Online research in philosophy

This article helps to clarify and articulate the ideological, legal, and ethical attitudes regarding software as intellectual property (IP). Computer software can be viewed as IP from both ethical and legal perspectives. The size and growth of the software industry suggest that large profits are possible through the development and sale of software. The rapid growth of the open source movement, fueled by the development of the Linux operating system, suggests another model is possible. The large number of unauthorized copies of software programs suggests that many people do not believe in laws regarding software copyright. There are many and varied views of software as IP, even within the information systems (IS) profession. In this article, four distinct subgroups of IS professionals are identified. The article describes the four subgroups and their respective ideological views on software ownership; it explores the subgroups' attitudes regarding software laws; and finally, it explains the ethical positions embraced by each subgroup.

Patent law, by necessity, needs some way to evaluate inventiveness. Otherwise, it will grant rights to advances not worth "the embarrassment of an exclusive patent." The innovations of version two of the Free Software Foundation's (FSF) GNU General Public License (GPLv2), arriving in 1991, could not, under U.S. patent law at that time, have been meaningfully measured against patent law's criteria, often referred to as the five elements of patentability. The first element of patentability, statutory subject matter, would have excluded the GPLv2's copyright-based licensing technique as a "business method." A variety of industry developments in the decades following GPLv2's arrival, combined with the license's potent ideological force and clever use of copyright law, propelled FOSS licensing into a prominent and path-breaking place within information technology worldwide. Its force and presence, and lightning-rod character, have grown over time, with GPLv2 remaining the dominant license in mind-share, if not code-share. In addition, all of this occurred without patent protection for GPLv2's unique licensing technique. This then raises the counter-factual inquiry for this symposium article: what might have occurred differently if GPLv2's licensing method had been patentable? In other words, if the U.S. patent law of statutory subject matter in 1991 was sufficiently permissive, and if the FSF and Richard Stallman successfully patented the novel licensing approaches of GPLv2, would patent protection have altered the FOSS movement's two-decade trajectory through information technology and the Internet? If so, can we estimate in what ways? The Article's assessment is that GPLv2 could readily meet the other four elements of patentability (with non-obviousness being the closest call compared to prior sublicensing schemes), and that the FOSS trajectory would change minimally, due to a variety of factors, including practical constraints on the enforcement potency of patent claims to GPLv2, competition from other types of FOSS licensing, and strategic considerations for a variety of players and camps within the FOSS movement. However, in the counterfactual, license proliferation diminishes, and dual licensing may be foreclosed.

There has been a transition in the way software developers work. Mistakes in software have been treated as "normal" occurrences. "All software has bugs." However, software engineering is an emerging profession which as a profession has now said that a caviler approach to software errors is unacceptable. They have asserted a very strong ethical position in the Software Engineering Code of Ethics and Professional Practice, a position which mandates concern for all those affected by their work. The Code has several unique elements as a professional Code.

The free and open source software (Foss) movement deserves to be placed in an historico-ethical perspective that emphasizes the end user. Such an emphasis is able to enhance and support the Foss movement by arguing the ways it is heir to a tradition of professional ethical idealism and potentially related to important issues in the history of science, technology, and society relations. The focus on software from an end-user’s perspective also leads to the concept of program conviviality. From a non-technical perspective, however, software is simply a new example of technology, and the effort to assure that technology is developed in a socially responsible manner has a significant history. The argument thus begins with observations about the history of technology. This leads to critical reflections on the development of professional engineering ethics, and to a discussion of the alternative technology movement. Finally, it concludes by indicating some criteria to consider when imagining the design of convivial software.

“This chapter looks at four arguments which Microsoft has used to justify the claim that illegal copying of software is wrong: software piracy is theft; software piracy violates the rights of copyright holders; software piracy is free riding; and software piracy reduces incentives to future innovation. It argues that the first argument is simply wrong, and the other three do not establish that it is in fact wrong to pirate Microsoft’s programs.

To many who develop and use free software, the GNU General Public License represents an embodiment of the meaning of free software. In this paper we examine the definition and meaning of free software in the context of three events surrounding the GNU General Public License. We use a case involving the GPU software project to establish the importance of Freedom 0 in the meaning of free software. We analyze version 3 of the GNU General Public License and conclude that although a credible case can be made that the added restrictions are consistent with the definition of free software, the case requires subtle arguments. Strong arguments against the added restrictions are less subtle, and may therefore be more convincing to many users and developers. We also analyze the Affero General Public License and conclude that it is inconsistent with the definition of free software.

Claims about the potential of free software to reform the production and distribution of software are routinely countered by skepticism that the free software community fails to engage the pragmatic and economic ‘realities’ of a software industry. We argue to the contrary that contemporary business and economic trends definitively demonstrate the financial viability of an economy based on free software. But the argument for free software derives its true normative weight from social justice considerations: the evaluation of the basis for a software economy should be guided by consideration of the social and cultural states which are the ultimate goals of any economic arrangement. That is, the software economy should be evaluated in light of its ability to provide justice. We conclude with a discussion of possible avenues for reform.

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.

Like the ownership of physical property, the issues computer software ownership raises can be understood as concerns over how various rights and duties over software are shared between owners and users. The powers of software owners are defined in software licenses, the legal agreements defining what users can and cannot do with a particular program. To help clarify how these licenses permit and restrict users’ actions, here I present a conceptual framework of software rights and duties that is inspired by the terms of various proprietary, open source, and free software licenses. To clarify the relationships defined by these rights and duties, this framework distinguishes between software creators (the original developer), custodians (those who can control its use), and users (those who utilise the software). I define the various rights and duties that can be shared between these parties and how these rights and duties relate to each other. I conclude with a brief example of how this framework can be used by defining the concepts of free software and copyleft in terms of rights and duties.

The “free” in “free software” refers to a cluster of four specific freedoms identified by the Free Software Definition. The first freedom, termed “Freedom Zero,” intends to protect the right of the user to deploy software in whatever fashion, towards whatever end, he or she sees fit. But software may be used to achieve ethically questionable ends. This highlights a tension in the provision of software freedoms: while the definition explicitly forbids direct restrictions on users’ freedoms, it does not address other means by which software may indirectly restrict freedoms. In particular, ethically-inflected debate has featured prominently in the discussion of restrictions on digital rights management and privacy-violating code in version 3 of the GPL (GPLv3). The discussion of this proposed language revealed the spectrum of ethical positions and valuations held by members of the free software community. In our analysis, we will provide arguments for upholding Freedom Zero; we embed the problem of possible uses of software in the broader context of the uses of scientific knowledge, and go on to argue that the provision of Freedom Zero mitigates against too great a moral burden—of anticipating possible uses of software—being placed on the programmer and that, most importantly, it facilitates deliberative discourse in the free software community.