A recent article by Richard Stallman on the subject of the direction of the Free Software community provoked a lot of discussion, in particular on whether he is right to push so strongly his principles of Free Software over and above the pragmatic principles of Open Source. In this article I would like to defend Stallman's vision of software, and its place in community rather than as a consumer product, and re-advocate Stallman's assertion that the right to form a community is more important than the ability to use particular software.

Open Source as a consumer product In one of the most telling criticisms of his position, one Slashdot poster commented that, to paraphrase, until Stallman realises that people don't expect cooperation and community to be products of, nor aspects of, a software industry, he won't ever succeed. Stallman, the poster implied, is talking only to a select group of people, and will never "meet the needs of the masses" until he accepts that their expectations of software are significantly different than his own. This apparently pragmatic approach to software can be found in a lot of documents advocating the use of the term "Open Source" in place of "Free Software" (though I am by no means implying that this applies to all Open Source advocates).

To many, the development models best described by Eric Raymond in The Cathedral and the Bazaar are what is most significant about GNU/Linux, along with the technologies and associated benefits of Open Source software, like stability, security, and speed. And it is these development models and their benefits that we ought to preach to potential customers and convertees. In the words of Raymond himself, the original push for Open Source "was a sustained effort to argue for 'free software' on pragmatic grounds of reliability, cost, and strategic business risk." It is undoubtedly upon these grounds that Free Software has seen such huge success in the business world, for the most part in the server market and increasingly in the desktop market.

The founders of the Open Source Initiative were no doubt correct in thinking that the term "Open Source" would be easier to sell to commercial entities than the term "Free Software." But this is only half the story. Where Open Source software has taken the business world by storm, Free Software is increasingly making a difference in governments, developing countries, areas of cultural minority and many others upon more grounds than "reliability, cost and strategic business risk." Read more here.