A brief overview
La propriété, c’est le vol! (roughly translated as “property is theft!”). Perhaps the most famous assertion of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, the French philosopher, considered by some to be the father of anarchy.
A contemporary of Karl Marx, Proudhon’s focus was on physical property. However, this resonates with the early libertarian open source software philosophy, which encouraged the free distribution of software for the purposes of learning and evolving the field of computing.
Much has changed since a senior Microsoft executive once exclaimed that they could not imagine anything worse than open source software for the software and intellectual property business. What was once limited to a few discrete programmes shared between academics has now become a key resource for multi-national PLCs and start-ups, enabling businesses to react quickly and innovate using freely available flexible technology, as well as making significant cost savings for business and consumers.
With no small degree of irony, in 2019 Microsoft counted itself as the world’s biggest open source contributor, paying $7.5 billion to acquire the software development platform GitHub in 2018—GitHub being one of the original promoters of open source software.
Some notable examples of open source software include: