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Upside on CoSource's Leap of Faith
Chris Fischer writes "Here's a great article on UpsideToday about CoSource.com, entitled CoSource's Leap of Faith: Bridging the gap between open source and the free market. This positive article offers insight into what CoSource is about, what they've been doing, and their goals for the future. "
Free software doesn't need to be made into a part of the free market -- it already is a part of the free market. The "freedom" of the free market is non-coercion: a free economy is the opposite of a command economy, in which economic activity is controlled through the use of force by the government.
You can have a free market without money exchanging hands: for instance, a barter economy or a gift economy. Provided that the economic acts of individuals -- the creation and exchange of wealth -- are not restricted "from above" by a government or similar entity, the market is free.
Already free software is competitive against proprietary software in the marketplace: consider the case of Apache vs. MS-IIS for instance. Is a user's choice of Apache over IIS a choice made in a free market? Of course it is. It is a choice made, after all, without coercion. The user picks the Web server s/he will use on the basis of price and performance (with the latter including support, stability, &c. as well as speed). This is economically a free-market decision.
So why in the world would someone characterize the CoSource effort as moving free software into the free market if in fact free software already is part of the free market? I'd say it was out of fear of free software -- the old misguided Red-baiting, in other words. Unfortunate, that.