Against Intellectual Monopoly

first to market is sufficiently high that
it is worth voluntarily giving up a future monopoly to be able to enter the
market.
    In the case of open-source software, the startling fact is how widespread
it is, a fact our wrong-shaded glasses often prevents us from noticing. If you
browsed the Web today, then it is virtually certain that you used open-source
software. Although you probably think of yourself as a Windows user or
a Mac user, the fact is that you are also a Linux user: every time you use
Google, your request is processed by the open-source software originated
by Linus Torvalds.
    In addition to Windows and Mac, there are three other widely used
operating environments: Solaris, Linux, and FreeBSD. Solaris, Linux, and
FreeBSD are all open source, and so is a good chunk of the Mac code. In
the server market, Google is scarcely exceptional - it is estimated that the
Linux operating system has a 25 percent market share.5 Not only Google
uses Linux - so does the widely used TiVo digital video recorder. Even in
desktops, Linux is estimated to be passing Mac in popularity.
    A great deal of the data you find on the Internet - for example, that
amusing blog about the shenanigans of Washington politicians you are
reading - is stored in databases. There are six major databases: Oracle, DB2,
SQL Server, Sybase, MySQL, and PostgreSQL. Two are open source, and
the odds are that the blog you are reading uses the open source MySQL
database - along with the open-source scripting language PHP. MySQL,
by the way, is developed and supported by a private, for-profit company,
as is the scripting language PHP. In addition, PHP has recently supplanted
the open-source Perl language as the premier scripting language for the World Wide Web, and four of the other widely used scripting languages,
Lua, Python, Ruby, and Tcl, are also open source. Only the Microsoft ASP
language is proprietary.

    Open source dominates the Internet. Whatever you are viewing on the
Web - we hesitate to ask what it might be - is served up by a Web server.
Netcraft regularly surveys Web sites to see what Web server they are using.
In December 2004, Netcraft polled all of the 58,194,836 Web sites it could
find on the Internet, and found that the open-source Web server Apache
had 68.43 percent of the market, Microsoft had 20.86 percent, and Sun
had only 3.14%. Apache's share is increasing; all others' market shares are
decreasing. So again, if you used the Web today, you almost certainly used
open-source software.6

    Even on the desktop, open source is spreading and not shrinking. Ten
years ago there were two major word-processing packages, Word and WordPerfect. Today the only significant competitor to Microsoft for a package of
office software that includes word processing is the open-source program
OpenOffice.
    Thousands of productive and highly paid programmers voluntarily
choose to produce and market software products that are distributed freely
to end users and to other developers. This must surely lead one to question
the common assumption that - without copyright and patents - the information technology revolution would have not come about, or that it will
die in the years to come.

    Why has the software market worked so well under competition and
without intellectual monopoly? The wide use of free software licenses has
unleashed the great collaborative benefit of competition. Open-source software makes available the underlying source code from which the computer
programs are compiled. Of particular importance is the free software movement, pioneered by Richard Stallman and others. Free software not only is
open source but also is released under a license such as the GNU General Public License (GPL),which allows modifications and distribution only
when the source code to those modifications is made available under the
same license. It should be understood here that the word free here means
(according to the motto of the GNU project) "free as in freedom, not free
as in beer." Although free software is often distributed without charge, it is
the freedom of the user to make use of the software that distinguishes free
software, not the price at which it is sold. The free software license serves
as a commitment for those who wish that their contribution also be freely
available, and as a guarantee to users that they will have access to the source
code in the future, if they so wish.
    These free software