Opinion: Why I Prefer Open Source Software

Mar 5

Submitted by Nick Clarke

For someone like me with a wide range of skills and interests but comparatively less money, free software has always been the only viable option. I taught myself 3D modeling in high school because I wanted to make cool Pokémon art: something that would not have been possible if I had to pay for the software first. I would never have tried 3D modeling if I had to buy a $300 software package just to dip my toe in. Now I’m using it for school – and to make “real” art.

The first open source project I became aware of was OpenOffice, a Microsoft Office clone. Learning that there was a free alternative that did everything Office did and was made by random people felt very similar to when I discovered Limewire (which happens to use the open source Gnutella network and is itself an open source program) and with it the joys of pirating media.

Suddenly a whole world opened up to me: a world that I had been stuck waiting to pay the fee to enter. It wasn’t long before I discovered Linux, a free open source operating system, and I’ve used it pretty much exclusively ever since. The monetary savings alone make open source software worthy of consideration, but that’s far from being the only benefit that these projects offer.

Free Software is Better

There are two meanings of the word “free” in the open source community. We refer to the meanings as “free as in free speech” and “free as in free beer”. Software developed by corporations is hobbled by the profit motive–take, for example, the Adobe Creative Cloud fiasco.

Adobe had a product (Photoshop) that already did what people needed it to, and because of that it became more and more difficult to convince people to buy the newest version. Eventually, they threw away the single purchase model altogether, and now the only legal way to use Photoshop is to pay $28 CAD monthly.

MONTHLY.

That means that for one person to have the legal right to edit photos, they’d have to pay $336 per year. If they do professional graphics work for 10 years, that means one person has paid a corporation over $3000 for nothing but the right to use a product that they already possess. I can’t believe they’re still making money with that; I suspect it has something to do with a general lack of knowledge among the population that it doesn’t have to be this way.

Corporate-developed software under capitalism will always have to find a way to deal with the profit motive: the idea that corporations must seek to continually increase profits and also increase the rate at which profits increase. This invariably leads to “feature creep”–the practice of adding unnecessary bulk to a program to increase its perceived value–and other anti-consumer practices like the software-as-a-service model employed by Adobe in the previous example.

Free software is not bound by the profit motive. Plenty of open source projects make money, but they do it through donations or by selling support and educational services on the side.

Imagine a world where Photoshop is free and Adobe offers inexpensive classes on how to use it. That world exists now–except Photoshop is called Gimp and instead of Adobe offering inexpensive classes, experienced community members volunteer to help others through communicating on forums and posting video tutorials on sites like YouTube.

Not only does open source software have better user support and less bulk, the development process itself is more secure. All open source software has its source code available for anyone to view–that’s why it’s called “open source”. In my opinion, that’s its greatest strength; if anyone has an idea for something to work better or more efficiently, they can code it and submit the change to be approved by the project maintainers. Any such change can then be viewed and audited by anyone willing to do so, which prevents bad actors from adding things like backdoors that can be used for surveillance.

Security Concerns

Due to Edward Snowden’s bombshell leaks of NSA data in 2013, security was brought to the forefront of many minds in the wider computing community. How can we trust corporate software when we have concrete proof that companies like Microsoft, Google, and Verizon included backdoors specifically so that government agencies could spy on people?

It seems we can’t trust them, so what now? Take comfort in the idea that maybe we’re irrelevant enough to be safely ignored? I will not live my life like that–not if I can help it.

In my eyes, open source software is the answer, especially now that we’re aware of what the NSA is trying to do. No project is immune from bad actors, and we have seen that corporate security means nothing when the people in charge are willing to compromise it at the request of governments. Transparency is a necessity.

Please note that I am not claiming that open source software is immune to such tampering, merely that it is more resistant than the alternative of closed source corporate software where there is no transparency. All software is vulnerable, but the transparency of open source makes it much harder to sneak in malicious changes.

In 2003, someone attempted to add a backdoor to the Linux kernel. The change was small enough that at first the project maintainers thought it was a human error - just the presence of an ‘equals’ sign (=) was enough to grant admin privileges to a hacker who knew what they were doing. This change was announced to the community “as a procedural annoyance”, and it wasn’t until other programmers looked into it that the backdoor was recognized for what it was.

This situation shows that without transparency, backdoors and other security concerns don’t even need to be approved by the developers to be hidden in software; whether open source or corporate, every piece of software is vulnerable. Transparency is needed in order to allow everyone to check for these kinds of additions. Without it, we reduce the number of eyes watching for bad actors to no benefit (save preserving copyright).

By its nature, open source software encourages users to learn about how it works, therefore building a community of watchdogs to watch out for these issues.

[original mailing list showing the announcement of the apparent ‘procedural annoyance’]

[contemporary discourse]

Industry Resistance

My writing of this piece came about after years of having to justify my choice of music composition software. Our school’s music department teaches Finale, a closed source program that’s used by professional composers across the world. So what’s my problem? There’s a better option that costs less, and it’s called MuseScore.

I’m not going to argue against the facts; every professional composer I’ve met uses Finale. I will instead argue against the principle–despite what neoliberal politicians have tried to imply over the last few decades, we have not reached the end of history, and the world will continue to evolve.

For me, MuseScore, like all free software, is inherently better than the commercial alternative. Despite being the industry standard, Finale is an absolute mess of a program due to the incompatibility of different versions. If you already owned the 2003 version and couldn’t afford the 2012 version, you’d presumably be locked out of the industry because some egghead did a study that said profits would increase by something like 0.2% if they encouraged consumers to upgrade.

MuseScore has used the same format (mscz) since its introduction, and while the format has gone through some revisions, the software is capable of opening any score from any previous version and converting it to the current format. This feature is great for users, yet provides little incentive to pay for new versions of the product. I would wonder why Finale has refused to implement it, since MuseScore has proven its effectiveness… but so is the way of capitalism.

MuseScore is free and will always be free. The nature of its license is such that even if the owners decided to start charging money for it, anyone could come along and make a new branch that would be available for free. This exact situation has played out with the Linux distributions Fedora and Red Hat Enterprise. Linux - Red Hat is a commercial product that costs money and comes with support for enterprise, while Fedora is the same product but available for free with different branding and without the enterprise support.

There was music before Finale and there will be music after Finale. Beethoven used ink and paper and Mozart composed in his head, yet none of their music seems any worse off for not having had access to the program.

If the superior product (which I hope I’ve successfully demonstrated MuseScore to be already) is not allowed to overtake the current industry standard, do we really have a free market?

Opinion: Why I Prefer Open Source Software

Free Software is Better

Security Concerns

Industry Resistance

Further Reading

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