COMP 601 - TME 1 - Algonquin College



Open Systems, Free Software, and Open Source

An Ethical Dilemma?

Reg Dyer,

September 25, 2002

Abstract

“Hi, here is the URL I used, download the software, it’s free.” Ever hear something like this? In fact, it is quite common today amongst almost anyone with a PC. This current trend to use “free” and “open” software is quickly becoming of interest to many “for-profit” giants like IBM, HP etc. The current PC software field is proliferating with free software, open source, and freeware. Many companies not only use this “free” software but also are now looking at the so-called “free model” as a technique for developing “for-profit” products. There have been a number of papers published that have researched the open source, free software, and freeware trend looking at issues like economics, technical progress, academics, the “open model” versus “the closed model”, business strategies using the “open” model, but very few reports have been published focusing specifically on the ethical issues of open source, free software, and freeware. This paper is a “work-in-progress” currently exploring what I refer to as the fringes of this “free” market place. It is the beginnings of research to discover if we face an ethical dilemma, and what that dilemma(s) might be. This report offers no definitive answer to any specific ethical or moral issue arising from this new frontier of “free-cyber-space”.

KEY-WORDS: ethics, ethical, software, freeware, open systems, open source, ethical behavior, economics, for-profit, government.

Introduction

Research methods and tools

Much of the research for this document has encompassed the use of tradition print based media but the majority of material has been obtained thru cyberspace (WWW). Some of the tools I have used to gather and disseminate this information are listed in the Appendix along with a brief description of how I used.

Historical Perspective

Having a background in computer systems and systems development spanning the past 25 to 30 years has allowed me to experience first hand the transitions of much software from “closed” to “open” and “for-profit” to “free”. In entering this business in the early 70’s, the concept of “free” software existed between individuals sharing thoughts and ideas for solving problems using a computer and in the world of “academia”. In most cases, the only so-called free software came from hardware vendors trying to break into the market place. For the most part, hardware vendors require you to license their software for an annual fee (mostly operating system software) and in most cases pay for support of their product. In no way, did the vendor provide a “free” and “open” view into their software components. To promote and sell their hardware, vendors would forge relationships with a 3rd parties to provide specialized software systems to the their hardware purchasers.

I recall in the late 80’s our company moving from a UNIVAC mainframe platform running OS to a VAX 11/780 platform running VMS. As a group, we basked in the sun of what we called an “open” operating system with VMS as opposed to the UNIVAC OS.

VMS was considered open as the operating system to us as we were able to obtain the documentation and code for the OPS routines and architecture. In reality, VMS was not an open system, we considered it such because Digital would release to us the OPS software and documentation if we signed a nondisclosure agreement. (Stallman, R. 2000)

UNIVAC OS was considered closed as one had to fumble thru HEX memory dumps, interpreting machine code to decipher what the operating system was doing.

Free software and open systems was in its infancy in the early 80’s, forged in a great part by Richard Stallman, the man responsible for the birth of the GNU …

“Stallman devoted his first efforts an operating system. Without an operating system, a computer is just a hunk of worthless metal, glass, and plastic… Stallman decided to make his operating system Unix compatible, to make the transition from proprietary software to his libré software as easy as possible. He called his project GNU (Gnu's Not Unix), to distinguish his software from the proprietary versions.

… In 1985, Stallman created the Free Software Foundation, a tax-exempt charity, to support his work and that of his collaborators. Stallman personally created an enormous body of software: GCC (C compiler), GDB (debugger), Emacs (text editor), and a number of other tools.“ (Rasch, 2001)

From that point on, the concept of “free” and “open” software continued to grow. It wasn’t until the mid to late 90’s that you could easily search the WWW to find an open source project in your area of interest.

Today, “free” and “open” software is a way of life, philosophers are writing and studying the issues of this new way developing software. Open software projects are available for just about any platform from UNIX to the different flavors of Windows. New projects are created every day. There are many web sites dedicated to open source development such as , , with tools being created the manage such sites like CVS and WinCVS to mention only a few.

Ethics and the “open” Software World?

What is Ethics?

The Josephson Institute for Ethics (2001) defines ethics as “…standards of conduct, standards that indicate how one should behave based on moral duties and virtues, which themselves are derived from principles of right and wrong.” It is expected in our society that business and individuals will act in an ethical manner. We are faced with making ethical decisions on a daily basis. Quite simple, these decisions are to be made from a number of perspectives (Valesquez, Andre, Shanks, Meyer 1996), the Utilitarian Approach where ethical actions provide the greatest balance of good over evil (what benefits and harm will the course of action produce), the Rights Approach based on moral rights: the right to the truth, the right of privacy, the right not to be injured, and the right to what is agreed, the Fairness or Justice Approach were you minimize favoritism and discrimination (Does everyone get treated in the same way?), the Common-Good approach where the action advances the common good, the Virtue Approach which considers the development of self and community (moral virtues).

After reading Forester and Morrison’s (1997) book on computer ethics, you realize the astonishing number of ethical dilemmas as a direct result of computer technology. Given this basic understanding of ethics and ethical decisions, the question begs to be asked, is there an ethical dilemma in the open systems, free software and freeware business of today?

The Current World of freeware/free software/open systems

Open source software has become a very hot topic evident from the extensive list of available sources on the subject. This area is of interest not only to software developers, the software industry at large but there is a rising interest by the economic community of many countries. The President’s Information Technology Advisory Committee (PITAC) in a 2001 report recommended that the US adopt the strategy of open source software development as the “new model for answering America’s high end computing software needs”. Why are many countries like the U.S. going to considerable effort to promote open source software, quite often at the expense of proprietary software? Traditionally, governments have only intervened when there has been significant market failure or a need to advance a technology for the common good (Reddy and Evans 2002).

Open source software is of major interest to corporations. What spawned the Linux-world has grown into a corporate strategy for deliver of software products. A report by Dalle and Jullien (2002) illustrates that the organizational ability of a company has more bearing on its financial success than “open” or “closed” software development policies.

To bring perspective to the market significance of open source software, the following table depicts the software success stories such as Apache an open source Web Server product (Giampaolo Garzarelli 2002).

Table 1.0 – Webserver Market Share

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Chart 1.0 – Web Server Market Share

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As can be seen from the graph, the Apache, an open source project has the predominant market share for Web Server software. In addition, a number of successful PC makers have become top Linux server vendors further supporting the shift to open source software in the commercial market place.

Table 2.0 – PC Linux Server makers

[pic]

(Source: Giampaolo Garzarelli 2002)

The market for free software, freeware and open source software is growing at an alarming rate. There is no doubt that such a cooperative effort is healthy for progress and the advancement of quality software products. The open source movement is of such a concern that many large companies are investing millions of dollars into these venues. Corporations like HP and IBM are also registering software patents to try and protect themselves from each other. Groups like the “League for Programming Freedom” are forming opposition to software patents and promoting open source concepts.

What does the future hold?

As we move further and further into the information age, information becomes more and more marketable. Publishing companies have known this for years the monetary value (significant profit margins) to be had with the provision and sale of information. I have personally developed different disseminations of the same data for sale and profit with revenue figures in the millions of dollars. As Yee states (1999), information goods make up a sizable amount of the worlds trade and is growing. More and more companies are adopting the open source technique for software development as a business strategy. New companies focused on the business of information are formed every day along with established corporations making their mark in the information field. Thousands of companies and PC users are making use of free software and freeware. We can expect this trend to continue in the future. It is doubtful that proprietary systems will become obsolete. Will all software concepts become the property of some giant corporate? One only needs to look at the recent court case of Microsoft and it’s monopoly. As of yet, the impact of a “society” of open source developers is unknown. There are many questions that need to be asked and more importantly answered such as: Whom will be affected by this wave of open systems; Are companies implementing open source strategies doing so in an ethical manner; Are governments acting responsibly and ethically by employing open source strategies in the advancement of high-end software; What is the effect on employment with so many developers working for free; What is the impact on overall software quality and progress; Are companies ethical in adopting open source development methodology; and Is this of benefit to society as a whole.

Conclusions

I am unable to draw any significant conclusions at this time. The volume of data and organization of such requires far more effort than what I have committed at this point. I have not found any significant studies that focus on the ethical and social impact of open source, free software and freeware issues. Material needs to be organized and analyzed to determine the ethical dilemmas we currently face and will face in the near future as a result of this new “technology”. I believe with some certainty that this area, the economic, social, and ethical use of free software, freeware, and open source development requires significant research and study.

References

Dalle, Jean-Michel and Jullien N. (2002) OPEN-SOURCE vs. PROPRIETARY SOFTWARE. Available from: [Accessed September 28, 2002]

Forester, T., Morrison, P. (1997). Computer Ethics, Cautionary Tales and Ethical Dilemmas in computing. The MIT Press.

Garzarelli, G. (2002). Open Source Software and the Economics of Organization. Available from: [Accessed September 22, 2002]

Josephson Institute of Ethics. (2001). Available from: [Accessed September 23, 2002]

President's Information Technology Advisory Committee Report (2000). Information Technology Research: Investing in Our Future. Open Source Software for High End Computing. Available from [Accessed September 25, 2002]

Rasch, Christopher. (2001) A Brief History of Free/Open Source Software Movement

Available from: [Accessed 28-Sep-2002]

Reddy B, and Evans D. (2002) Government Preferences for Promoting Open-Source Software: A Solution in Search of a Problem. Available from: [Accessed September 27, 2002]

Stallman, R. (2000) The GNU operating system and the free software movement. In: C. DiBona, S. Ockman, and M. Stone, eds. Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution Sebastopol, CA: O'Reilly & Associates. Available from: [Accessed 28 September 2002]

Valesquez, M, Andre C., Shanks, T., Meyer, M.J. (1996) Issues in Ethics – V.7, N.1 Winter 1996: Thinking Ethically:A Framework for Moral Decision Making . Available from: e[Accessed September 19, 2002]

Yee, Danny. (1999). Development, Ethical Trading, and Free Software. Copyright (C) 1999 Danny Yee. Available from: [Accessed September 26, 2002]

Appendix

A number of software tools were invaluable in obtaining research material and preparation of this document such as the Alta Vista Search Engine, “sed” file search tool, the “find” facility under windows explorer search utility and Alta Vista.

Alta Vista

The primary tool I used for searching the web was the Alta Vista search engine. I took advantage of the advanced Boolean search capabilities of this engine in order to refine my search technique to specific material of choice. I followed the following steps:

Starting with the Alta Vista advanced search page at: . I made use of a Boolean search using the Boolean and “&” operation as follows: "market share" & "open source" & statistics. I further sorted my result set by “open source” to move my key entries to the beginning. This provided me with the most significant finds first making it much quicker to obtain the information I required.

Sed

I used the “sed” UNIX program to assist in searching the contents of the web pages I saved in my research directory. This utility assisted in finding documents that contained specific occurrences of a word and/or phrase. For example to find the html document I saved containing the authors name “Dalle” I used the following sed command:

>sed “/Dalle/p” *.htm

Windows Search

Having a number of directories on my computer, along with constant work on a number of tasks, I find it difficult to remember exactly were I saved/stored a particular file. This utility is very easy to use, you open an explorer window, right click a folder and select search. For example, under the search menu (left hand window) I entered *govern*.htm to search for any occurrence of a file/folder containing the word “govern”.

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