Embracing the open source world
Eben's passion for free software reflects in the fact that he is the founder of the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC), which provides legal support and diplomatic services for free software and counts Richard Stallman's Free Software Foundation - as one of its clients. He has been closely associated with the Free Software Foundation and was involved in the enforcing of the GPL on behalf of the FSF.
A lot of companies in the Indian IT industry exist primarily by servicing 'other people's software'. However, considering that it is primarily product and solution vendors that break into the global top lists, it is important for Indian companies to relate deeply with the free and open source world to be able to innovate independently and produce quality products and solutions. Servicing monopoly software alone and developing vertical software will not be enough for companies to reach the top.
Eben felt that a world with proprietary software was akin to a world with proprietary mathematics or proprietary physics. Imagine how frustrating it would be if you were wanting to find out the square root of a number, and you had to 'buy' from someone to be able to use the square root function. Just as the world of mathematics and physics did not belong to any individual or organization, there was no reason that the same should not be seen in software.
Companies like Microsoft do churn out products and solutions, collaborating with services companies to develop proprietary software. However, such companies have also come to understand that to meet customer demands at the pace necessary, they cannot ignore open source software. Interestingly, Microsoft has been a platinum sponsor of the Apache Software Foundation thus underlining its intentions towards embracing open source software. It wouldn't be surprising if future versions of the Windows OS were built using open source software from FSF for example. Similarly IBM has been open textured for years, Sun Microsystems has embraced open source while Oracle too has realized the need to embrace open source software to stay ahead.
Eben believed that businesses that profit from open source software should contribute to it. SFLC services are used to ensure that licensing conditions of open source software are ethically adhered to - with the main purpose of making sure that people who use them contribute to the movement. He mentioned that Richard Stallman had once told him - Don't ever settle for damages over settlement for compliance - which deeply reflects the ideology of the free software movement (be free to use it but make sure you share). There are tools in the market from Black Duct and Palamida which maintain databases of open source software and help detect presence of undocumented open source software in code base of organizations - and hence it is important that software is used only with the intent of adhering to the conditions of the license. It is important for companies to set up a 'compliance review board' which checks if products using open source software are allowed to use it. Even otherwise, compliance review boards can help determine conditions of any type of software - proprietary software (developed by the company), third party software bought under a commercial license, free open source software under the FOSS license, or a combination of these - to safeguard the interests of the organization from possible litigations.
On the social front, open source software is quite popular in engineering colleges in India because of the difficulties in affording the high costs of proprietary software. There is an incessant demand for open source software to serve as educational tools in such colleges. The education in developing solutions using open source software - should result in a generation of engineers equipped with the knowledge and confidence in engineering industrial/scientific solutions based primarily on open source technologies.
The Free Software Movement seems to aim at a society where knowledge is freely shareable and not within the control of a few. The idea is to promote the idea of developing and using open source software so that the knowledge gained can be shared multiple times to further enhance it. It is common that breakthroughs in medical science are achieved by brainstorming and free sharing of knowledge available - and that will be the case with software too.
