Exit and Voice in Free and Open Source Software Licensing: Moderating the Rein Over Software Users

Abstract

Theorists have posited a number of causal factors underlying Free and Open Source Software (FOSS), including software quality, development advantages, economic based justifications, and sociological factors. Presupposing that FOSS is a multi causal phenomenon, this article proposes that a full cataloging of its causes includes the symbiotic interplay between exit and voice for FOSS user adoption, as these two are conceptualized in Albert O. Hirschman's book Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations and States. Exit and voice cooperatively help sustain FOSS through the institutional mechanism of the FOSS license. To demonstrate this, I analyze four situations to show how this framework is important to a full understanding of FOSS and its future. First, even with attendant uncertainties in its novel legal landscape, users adopt FOSS to escape proprietary licensed software. This exit is tinged with indirect voice. Second, this indirect voice arises from collaborative projects to develop FOSS, which contains both exit and voice. The very same code and license that provides the exit carries the voice. Anyone can view the source code, and the FOSS license associated with it, to see how it works and what it might say. Furthermore, FOSS use is an expression of the functional freedom it promises. Third, complementing exit by users are technologists who contribute, extracurricularly, to open source projects. Affiliation with FOSS signals the technologist's values, and these may radiate into her home organization as a form of indirect voice. Fourth, from its beginning, the FOSS movement has employed direct voice. Its norm entrepreneurs use rhetoric and persuasion to reinforce FOSS's disciplining effect on an entire industry. This message is enhanced by the presence of noticeable exit, and the increasingly credible threat of exit as viable FOSS projects proliferate. Thus, FOSS manifests unique combinations of indirect and direct exit and voice. Through these four situations, this article examines exit and voice combinations in light of copyright based open source licensing on the one hand, and patent law on the other. The FOSS copyright based licensing scheme helps channel FOSS into uses where both direct and indirect exit and voice are concentrated and synergistically reinforce. The interplay with patent law generates voice because patent law, at least theoretically, inhibits exit to FOSS and thus pressurizes the voice mechanism in Hirschman's framework. The cacophony of Europe's debate concerning its directive for computer implemented inventions is an example. Understanding FOSS based combinations of exit and voice in light of this framework helps participants and policy makers formulate legal, licensing and policy strategies to guide the movement and respond to its evolution.