Wednesday, July 19, 2006

Why free software exists: Part 3

Free software makes sense

Copyrights were once significant. That was a long time ago when the printing presses became popular. With the technology to make copies of books a bit faster people started making profits out of selling more copies behind the authors back. Sometimes these books were ill-printed; they might have contained some errors. These little things can eventually scapegoat the author, and not the publisher. Moreover the author derives his or her incentive to write if he or she was rewarded for what he or she wrote. But that time what happened was quite reverse; they didn't get paid and hence their incentive was destroyed. Hence these authors approached the law and thus copyrights became significant.

Today we live in world where information technology has advanced to a great degree. It means that copying and distributing has become even more easier compared to the past. People download music files, e-books, and software and other stuff from the Internet. They pass it on to their friends; and thus the proliferation goes on. Licenses prohibit them to do so; but honestly no one really heeds to these licences. But there is a potential threat of being punished by international laws as long as such things go on.

The idea of free software wasn't really introduced to obviate such a threat. It was introduced so that people recognise their freedom, and what really these proprietary licenses are doing to restrain it. But proprietary software exists and will continue to exist. It is something which came first, i.e. before free software. Hence there must be situations where you must resort to proprietary licenses. Well, I haven't thought about that yet, and moreover this post isn't meant to deal about that subject either.

I will look to discuss these things in the future, and I will also look into extending the concept of free software over fields other than software. But next I will discuss about free software.