An article over at “Works With U” has an interesting thing that I have run into a few times before:

And here’s another ironic twist: Consumers may actually prefer to pay for Ubuntu — rather than get it for free. No joke: Many consumers don’t like free software. They fear it. My brother in law didn’t understand how Ubuntu and OpenOffice could be free. “Is it legal to actually download and share that software?” he wondered.

I understand how some people can feel like it may not be legal to acquire software that is free, I suppose. Microsoft and the BSA have pretty well attempted to drill the thought into people’s minds that software acquired without a financial cost can be somehow illegitimate, implying that it’s simply not possible for the Internet’s citizens to create software that is of any measurable quality. Of course, anyone that is “in the know” is quite aware of just how wrong this idea is; the quality of Microsoft’s own software is somewhat debatable.

The simple truth is that people just like you can learn to write software, and write high-quality software if motivated to do so. A large portion of free/open-source software is worked on by people such as yourself. Things ranging from the actual programming, to bug management, to documentation—all of those things can be done by regular, everyday people. There’s nothing—other than Microsoft’s business strategy—that says that the work that you or I do on a free or open-source software project is automatically of any sort of lower quality when compared to Microsoft’s software. In fact, the major argument for such software is its transparency. I know that when it comes to any software, I often want to change it to fit me better than the original programmer or company provided for. For software such as Windows, or Internet Explorer, or Microsoft Office, or any other proprietary software offering, this is impossible without violating some sort of license agreement. Now, that having been said, there is the belief that copyright law permits some “tinkering” of something which one has the right to use. I suppose this make sense—nobody would dare invoke copyright law to declare that the notes you’ve written in the margin of your textbook are illegal. Effectively, writing notes in the margin of a textbook or highlighting passages is “patching” the textbook to contain more information and do more things for you the next time you read it. So, why should it be illegal for a Windows user to write (or run) software to bypass the silly restrictions on theming in modern versions of Windows? It’s essentially the same thing.

The fact that Microsoft, the BSA, and other companies and organizations are so successful in drilling this “thou shalt pay for thy software” commandment into people’s brains is somewhat terrifying to me. It means that people in general are still easily had; they think that a corporation that makes billions in revenue every year is somehow more legitimate than the loosely-knit ecosystem of free/open-source software programmers. Of course, we can confirm that idea by simply looking at the U.S. Government, as well; people are inclined to trust it to provide the freedoms that we’re supposed to have, while all the while taking those freedoms away in the name of “national security”.

The point? Think before accepting what corporations and alliances such as the BSA quote as gospel truth. Yes, it is illegal to copy and redistribute Microsoft software without a grant of permission from Microsoft to do so. That restriction does not hold true for all software, though; you can freely copy and redistribute the Linux kernel, the Firefox Web browser, the OpenOffice.org suite of office software,˙and so many more, worthwhile pieces of software—including the entire Ubuntu operating system distribution discs. (In fact, they even say “Pass it on!” on the official media!) There is a lot of value to a system that can be modified on the fly to fit the needs of its user… and this is something that corporations and “copyright advocates” will seemingly never understand.