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The Social Disutility of Software Ownership

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Abstract

Software ownership allows the owner to restrict the distribution of software and to prevent others from reading the software’s source code and building upon it. However, free software is released to users under software licenses that give them the right to read the source code, modify it, reuse it, and distribute the software to others. Proponents of free software such as Richard M. Stallman and Eben Moglen argue that the social disutility of software ownership is a sufficient justification for prohibiting it. This social disutility includes the social instability of disregarding laws and agreements covering software use and distribution, inequality of software access, and the inability to help others by sharing software with them. Here I consider these and other social disutility claims against withholding specific software rights from users, in particular, the rights to read the source code, duplicate, distribute, modify, imitate, and reuse portions of the software within new programs. I find that generally while withholding these rights from software users does cause some degree of social disutility, only the rights to duplicate, modify and imitate cannot legitimately be denied to users on this basis. The social disutility of withholding the rights to distribute the software, read its source code and reuse portions of it in new programs is insufficient to prohibit software owners from denying them to users. A compromise between the software owner and user can minimise the social disutility of withholding these particular rights from users. However, the social disutility caused by software patents is sufficient for rejecting such patents as they restrict the methods of reducing social disutility possible with other forms of software ownership.

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Notes

  1. An early account of this argument can be found in Johnson (1985).

  2. Due to lack of space I am confining my discussion to software stored on a user’s computer and not software that is stored and is executed on a server that the user’s computer communicates with. However, the Free Software Foundation addresses this issue with their Affero GNU software license that requires users of server software to access the source code of that software (Free Software Foundation 2010). I thank an anonymous reviewer for raising this point.

  3. A famous case of such harm was a flaw in the software controlling the Therac-25 radiation treatment machine that contributed to the machine erroneously administering significant overdoses of radiation to six patients (Leveson and Turner 1993; Huff et al. n.d.).

  4. An example of this is the Microsoft Shared Source Initiative (St. Laurent 2004).

  5. The competing GNOME and KDE graphical desktop user interfaces are an example of this (Moody 2002).

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Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Julian Lamont, Kimberlee Weatherall, Fabien Medvecky, and the two anonymous reviewers for their many helpful suggestions and comments on previous drafts. I also thank the delegates of the 2007 New Horizons in Political Philosophy Conference and the 2009 Australasian Association of Philosophy Conference for their responses to early versions of this paper.

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  1. School of History, Philosophy, Religion and Classics, University of Queensland, St. Lucia, Brisbane, QLD, 4072, Australia

    David M. Douglas

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Douglas, D.M. The Social Disutility of Software Ownership. Sci Eng Ethics 17, 485–502 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11948-010-9224-4

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