World Student Community for Sustainable Development

Free Open Source Software: Pros and Cons from a Development Perspective

by Simon Schneebeli

Software has reached a very high importance for our society. However, software is not just software. Actually there exist two quite distinct worlds of software.

At the Forum on Information and Communication Technology for Development ICT- 4D that was held in parallel to the World Summit on the Information Society in December en Geneva, Switzerland, a debate was organised entitled: “Open Source Software: Pros and Cons from a development perspective†. This text is a summary of the main points discussed there.

Two different worlds

Itâ€^TMs justified to speak of two different worlds when speaking of proprietary and of free and open source software since the differences are important. What are these worlds: proprietary software is normally developed by a company. You buy a licence that gives you the right to use it and eventually support for its setup and its use. What you get is generally a CD with a compiled programme, but not its source code.

On the other hand, a piece of open source software is often not produced by a company, but rather by a number of programmers spread all around the world who face similar problems and gathered together to create a solution to it. Generally they communicate only through the Internet. There they publish the source code of their software free for everybody. So you just have to download it and recompile it on your computer. So what you acquire is normally the source code. And you can feel free to change it and to copy it as many times as you want (although there are several conditions that should be respected, for more details: http://www.gnu.org/) So you also have the right to adapt it to your needs and to improve it and publish your improvements, which is generally not at all the case with proprietary software.

Thus the two worlds have fundamental differences. The one world relies on a complete openness, whereas itâ€^TMs almost the exact opposite for the other one, where the source code is one of the best-kept secrets of a company.

For a developed country, the effects of the use of proprietary or open source software might not be very important, but for developing countries, there are significant differences.

The technological independence

First of all it is important to understand the importance of technology. Technology is NECESSARY for development. It is NECESSARY that populations have access to computer resources. But in the same time it is NOT the software that does the development or that gives the access to knowledge. Software it NOT the finality, but itâ€^TMs a tool that makes the access to knowledge and resources much easier. Then what one has to understand is that by buying software, one gets linked to its developers. This relation is a kind of a dependency since itâ€^TMs them who assure the support and further development. As the software evolutes, one has to buy upgrades, patches or new versions. And if the company goes bankrupt, one would have to buy a different software, which is often not compatible with the previous one.

For developing countries, being dependant on a company signifies, in most cases, being dependant on foreign country. In other words, an important part of the money that is invested into proprietary software goes abroad.

So to stay as independent as possible, and to invest in the local industry, it would be an advantage to have a local software industry.

Develop local capacities

But here we meet another problem. Often, there is no local IT industry of significant size, or it happens that on the local software market, the needed capacities are simply not available. So to reach technological independence, a government has to, first of all, develop local capacities. Usually companies that work with proprietary software are often linked to a company that produces software and that is located in a developed country. This is not the case for open source software. Thus it is more interesting for a developing country to develop an IT industry through open source software.

The tendency of monopolisation of software markets

Here again it is important to understand an important characteristic of software markets: The tendency to monopolise the markets. The unit costs increase very little if one increases the production. Whether one produces 100â€^TM000 or one million pieces, the unit production cost is practically reduced to the cost of a CD and the packaging. Thus a company that has reached a strong position in a market is in a very strong position compared to other, emerging companies that first have to achieve a certain number of customers. And since the majority of important companies are located in developed countries, it is extremely difficult for developing countries to build up their own IT sector.

The IT sector based on free software may show the same tendency, but in a much lesser amplitude. This is because what is sold is normally only the support of a software and not the software itself. And for support, the unit cost remains similar, whether you have one thousand or one hundred thousand clients. Furthermore, different companies can offer the support for the same software, thus local companies in developing countries, can easier emerge into the IT sector. The concurrence is much more efficient and developing countries have a more realistic chance to develop their own IT sector.
Open standards

Microsoftâ€^TMs format .doc has become a non-official standard for text documents. However this is not an open standard. Other applications such as OpenOffice.org are able to read and write the format through reverse engineering, but only in an incomplete manner.

Developing their own standards is a way for a company to attach a clientele to their product, thus to guarantee the future of the company. Changing the software would mean for a client to change format, thus there might be problems with compatibility. In the same time this constitutes a way to prevent concurrence in the market since it is difficult to establish a new standard and existing standards most of the time protected.

The use of open standards does not link the client to the company in the same way. Thus, to develop an IT sector that is not dominated by foreign companies, open standards offer clear advantages compared to proprietary solutions.

Free software is democratic Experts do not have a common opinion whether there is direct link between free software and democracy. But there are certain aspects that are of importance for a democracy, and that reappear in the world of free and open source software. Itâ€^TMs not only the way that the development of open source software is organised that is often democratic. Proprietary software often does not manage to satisfy the following principles:

* Free access to knowledge (for free software you do not need to pay any license fees for software that constitutes the base to access the knowledge through internet)
* Free access to the resources of a country (e-democracy is a domain that is probably going to develop itself quite a lot in the coming years)
* The security (as for general infrastructures, such as streets, energy, drinking water the government has to guarantee itâ€^TMs security. Most experts agree that open source software offers a higher degree of security than other software).
* Data protection (often it is unknown what data a computer sends to a company since the source code is not freely available. This is not the case with open source software)

Easy to regionalise

Open source software is often available in a multitude of languages. This is due to the fact that the open source code allows ease of translation of the applications, even without much knowledge of programming. This translation is most of the time done by volunteers. Proprietary software does not offer this possibility. Since the code is protected, it is not possible for volunteers to do this translation. And for the company itself the demand for a translation is often too small to make it worth investing any money. Open source software can also me easily adapted to local needs that may be different from what is generally available.
The contras

The advantages are numerous, but there are also disadvantages if governments adopt an open source strategy. What has to be mentioned is first of all the impact such a strategy has on existing markets based on proprietary software. There might already be a software market. This market, that may have significant size, even in developing countries, may be disturbed significantly through a governmental politic that supports mainly open source software. This aspect has to be analysed seriously.

Another aspect is that there is sometimes simply no open source software solution available that is comparable to proprietary software. This is typically the case for publishing or CAD tools. Here it might be more interesting to use proprietary software, against all the other points mentioned previously.

Open source software is often falsely considered as not viable or is rejected without further analysis, just because people are used to one software and do not want to relearn the use of a new software. To deal with this, there are attempts to create quality standards and labels that bring this debate to a more objective level.

The role of governments

It is important to understand that governments may play an important role in software development. Many other fields of importance for a society, such as infrastructure planning, health care, media and so on are regulated by a multitude of standards and regulations. This is not yet the case for software, although software has reached a point of fundamental importance for a society.

There might again be a debate about the usefulness of such regulations, what is clear is that it is not up to some dominating software companies, to dictate such regulations, but that they have to be based on a real debate that is often not lead.