Free Software and Freakonomics
This is an essay I wrote for my IB Economics final about free software and economics. It's heavily inspired by the Freakonomics movie. I've made minimal changes from the version I submitted.
Free software—free as in freedom—is a cornerstone of the current software environment. Most, if not all, of the apps people are familiar with use code from free software. But what even is free software? Free open-source software (or FOSS) is software whose code is publicly available under a license that allows the use of the code in your projects. One of the largest FOSS projects in the world is the Linux kernel, which is freely available. You might not have heard of the Linux kernel, but it is the software that powers ChromeOS, Android, most IoT devices, and the majority of the world's servers. It is only alive because of the millions of dollars in donations it receives from companies which depend on the software. However, there are pieces of FOSS software that someone has been thanklessly maintaining for decades with no pay.
This is clearly an issue. The current state of software is such that everything depends on everything else. If one essential component ceases to be maintained, or is sold to another (more malicious) actor, the software which depends on it will break. So how do we prevent this? FOSS is typically created by individuals, not by corporations (although there is a shift toward FOSS companies), and since the software is free, you can not sell or license it to make money.
