By Jeff Gould, Peerstone Research / Interop News

Jargon is the hobgoblin of little minds, or so taught one of our revered philosophers. Well, all right, Emerson didn't quite say that – he said "consistency" where I put "jargon." But if old Ralph Waldo were alive today, I'm confident he would recognize the natural affinity of those two little bugbears.

Jargon is not the same thing as terminology or a big pile of acronyms. Goodness knows the software industry is afflicted with plenty of both of those. However, while they make reading industry documents tedious, technical terms and acronyms qualify as necessary evils. They represent the least costly way of conveying complicated ideas and multi-part names that are in constant use. But jargon is something else. It is an unnecessary evil. It is a tax imposed upon us by the forces of political correctness.

So what do I mean by jargon? Well, the title of this post contains one conspicuous example. According to some parties in the software world, we are not supposed to say just "open source." This term isn't good enough, because – as the righteous Richard Stallman explains in this stinging denunciation of its use – it evokes purely "practical values." Instead, politically enlightened and morally scrupulous folk must say "free/libre open source software" aka FLOSS.

Yikes! How did this happen?

That's easy enough to explain, though a little harder to understand. Back in the 90s people were looking for a neutral, business-friendly term to describe software like Debian Linux. Bruce Perens wrote up a definition that later became the semi-official definition of "open source." In a nutshell, the expression designated software whose source code was freely available to all who wanted to use it. But other factions in the community led by Brother Stallman objected to the term precisely because it was too neutral. They wanted a more politically engaged term that wore its anti-business values on its sleeve, hence "free software" which meant software liberated from all constraints on its use.

The free camp readily admitted that the two terms referred to the very same body of software and that the naming difference was purely ideological. But once engaged on this slippery slope, they promptly began to lurch and slide down it. They soon discovered that their preferred term suffered from a terrible vice. It was ambiguous. Where they had intended "free as in speech" the hoi polloi might take it in the cruder sense of "free as in beer." So they took to adding a qualifier that spelled out the difference, the Spanish or French word "libre" which means "free" in the sense of freedom, not "help yourself." (But be warned, these foreign lingos can be tricky – if a girl says she is "libre" in French, she means "I didn't come with a date, are you interested?").

Later on, realizing that the despised "open source" was not going away, the free/libre partisans and their politically correct allies annexed the enemy term to their own and coined the lexicological monster "free/libre open source software" along with its ludicrous acronym FLOSS.

Stallman is very explicit about his reasons for rejecting "open source":

"Open source is a development methodology; free software is a social movement. For the free software movement, free software is an ethical imperative, because only free software respects the users' freedom. By contrast, the philosophy of open source considers issues in terms of how to make software 'better'—in a practical sense only. It says that non-free software is a suboptimal solution. For the free software movement, however, non-free software is a social problem, and moving to free software is the solution."

Um, okay. Linus and company, those vulgar peasants, only want to make better software. The noble Lord Stallman wants to make a better world. What's wrong with that? It's a free country, right?

Sure, it's a free country (hmm, that word again). But I don't think Stallman's jargon crusade is harmless. On the contrary, it warps the truth about open source software like Linux in a dangerous way. How's that, you say? Stallman states quite openly that for him some software developers have good motives and some have bad motives, and that we should decide what software to use by judging the moral purity of those who made it. I say balderdash. This is toxic rubbish, and it's time we tossed it on the compost heap.

In general I have a pretty jaundiced view of human nature. So much so in fact that I frankly doubt Richard Stallman is in any position to be giving lessons on moral purity to Steve Ballmer, Linus Torvalds, Eric Schmidt or any of us other lesser mortals. We are all in the game for our own reasons, and it's not up to you or me or anyone else to say whose reasons are nobler.

Let me turn this around by giving my own succinct definition of "open source" which will also apply to "free" software, since as Stallman admits there is no difference between the two in practice. I define open source/free in the context of software as:

A software development and distribution strategy pursued by self-interested economic agents who wish to circumvent the barriers to competitive entry that larger and more established software vendors create around their products when they restrict access to their source code.

In effect, open sourcers are saying to the dominant proprietary software vendors (IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, etc) something like this:

"Your closed source code makes it hard to copy your product and gives you pricing leverage over your customers. We'll level the playing field by opening our code for all to see and we'll win customers by accepting a lower level of remuneration than you can tolerate."

Here is the crux: nobody is truly selfless, and no software developer should take it upon himself to cast stones at the selfishness of others before looking to his own. Even when they charge nothing at all for their software, open sourcers and FLOSSers alike are invariably seeking an economic benefit of some kind. No sane individual knowingly undertakes an activity that is sure to be a dead loss. There is always the some expectation of gain that is proportionate to the effort. What kind of gain? Any kind.

Most developers are looking to get paid in actual folding money, but they also avidly pursue such non-monetary benefits as peer recognition, the realization of political goals (tossing the occasional monkey wrench into the wheels of global capitalism), and the deep personal satisfaction that comes from knowing one has built a better mousetrap. Even when no cash is involved, these benefits are still real economic benefits, recognized as such by economists in their calculations of the "utility functions" that motivate the choices and actions of individuals. Hence my reminder that all developers are "self-interested economic agents."

Open source is not a morally superior way of doing things – not even if you call it "free/libre software" or FLOSS. It is merely another way of doing things that produces better results in some circumstances but not all. Mostly it is a way for outsiders to even the odds with insiders by changing the rules of the game. It doesn't imply anything at all about the relative moral probity of the insiders vs. that of the outsiders (though it's usually easier to root for underdogs). Open source is not the only way of changing the rules or even the most effective. Other examples include renting software instead of selling it (Salesforce.com) or getting rich from your rocket-science programming skills by giving your code away embedded with advertising (Google).

What's corrupt about Stallman's moral sloganeering is that he condemns the pursuit of self-interest by others in order to promote his own equally self-interested goal of replacing the free market by some kind of high-minded collectivism. Like that other genius-turned-fanatic Noam Chomsky, Stallman is entitled to express his views. But he should not be exempt from criticism which dares to state the true nature of his beliefs. While many people in the open source camp smile at Stallman's antics, few seem willing to admit how closely his ideas resemble the defeated and discredited totalitarian creeds of the last century. Think I'm being too harsh? Well then, consider these recent extraordinary statements by Stallman:

"Although I sympathize with a programmer’s wish to make more money, that is not as important as respecting other people’s freedom. In fact, developing a non-free program is an attack on society, and I hope that you will not be able to do it. I hope that no one will be able to do it. I hope to see non-free software disappear entirely, because it’s an anti-social practice... Software developers have no right to take away from other people the freedoms they are entitled to. And so non-free software is completely unethical and should not exist at all."

Notice the Olympian height from which these absolutist judgments are made, and the coercive policy prescriptions they are used to justify. The vast majority of software developers working in the world today have no right to do what they are doing. Routine business practices carried out within a well-established framework of law and commercial custom, practices that have promoted the growth of a vast industry that has made an incalculable contribution to the welfare and prosperity of the entire human race, should not exist at all because they are an "attack on society."

It is only a short step from "should not exist" to "must not be allowed to exist." Instead of dismissing Stallman as a crank, it's time for the open source community to take his totalitarian ideas more seriously and to reject them categorically. Because we've seen this film a few times already, and the end is never pretty.