But the contention is intriguing. A central tenet of open-source faith is the belief that source code is an intellectual good that should be shared with as wide an audience as possible.
Free software is free speech.
University researchers, from computing's earliest days, have long spearheaded research and development in both computer hardware and software, so it should come as little surprise that academic customs influence how some of them view their work. Not, certainly, in any literal sense. And yet it is still worthwhile to think about free software in the context of nearly 1,000 years of intellectual curiosity and academic freedom. To put into place proprietary restraints restricting that speech is a repugnant act of censorship. But free software is also fundamentally a software development methodology.