Recently, I bought a new computer. It’s the modern kind, with a dual-core, 64-bit, processor, an Nvidia graphics card, a huge SATA drive, and everything else I could think of when placing the order. And of course, I installed the amd64 Debian GNU/Linux distribution, envisioning fast and trouble-free computing using my favourite Linux distribution.

Well, so I thought. Then I started putting all those small support programs in place, from Flash to Skype, and realised that none of them would install. See, they are 32-bit, made for 32-bit operating systems, and there are no 64-bit versions for Linux available.

Why is this?

Mind you, it is possible to run most of these in “32-bit mode”, using 32-bit libraries, but you also need a steady supply of Aspirins and such, because it takes a lot of extra work, tinkering, and cursing.

If a piece of software was truly open source and free, as in “free speech” (as opposed to “free beer”), someone would immediately rectify this by compiling a 64-bit binary for others to use. And if that binary had problems, someone else would come along and fix that, often in a matter of days, not to mention adding features and fixing bugs in the original.

As many Linux users will testify, this works extremely well. Me, I’ve been using open source for years now, professionally and privately, and have experienced significantly less downtime than many of my colleagues and friends stuck with commercial software, often from that large Redmond manufacturer, in spite of the fact that my Linux variant is Debian’s development branch, codenamed Sid (named after the kid from Toy Story who liked to break toys).

Yet the makers of those small bits and pieces of software that many of us rely on, software that some insist are “free”, will not provide the large 64-bit Linux user base with 64-bit binaries, or make available the source code so others can provide us with that service.

Why? And what’s free about these programs, anyway, when you can’t do what you want to with them?