Re: Coffee and Open Source

[Jeff Licquia <jeff@licquia.org>]

On Wed, 2003-01-29 at 11:18, mike808@users.sourceforge.net wrote:
> And, like the throngs waiting to pay $99 to get their copy of Windows98
> on the first day of release, the line for the (free today) $0.50 coffee 
> was ten deep.

That's a natural reaction.  There's no downside to trying the coffee for
free and seeing if it's fifty cents better than the other stuff.  It's
certainly better than paying fifty cents for your experiment -
especially if it isn't.

> So, I'm enjoying the humor in the irony of the analogy. Then I find
> out that the $0.00 coffee is going away tomorrow. Apparently, folks were
> taking cases of the "free" coffee home with them for their personal
> use (or to sell on eBay for all I know). So, the supply of $0.00 coffee
> was eliminated by management, in favor of the $0.50 self-sustaining
> (and its inter-twined enforced single-serve pricing model).
> 
> Can you say "product activation"?

Well, sort of.  The difference here is that coffee is a physical
substance, and making "copies" of physical substances is still a hard
problem.  So, free riders are actually draining someone else's resources
in an illegitimate matter.

Free riders have a significantly smaller impact in the software world. 
It's no loss to me when several million people take my code and use it;
the software is exactly as hard to write as it is if only five people
use it.

The only time such copying seems like a loss is when you get the idea
that you deserve a cut every time someone benefits from your thoughts. 
I'm less and less partial to that notion as time progresses, especially
when I consider the many idea-mongers who have deposited far more
important data in my head for far less reward than Britney Spears has.

> And, finally, the question is: 
>   Is the only contribution of the Free software "takers" to its own demise?
> 
> Is it a realistic possibility that if MS and terrible US IP laws "win",
> that the motivation to contribute Open Source will diminish and stagnate?
> Effectively, becoming obsolete and marginalized by continuted neglected 
> development? TNSTAAFL comes to mind.

Nope.

There are too many of us out there who truly believe in freedom, I
think, and who won't willingly part with it.  I may shudder at the kinds
of restrictions that big IP companies are trying to impose on people,
but I shudder from a position of safety, one that I myself have had a
(small) part in creating.

Think about this: AMI feels it has to make a PR person available to
Slashdot after the backlash concerning TCPA support in AMIBIOS.  That
indicates that no vendor is going to be able to destroy the utility of
the Internet and general-purpose computing totally.  And as the XBox
hacking project demonstrates, all we need is a foothold.

This link, I think, does a better job of explaining what I'm saying:
http://emoglen.law.columbia.edu/publications/anarchism.html

(Not that we should all relax, mind you.  Moglen doesn't deny that it
could take hundreds of years for the effects he's describing to play
out; I don't want to wait that long.)

> For an analogy, making turntables is a well-known technology. Even if 
> they were free to make, produce, and distribute, people would likely have
> still abandoned them for CDs. It doesn't matter how "good" your turntable 
> is when the knowledge base required for the continued existence of the
> turntable industry goes away. Look at NASA. They've got media with loads
> of scientific information on it that they can't read because the knowledge to 
> use or maintain the equipment to retrieve it has been lost. Its not a 
> question of GPL, the knowledge was lost due to lack of interest in 
> preserving it. Usenet was also free and public. But the Internet Wayback 
> Machine and Google can only save so much of that information. So, the 
> Open Source movement's continued evolution is not a licensing problem.

Again, there's the problem of comparing physical devices to software. 
It costs to make copies of physical objects, which explains how people
can make decisions to not copy them for posterity.

If NASA's old data was really worthless, would we be hearing about the
problem they have with reading their old data?

Besides, I doubt that knowledge about the turntable will ever be
permanently lost; it's been engraved into at least one significant,
long-lasting historic object.

> IMHO, the OS movement needs to galvanize behind "building" and "growing"
> more folks that write code, and more importantly, *fix*, *extend*, and 
> *maintain* the huge mass of OS and GPL code already in existence.

Well, maybe.  Not that your idea is a bad one; I certainly wouldn't mind
more maintenance of old code, and am ashamed of my own complicity in
this matter regarding some of my own code.

But this is fundamentally a movement about people doing what they see as
important.  If something isn't maintained, then evidently few out there
see it as important.  And if you see something important being left by
the wayside, the best thing to do is to help out.  A thousand points of
light, and all that.

We already get slammed as not being innovative enough (although, IMHO,
that's a bogus assertion).  Far be it from me to tell someone who's
pumped about some great idea to go away and maintain somebody else's
good idea instead.
-- 
Jeff Licquia <jeff@licquia.org>

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