Written by Scott Dunn   

At the moment, Egypt is at the top of the headlines in a political battle over personal freedom. While the people at the top want the people at the bottom to stay put, the people at the bottom want freedom. They see what we have in the United States, and they want to enjoy our freedoms, too.

But there is a subtext that has so far gone unnoticed in the mainstream press and that is with digital freedom. We all know that the Egyptian government cut off Internet access to quell the revolt. What is not so well known is that at least one American company assisted the Egyptian government with surveillance and traffic management. Al Jazeera has reported that it was an American company that provided the tools used by the Egyptian government used for detecting the buildup of the revolt. That tool is deep-packet inspection and it was provided by Narus, a company based in Sunnyvale, California. Should it surprise anyone that an American company would work against individual freedom? Probably not.

Our digital freedom depends on the software we use. For the moment, I want to draw your attention to two American software companies, Microsoft and Google as a short study in contrasts. Over the past week, Microsoft pulled its operations out of Egypt, ostensibly because they feared for the safety of their employees. At the same time, Google and Twitter were working together to give Egyptians a way to tweet on Twitter when Internet access was cut off by Mubarak’s government. I have seen no such effort by Microsoft.

For decades, Microsoft was held as a great example of an American business. When they started, they competed like everyone else. Or did they? Through two long decades, Microsoft defeated one competitor after another. Eventually, it became nearly impossible to buy a computer with any other operating system but Windows installed on it in any brick and mortar store. The only alternative that stayed alive was Apple.

Microsoft has been the subject of litigation in many areas, but most notably, as a convicted monopolist in the DOJ v Microsoft and in the Comes v. Microsoft trials. The DOJ case showed us that Microsoft was lying to Netscape about how the Windows operating system worked in order to impair the performance of Netscape relative to Internet Explorer. In Comes v. Microsoft, we learn that Microsoft was using OEM licensing restrictions to prevent OEM computer manufacturers, like Dell and Acer, from pre-installing other operating systems, including the free and open source operating system, Linux.

A litany of lawsuits involving Microsoft show that time after time, Microsoft “competed” with their competitors through deceit, misdirection and collusion with their partners to hinder, delay and eventually eliminate their competition. The phrase, “Embrace, Extend and Extinguish” is closely associated with Microsoft for their habit of taking an open standard, embracing it, extending it with proprietary extensions of functionality and extinguishing it to ensure that no one else can use it.

Microsoft has a tendency to kill off it’s partners, particularly if they fear that partner as a competitive threat. Anyone and everyone who has ever entered a partnership with Microsoft could get the kiss of death if Microsoft should ever perceive a threat from that partnership. A few recent cases in point are Sun and Novell. As a settlement in a lawsuit, Microsoft and Sun entered into an interoperability agreement. Instead of declaring bankruptcy, Sun offered itself up for sale to Oracle just last year. Novell is still around, but it’s on the ropes after less than 5 years of an interoperability agreement with Microsoft. Novell has already put itself up for sale and currently, a Microsoft-led consortium of companies is working on purchasing 882 software patents in the Novell portfolio of assets. That consortium includes Apple, Oracle and EMC. What are the patents for? Why, for hindering the use of Linux by consumers, of course. Is Microsoft the paragon of capitalism that we should all embrace? I prefer personal freedom, so I’d say no.

In recent years, many technology pundits have noted a slow decline in Microsoft. Apple now greater market capitalization than Microsoft. There is a revolt among Microsoft partners as Microsoft is starting to compete against their own partners by offering services in the cloud computing space, and lately, many high-profile execs have left Microsoft to work elsewhere. Real competition is emerging in the form of Google, the Linux operating system and the Firefox web browser. All of these came about because of Microsoft’s complete dominance in the software market.

Linux is free and open source software that was built by thousands of men and women who wanted an alternative that they could share with others - and it was built without the legal protection of software patents. Linux powers web servers, smart phones and supercomputers worldwide - it is everywhere. Even this article was written on a Linux workstation I installed myself. Firefox is the result of the release of the source code from the Netscape browser into an open source project - a sort of Netscape’s Revenge, if you will. And finally, there is Google. Now Google may not be a saint, but Google doesn’t depend on you to use Windows, Mac or Linux - the choice is yours. Google understands that when you have software freedom, you will eventually find your way to their search engine. This article was written in Google Docs so I could access it from anywhere.

On the other hand, with Microsoft, all of their Internet properties are designed to work better with Windows to drive sales of Windows. Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft, has even gone so far as to say that he wants all open source software to work better on Windows.

So what does all this have to do with Egypt? The young men and women protesting in Egypt were able to organize their effort through Google, Facebook and Twitter. In order to provide a consistent user experience on all operating systems (and that includes smartphones), Facebook, Google and Twitter must employ open, royalty-free and unencumbered standards so that any operating system, anywhere, could use them. They all use Linux on a truly massive scale to run their servers, too. This is digital freedom, and in this time - our time - digital freedom really matters.

I use Chrome on Linux as a way of casting my vote for digital freedom. When I visit a website, the server will record my visit along with the operating system and browser that I’m using. My choice of browser and operating system allows me to vote for digital freedom every time I visit a website.

In this digital age, software freedom is essential in order to exercise all other freedoms. So think about that the next time you are using Windows to view Facebook, Google or Twitter. If you have invested in Microsoft stock or bought a computer with Windows on it, you might also want to consider whether or not Microsoft’s interests are aligned with yours. While Microsoft is a major player, it doesn’t stop with Microsoft as they’re not the only software company working against digital freedom. We all have a choice now, thanks to the people who write and share free and open source software.