There’s been a discussion on the UKRiders e-mail list about the similarities between Free Software and Fair Trade, started by a presentation Matthew Edmonson of Open IT Up gave at the UK circuit rider’s conference. Not only do I have a dislike for argument from analogy, since I feel things stand best on their own merits, but I can’t help but think this is too easy a comparison – comparing something we wish to promote with something that people already believe to be a good thing.

There are many similarities - Fair Trade helps to build the capacity of growers whilst Free Software levels the field for new developers with a capacity to build upon an existing body of work, but the discussion talks about the moral choices a buyer makes when choosing a fair trade or free software product. This misses the point. The moral concerns a buyer of fair trade products has are for the producer of their product whilst it’s the properties of our software, and our rights as users, that concern us as providers and users of software. We shouldn’t lead people to think that free software can make a difference to the lives of developers of proprietary software in the same way that fair trade does to growers in the third world. The best we can claim is that both involve a choice and a concern for people.

As users of Free Software we expect to be granted the freedom to do as we chose with our software as long as we don’t restrict what others can do with our derived software. As purchasers of Fair Trade products we expect a fair deal for growers and manufacturers.

(See also Beth’s Blog: Is Open Source Fair Trade for nonprofits)

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 8th, 2007 at 10:35 am and is filed under Articles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.