I hope you don’t feel neglected, dear reader. I spent the weekend learning how to do something and am working on writing up a howto for it. It may not be something my regular readers will have an immediate need for, but I suspect it will be popular with the Google crowd.
I’m uncertain how to balance technical “how to” type articles with other more narrative/opinionated posts. Tutorials tend to draw searchers in and it’s rewarding to me if people find them useful, but I don’t think they serve subscribers as well. Then again, it’s a mystery why so many people want to follow what happens here at all. :-)
Generally I like to get editorial opinions from the blogs I follow, and therefore tend to think that others may like more of that from me as well. I like writing about the ideas and politics in free software and free culture. At the same time, I don’t want to force anything. Since I’m in the mode right now of trying to learn a lot of new things, I have much to write about those experiences, and so I’ll probably be writing more technical posts. (Which take longer, and thus result in less frequent entries…)
Free as in Freedom
Without mentioning *what* I’m working on—since we want to maintain some suspense, after all—I wanted to say that part of the enjoyment of this latest episode has come from the freeness of free software.
It’s a joy to be able to download and use unencumbered software. Partly because of price. There is so much software out there and you could easily spend hundreds and thousands of dollars each year on equivalent proprietary software. Transactional costs would really slow you down if you’re always having to make purchase decisions on software that you may or may not derive long term value from.
Yes, there are trial versions, but the limited time or functionality may not be enough to evaluate the software under normal use. Or maybe you only need it for one task. Or maybe it’s not just for your personal use and you have to consider the impact of all the other parties you might want or need to use the software also to achieve your goal. Will they be willing and able to pay?
Even when the monetary price is manageable, the strings attached to non-free licenses are costs you bear, and it’s much too expensive in liberty lost. If you have one hundred pieces of proprietary software on your machine, you have one hundred entities with a say in what you do with your computer. I want my MTV and my Ones and Zeros.
Of course there are obligations in free software licenses also, but they apply mainly to distribution. You are free in the private realm of your machine. And to me, the restrictions on distribution are not onerous at all. You simply have to preserve the same freedom for others that you enjoyed.
Compliance with a free software license is an honor and recognizes the importance of freedom. Compliance with a proprietary license is a dreary exercise in submission and petty accounting. The creation of scarcity where none should exist.
With proprietary software and formats, your future use of the software and the investment you make in creating data with it are at the mercy of one company. They may discontinue the program you’ve come to depend on, or make new versions that are incompatible with your old one, or pressure you into expensive upgrades to stay compatible with new operating systems.
I don’t like that kind of long term uncertainty. I say that as someone who enjoyed programming in Visual Basic 6, which has no future now because Microsoft is letting it die. You’re just not free with proprietary software. (Please forgive the conflation of software and formats. There has been some movement in the direction of open formats, but I think proprietary software makers are always going to try to lock you in on the data.)
(And I’m not really bitter about VB. Microsoft did me a favor there by helping to highlight a problem with non-free software, and hopefully I’ll soon become as productive in Java or some other free language.)
With free software, its future may be largely at the mercy of the development community, but it doesn’t seem like a big risk for the popular projects. Some group will likely have an interest in maintaining the software and formats you use.
We have this amazing new digital frontier, and its products can be replicated at zero cost. I want to be part of a community that freely shares these easily copied “goods,” and live in a society that recognizes it is harmful to restrict the use of published information and knowledge.
I say “published” to head off the those who might speciously ask if I think we should freely share everyone’s bank account number. That is private information. Maybe I should further qualify by saying “voluntarily published” to answer the person who brings up leaks of private information.
For another obvious objection to this free love nirvana, there is the whole subject of how we create incentive for people to write the software in the first place. But that is separate issue than what happens to it after publication.
Finally, I like that I can write about free software and recommend it to others and they can likewise download and install it and enjoy the same freedom. Eventually I hope to get more involved with free software development and take an active part in this cycle of creating and freely sharing knowledge and the benefits of the digital world.
4 Comments
While I applaud your attempts at nobility, I’m not sure you’re looking at the whole picture.
There is a lot more liability incurred using some free software licenses (such as the GPL) than what you say. For example, you are required to not only preserve the freedom of the software you use, but also any software you write that is derived from that software, even if you use only a tiny fraction of free software in your otherwise almost entirely original code.
You have to consider this when you deal with your customers. Maybe you’ve built a library of code you rely on, but if that code was originally derived in any way from any GPL’d software, then your customer may inherit that liability from you, and that may not be something they want.
The other thing is that you highlight VB6 as an example of being locked in with proprietary code, but you don’t seem to recognize that Microsoft actually moved VB to an international standards based platform (though the language itself has not been standardized, the underlying bytecode is, and there are already open source implementations of VB.NET that target standard CLI).
27 April 2007 at 3:42 pm
Thank you, NR. And I applaud your attempt to patronize me.
You’re right — I made an assumption in my post about those downstream recipients of free software: they must play by the same rules, and share alike (but only if they redistribute, of course). I realize this is a concern for some people.
It’s interesting that this came up today in a presentation I attended given by Red Hat. The presenter was asked what Red Hat’s position was on the risk to their customers of “viral contamination.” The speaker seemed a little nonplussed by this. If people want to avoid comingling their proprietary code with other code, then they must keep them separate. If they want to enjoy the benefits of free and open source software (e.g. creating new code from it), then they are obligated to play by the rules.
I think these obligations are less troublesome than the ones imposed by proprietary licenses, but then I believe in the superiority of the free and open source development model.
I know that Microsoft has provided vb.net as the successor to VB6, but in many ways it is a new language and the migration is quite painful for companies that invested significant amounts in their classic VB applications. I’ve heard some things about .NET are supposed to be standardized, but is there a long enough spoon to dine with this devil? Why should we trust anything they offer?
27 April 2007 at 9:20 pm
You, and many others, seem to equate open source software with the GPL. There are other licensing schemes such as the BSD one that is considered open source, but does not stop a developer making the resultant product proprietory.
As far as development tools and languages are concerned, you should take a look at tcl/tk, a mature and very powerful language with many extension packages available, many under BSD licensing, as is the core product.
I also developed software using VB5 and VB6 and abandoned those products a few years after Microsoft moved to the .NET model. I now work mainly under Linux, but fortunately there are many open source development tools which are designed to be multi-platform. This gives the developer freedom to work on Windows, Linux, etc. as they wish and also not to be dependant on the whims of a company which keeps their development tools as proprietory.
Rob.
30 April 2007 at 4:16 am
Hi, Rob. Thanks for commenting. I tend to equate free software with the GPL, since it is the most popular license that ensures free software will remain free. (The copyleft part of the license.)
But you bring up a good point. The BSD license is also a free license that people may consider if they’re concerned about how customers will accept the “risk” of copylefted software. I could have mentioned that above, even though I’m in the GPL camp. :-)
(It’s been several years since I used VB as the main part of my job. I’ve continued to use it to create a few utilities at work and many programs at home, but I’m finally letting it go. It was pretty nice for whipping up GUI programs in Windows, but even aside from the forced change, now I want freedom.)
30 April 2007 at 5:35 am