The Open Source Movement was founded specifically to discard the
ethical foundation of the free software movement. The Free Software
movement starts from an ethical judgment, that nonfree software is
anti-social, it is wrong treatment of other people. And I reached
this conclusion before I started developing the GNU system. I
developed the GNU system specifically to create an alternative to an
unethical way of using software. When someone says to you:
“you can have this nice package of software, but only if you
first sign a promise you will not share it with anyone else”,
you are being asked to betray the rest of humanity. And I reached the
conclusion in the early eighties, that this was evil, it is wrong
treatment of other people. But there was no other way of using a
modern computer.
All the operating systems required exactly such a
betrayal before you could get a copy. And that was in order to get an
executable binary copy. You could not have the source code at all.
The executable binary copy is just a series of numbers, which even a
programmer has trouble making any sense out of it. The source code
looks sort of like mathematics, and if you have learned how to program
you could read that. But that intelligible form you could not even
get after you signed the betrayal. All you would get is the
nonsensical numbers, which only the computer can understand.
So, I
decided to create an alternative, which meant, another operating
system, one that would not have these unethical requirements. One,
that you could get in the form of source code, so that, if you decided
to learn to program you could understand it. And you would get it
without betraying other people and you would be free to pass it on to
others. Free either to give away copies or sell copies. So I began
developing the GNU system, which in the early nineties was the bulk of
what people erroneously started to call Linux. And so it all exists
because of an ethical refusal to go along with an antisocial practice.
But this is controversial.
In the nineties as the GNU+Linux system became popular and got to
have some millions of users, many of them were techies with technical
blinders on, who did not want to look at things in terms of right and
wrong, but only in terms of effective or ineffective. So they began
telling many other people, here is an operating system that is very
reliable, and is powerful, and it's cool and exciting, and you can
get it cheap. And they did not mention, that this allowed you to
avoid an unethical betrayal of the rest of society. That it allowed
users to avoid being kept divided and helpless.
So, there were many
people who used free software, but had never even heard of these
ideas. And that included people in business, who were committed to an
amoral approach to their lives. So, when somebody proposed the term
“Open Source”, they seized on that, as a way that they
could bury these ethical ideas. Now, they have a right to promote
their views. But, I don't share their views, so I decline ever to do
anything under the rubric of “Open Source”, and I hope
that you will, too.