Devil’s Advocate

By: Ker Thrawn

Devil’s Advocate – One who argues against a cause or position either for the sake of argument or to help determine its validity.

I like free beer as much as the next person and I like having access to free software (free as in beer) as well. I think everyone enjoys getting something for nothing, but I equally think that most people would acknowledge that you couldn’t have all beer mandated to be free! The breweries would go out of business for a start, not to mention the tidal waves of vomit that would no doubt flow down the streets of the world’s cities.

It’s an obvious thing to say, I realize, that if all software were free then nobody would develop for it, and if I predicated my argument on that alone then you dear reader would roll your eyes at the somewhat precarious groundwork I’ve been doing over these last two paragraphs. Fortunately I’m not extrapolating free software to a potential nightmare future of all software being available without cost.

There’s a balance between freely available software and that which must be bought, and it might be reasonable to believe that said balance results in a status quo which is entirely harmless. However, if there’s one thing that free software is then that one thing is definitely not harmless. Incidentally, Status Quo the band are also not harmless but I digress.

Software available for no cost deters potential future engineers from becoming coders; if you see flowers being given out for free then you’re less likely to build your career upon the sale of flowers. And it’s not just free-as-in-beer software that harms our future. Free-as-in-ideas software does too.

I’m fairly opposed to capitalism as a system, but I’m not so divorced from reality that I’m unaware that the past couple of hundred years of scientific advances have also been times of almost unlimited capitalistic expansion. It’s as a result of capitalism, I argue, that we have had such advances. Capitalism creates a sense of everything being worth something; there’s always an incentive to create an advantage, whether it’s a pure business advantage or in unlocking some new scientific secret. Everything a person does is rewarded through enhanced desirability to employers, increased opportunities due to fame, advantages over competitors and so on. It’s not perfect but it’s also foolish to therefore dismiss it as being evil.

Free (beer and ideas) software undermines that sense of everything having a value, and thereby removes incentives for improvement. Whilst it would be nice to believe that we act even without incentives, it’s sadly not the case (at least for most of us), and therefore if we are removing incentives from improvement we make that improvement much less likely.

I don’t have anything against the free software movement, but they are misguided. They should abandon their promotion of the free distribution and creation of software and instead concentrate on taking the thousands of talented coders who are currently wasting their ingenuity on meaningless high-concept distribution methods and offering them help in joining major software companies.

It’s the only way we can hope to progress.

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