Some time ago I wondered aloud whether free and open source software might one day follow environmentalism from being dismissed as the realm of “sandal-wearing and beard-toting troublemakers or romantic idealists” to being a significant corporate agenda item.

While we are not at that stage yet, there are indications that open source development is being seen as a matter of social responsibility. Via Roberto Galoppini comes the news that the Software Freedom Law Center recently received a call from someone at a socially responsible investment house inquiring about “willingness to contribute to FLOSS” as a social responsibility item.

As Bradley M Kuhn explains: “This fellow was actually investigating the FLOSS credentials of various companies and trying to bring it forward as a criterion when considering how socially responsible their practices are. He seemed genuinely interested in bringing this forward as part of a social agenda for his company. ”

It is interesting to view this call in the context of Jim Whitehurst’s call for corporations to invest more in sharing and reusing their code via open source development. I suspect Jim’s talk of eliminating “waste” in IT software development was not accidental.

That speech prompted Dana Blankenhorn to call for the development of a “Code Recycling Center”. I commented at the time that at a local level such projects are being created, at least at for governments, but that corporate take up might be prompted by some sort of tax incentive.

I was forgetting that, according to the Center for American Progress “corporations and self-employed individuals may already take a deduction for their development expenses for both open source and proprietary commercial software” (the Center proposed in 2006 to extend a tax credit to individuals that create open source software).

Meanwhile, Stefano Maffuli has suggested the creation of a Free Software Fairness Index by which to classify open source businesses on the grounds of social responsibility. This in turn calls to mind Milking the GNU’s suggestion of an “Equitable Open Source” index by which to judge vendors on their patent policy, business model and development model.

As Roberto notes, Sun’s corporate social responsibility report explains that the company’s commitment to open source means that it shares its “technology and resources with communities worldwide to help eliminate the digital divide, create economic opportunity, and foster equal access to technology.”

Meanwhile I previously noted that a proposal was presented to Oracle’s shareholder meeting in 2007 asking the company to detail its commitment to open source and use its patent portfolio to protect open source. While Oracle opposed the proposal it did note that it intended to include information about its open source activities in the next social responsibility report (which it hasn’t yet published).

Back in March I wrote:

“Perhaps in years to come we will see big businesses boasting about lowering their proprietary licensing footprint through the more efficient use of computing resources, just as today they boast about the efficient use of natural resources. Maybe the laggards could pay someone else to adopt open source for them via proprietary offsetting schemes. While I am being flippant here, it wouldn’t seem unreasonable for shareholders to demand that businesses justify their spending on IT resources to ensure that profits are being reinvested efficiently.”

Clearly we’re not there yet, but the situation I desribed seems more likely today than it did just four months ago.