An up-to-date look at free software and its makers
Projects on the Move
© Yuri Arcurs, 123rf.com
The Open PC helps the dream of free hardware come true, and robot simulations fire the imagination.
To its pioneers, free software is a production model for a better society. Unlimited, loss-free copies mean that the only barriers to reproducing digital media are either of a legal nature or due to copy protection. Development is the only really expensive part of producing software; media prices for DVDs or Internet servers are negligible
New Business Models
Producers and vendors of proprietary software claim that they need to recoup the cost of development by selling individual copies; otherwise, they would be unable to afford the salaries that professional developers earn. Companies such as Red Hat, Novell, and many others disprove this by relying on a business model in which individual licenses do not generate turnover. In both cases, this is not strictly what the Utopian pioneers of free software had in mind, in that neither Red Hat nor Novell have foresworn profit as the maxim of trade but simply modified the process to reflect the characteristics of "software" as an asset: They no longer sell the reproducible product, but provide services related to it.
Although free software so far hasn't created a society free of material need and social imparity, it can point to measurable success that does more than benefit a couple of companies. In recent years, free software has managed to shorten the digital gap between poor and rich. An African child could soon be equipped with a laptop and a free (as in beer and freedom) Linux operating system at a price even poor governments can afford [1].
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