The average Joe wants something for nothing, and I want to give it to him.

I paid for my university education, but I paid an institution for access to its faculty and for use of its facilities. The knowledge itself was free; all I had to do was take advantage of the situation I had put myself in and pick up the knowledge that was, as it were, lying on the ground. My degree program was merely an accelerated way of getting that knowledge, but the knowledge was lying around, waiting to be enminded. I’ve told lots of other people about things I learned in school. I didn’t need to pay a license fee to tell other people about Hamiltonian mechanics or Gödel incompleteness. The academics who created this body of knowledge published papers and gave away their knowledge. As far as I’m concerned, I got something for nothing from them.

Michael Faraday discovered electromagnetic induction and thereby paved the way for the electricity and electronics industry. The value he captured from this development was nowhere near all the value he created for everybody else. Such was his station in life. He freely gave his time to the advancement of science. That was his choice. Many others have followed likewise, but nowhere near a majority. Yet this tiny numerical fraction of people have exerted a significant, disproportional change upon the world. Such is the fate of certain knowledge workers. Get used to it.

On first blush, software appears to follow right down this academic pathway. Yet software has users, who have to find the software useful to continue using it. Researchers do not have to make their output useful, just accurate, novel, and therefore potentially useful. To wit, researchers don’t have to do market research. Clearly — and clearly from sad, repeated, and all-too-expected experience — software developers don’t think they have to understand their users. Developers need to understand their users only when they expect to have users.

There’s the rub. The distribution of software clearly follows the model of academic knowledge. Create it once for free and make the user pay for its distribution. Yet the creation of software does not mirror the creation of knowledge nearly so accurately. The principle of "academic freedom" is about as antithetical to the principle of "attaining user benefit" as is possible. The two just don’t fit, and can’t. The university never had a monopoly on creating knowledge — nor on developing free software — and it never will. The university, however, does embody the understanding that some kinds of knowledge work require nurturing that its creators cannot easily obtain elsewhere. Software development has no such analogous institutions. It needs some. And you can’t just reuse the university.

This new institution is a non-profit corporation, tax-exempt, whose purpose is to pay for the design, construction, and delivery of public software. Let’s be obvious about this: giving away software for free is about as close as is possible to the center of the charitable purpose requirement of a tax-exempt company. Like the university, the staff — no, let us call them the talent — the talent working at this institution are not motivated by dreams of entrepreneurial riches but by the advancement of the craft. The talent need to come from a wide variety of disciplines, essentially all that are present at a for-profit software company. This new institution will always be in competition with commercial interests for talent, so it will have to pay for talent accordingly. Talent gets paid, institution creates some well-needed feeling of solidity, and regular folks get software they don’t pay for.

By "public software", I mean any software that people can just get and use for themselves without any entanglement with intellectual property issues. Public software also denotes the ubiquity of the software and the corresponding expectation that people encounter it frequently. Some open source software is public software, and some is not. Public software is a concept rooted in the nature of its end-use, not in the means of creating it. All the wrangling over license terms for derivative works has obscured the otherwise-obvious point that the license is in service of some goal, and if you don’t name your goal, you can’t possibly attain it. I know what my goal is, though. As it were, my goal is free beer.

I still can’t figure out how the claim that GNU Public License encourages free speech is not utterly disingenuous. The GPL is the opposite of free speech; it’s a highly detailed copyright agreement whose whole purpose is to restrict the expression of derivative works. If I can’t keep an expression to myself, I am restricted. All license agreements begin from the starting point of complete restriction, that is, total prohibition against use, and then work forward from there. The summit of free speech is public domain expression — if you want to speak it again, go ahead, and for whatever purpose you care to seek. As much as I am an advocate of free speech and all other civil rights, my purpose with public software is not free speech. It’s public software as free beer.

The crucial reason that the GPL has achieved such limited success in scope is that the purpose of the GPL is to benefit programmers who want access to code, not to benefit outside customers. Whatever benefit an outside customer gains is ancillary to the benefit to programmers. This observation also explains why most GPL code is in development tools and environments. I will be bluntly clear here. The GPL is a selfish contract for selfish purposes that cannot possibly generalize.

The open source model, by contrast, is a technique in search of goals. Open source encompasses the goals of the GPL, to be sure, and found some of its initial inspiration there. Yet open source also encompasses other disparate goals, such as those for Mozilla. Now I want to promote open source, to be sure, but as part of my desire to promote public software. My goal is compatible with open source, but I seek open source, not to promulgate its own merits, but as an enabler of public software. Indeed, I fear sometimes that the open source movement may fall to the hazard that is the core selfishness of the GPL. In an attempt to seek after openness as such, its promoters may forget that, whatever benefit they derive from access to code, they must place benefits to users first. Avoiding that hazard, I am confident that good results will come from the hubbub of activity surrounding open source. I wish them well, but their effort is not identical to mine. My effort is toward public software.

The natural venue for the release of public software is the new institution. The value of any software derives in large part from the solidity and gravity of the organization that creates it. Ferreting out those expectations about the future that affect the net present use value of software is another essay. Let me suffice to observe, without justification, that people overwhelmingly prefer code that is stable, architecture that is well designed, products that will be repaired and upgraded, and companies that will endure. Most people lack the means to evaluate technical merit in software. Even more people prefer to do things other than evaluating software. For almost everybody, one’s expectations about the institution stand in as a proxy for all that thinking. Since I want public software to become ubiquitous, I want the new institution to ship product.

I have not yet mentioned sustainability of the new institution, because concerns about sustainability are concerns about means, not about goals. A coherent and organizing focus on what needs to be accomplished has been lacking; instead we have had endless fretting about how to do it, whatever this "it" is. For all of its faults, at least Richard Stallman elucidated a clear goal for the GPL: "Make all source code everywhere usable by me personally." A selfish goal, but at least it roused the mutually self-interested to action. I cannot name another general goal that has inspired more coherent effort in this area. There has been much agreement about techniques, but I have seen no successor — in goals — to the free software manifesto and the GPL.

Nor do I want a single successor. I want to see many inspirations for creative technical work. Some may overlap; some may conflict — this is of no matter. I want to see manifestos that exult in the clarity of their vision. I want to see new approaches conceived in the understanding of the obstacles to victory. Here, for example, is one such possible goal for Linux:

The point here is not to illustrate a realistic example. (You may, however, feel free to adopt this goal as your own if you’re feeling that oppressed.) Instead, just observe how, in another era, such a call to action would have incited some of the brightest to lend their lives to the cause. We need expressions of such causes today. And I want enable these causes through a new institution.

No institution can survive on a single goal, for when that goal is accomplished, the purpose of the institution fades. The lifespring of an institution, that whence all material support arises, is the stream of specific purposes that pass through it. Universities achieve this with tenure and academic freedom. The new institution, for its existence and its continuation, requires this same kind of stream of purposes. The formalization won’t be academic freedom — we’re talking about coordinated releases and market research, after all — but it must embody a similar variety. I want software for nothing, but I thus require cooperation with others.

Given my goal, just-use-it-ware, I propose the means of a new institution. As a means to a means, we now have to examine the grungy underbelly of institutional sustainability. Or, to wit, who pays? If you, faithful reader, grant the desirability of the goal (no-fee software) and the usefulness of the means (the new institution), then we need not become spooked when we discover that sustainability is hard. Once we know our goal, we may persevere in seeking it and not be distracted seeking, unwittingly, a less attractive or even undesirable goal.

The first, almost too-obvious place to look for resources is the existing network of public and government money that funds such non-profit endeavors as public broadcasting and particle accelerators. No one can do this by themselves. Who would give a few ten million to hastily organized bunch of technical guys, who suspiciously look like the Hacker Development Environment League? If the point of the institution is software that benefits the public directly as a whole (and not indirectly, with compilers), then we need representatives on the board who are believable and legitimate to the various constituencies who might provide funding. That means people outside the computer industry. So develop a board, and write some grant proposals. More will follow, but that’s a start.

As a rule of thumb, the university takes one-third of each grant to support the institution. This is simply the necessary overhead to have an institution and not just group of researchers. Rather than worrying about the shibboleth of "efficiency" of the grant allocation, accept that the very existence of the institution is of separate efficacy. The institution creates value — value in solidity, value in stability, value in longevity — that individuals and informal groups can never provide. The total value of software is far more than the actual running code. Software of uncertain provenance and indeterminate future is mostly worthless. If you disbelieve this, go look at market share estimates. Put an institution behind that same code and it suddenly becomes valuable. To be generous, maybe one-quarter of the total value of software comes from the product itself. We can get the other three-quarters value from an institution and pay for the institution with only half the money we spend directly on talent. Still worried about efficiency? Three times the value for half the money, and institutional maintenance is looking six times more productive than the talent.

It’s not that the developers are unproductive. The mythos of the hacker community rests in the power of a small number of programmers to change the world. When put this way, the effort is discrete and the change is instantaneous. In other words, the formulation is one of magic, not of economics. Extensive change only ever comes from sustained effort by numerous people with aligned goals. The seed of this change may lie in the inspirational power of the initial, discrete effort — and the power to so inspire is indeed magical. Yet this good start is insufficient. Unless there are people who nurture the project without interruption, these efforts at change wither and become of no consequence. Those who have set their lives around the mythos of the magical coder urgently need assistance in completing their work. I believe in this mythos. I do not identify it as magical in order to kill it but rather to feed it. The new institution I advocate herein is a completion of the creative spark at the heart of all good software.

It is not my purpose here to examine the various reasons that people might have to support an institution dedicated to public software. Suffice it to say here that the reasons are numerous and various, and that no single approach to seeking support can be sufficient by itself. Some people will support the institution from pure motives to further the public good; others will only support when they get specific benefit themselves. Between these poles lie all the fertile hybrids mixing charity and commerce. Of consequence, though, is that pursuit of new forms of support for public software — and other informational public goods — is a area of relevant innovation for the institution both to support and to use itself. The activity here is not merely inventing such mechanisms and analyzing them, but also mounting experiments. The institution, though, needs fiscal solidity here in order to have the confidence to attempt new forms of support.

A first, concrete funding goal would be to build an endowment fund. Rather than endowing a chair in which a single researcher sits, I want to endow a table around which a release committee shall meet. Here’s a specific beginning goal for such a new institution: a $25M endowment for the Linux Release Table. The residual investment income would be adequate for five members of the table, two paid interns, and two administrative staff, all full-time positions. This table would not do any technical work themselves, but only coordinate planning, architecture, development, and release. Now this table could not possibly encompass the breadth of activity generated from a ubiquitous, dominant Linux; clearly more people and more money and more structures would be necessary. Yet this first endowment could be the seed of a full set of institutional structures surrounding Linux.

The focus on endowed tables for release is one of the lessons learned from the open source world and from Java. Namely, who matters more than how — the party who releases new versions of a product matters more than how the license terms read. The new institution needs to focus strategically on branding and compatibility as keystones to generating value for users. No matter what the licenses for intellectual property are, the association of the institution with the product is the critical element in delivering the value of the institution-as-such. Branding is the manifestation of this association and is the initial point of its delivery. Compatibility prevents pollution of the brand and thereby ensures its longevity. Trademark licensing enables control of the brand and subsequent control over compatibility. Sun has masterfully demonstrated with Java how to pull this trick off. How much better had one of the new institutions pulled it off instead!

I have suggested a new institution, but I suggest a new idea for an institution. A mature field of public software creation could not subsist on a single organization of this new type. No initial efforts in creating these new institutions should be taken as an excuse to defer one’s own effort away from building a "competing" institution. The principle of the new institution is public and cooperative, not singular and nepotistic. I should hope for jockeying for position between institutions, but as a convivial process of mutual betterment.

The average Joe wants something for nothing. With knowledge and information, we can come as close as might ever be possible to this ideal. Let the scarcity economists haggle over flesh. We won’t appreciably change GDP figures. The new institution is an exercise in abundance economics. Free knowledge and information add untold real wealth to the world. Let it be our revenge upon scarcity that its limitation upon wealth become miniscule.