Message to Earth 2: Freedom of Ideas and Corporate Takeover of "Intellectual Property"

This is a (brief) diatribe based on my recent experiences with proprietary software. The argument is admittedly about software, and the open source and "free software" movements, but it applies more broadly to the free exchange of ideas, for example the NIH's recent announcement that it hopes to require all articles published under NIH grants free to the world 6 months after publication.

In science particularly, but throughout the world of though, there is an ever increasingly vastness of information. Many corporations have introduced sophisticated tools for using, analyzing and storing this information. Their tools are in fact useful, but it is strange that academics in particular have come to rely on these tools. Suppose you put your data in a Mathematica format, the so-called "notebook" file. This seems convenient. You can now send it to anyone who wants to look at it, right? Well, no, you can't even really bring it home. If you're like me, you have a machine at home, and sometimes you like to do some work on it. Also, if you're like me, you can't afford Mathematica or Matlab at home. So you're trapped. You've put your own ideas and work into a format that you can't even read without paying a license fee to someone else.

This is what really bothers me, that I give up the right to even access my own work from other locations. All proprietary formats have the same problem. You may counter that such formats are standard, and if you want to play the game, this is what you do. Well, frankly, that's absolute nonesense. For years formats have existed that were free to use, if not "free" in the sense defined by the Free Software Foundation. This recent trend is really only one of laziness.

The tools to do better exist, and they are frequently better and more powerful than their commercial counterparts. WYSIWYG is a fine idea, but if you want to eliminate the headaches of formatting your thesis, or if you want rapid submission to PRL, you do it in TeX. Want to make Matlab command line scriptable? Good luck. Try the Perl Data Languange or Python instead-they're free and have thousands of add-on modules exist to extend them. Don't see something you want? You can write it yourself. Most importantly, using open-source software ensures portability. While technically permissable under the GPL, it is unlikely that you'll ever pay exorbitant licensing fees for such programs.

You may wonder about the longevity of such code. What will happen if someone decides to stop supporting it? Will the format just disappear? Well, perhaps. But the risk is not much less for proprietary software. Many companies have come and gone, their products no longer useful, data trapped in old formats. What happens if an asteroid hits Adobe? I know several people who have to use ancient computers because the proprietary software they use is no longer updated. Open source software is at least safe in the sense that it won't disappear completely. In fact, it is probably more robust, since there are literally thousands of people all over the world working on the code all the time.

What's the message here? Software is the cash of academic ideas today. We can choose to let large corporations who don't know or care about what we do be the arbiters and final controllers of our ideas, or we can take them back. I suggest we do the latter.