Open Source Is Lucky to Have Microsoft Where It Is

Everyone in the free software world complains about Microsoft's dominance, and I have done my share. Here is the unpopular counterpoint. The dominance is, right now, one of the best things the movement has going for it, and for three reasons that have nothing to do with the quality of anyone's software.

One Target Concentrates Effort

Imagine the alternative world in which the desktop is split evenly among five proprietary vendors, each with its own file formats, its own protocols, its own driver model and its own licensing tricks. Free software would have to interoperate with all five. Every office suite would need five import filters, every mail client five calendar formats, every kernel five sets of undocumented hardware quirks. The effort would be divided, and each fifth of it would be too small to matter.

Instead there is one target. Every reverse-engineering effort, every compatibility layer, every file-format decoder aims at the same thing, and the results are shared. Samba exists because there was one network file protocol worth implementing. Wine exists because there was one application interface worth reimplementing. A dozen projects that could not have justified themselves against a fragmented market justify themselves easily against a single one.

Monopoly simplifies the enemy's surface, and a simple surface is what a distributed, volunteer, underfunded movement can actually attack.

A Common Adversary Unites

Free software is not one project. It is thousands, with incompatible licences, rival desktops, competing toolkits and a long history of arguments that outsiders find baffling. The GNU people and the BSD people do not, left to themselves, agree on very much.

They agree about Microsoft. The shared adversary is the one thing that has consistently produced cooperation across those lines: joint standards work, shared legal defence, distributions that package everyone's software together, and a public identity that a newcomer can recognise. Coalitions form against something far more readily than for something, and a movement made of people who chose independence over employment needs whatever coalition-forming force it can get.

Take the adversary away and I expect the arguments to get louder, not quieter.

Lock-In Creates the Demand for Freedom

This is the important one.

Nobody values freedom in the abstract. People value it when they have felt its absence. A user who has been told that their own documents will not open in next year's version unless they pay again, that the hardware they bought will not work without a driver the vendor declines to release, that the program they rely on is being discontinued and there is no alternative because the format was secret, has learned what lock-in costs. That user is now a potential recruit, and no essay about the four freedoms could have done what the experience did.

Microsoft's business model manufactures those experiences at industrial scale. Every forced upgrade, every incompatible format revision, every licensing audit is an advertisement for the alternative, delivered to exactly the people who need to hear it, at exactly the moment they are receptive. The demand for free software is a by-product of proprietary software behaving the way proprietary software must behave when it is dominant. A gentle, generous, interoperable monopolist would be far more dangerous to us than the one we have.

The Honest Caveat

None of this means the dominance is good for users, or for the industry, or for the world. I have argued the opposite at length and I stand by it. The point is narrower: the movement that opposes the dominance is, in its current state, shaped by it and fed by it, and would have a harder time without it.

That is worth knowing for two reasons. It should make us humble about the movement's growth, which is partly borrowed. And it should make us prepare for the day the target fragments, or softens, or stops being the obvious enemy. On that day the unity, the focus and the recruitment will all have to come from somewhere else, and I am not sure the movement has thought about where.

I would rather live in the world where free software wins on its merits than the one where it wins because the alternative behaved badly. But I would be lying if I said that is the world we are in.