Free and open-source software

A tongue-in-cheek photoshopped poster equating open source development to communism, based on an actual poster from the Recording Industry Association of America claiming that pirating MP3s is "downloading communism"

Free and open-source software (FOSS) or Libre Software is software that is free (as in freedom) to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve. For a piece of software to be considered Free and Open Source, it must comply to a small set of requirements laid down by the Free Software Foundation (FSF).

Essential Freedoms

To be considered FOSS, a program must comply to the Free Software Definition:

• The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose (freedom 0).
• The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
• The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help others (freedom 2).
• The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others (freedom 3). By doing this you can give the whole community a chance to benefit from your changes. Access to the source code is a precondition for this.

History

Before software as a commodity (1950s - mid 1970s)

From the creation of the first true programs written by Alan Turing and Neumann János in the late 1940s until the late 1970s, bourgeois intellectual property laws had not yet been enforced on software outside of rare cases, mostly because utilizing state and academic resources to quicken research was seen as advantageous by electronics corporations. Some projects were even released into the public domain as a way to facilitate keeping research software widely available for corporate use at a later time. Thus, a great number of software projects were developed by academics in co-operation with the private sector, following a model where companies would comission new features to be added to existing programs.

At that time, the principles of openness and cooperation prominent in theoretical academia were still the most widely-accepted doctrine in the software space. Programs were still widely distributed in source-code form due to incompatibilities between machines making usage impossible without slight modification. Early FORTRAN compilers are most likely an example of this, as the original FORTRAN compiler, written in the 1950s, still has archived copies of its source-code in the form of direct scans of paper cards.

Decline of software sharing (mid 1970s - 1985)

The Bell Corporation (AT&T) was the first to close the door on early software sharing. Some companies had already started charging for the documentation and technical specifications that made software usable while only providing programs in their binary form, but AT&T was the first to take advantage of a 1974 ruling in the United States that granted companies intellectual property rights on the programs themselves, and in 1979 began to commercialize their UNIX operating system with a restrictive licensing scheme, initially granting free copies to academic institutions and the Statesian government. In the beginning of the 1980s, AT&T began to cut down on the benefits of their academic licensing program, settling on charging universities full price for copies of the software.

In 1983, Apple v. Franklin, a case over wether computer firmware was subject to copyright, would be ruled in favour of Apple, which claimed that the Franklin Computer Corporation had illegally copied part of the Apple II's BIOS. This resulted in both the source-code and compiled versions of programs being treated similarly to literary works, where source-code was legally similar to the version of a book etched in ink presses, while the compiled version was similar to a finished paper copy of the book. The case was initially ruled in favour of Franklin, however, the ruling was reverted only 3 days later, after an appeal by Apple made the courts rush to protect private property.

After the rulings, academics and hobbyists continued to share software via public listings stapled to information boards in companies and universities, magazine listings, and later via digital bulletin board systems. Some still continued to distribute proprietary software and reverse-engineer it, resulting in the formation of modern "hacking culture" (a positive term outside of mainstream media). This underground culture of sharing and gathering knowledge, embodied by software reverse-engineering, would later be deemed as "piracy" by bourgeois legalists and their ideological allies.

Born from hacking culture was the wish for an organized framework when it came to software sharing. In 1983, Richard Matthew Stallman created the GNU Project, which was intended to be a freely-shareable implementation of the UNIX operating system. The project exalted the values of collaboration and solidarity between programmers, however, it was solely concerned with keeping software free and shareable, and not with contributing to the external struggle for freedom of information and for breaking out knowledge about software from the academic spheres, granting it a petty-bourgeois character.

Beginnings of the Free Software Foundation (1985 - 1992)

Stallman founded the Free Software Foundation in 1985 as a non-profit corporation, and transferred all copyrights over the GNU system along with a few other programs to it. Work began to create a legal framework for the enforcement of free software principles, which would later dominate the extent of the free software movement's social action. At the time, some small circles involved with the FSF went as far as to support the full abolishment of copyright and intellectual property laws, but agreed to the creation of a license, as it was seen as a provisional measure until copyright over software works could be abolished. In 1989, the first version of the GNU General Public License (GPL) was published, the license was most likely written by Stallman himself. In 1991, the license was revised, updating the legal wording and adding an additional clause to prevent issues over patent litigation.

After the GPL was published, the GNU C Compiler (GCC, later renamed to the GNU Compiler Collection) was released under the license. Previous versions had already been released under their own licenses for the past 2 years, but the introduction of the GPL, and the fact that the software was shared for free in bulletin boards and at a low cost by mail, along with being copied around in the hobbyist sphere, made it one of the most popular compilers of all time and an ideal alternative to proprietary C compilers, which were often sold by operating system developers at absurd prices. The release of GCC turned the FSF from a small collective of developers into a large organization, introducing many developers to free software and bolstering memberships and donations.

After the completion of the GNU Operating System (1992 - 1997)

Linus Torvalds, the son Nils Torvalds, a member of the right-wing Swedish People's Party of Finland, released the Linux Kernel in source-code form in 1991. The next year, in February 1992, Linux was released under the GNU General Public License. This marked a significant milestone for the Free Software Foundation, as previously, there was no way to run the GNU Operating System without the usage of proprietary software. A few days later, the release of MCC Interim Linux by Owen Le Blanc marked the first time a fully-functional free software operating system was ever distributed.

In the 1990s, free software began to be seen as commercially viable, as shrink-wrapped copies of FOSS projects started being sold in stores, and companies started providing paid on-the-phone technical support to corporate users of free software products. This brief period of general success attracted the eyes of some petty-bourgeois intellectuals, which began to study ways in which they could utilize the community aspect of the model while not having to comply with the requirement in the GNU GPL to keep all versions of the software FOSS forever.

Open-Source and the Initial Decline of the Free Software Foundation (1997 - 2019)

Fascist origin of Open-Source

Eric Steven Raymond, a nazi occultist neo-reactionary, vocal opponent of women-in-tech initiatives, denier of racialized police violence, and a proponent of the delusions that HIV-AIDS was a "divine punishment" against LGBTQ+ individuals, published the 1997 essay The Cathedral and the Bazaar, in which he pitched FOSS as a public and rapid development model to companies. After the book was published, circles around Raymond sought to commercially rebrand free software as open-source software, casting away what remained of the FSF's social activism, which by that point was beginning to be almost exclusively focused on the GPL.

After the year 2000, open-source began to be adopted as corporate branding, and permissive FOSS licenses which removed the requirement to share publicly released modified versions of software were quickly adopted by corporate developers. Eventually, most developers began to identify with open-source, and free software was overshadowed.

New development model

The new model of open-source software development was quickly estabilished. The adoption of open-source by a few corporate projects and the idea of absolute freedom of redistribution as a form of branding appealed to developers, which began to utilize permissive licenses more and more, and eventually, companies began to reap the benefits of the free labour that created an infrastructure around which they could develop their own proprietary projects upon. An example of this is OpenSSL, a secure communications library which powers millions of computers and faces critical underfunding, mostly being supported by individual donations.

In 2007, the FSF released Version 3 of the GPL, which made it impossible for any GPL software to be legally considered as Digital Restrictions Management software and forbade companies from making it impossible for modified versions of free software to be used via hardware restrictions that impeded the replacement of programs. Linus Torvalds and the Linux Foundation, which at that point was sustained solely by the good graces of gigantic technology companies, refused to relicense Linux under the GPLv3, as Linux development relied too much on support from manufacturers of home media sets and IoT devices. This marked a definitive split between the Free Software Foundation and the Linux Foundation.

Stallman's Resignation from the Free Software Foundation (2019 - 2021)

In 2019, Richard Stallman published a defense of right-wing politician and pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, and was met with significant backlash. Later, it was brought to light that he had published a statement where he likened having a child with down syndrome with having a pet, saying "If you'd like to love and care for a pet that doesn't have normal human mental capacity, don't create a handicapped human being to be your pet. Get a dog or a parrot. It will appreciate your love, and it will never feel bad for being less capable than normal humans". Stallman's other statements absolving multiple forms of pedophilia were also revealed. He is recorded as saying that “there is little evidence to justify the widespread assumption that willing participation in pedophilia hurts children", and has also defended the posession of child pornography, arguing "making such [pornographic] photos [of children] should be a crime, and is a crime, but that is no reason to prohibit possessing copies of the photos". Commenting on the rape of a 14-year-old by an adult woman, he stated: “I wish an attractive woman had ‘abused’ me that way when I was 14”. Later, it was revealed that the Free Software Foundation had a significant internal problem relating to discrimination against women and LGBTQ+ people.

Most left-wing cadres of the Free Software Foundation had already stopped supporting the organization, and many others left after the statements came to light. As a form of damage control, Stallman was made to resign from the position of President of the Free Software Foundation. Stallman's position remained vacant for 11 months, until an ex-treasurer of the FSF, Geoffrey Knauth, was elected. Stallman also lost his voting rights inside the FSF.

In 2021, Richard Stallman re-joined the Free Software Foundation as a board member, with Knauth maintaining his position in the presidency. Stallman's re-joining was met with significant backlash, and was announced only a few days before the beginning of the FSF's Libreplanet conference, making it impossible for participants to re-plan.

Attempts at Replacing Free Software (2021 - Current)

After the desertion of free software activists from the FSF, many evaluated the problem as being one with Free Software itself and have sought to replace the model. In 2021, the concept of Common Software started to be developed as a way to turn software into a tool of collective bargaining. The model was developed as a way to form a software commons that would ensure that all software developed by them would not be used for the purposes of oppressing the working class.

At the end of 2021, provisions started being made to form a communist organization that would work to promote the software commons and class cousciousness in technical-scientific spaces. In July of 2022, that effort mutated into the founding of the Revolutionary Technical Committee, an organization involved with student affairs in technical schools, efforts towards freedom of information, translation of marxist works, and the promotion of common software, along with being assigned as the collective steward of the Commons Protection License, which acts as a repellant for companies' legal departments.