Editorial

Dear Ubuntu User Reader,

King Pyrrhus of Epirus was waging war against the Romans in the year 279 BC when he won the battle of Heraclea. Despite his victory, Plutarch comments on how "such a victory would utterly undo him [Pyrrhus] " because his army had suffered such tremendous losses.

Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols recently wrote a piece called "Linux and open source have won, get over it" for ZDNet. You can imagine how it went: Open source has made its way into all sorts of industries and is a success story everywhere, even Microsoft is coming around, and blah, blah, blah.

I have the utmost respect for Steven and have followed (and, at one point, translated) his writings for years, but I take issue with his triumphalism. Even though open source may very well have won, Free Software has lost. Or, not to be too pessimistic, is losing.

And, I am not talking semantics here. Let's be clear on the definitions: Open Source is Free Software with the all ethics deliberately and systematically stripped away. Open source proponents, usually engineers, think they are being pragmatic by ditching the "freedom" and moral component, but "pragmatic" is not the word.

"Misled" is more on the mark.

Open Source is the convenient moniker for corporations and managers. But when the convenience/interest of companies override users' rights and well-being, bad things happen. Our environment gets polluted; people get poisoned; consumers get duped into frenzied and frivolous consumerism. And, citizens – you and me – who have done nothing illegal, get spied on, with our every move and thought tracked, quantified, and used against us. By removing the theoretical morality component, Open Source becomes immoral in practice.

Free Software proponents (as opposed to Open Source supporters) don't care only about the openness of the code. They also care about the moral implications of distributing software. However, they have not formally addressed these implications in their licenses. RMS and others have talked about mass surveillance, corporate greed, and dishonest practices versus the rights of the people in blog posts and online and offline rants, and the Free Software Foundation (FSF) has run campaigns against these things. But, there is no formal document, no clause in the licenses that broaches "bad" (illegal or immoral) coding or use of code.

The FSF argues that such a clause would be against at least one of the four basic freedoms spelled out in the header of the GPL license, namely the freedom to use the software for whatever purpose. They also argue that illegal behavior is already covered by the law, so there's no need to include it in a license. And they are right: If someone is going to use a word processor to write a ransom note, you don't have to state in your license agreement that your software can't be used as an accessory to a crime, because there are already laws against kidnapping. Besides, a clause in a document that most people don't even read is probably not going to stop an abduction.

However, there's no FSF-sanctioned document on how the programmers should behave. For example, there is nothing to stop a programmer from including a backdoor or malicious code into a free software program. No, seriously: There isn't. The theory is that, being open source, someone will find deliberately malicious code and patch it, but we all know how theories go.

Also, bigger projects rely on communities of coders, testers, and users for their success. Most successful free software projects do not happen in a vacuum. However, there is no universal consensus on how members of a Free Software community should behave toward each other or toward their users.

That is where Codes of Conduct come in. Codes of Conduct (CoCs) supposedly set down the rules for dealing with harassment, discrimination, and other cases of misconduct within communities.

Codes of Conduct, however, are controversial things and Free Software programmers often oppose them. "If I am giving away my time and energy for free" the reasoning goes, then "I should be able to behave very much as I please." As for that, you could volunteer your time and energy taking care of animals in a shelter, but then prowl the streets punching people in the face. Just because you did the former, doesn't mean you would not be arrested for the latter. If a good thing does not excuse a bad thing within society, why would it in a much tighter group of people?

Codes of Conduct also face the very hard task of coming up with a fair list of rules that do not stifle creativity, ingenuity, and ambition, and, at the same time, are fair for all – veterans, newcomers, the majority, and all the minorities.

This leads to another source of controversy: the belief that CoCs and the clauses designed to protect minorities they often contain can be used as "victim cards" to climb positions within the FLOSS hierarchy, skipping the hurdles of merit Free Software programmers apparently rely on to decide each person's status within the hierarchy.

It's kind of ironic that the so-called "meritocracy" is often efficiently used the other way around – that is, invoked as a way to put down a user or coder from a different ethnicity or gender, accusing them precisely of what I describe above.

Just in the way of anecdotal evidence, let me tell you I was at FOSDEM this past weekend and, according to the organizers, more than 8,000 people attended. Brussels is a variegated city, with plenty of people of different colors and origins. And, dare I say that, according to my estimates, at least 50 percent of the population is female. Looking down from the steps in the K building onto the Main Hall, however, the view was of a sea of pale, white, male faces. It is pretty obvious which of the two tactics is working better.

So, yes, Open Source, the immoral half-brother of Free Software, may have won. But if, within the FLOSS community, we can't even agree on how to be fair to each other, I'm noting this victory down as "pyrrhic."

Paul C. Brown,

Editor in Chief