Free for All - Peter Wayner (the false prince series .txt) 📗

its product. The concept of shareware began long before the ideological free software movement as companies and individual developers began sharing the software as a cheap form of advertisement. Developers without the capital to start a major marketing campaign have passed around free versions of their software. People could try it and if it met their needs, they could pay for it. Those who didn't like it were honor-bound to erase their version.

Shareware continues to be popular to this day. A few products have made a large amount of money with this approach, but most have made very little. Some people, including many of the major companies, distribute their own crippled version of their product so people can try it. Crucial functions like the ability to print or save a document to the disk are usually left out as a strong encouragement to buy the real version.

Of course, free source products aren't the same thing as shareware because most shareware products don't come with the source code. Programmers don't have the ability or the right to modify them to do what they want. This has always been one of the biggest selling points to the high-end marketplace that knows how to program.

In fact, free source software is not dirt cheap either. Anyone who's been around the open software community for a time realizes that you end up having to pay something for the lunch. Keeping some costs hidden from the consumer isn't new, and it still hasn't gone away in the free software world. The costs may not be much and they may be a much better deal than the proprietary marketplace, but the software still costs something.

The simplest cost is time. Free software is often not as polished as many commercial products. If you want to use many of the tools, you must study manuals and learn to think like a programmer. Some manuals are quite nice, but many are cursory. This may change as the free software movement aims to dominate the desktop, but the manuals and help aren't as polished as the solutions coming out of Microsoft. Of course, one free software devotee told me by way of apology, "Have you actually tried using Microsoft's manuals or help? They suck, too."

Even when it is polished, free source software requires time to use. The more options that are available, the more time it takes to configure the software. Free source gives tons of options.

The lack of polish isn't usually a problem for programmers, and it's often not an extra cost either. Programmers often need to learn a system before they find a way to revise and extend it to do what their boss wants it to do. Learning the guts of a free software package isn't much of an extra cost because they would be just trying to learn the guts of a Microsoft product instead. Plus, the source code makes the process easier.

Still, most users including the best programmers end up paying a company like Red Hat, Caldera, or a group like OpenBSD to do some of the basic research in building a Linux system. All of the distribution companies charge for a copy of their software and throw in some support. While the software is technically free, you pay for help to get it to work.

If the free source code is protected by the GNU General Public License, then you end up paying again when you're forced to include your changes with the software you ship. Bundling things up, setting up a server, writing documentation, and answering users' questions take time. Sure, it may be fair, good, and nice to give your additions back to the community, but it can be more of a problem for some companies. Let's say you have to modify a database to handle some proprietary process, like a weird way to make a chemical or manufacture a strange widget. Contributing your source code back into the public domain may reveal something to a competitor. Most companies won't have this problem, but being forced to redistribute code always has costs.

Of course, the cost of this is debatable. Tivo, for instance, is a company that makes a set-top box for recording television content on an internal hard disk. The average user just sees a fancy, easy-to-use front end, but underneath, the entire system runs on the Linux operating system. Tivo released a copy of the stripped-down version of Linux it ships on its machines on its website, fulfilling its obligation to the GNU GPL. The only problem I've discovered is that the web page (www.tivo.com/linux/) is not particularly easy to find from the home page. If I hadn't known it was there, I wouldn't have found it.

Of course, companies that adopt free source software also end up paying in one way or another because they need to hire programmers to keep the software running. This isn't necessarily an extra cost because they would have hired Microsoft experts anyway. Some argue that the free source software is easier to maintain and thus cheaper to use, but these are difficult arguments to settle.

In each of these ways, the free software community is giving away something to spark interest and then finding a way to make up the cost later. Some in the free software community sell support and others get jobs. Others give back their extensions and bug fixes. A running business is a working ecology where enough gets reinvested to pay for the next generation of development. The free source world isn't a virtual single corporation like the phone company or the cable business, but it can be thought of in that way. Therefore, the free software isn't much different from the free toasters at the banks, the free lollipops at the barber's, or the free drugs from the neighborhood pusher.

If you want to think bigger, it may be better to see the free software world as closer to the great socialized resources like the ocean, the freeway system, or the general utility infrastructure. These treat everyone equally and provide a common basis for travel and commerce.

Of course, that's the most cynical way that free software is no different from many of the other industries. There are other ways that the free source vision is just a return to the way that things used to be before the software industry mucked them up. The problem is that a mixture of licensing, copyright, and patent laws have given the software industry more ways to control their product than virtually any other industry. The free source movement is more a reaction against these controls than a brave new experiment.

21.2 WOULD YOU LICENSE A CAR FROM THESE GUYS?

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Comparing the software industry to the car industry is always a popular game. Normally, the car industry looks a bit poky and slow off the mark because they haven't been turning out new products that are twice as fast and twice as efficient as last year's products. But many parts of the car industry are bright, shining examples of freedom compared to their software equivalents.

Consider the Saturday afternoon mechanic who likes to change the oil, put in a new carburetor, swap the spark plugs, and keep the car in running order. The car guy can do all of these things without asking the manufacturer for permission. There's nothing illegal about taking apart an engine or even putting an entirely new, souped-up engine in your car. The environmental protection laws may prohibit adding engines that spew pollutants, but the manufacturer is out of the loop. After all, it's your car. You paid for it.

Software is something completely different. You don't own most of the software you paid for on your computer. You just own a "license" to use it. The difference is that the license can be revoked at any time if you don't follow the rules, and some of the rules can be uncomfortable or onerous. There's nothing wrong with this mechanism. In the right hands, it can be very pleasant. The Berkeley Software Distribution license, for instance, has no real requirements except that you credit the university for its contributions, and the university just revoked that requirement. The GNU Public License is much stricter, but only if you want to change, modify, and distribute the code. In that case, you're only prevented from keeping these changes a secret. That's not a big problem for most of us.

Other licenses are even more stricter. One Microsoft license prevents the programmer from trying to figure out how the software works inside by saying "LICENSEE may not reverse engineer, decompile or disassemble Microsoft Agent." These clauses are popular and found in many software licenses. The company lawyers argue that they ostensibly prevent people from stealing the secrets that are bound up in the software.

These licenses have been interpreted in different ways. The video game maker Accolade, for instance, won its case against the manufacturer Sega by arguing that reverse engineering was the only way to create a clone. If companies couldn't clone, there would be no free market. On the other hand, Connectix lost some of the early court battles when Sony sued them for creating a software clone of the PlayStation. The judge decided that Connectix had violated Sony's copyright when they made a copy to study for reverse engineering. In February 2000, an appeals court struck down this ruling, freeing Connectix to sell the emulator again. By the time you read this, the legal landscape will probably have changed again.

In practice, license clauses like this only hurt the honest programmers who are trying to deal with a nasty bug. Most people don't want to steal secrets, they just want to be able to make their software work correctly. Decompiling or disassembling the code is a good way to figure out exactly what is going on inside the software. It can save hours and plenty of grief.

The license even borders on the absurd because the phrase "reverse engineer" is so ambiguous. It may be possible to argue that just learning to use a piece of software is reverse engineering it. Learning how a feature works means learning to predict what it will do. In many cases, the bugs and the glitches in software mean that the features are often a bit unpredictable and only a bit of black-box reverse engineering can teach us how they work. That's not much different from learning the steps that happen inside. Fiddling with shrink-wrapped software is like fiddling with a black box.

Imagine that General Motors or Ford sold their cars with such a donot-reverse-engineer license. They would either weld the hood shut or add on a special lock and only give the keys to registered dealers who would sign lots of forms that guaranteed that they would keep the workings of the cars secret. No one could change the spark plugs, chop the hood, add a nitro tank, or do anything with the car except drive it around in a completely boring way. Some lawyers at the car companies might love to start shipping cars with such a license. Think how much more they could charge for service!The smart executives might realize that they were hurting their biggest fans, the people who liked to tune, tweak, fiddle, and futz with their machines. They would be stripping away one of the great pleasures of their devices and slowly but surely turning the cars into commodity items that put the owners in legal strait-jackets.

Some software companies take the licensing requirements to even greater extremes. One of the most famous examples is the Microsoft Agent software, which allows a programmer to create little animated characters that might give instructions. Some versions of Microsoft Office, for instance, come with a talking paper clip that points out new and improved features. Microsoft released this technology to the general programmer community hoping that people would add the tools