their only option at this stage is to use specialised software from companies like Adobe or Macromedia.

The solution to the present chaos in the computer world is not to just convince everybody to switch to Linux operating systems or to only use open source software and avoid proprietary software. Of course that would be a step in the right direction, but we need to see the limits of a moralist approach like this. It is a myth to think that in a capitalist world you can somehow create a fair haven while the system itself only creates inequality and injustice. Free software can only be the "germs" of a new society, as it cannot involve the total production. For the free software movement to truly take prime position, society has to change. We need to change the capitalist mode of production and replace it with a socialist one, based on cooperation and sharing of information.

In a genuine socialist society (not the monstrous caricature that existed in the former Stalinist countries) there would be no reason for competition beyond the type of competition we see in sports. Instead various kinds of fruitful cooperation would take place. You can see that today not only in free software but also (partly) in science and, for instance, in cooking recipes. Imagine your daily meal if cooking recipes were proprietary and available only after paying a licence fee instead of being the result of a world-wide cooperation of cooks. A socialist society would seek to harness radically improved working patterns now afforded by technology and open source and free software foreshadow some of the possibilities of how society can be run democratically and efficiently.

In order to remove the existing fetter on technological development we need to enable radical change in the way software is produced. Imagine if the source code of Microsoft's and other private companies' software were made publicly available so that all software could be freely distributed and further developed to the benefit of the whole of humankind. The free software movement is a foretaste of how engineering - not just in software - might be organised once it is freed from the constraints of private profit.