The “Free Open Source Software” (FOSS) movement is based on the idea that the user has access to the software code (open source), and that he can modify it, apply and distribute it as he wants. It is often distributed for free, but that is not essential. What is important is the user’s freedom to use it as he wants. This is contrary to commercial software, where the code is encrypted, and where the user anyway is not allowed to change it and much less distribute it. The FOSS movement started at university campuses, particularly Berkley in the US, as a by-product of the 1968 student rebellion and gained traction all over the world.

The FOSS movement has turned out to be very innovative as people can come up with their ideas, join and leave groups as they want and anybody can clone the software at any moment and establish his own branch. Its strength is in the number of contributors spread all over the world and their dedicated work. It is not driven by economic gain, but by love of coding, satisfaction of seeing the end product working, pride of good craftsmanship, and the like. Its weakness is that as programmers often are very individualistic, some projects are weakened or abandoned because of branching.

Even if many FOSS projects are carried out by hobbyists, it is also possible for some programmers to make a living from it. Often the projects will receive voluntary contributions from the users, but the main source of income is from providing services related to the software. Some projects have become so big that non-profit organisations have been set up with substantial financial support from companies benefiting from the software and who are interested in keeping it developing, despite that the companies often are competitors. One example of this is the Linux Operation System (OS) (actually only the kernel of the OS). But there are many, many others.

To understand the logic behind the FOSS movement, it can be useful to compare the Linux OS with the Microsoft OS (DOS and Windows). Linux is a big cooperative non-profit project based on a General Public License (GPL), while Microsoft OS is a hard-nosed commercial project aiming at maximum profit by monopolizing the market. Microsoft’s Bill Gates became the world’s richest man, while the Linux kernel is still free of charge and the inventor (and owner) of Linux, Linus Torvald, is a (well-paid) administrator at the non-profit Linux Foundation.

Bill Gates and his company Microsoft (MS) is often presented as the story of a genius inventor, who laid the basis for the modern software industry. This is very far from the truth. Young Bill Gates was able to see where the things were moving and realising the opportunity to make money from it. At the moment when the first Personal Computers (PC) appeared, most OS were written for big computers (main-frames) or mini-computers (still much bigger and powerful than PCs), so there were few available OS for the PCs. Young Bill had two strikes of luck. In 1981 he made a historic deal with IBM to deliver an operation system for the new IBM PC (according to New York Times because of his mother’s connections in IBM). He bought QDOS (“Quick and Dirty Operating System”), a clone of an earlier OS called CP/M from Seattle Computer Products, “that its programmer Tim Paterson had thrown together in six weeks (...). Concealing the IBM deal from Paterson and SCP he got the rights for $50,000”. And then Bill’s money machine started to spin. “Over the next decade, leveraging code he didn't write made Bill Gates a multibillionaire, and business tactics even sharper than the original deal gained Microsoft a monopoly lock on desktop computing”. That is still the case.

The English Tycoon Alan Michael Sugar created his own PC in the late 80ties and called it Amstrad (here PC1512). He made his own clone of the CP/M OS and called it AmsDOS. I was a quite good product, and at a moment he had 25% of the European PC market, but then ran into problems. By the way it was the first PC I bought (used) for personal use in circa 1988 for 12,000 DKK (around 1,700 USD), but with a 20MB hard drive. At my work at the University I had an Olivetti IBM clone and later an IBM PS/2.

The beauty of an OS for a would-be monopolist is that software written for it will not work on another OS without rewriting. So to own the OS is to have leverage over the programmes written for it. The same is the case for the user base: once users have been trained in using the programmes, it will be cumbersome and costly to change to other programmes. MS cloned existing text-processing and spread-sheet programmes (mainly Word Perfect and Lotus 123) and called them Word and Excel, and he succeeded in popularising these clones through PC vendors by bundling them with Microsoft’s OS and hence create what is called a “vendor lock-in”, where they made sure their programmes would not be able to export files properly to other non-MS programmes (as they have their own format). Vendor lock-in and ownership of de facto standards is where big money can be made in the software industry. Young Bill and his collaborators had a good sense of smell (of money).

The birth of the Linux OS couldn’t be more different. The FOSS people at Berkeley, headed by Richard Stallman, were toying with an OS they called GNU, but were moving very slowly (some say they were too perfectionist). Linus Torvalds, born in 1969, was a Computer Science student at University of Helsinki, Finland. In 1991 he bought his first PC (with an Intel 386 CPU) but was not happy with the Microsoft OS that came with it. However, he was unable to buy the better OS he wanted (UNIX) as a licence would cost him 5,000 dollars. Linus thus decided to create a new OS from scratch that was based on UNIX (and a scaled down version of it called MINIX), so he sent an email to a MINIX user group telling that he was writing an OS and that he would welcome contributions. The feed-back from the programming community was overwhelming, as many other programmers had the same problem, and a couple of months later he released his first versions of the Linux Kernel. Influenced by Richard Stallman he decided to go for a General Public License which means that it can be used, freely modified, and redistributed, both commercially and non-commercially. A couple of years later several so-called “distributions” appeared, where the Linux Kernel was packaged with various software utilities and applications, each tailored for specific use-cases or philosophies, including the most influential one called Debian (1993). Commercial distributions were released, aimed at enterprises, among these Red Hat and SUSE (1994 and 1995), and in the late '90s and early 2000s there was a surge in enterprise adoption of Linux.

The inventors of the UNIX Operating System, Ken Thompson (seated) and Dennis Ritchie (standing) in front of a PDP-11/20 computer, circa 1970.

Today Linux is practically everywhere, even if the users often don’t know it. The most used mobile phone OS, Android (70% share), runs on the Linux Kernel, it is estimated that around 70% of web servers worldwide run Linux (among these this website), all the 500 top supercomputers in the world run on Linux, and scaled-down versions of Linux are running on most smart TVs, smart cars and internet of things gadgets. Microsoft still dominates company servers and the desktops. The share of desktops running Linux is estimated at around 5-6% only (including Chrome-books, which run on Linux).

No surprise that Microsoft hated Linux and other open source programmes, their only real competitors besides Apple. Microsoft’s Steve Balmer said in 2001 that "Linux is a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches", and claimed it was communism. Using its deep pockets, Microsoft tried for a long time to block Linux with patent lawsuits and was close to being successful. With the change of CEO in 2018, Microsoft called a truce, and claims it now embraces open source Linux. Not everybody believes it.

So what can we learn from this story? Firstly, once the investment in developing a software has been done, the cost of distributing it is close to zero. Add to this the vendor lock-in and ownership of de facto standards, and we have a fertile field for monopolies or quasi-monopolies. And there are lots of them: Microsoft, Google, and so on. Open source software is an opportunity for individuals and companies, that want to avoid being fleeced by rent-seekers. It requires cooperation, but it also provides rewards. When it comes to proprietary networks as Facebook, Twitter and the like, there is not much open source can do. That requires another type of cooperation.

Secondly, everybody needs to earn a living, but profit is not the only driving force for human beings. Tens of thousands of programmers all over the world are working voluntarily to create open source code because they like to do it, and because they like the freedom that comes with it. And they like choice. Programmers spend most of their time in front of a computer screen, and many of them hate the idea that somebody else is telling them what they are allowed to do and not to do with their computer. They want to decide for themselves how they use it. Contrarily to what some are claiming, FOSS is not an obstacle for people or companies that want to earn a living. They can use the open source software and add their own proprietary programmes on top of it, if they want. Or they can offer services to the clients – installation, trouble shooting, technical back-stopping, and so on. And that is what many do. Others do it for fun.

It really is power of the people. So there is a reason monopolies hate it.

PD: This article is written with Libreoffice Writer on a PC running on Linux Mint 21.3. Photos edited with GIMP. The webpage is setup in the open source Joomla content management system, using paid add-ons and a commercial Joomla template.

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This is the second article on cooperatice man. To read the first article click on the link below:

1. Humans may be self-interested, but they are also cooperative and self-sacrificing