The Infinite Game of Free Software

sean — Wed, 10 Nov 2004 11:02:00 +0000

Marianne B�jer, one of my Pioneers of Change colleagues, asked me to write a comment on her article 'Changing the Game' (429kb PDF file).

The idea of 'Changing the Game' is that we live in systems governed by old games played according to old rules, 'finite' games involving winners and losers. In Pioneers of Change we believe that we can change the rules of the game, that we can instead play win-win 'infinite' games. My comment considers free software to be one of these new games.

I am passionate about free software, also called 'open source' (the 'free' refers to freedom rather than lack of cost). Through the Changing the Game workshop and through this article I've realised that free software is a new game played by different rules. The free software movement is all about giving users the freedom to modify and redistribute at will the software they rely upon. This runs contrary to the old rules of the 'proprietary software' game which were about keeping the means by which software can be modified (the source code) secret. The old game is about playing to win, about having my code triumph over competing code, and when I'm playing to win it makes no sense to give away my secrets.

Free software is an infinite, or win-win, game. The global community of coders collaborate to produce the best software we can. Within this infinite game there can be finite sub-games, just like Mille and Anthony's game of sustainable living. I can start a new project that tackles a problem differently to an existing project and compete with it for mind share (I was involved in one project whilst it underwent a revolutionary design shift through exactly this process). If my approach is better then others will move over to my project, and the developers of the old project will be free to join in. If my approach doesn't work then I can still participate in the old project. Through this kind of 'collaborative competition' the conditions for innovation are created. New ideas can compete with old ideas and every player can draw upon the work of every other.

The players of the old game of proprietary software don't always understand why I play this new game. I have been asked by programmers I used to work with: �Why would you give your code away? Why would I when that makes me more likely to lose out?�. If I ask them in return �Why would you keep your code secret?� they respond �because that's how I make money� - in other words because those are the rules of the game. The fact that I have successfully earned a living through my participation in free software won't necessarily convince them. I've even had a conversation with a potential business partner where he expressed great enthusiasm for free software, particularly for the benefits we could glean by making use of it, and then turned around and said �but of course we must keep our own code proprietary, otherwise how shall make any money?�

Sometimes just playing the game has been its own reward. During the time I did my most intense free software work I had the email signature 'humani sum: nihil a me alienum puto', a well-known Latin quotation that roughly translates as 'I am a human, nothing human is alien to me'. A conversation on our email list that began as a request for explanation ended with me being given translations of the same statement in about ten different languages � from French, German and Spanish to Czech and Polish � representing the diversity of the community's members. It was a great pleasure to rotate my signature through all these languages knowing that I'd been provided with each translation by a distant colleague.

Of course this new game is not without challenges. Within the rules of the old game the way in which my work as a coder earned me a living was well established: I kept my code secret and sold access to it. In the new game we are still experimenting with different survival strategies. I make money by doing custom modifications of free software and following up with support. Some make money by selling CDs and books and some are sponsored by institutions or companies.

One of the biggest challenges is from those, like my potential business partner above, who believe they embrace the new game but come to it with the old rules. They don't see the paradigm shift needed to play the new game, and so they think that they should still keep some code secret or they want to restrict the participants in the game (to just non-profits say). This creates legal confusions that threaten to undermine our new game. Part of playing the new game is helping myself and others to clearly see the differences between the games and their rules � and it is precisely in causing me to conceptualise in terms of games and rules that this article has hit its mark.

informage: The Infinite Game of Free Software

The Infinite Game of Free Software