Origin:

Free software initially did not exist (or was not conceived as such), because almost all software being developed was already freely distributed. This was because access to computing centers or computers of the time was the true and main limitation. However, with the decrease in hardware costs and the rise of professionalization in the sector, personal computers became available to a wider public, and what was previously inaccessible (limited to the military, universities, and large corporations) found new avenues for dissemination to the general public, such as the distribution of... unauthorized copies (the misnamed piracy).

It was during those times, the late 70s and early 80s, that for various reasons one of the hackers of MIT (Richard Stallman) opposing the growing privatization of the software, conceives the idea of ​​an operating system, software and community free, that is to say, programs/estate cultural that, not being free, could be freely distributed.

Although this idea seems novel today, its principles have been used for centuries in the scientific world, where knowledge progresses from existing knowledge (as Newton would say, standing on the shoulders of giants), the formulation of new questions to be answered or needs (new unknowns in the equation), and the peer review (in the case of software, the inspection of algorithms to study their correctness).

This idea, to create a new operating system, which at the time seemed quite far-fetched, generated two major contributions that laid the foundation for its philosophy:

• a free softwareThat is, a material whose code, its content, can be spied on
• a new way of enforcing copyright, the copyleft

This concept, copyleft, was not created to eliminate copyright or authorship rights. Instead, its first step is to recognize these rights for the author and then provide a license or agreement (such as the GNU GPL or General Public License) that permits the use, copy and distribution of the work that is attached to it, also granting more benefits, since all derivative works or those that use programs included in it for their operation, must maintain the original license type.

In other words, copyleft arises so that by making use of the license it grants, to a certain extent “contagion" to the products derived from the rights collected in the original and has allowed some developments which were initially going to be proprietary and were based on or made use of copyleft software (for example, the gcc compiler or the gnu-emacs editor for gnu-linux, protected by the GPL), to have to be released to this license if they wanted to be distributed to the general public, in turn increasing the potential of the free software community.

Later, to make the license a little more flexible, the LGPL or reduced GPL was created to allow non-GPL programs to link to them (provided they do not constitute derivative works); in turn, the community also opened up to new areas, creating the GNU-FDL license focused on written materials (manuals, textbooks), among others.

Current situation

A couple of decades ago, business models in the technology world underwent a paradigm shift This was due to the low price of new digital products, which allowed them to approach zero cost per copy or unit of production. In this environment, the internet acted as a catalyst, promoting the development of a flood of "free" products, to the point that today a large part of the population is more accustomed to obtaining a wide range of leisure and everyday products for free than paying for them. In this context, users have been exposed to a catalog of products where the determining factor for their consumption is not so much the underlying philosophy, but rather their popularity, functionality, and, above all, their price.

In response, the software industry has taken two paths. On the one hand, some companies have chosen to covertly finance their costs through advertising or by relaxing user privacy levels (in other words, commercially exploiting customer information). Thus, there are operating systems erroneously labeled as free, where, despite using free software as a base, the distributions are built with a large amount of proprietary software and commercial advertising; free online office suites (with constantly changing privacy policies); and portable operating systems that include tracking capabilities, among other things.

On the other hand, business models aligned with the philosophy of free software have emerged. This is the case with companies like Red Hat and the Apache Software Foundation, which generate revenue from free or open-source software while maintaining open standards. This field is experiencing a powerful boom, with its production currently valued at 11 billion euros (the Linux kernel alone accounting for 2.2 billion).

This leads to a proliferation and popularization of open licenses (Apache License, MIT, BSD, Mozilla Public License, etc.) in the field of software development, to the point that some corporations, generally enemies of free software (and even sued for monopolistic practices), create their own open licenses and open a minority part of their software.

Where are we headed?:

Free and open-source software is experiencing a boom, as we have acknowledged throughout this text. It is quite ubiquitous and can be found on a large number of devices (mobile phones, computers, servers, supercomputers, among others), and we are often unaware of its use. However, although one of its main underlying principles involves the user's own knowledge and exploration of it, this sheer volume of software, much like the sensory overload resulting from the misnamed information society, makes it increasingly difficult to thoroughly examine each and every work within its domain.

This, coupled with the fact that corporate, media and government control mechanisms are becoming increasingly subtle, can lead to the end user becoming less and less aware of the opinion-shaping or alienation to which they may be subjected.

Thus, some operating systems may include backdoors that spy on behavior, search engines may restrict free access to information by blocking or prioritizing certain searches (as is clearly the case in some countries), and browsers may record and transmit the behavior of users on the network in certain portals (there are known cases of some quite popular social networks that have even carried out experiments on their users).

Thus, in order for the foundation on which this philosophy (as old as humankind) is based to continue to persist, greater involvement of the community that benefits from it is necessary, not only in its consumption, but above all in its development and critical analysis, because otherwise only its free aspect will survive, and that will only be for a while.

Richard Stallman, Free software for a free society

Lawrence Lessig, For a free culture