2. 1. 2  Software as part of a product

Software is only one component of a product (albeit a very important part), a part or complement of the whole product that we wish to obtain, and what we want is to have all the pieces – such as the computer and the software – at the same time.

As a result, the multinational giants of the computer industry like IBM and Sun Microsystems provide funding to computer scientists who develop free software. Their selfish (in the sense that they are thinking primarily of increasing their profits) reason is that they think that this will increase the sales of complementary products and services for which they charge their customers.

Likewise, the leading mobile phone manufacturers (Nokia, Motorola, Siemens, Samsung, etc.) teamed up to create – and allocate financial resources to – the Symbian consortium, which develops free software designed as a program to operate the mobile telephones that they manufacture. Thus, all mobile telephone manufacturers use the same platform (the same operating system), which is based on the GNU/Linux operating system and is flexible enough for each manufacturer to then design a different mobile phone model to its rivals, incorporating improvements and variations to attract customers (telephones that double as cameras, allow the user to send e-mails, etc). Each company changes the appearance of the phone screen to adapt it to the services it offers, since it has access to the source code of the program used to operate the telephone. This system encourages innovation and product improvement because the companies expect to attract new customers by creating a device (the telephone) that works better than that of its rivals.

The fact that the big multinationals have fully incorporated free software as a tool in their activities thus guarantees the future development of this software. It even ensures that IT engineers can, on their own initiative, engage in the development of free software. As Lerner and Tirole (2002) explain, these engineers can demonstrate their professional expertise to companies in this sector by participating in the improvement of this software, which will make them highly sought after by IT companies, hence allowing them to improve their employment prospects.