It's election fever, all right, more than enough to make one ill. We have a presidential election in which the American public flipped a coin that landed on its edge -- what one CNN commentator called a "constitutional crisis." Up here in Canada another election campaign drags on.
Even one of the more interesting recent events in the world of open source and free software has a political slant. FreeDevelopers.net, which recently earned the endorsement of Richard Stallman and the Free Software Foundation, is trying to rewrite the book on corporate culture, and its cornerstone project is an electronic voting system.
The organization plans to evolve into a commercial software vendor in which every developer votes for the group's leadership and on major policy decisions. Furthermore, all the developers will be equal co-owners, and the company will restrict itself to producing software under the GNU General Public License. At least that's the plan. For now, FreeDevelopers.net consists of a Web site and about 300 people on Internet mailing lists.
The spark plug behind the organization is Tony Stanco, a former senior securities attorney at the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Stanco espoused the same philosophy and dogma as Stallman during a recent interview, referring to the "immorality of proprietary software" and the need to "defeat" it. According to Stanco, some of his inspiration also comes from good old American pride.
"While at the SEC, every day I walked from one side of the Capitol to work on the other. One day I looked up at the Capitol dome, home of modern American democracy, and asked myself, 'Why couldn't the company be democratic?'" he said.
Stanco hopes to make money by bidding on government projects. He says FreeDevelopers.net should be able to attract at least one percent of the U.S. government's expenditure on software.
More than one road to free software
So now we have a grand experiment in view, a global-scale virtual kibbutz, created to produce free software. It's a different model than anything else I can think of. It's even a far cry from existing groups, such as Collabnet, that are designed to bring together developers and those willing to pay for free software projects.
I like the idea that software paid for by public funds should itself be publicly accessible, but I wonder how much success FreeDevelopers.net will have against established organizations. None of the successful free software and open source projects today are real democracies. The Linux kernel is controlled by Linus Torvalds and an inner circle. Apache and XFree86 are produced by small self-appointed committees. The closest thing to a democracy in the Linux world is the Debian group, but it's not aiming to make a profit (and indeed is still grappling with the issue of commercial Debian-based distributions). Even most FSF projects are run either by individuals or small groups, going back to Stallman's personal connection to Emacs.
We live, for better or worse, in a world in which "market economy" is a euphemism for "greed is good." Indeed, the FSF doesn't consider itself a part of the open source movement because it sees open source as using free software to pander to greed rather than replace it. But the fact remains that many of the companies dealing primarily with free software have yet to turn a profit, including those like Red Hat that are run in the conventional hierarchical style.
It's hard enough to make a buck from Linux and free software the old fashioned way. Yet FreeDevelopers.net seeks to reinvent the way companies produce software, and to bring to development models the same kind of ethical imperatives and innovation that drive the FSF in its efforts to create and advocate its GPL license.
I don't know if it will work. I don't know if it can work, or even if it should work. I don't share Stanco's view that software is as important a public interest as law, and therefore deserves more protection than literature. (Indeed, his philosophy, which is a bit too detailed to present here in its entirety, is that software is law). All I do know in this matter is that the FreeDevelopers project breaks the boundaries of free software development models and is worth keeping an eye on.
Where do you place your votes in the free software battles? Tell Evan in the TalkBack below or in the ZDNet Linux Forum.
