Free Software, Free Society: selected essays of Richard M. Stallman. 2nd edition.

Whatever you do, raise the issue early—well before the program is half finished. At this point, the university still needs you, so you can play hardball: tell the administration you will finish the program, make it usable, if they agree in writing to make it free software (and agree to your choice of free software license). Otherwise you will work on it only enough to write a paper about it, and never make a version good enough to release. When the administrators know their choice is to have a free software package that brings credit to the university or nothing at all, they will usually choose the former.

Not all universities have grasping policies. The University of Texas has a policy that makes it easy to release software developed there as free software under the GNU General Public License. Univates, in Brazil, and the International Institute of Information Technology in Hyderabad, India, both have policies in favor of releasing software under the GPL. By developing faculty support first, you may be able to institute such a policy at your university. Present the issue as one of principle: does the university have a mission to advance human knowledge, or is its sole purpose to perpetuate itself?

Whatever approach you use, it helps to approach the issue with determination and based on an ethical perspective, as we do in the free software movement. To treat the public ethically, the software should be free—as in freedom—for the whole public.

Many developers of free software profess narrowly practical reasons for doing so: they advocate allowing others to share and change software as an expedient for making software powerful and reliable. If those values motivate you to develop free software, well and good, and thank you for your contribution. But those values do not give you a good footing to stand firm when university administrators pressure or tempt you to make the program nonfree.

For instance, they may argue that “We could make it even more powerful and reliable with all the money we can get.” This claim may or may not come true in the end, but it is hard to disprove in advance. They may suggest a license to offer copies “free of charge, for academic use only,” which would tell the general public they don’t deserve freedom, and argue that this will obtain the cooperation of academia, which is all (they say) you need.

If you start from values of convenience alone, it is hard to make a good case for rejecting these dead-end proposals, but you can do it easily if you base your stand on ethical and political values. What good is it to make a program powerful and reliable at the expense of users’ freedom? Shouldn’t freedom apply outside academia as well as within it? The answers are obvious if freedom and community are among your goals. Free software respects the users’ freedom, while nonfree software negates it.

Nothing strengthens your resolve like knowing that the community’s freedom depends, in one instance, on you.

Copyright © 2002 Richard Stallman

This essay was originally published on http://gnu.org, in 2002. This version is part of Free Software, Free Society: Selected Essays of Richard M. Stallman, 2nd ed. (Boston: GNU Press, 2010).

Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire chapter are permitted worldwide, without royalty, in any medium, provided this notice is preserved.

Chapter 9. Why Free Software Needs Free Documentation

The biggest deficiency in free operating systems is not in the software—it is the lack of good free manuals that we can include in these systems. Many of our most important programs do not come with full manuals. Documentation is an essential part of any software package; when an important free software package does not come with a free manual, that is a major gap. We have many such gaps today.

Once upon a time, many years ago, I thought I would learn Perl. I got a copy of a free manual, but I found it hard to read. When I asked Perl users about alternatives, they told me that there were better introductory manuals—but those were not free.

Why was this? The authors of the good manuals had written them for O’Reilly Associates, which published them with restrictive terms—no copying, no modification, source files not available—which exclude them from the free software community.