Conscious, minimalist, neo-luddite perspectives on nonprofit technology.
14th July 2008

The “Open Source Software is Free” myth

posted in Nonprofit Tech, Open Source |

I had a startling realization a few days ago. I seem to spend inordinate amounts of time responding to people (proprietary software vendors, to be specific) harping on the idea that “open source software is free” is a myth, and blathering on about how it’s not really free, because you have to hire a geek to install it, and maintain it, and blah blah blah.

No credible nonprofit technology open source advocate has ever suggested that open source software was free to implement. In fact, we all go out of our way (like in the open source primer) to talk about total cost of ownership, and how cost-wise, implementation of open source software is sometimes a wash with proprietary, etc. I’ve been caught using the “free as in kittens” metaphor many more times than once. We talk much more about the value and values that free and open source software bring to the table.

My realization was this: the myth is entirely of the making of these proprietary vendors who claim it is a myth. There would be no myth if it were not for them. No one would think that anyone thought that implementing open source software was without cost.

And from now on, instead of writing some long-winded response, I’m just going to put in a link to this post.

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There are currently 7 responses to “The “Open Source Software is Free” myth”

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  1. 1 On July 14th, 2008, Robert Fischer said:

    I love the “free as in kittens” response.

    One thing I note, however, is that proprietary software seems to require roughly the same amount of geek to install and maintain — and it’s very possible you’ll hit problems that you simply can’t solve without feeding up the proprietary food chain.

    Compare OpenOffice/NeoOffice and MS Office/iWork. They’re both exceedingly standard installs, and to maintain it, you just do updates. Problem solved.

    Now compare IIS and Apache. IIS may come magically installed (and probably running) on your Windows Server, so you do have some smartness requirements to install Apache (not much, though). If you want either of them to just serve up static files, they’re equally easy to use. If you want them to do anything fancy, they’re both a pain in their own unique ways. The difference is that if you *really* want Apache to do something, you guarantied can get there. If you *really* want IIS to do something, you may be SOL unless MSFT says you can.

  2. 2 On July 14th, 2008, Ryan Deschamps said:

    “No credible nonprofit technology open source advocate has ever suggested that open source software was free to implement.”

    This may be true, but I’ve seen my share of occasions where poor planning put people in what is affectionately called “open source hell.” The “free” aspect of open source is definitely a draw to the neophyte; that doesn’t mean that proprietary is the only way to go afterwards.

  3. 3 On July 16th, 2008, AJ said:

    In the strictest sense, open source merely means that the software developer gives your access to the source code. There is no implication of it being free, although much of it is. However companies such as Atlassian sell open source products. You have to pay to use their corporate wiki software “Confluence”, but they bundle the source code with the licence so you can customise (and improve) the software yourself.

    The “no support” myth is very prevelent as well. Vendors of proprietary softeware will tell you that open source software has no support. This of course is rubbish. I use Wordpress for my web site and if something goes wrong with it, there are millions of users world wide who can offer me solutions, and because we all have access to the code each one of us can analise the problem, edit the code to fix it and distribute the code to fellow users without ever having to deal with the ‘owner’ of the software.
    If you think proprietary software has better support think of those people who had databases written in Fox Pro, a product that was bought by Microsoft with the prime purpose of removing it as a market competitor.

  4. 4 On July 17th, 2008, Dan Knauss said:

    I respectfully disagree. FOSS that is accessible, popular, and widely-used-by-amateur-home-hobbyists (Wordpress, Drupal, Joomla) is fully of non-credible, immature, open source advocates.

    There is a little of that in this thread:
    http://drupal.org/node/237682#comment-925238

    The home-hobbyist FOSS user frequently thinks of “free as in kittens” from the standpoint of a child or single adult, not from the standpoint of an employer or business owner who really understands what total cost of ownership means. Most of all, FOSS publishing software is dominated by (again, young, single) people in the affluent parts of the world (i.e., the USA) who socialize and gain esteem by spending insane amounts of time coding, designing, and writing through a blog or CMS or forum. (I note that there seems to be a prevalence of Asian, Indonesian, Indian, and East European involvement in the robust commercial developer market that the Joomla CMS has acquired. )

    ***The “free” software is an extension of themselves and a symbol of their freedom.***

    They pay greatly to use this software but do not want to pay direct monetary costs because this forces them to think in more grown up terms, as it were, and prolonging the magic of adolescence/childish bliss is their defining trait.

    This is also a strategy of America’s favorite past-time–denying class consciousness, avoiding awarenss of class stratification, living a head-down passive-aggressive consumer’s existence that sublimates resentment and confusion into blogging, even thinking that this will somehow change the world. People were saying that stuff when Clinton was president. What does that tell you?

    Let’s be real–the twit/ter culture is the kidult culture, and it’s rather pathologically self-disenfranchising. Everyone can use twitter, few vote, nobody knows jack about their city, county, and state politics or the “information systems” that make them run/fail to run.

    As long as young fools in decadent, declining empires keep making money for the employer class, only cranks like me will say it’s not a good thing.

  5. 5 On August 11th, 2008, Ron said:

    Yeah, well, I just spent 12 work hours coding around the bugs in Internet Explorer, so it’s not just FOSS that isn’t free. In fact, I spend more time working around the bugs in paid-for commercial software than those in FOSS, even though I use FOSS for the bulk of my work.

    Paying for software doesn’t guarantee that its “hidden” cost of ownership will be lower than that of FOSS. Far from it — in commercial software, bug fixes often play second fiddle to feature “enhancements.”

  6. 6 On August 20th, 2008, Wild Apricot Blog : Tech Support for Free and Open-Source Software said:

    [...] was free to implement,” however, Michelle Murrain says: Free and open-source software is “free as in kittens” — it doesn’t matter whether you buy an expensive purebred Persian or adopt a free kitten [...]

  7. 7 On August 22nd, 2008, Charles said:

    ***The “free” software is an extension of themselves and a symbol of their freedom.***

    Oh god yes. Thank you for helping me articulate it.

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