When Free Software is Not Free
The Free Software movement was created with the assumption that software should be freely modified by its users. The main premise being that having the rights of using a program also means the right of modifying it when necessary.
Free software exists today in different forms, and it is widely used, however in many situations it hasn’t provide what it proposed.
Consider the case of the Linux Kernel used on Android Phones. You are free to download and study it if you have a suitable Internet connection. After all, the software is in many ways the same used in any other Linux machine.
However, if you really plan to use this software to do any useful improvement you are out of luck. First of all, changing the operating system in one of these devices will break all warranties. I wouldn’t even be surprised if it make the mobile phone stop working.
You only hope of getting your modifications into the OS is making changes in a simulated environment and then submit a patch to Android developers. Then, if they are interested in your patch you might have a chance of seeing it in the next version of the Android OS, when released by your vendor.
The same thing would happen if you used the iPhone, which has a BSD-based kernel.
Free For Whom?
As you see, the fact that the software is free didn’t take away the right of companies to dictate what they want you to use. And this is the key for this new generation of open source deployments.
What the technology companies learned is that it doesn’t matter that anyone has the right the change the software. What really matter is that the companies still have the right to say what you can run or not — and their problems are solved.
Using this tactic, technology companies have the best of both worlds: they are using free software, which makes it seem like they care about freedom. This also makes it possible for them to use billions of lines of free, tested code. On the other hand, they don’t need to give away control of the resulting system, and any changes need to be approved by them.
Free software is a fantastic bargain: all of the excellent free code can be combined into powerful frameworks for very little price. In fact, a big company just need to hire some of the same developers that created the free software project.
At the same time, companies such as Google and Apple can put themselves into direct competition with, for example, Microsoft, which by their own decisions decided to create software from scratch.
Ultimately, the power of open source is demonstrated by the fact that it can be used successfully in such a scenario.
If this is what their creators intended, it is another story. I am pretty sure, however, that this was not the future intended by the Free Software Foundation, for example.
But only time will tell if free software will really mean freedom for developers, or free profits for big companies.








