The conclusion most people have come to is that open source licensing is a way to “pay it forward”, where generously sharing one’s work without any expectation of reward is an honorable pursuit. Great!

But there’s a different way to think about open source software and why we need licensing terms to protect the work that we share. Here’s my story:

In 1984 I was working on extensions to a 3rd party software package that ran the core functionality of a hotel business. My task was to create new functionality that went beyond the vendor’s standard setup. The vendor didn’t want to modify their general purpose software to meet each client’s unique needs, so it was up to each client to either change how they conducted their business or figure out a work-around.

In the 1980s all software was compiled, and 3rd party packages were distributed in object code format only. This proprietary software distribution model was common and no one questioned it.

Because the source code was never revealed to me, I had to resort to reverse engineering the database and its access routines in order to discover how I could extend it, to meet the hotel’s unique business needs. There was nothing illegal about this; annual licensing fees were still paid to the vendor, and the terms of the license didn’t forbid such effort. But it was time-consuming and error-prone for me to guess what’s what. And my knowledge couldn’t be shared with other clients of that vendor.

So I was dealing first hand with some of the very issues that led to Richard Stallman’s four freedoms:

• freedom to run the software
• freedom to study the software
• freedom to modify the software
• freedom to share copies of the software

Here we are decades later with a vastly different industry. Those four freedoms haven’t evolved to keep up with the new commercial, legal and technical challenges we face.

Shouldn’t we reexamine the assumptions — made four decades ago — about our open source goals, and rewrite the legal contracts that bind us to fair play?