"Why Software Should Be Free" (originally written 1986, revised and published 1992) is stallman's systematic economic and ethical argument for software freedom. Where gnu-manifesto was a call to action embedded in a project announcement, this essay makes the philosophical case independently of any particular project. It is one of the foundational texts collected in free-software-free-society.
The essay's structure is primarily economic before it is ethical. stallman argues that restricting software — preventing copying, study, and modification — imposes costs on society that outweigh the benefits. He identifies the direct costs: users cannot adapt software to their needs, programmers must duplicate work already done rather than building on it, and the technical knowledge embodied in programs is artificially withheld from the community. These are inefficiencies in the economic sense, not merely inconveniences.
The ethical argument follows from the social analysis. When software is restricted, users are placed in a relationship of dependency and submission to the developer or publisher. They must accept whatever the software does, cannot verify it, and cannot fix it. This dependency stallman regards as a form of domination — not merely an inconvenience but a violation of the user's autonomy and the community's self-determination. The language of the essay is deliberately strong on this point, and it anticipates the later can-you-trust-your-computer essay's argument about trustworthy computing.
The essay distinguishes between free as in freedom versus free as in price, a distinction that became essential to explaining the free software position to audiences who kept hearing "free software" as "software without charge." This clarification — that the goal is freedom of use, study, modification, and distribution, not necessarily zero cost — is central to the four-freedoms formulation that stallman subsequently developed.
The essay also addresses the "incentives" argument for intellectual property: without the prospect of monopoly profits from software, won't innovation stop? stallman's response is empirical (software was developed collaboratively before proprietary models), economic (the value of free software to the whole community exceeds the marginal value of secrecy to one firm), and social (other forms of compensation — service, employment, prestige — remain available). This argument prefigures the academic literature on open source economics that would emerge in the late 1990s and 2000s. A complementary essay, why-software-should-not-have-owners, approaches the same question from the perspective of ownership and property rights rather than incentives.
The essay's limitations are also instructive. It does not engage seriously with the scale of investment required for complex software systems, and its model of software development is closer to the mit-ai-lab hacker culture of the mit-ai-lab-hacker-culture-1971-1984 era than to large commercial software projects. eric-raymond's later work in cathedral-and-bazaar-raymond offered a more pragmatic and sociologically grounded argument for open development, though one that stripped out the ethical core that stallman regarded as essential.