Software Inevitably Must Be Free

There is a certain tech “analyst” who likes to troll the GNU/Linux/free software community. I don’t want to give him any recognition by name or hyperlink, but his posts FUD bombs can provoke some interesting comments, like the one included later in this post.

Greg Loeppky asks a good question: How many times do we have to pay for the same piece of software? If you are Microsoft and we’re talking about your software, the answer is: “a bazillion times.” For the rest of us, that’s not a great deal. (This applies to all proprietary software vendors, of course, but as is customary, we will single out our favorite bogeyman.)

There is a lot of debate about how much Microsoft actually innovates in software and how much they copy from others. Whatever value they add, I want their to be a way for them to profit from this. But I don’t think they should forever get to control the digital bits they twiddle. They’re just bits. We need various incentives to create software, but once it is out there, it should not be ownable. Once software is produced, it doesn’t serve us well to enforce artificial scarcity.

Think about other industries. Competition always comes in and reduces prices down to the marginal cost. (Or something like that.) With software, the marginal cost is zero. Due to that special nature of software, and to the fact that it can be hard to compete with an established “standard” that is owned and controlled by one company, we get the ugly situation right now where Microsoft gets to extract monopoly rents from the rest of us in perpetuity.

Fortunately, with free software, we have a chance of avoiding that, if software patents don’t f**k everything up first. I agree with Greg in thinking that software inevitably must be free. My fear is always that our distorted “IP” ways of thinking will slow everything down and retard our progress. Four out of five dentists agree that software patents are no friend of innovation in addition to being bad for your teeth.

Imagine our software commons is a sphere that rapidly expands outward as shared knowledge is reused and built upon. There is plenty of value to be added and money to be made in support and training and integration in this sphere. Around the outer edge of the sphere, there will be additional money made in innovative new development. Some of this new development may be in areas that are not addressed so well by our current free and open source models.

We need to find ways other than “selling” copies of the software to fund this new stuff, but for a while to come it might be something like the proprietary software we have today, where for a time some innovative company can make a lot of money developing something new and “selling” binary copies of the software. But if they can’t patent their ideas and software, and the ideas prove to be good, free software enthusiasts will copy and “commoditize” them, creating more opportunities for others to expand on them and add additional value, all of which can be shared freely.

Those innovative companies then cannot just sit back and rake in monopoly profits, but must continue expanding the sphere if they can, or turn to providing less exciting value-added services like support.

Or something like that.

Please! Keep reading below the fold for Greg’s comment that prompted this whole post.

Here is Greg’s comment at [unnamed], edited and with my emphasis added:

First, this article is much like what security guys call honey pots. You are writing this article in a matter designed specifically to draw out zealots. You are pushing buttons to get a reaction to prove there are Linux zealots out there. Same works for any topic you choose to write about as I’m sure you clearly know. If you pushed buttons about MS, you would have Linux haters here, advocating MS.

So to the core of this article I say, whatever… But there is a particular point that I haven’t found anyone talk about yet. Occasionally, I almost hear the argument in the comments, but I figure this time I will put it out there and see if it gets any traction.

The second point is based on an argument I’ve been looking for someone to make. That being: Linux is an example of the inevitable direction of software. How many times does one have to pay for the same piece of software? Once you’ve figured out how to make a solid base of software, eventually everybody does it. (How rich do you think the original inventor of the chair would be if he could continue making people pay him for the design principles.) It just makes sense. Eventually, the core components of software have to become free. It doesn’t make sense to constantly pay for them, particularly since there is no manufacturing costs.

Open Source software is merely the inevitable direction that software must take. This is what Microsoft is scared about. It’s most lucrative business is turning into a commodity and it hasn’t found a replacement to continue to pay it’s many of thousands of employees.

Eventually all popular software will become Open and Free. After all, when you boil everything off, the copyrights, the intellectual property, and the money spent into making/discovering, it’s really just knowledge. And eventually someone else comes up with a similar idea. You can’t hang on to it forever, just because you were there first. That’s silly; childish even. Eventually you have to grow up and share.

What we are seeing is the first signs of some software finally becoming mature. There will always be proprietary software out there. There has to be, new software is rarely popular because it generally doesn’t work well and/or costs a lot because the original developers want to have compensation for the efforts. I’m speaking as a software developer who is definitely feeling the pain of lost cost software.

But despite, it’s still the best way to go. It’s far more comfortable working in a space that you know is going be around no matter what happens to any one company. There is always going to be access to the source, and as long as the software is popular it’s going to be supported.

Also, quite nice to work in an environment where the answers to your questions are not always surface answers designed specifically to protect the inner workings. There is no roadblock when developing on an Open Source platform.

The only real shortcoming of Open Source software is the lack of hardware support for it. Hardware manufacturers are still too busy protecting the Intellectual Property and not releasing full specs for their hardware so that Open Source software can make use of it. But rest assured, eventually this industry will mature as well. It has to. That or we will be stuck, in our communism-veiled-in-capitalism world.

Unfortunately, my post is nearly at the bottom of a long list of comments, so few people are going to see this one. But hopefully Mr. [Troll] (ed., Greg politely used the troll’s proper name) will, and use his significant media exposure to present this idea in a fashion that many more people can see, than I could manage. So feel free to take my intellectual post, modify and redistribute to your heart’s content. And you don’t even have to give me credit for it.

Kind Regards,

Greg Loeppky

There, Greg: I can’t give it as much airplay as [unnamed], but hopefully that’s a little bit less buried. :-)

Attribution Note

I’ve previously used images from Clipart ETC in my posts. They have a super collection of clipart and were very generous in granting me permission to use them on this site, but they are not currently completely free. I think they are all public domain images, but they have been cleaned up for display on the web site. (Would that make them a derived work, copyrighted in the year they are modified?)

So while I really like the clipart and the look of it in the posts, I think it would be better to avoid encumbered works here. Especially for regular features.

On the previous post and today I’m using images from Karen’s Whimsy, where they are advertised as being in the public domain. She has a lot of good clipart available. I don’t know that I’ll link to her site every time with the pictures I reuse here, but the image filenames will at least include “karenswhimsy.com” by way of attribution of the source. (I wish the images had better attribution at her site for the original source.)

Check out Karen’s site for the generously shared free culture and to see artwork of her own made from altered books and collage.