Can the hacker ethic truly and fully survive in a world of commercial and proprietary software? Is it better to be a “professional programmer,… the goal-oriented… responsible engineer,” or is it better to be a programmer with “love for [computing] in [your] heart” and “hacker perfectionism in [your] soul”?

In this era of computers, we have a combination of proprietary and open-source software. Neither is strictly better than the other. Their existence is not mutally exclusive; a lot of proprietary software depends on open-source software. It is important not to take open-source software for granted because it is technically possible for open-source code to be less open.

Sometimes it’s for the better. On Monday, February 26, 2001, the license of an audio codec called Ogg Vorbis was changed from LGPL to BSD. The LGPL license allows companies to link their proprietary software to open-source libraries licensed under LGPL. Companies can modify the LGPL-licensed libraries, but then they must make the modified version of the library open-source under the LGPL license. In other words, it lets companies use open-source software with proprietary software. The BSD license, on the other hand, allows companies to use and modify open-source software licensed under BSD without having to open-source their modified version. The reason the license was changed was to encourage the adoption of the software by companies. Nowadays, we take for granted the MP3 audio codec, but it was actually protected by patent laws and not open-source until 2017! To encourage the adoption of Ogg Vorbis, its license was changed to a more permissive one, and even though it meant that companies could modify it and keep their modifications closed-source, Richard Stallman thought the decision to switch licenses was for the best.

I was surprised to learn that it is possible to change a software license from LGPL to a more permissive one like BSD, so I decided to see if software has ever gone from AGPL, the strictest copyleft license, to MIT, the most permissive. And lo and behold, FrePPLe did so with version 8.0.

One other example I can think of is OpenAI. Despite their name, they’re not very open lol.

Did you know that much of the MPEG-4 standard is patented? For instance, the AAC audio codec (which is what MP4 primarily uses) is patented, and you have to pay a fee to get a license to use it. Unbelieveable. And it won’t be patent-free until 2031. Yup. At least now we’ve got MP3 (which wasn’t patent-free in the US from 1997 until 2017), I guess, except AAC is just better than MP3. Well, at least we’ve got Opus, oh, but Opus isn’t as widely supported despite using a 3-clause BSD license (permissive).

So what does this all mean for the hacker ethic and good software? I truly believe that the commercialization of software has been a good thing overall. It accelerated development and created a ton of jobs. One of the bullet points given for reflection was:

Did the public benefit from one company ‘owning’ a piece of software and preventing others from making it useful?

I’d like to challenge the preconceived notion that companies prevent others from making their proprietary software useful. Software companies are completely organized constructs for the purpose of making software. You can argue their main purpose is actually to make money, but they’re making money making software. They hire the best programmers they can find and work towards a common goal. I would say that the popularity of software companies created more good software, hackers, and led to more open-source software by virtue of popularizing computers.

Still, free and open-source software is so important. I know the “free” in “free and open-source” does not have anything to do with price, but having access to information, resources, and tools for learning how to code, with no cost or strings attached, changes everything; if not for the accessibility of great software, then for the accessibility of information for the next generation of hackers.