I came across this post about “Things No One Gives Microsoft Credit For (But Should)“, which I thought seemed a bit… uninformed. But I was surprised to realize that it was posted on Gizmodo, which I had expected to post more accurate and educated content. So, as there is nothing good on TV right now (or more specifically, nothing good on “my” TV right now, thanks to my wife) I thought I’d pick it apart;

1. Windows is on the vast majority of the world’s computers, creating a virtually ubiquitous platform that anyone can develop for. That actually breeds innovation and development. Yes, Microsoft fosters innovation. While it’s much easier for griefers to be mean if everyone’s on the same platform, that ubiquity gives us a common ground to drive forward on.

Well, as a starting point, this one is perfectly true. There is now an almost ubiquitous platform for software developers to work with. (Although you could question whether the array of Windows Vista, Windows XP, Windows NT, Windows ME and Windows 98 which are all currently supported by Microsoft, is really a single ubiquitous platform.) But while this cycle of new versions can make life difficult, there is this common ground that we can all work on and drive forward from. That is, provided that you have the sort of computer that can run the latest versions of Windows (which rules out all those things like TVs and mobile phones that happen to have computers inside them), and that you’re not bothered about buying licence(s) from Microsoft to use it.

But what’s happened more recently? Well there’s the idea of a new ubiquitous platform that anyone can develop for; the World Wide Web. By following the open standards of how this works, instead of a ubiquitous desktop platform, we now have a ubiquitous global platform. One which Microsoft have repeatedly tried to dominate and turn into an extension of it’s ubiquitous desktop platform by closely tying it in with Windows-only technologies.

Stan Seiler, senior docent at the Computer History Museum, credits Microsoft for creating the common UI concept—”a common look and feel across multiple applications,” something that “couldn’t be pioneered until somebody had a whole suite of applications,” which Microsoft was among the first to do. They dragged third-party developers into following it as well, and voila, now most stuff works and looks the same across an OS.

But in saying this, he does a massive discredit to the operating systems that came before; firstly Xerox for creating the basic user interface that we now take for granted; WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get- the idea of what something looks like on the screen is the same as what it looks like if you print it out) and WIMP (Windows, Icons, Mouse, Pointer.) Then there’s Apple’s work using WIMP in a commercial personal computer and popularising it. But, you know, it’s true that Microsoft built today’s homogenous PC platform. Whether they created all the parts that they built it from depends on what you think of ideas like intellectual property, but can you really say that they came up with the idea, or that it was necessarily a good thing for the world? More on that later…

But the idea of giving credit to Microsoft for creating the ubiquitous platform that “the world’s computers can use as a common ground to work forwards from” is something I find hard to agree with.

2. Microsoft is basically responsible for the two-button mouse. Will Smith from Maximum PC (but not quite Hancock) gives the Gates machine props for really bringing the mouse to business computing with “the one-two punch of Windows 3.0 and Office.” More than that, it created a simple standard for two-button mousing: left-click equals action, right-click equals choices. Love your scroll wheel? (I do.) Microsoft, baby. Apple’s mouse philosophy is just silly.

Well, when Douglas Engelbart invented the mouse in 1969, it had one button, but subsequent versions had three buttons (with the idea being “as many as can fit on”- 3 was as many as could fit at the time.) The idea at the time was that it would be used with one hand on the mouse and the other on what’s called a Chord Keyboard- where different combinations of buttons are used to enter letters with one hand. (Apparently when it was tested against the standard typewriter keyboard, typists found that they could type faster using a chord keyboard with minimal training.) Then that idea was taken by Xerox, who developed the idea of a mouse you would grab when you needed it, using a standard 2-handed keyboard for most of the time, creating the basic idea of the mouse that we have today. (At a time when light-pens, trackballs, joysticks, tablets and cursor keys were all being trialled as ways to operate a computer.)

Here’s a picture of the Xerox Star- the first commercial system that used the mouse, released in 1981 (4 years before Microsoft’s first version of Windows.) Count the buttons.

But this also overlooks what Apple did with bringing the mouse to the market and making the mouse a part of a more usable and commercially successful user interface; simplifying the mouse to a single-button concept, and successfully turning the focus of the user interface from a string of text to a 2-dimensional, graphical interface.

So I don’t think that you can really give Microsoft credit for the two buttoned mouse- either for creating it, or for making it popular.

3. Microsoft popularized the concept that software has value and is worth paying for it. Seiler says “it might sound obvious… but it was an important change in the mindset of people.” No one had done it on the scale Microsoft did. Today this leads to some weirdness: There’s a different price for each version of Windows. But this theoretically based on how much value Microsoft think is packed into each version of Windows (you can debate this, of course). But unless you’re a freetard, you probably don’t think the idea itself of paying for software is insane.

This is one that I wouldn’t disagree with. In a commercial market, putting a software suite together while any competitor would be free to re-use your work, making sales incredibly difficult, would of course slow down growth and development. Software has value, and the fact that it’s easily copied shouldn’t be allowed to detract from the value of the software, and the effort that goes into it’s creation.

Similarly, we’re in a position where the value of music and video needs to be recognised today; the same fight over how this value should be recognised is going on at the moment- is the answer in money from subscription services, advertising revenues, state funding… or something else? I don’t know.

But if someone buys a piece of software and then gives it away to other people for free (without the original developer getting some sort of payment that matches it’s value) then it would be incredibly detrimental for the original software developer, which would be bad for innovation.

I’ve blogged before about Bill Gates’ “Open letter to hobbyists”, in which he was asking people to stop copying software as it devalued the work that went into making it, at a time (way back in the 1970s) when the right to copy software was being seen in a similar light as the scientific community’s right to share information, understanding and knowledge.

So I’m utterly, 100% behind the idea that software has value. But there is also that argument about free software- not software that doesn’t cost money, but software that you’re free to modify, because you have access to the source code. If it doesn’t work, then anyone with access to the source code can make it work. Yes, it means that you can’t stop it from being redistributed once you’ve let it go. But it also means that if you want to learn how to program, then you can study existing programs and learn from them.

Is studying computer science the best way to prepare to be a programmer?

No, the best way to prepare is to write programs, and to study great programs that other people have written. In my case, I went to the garbage cans at the Computer Science Center and I fished out listings of their operating system.”

According to ‘Programmers at work’ (Microsoft Press, Redmond, WA [1986]) – note- I found that quote online and haven’t read the book), that’s Bill Gates’ answer to the question.

If you’re the only ones who have access to the source code for your operating system- that ubiquitous platform that Point 1 talked about- it also makes it difficult for other people to compete when making applications that will run on that operating system. Especially when not only is the source code not available, but the full detailing of how it works is not even published (the subject of an ongoing fight between Microsoft and the EU.)

So- credit for establishing the concept of value of software- sure, I’ll give Microsoft credit for doing that. Shame they didn’t make sure that other people could benefit from the value of that work in the way that they benefited from the value of other people’s work. Maybe they didn’t recognise what they were doing themselves?

4. Microsoft’s intimidation leads to innovation. The flipside of Microsoft’s scale and success is that everyone hates them. (Duh.) While this sometimes results in unproductive pissing and moaning, it often drives companies to try to outdo the behemoth, after which Microsoft strives to catch up before getting leapfrogged again. This process benefits everyone.

Everyone except those who try to drive innovation which conflicts with Microsoft’s interests, that is. I mean, I agree that a consistent user interface is a good thing (but disagree that it was a Microsoft idea/creation), but Microsoft have attempted to block other companies from using elements of the same user interface. Not allowing anyone else to improve on Microsoft’s platform doesn’t exactly drive innovation.

But it’s the example of Internet Explorer that I found an odd choice to illustrate this idea. Sure- Internet Explorer drove Netscape to develop and improve their browser, but it also forced them to play Microsoft’s game when they did it. (The quotation “never argue with an idiot, because they will drag you down to their level and then beat you with experience” springs to mind.)

The most famous example is the Browser Wars. Netscape Navigator pushed Internet Exploder forward (not only feature-wise, but leading Microsoft to bundle it with the OS, a big step in and of itself) before IE killed it and achieved a virtual browser monopoly.

When Microsoft decided that they wanted a web browser, they bought Internet Explorer (from Spyglass- who are still credited in the “About” info), then promptly gave it away for free- making it impossible for Spyglass to carry on selling their browser and making any money. (See point 2…) They then threw all they could into it’s development, with more people working on Internet Explorer than Netscape had in their entire company.

Meanwhile, as Netscape gave their browser away for free, making their money from selling server software, Microsoft were incorporating server software into Windows (that ubiquitous platform that point 1 talked about), meaning that once you’d paid for that, you didn’t need to pay for server software. In devaluing Netscape’s work (as talked about in Point 3) by funding from other parts of the company, they drove them out of business.

Then, as the original point mentioned, they included Internet Explorer with Windows, putting the nail in Netscape’s coffin. If they had continued to develop and improve Internet Explorer, the kinds of advances that we have seen in web browsers in the last few years could have appeared much sooner. But while between 1995 and 2001, Microsoft released six versions of Internet Explorer, between 2001 and 2006, they didn’t release a single upgrade.

What else should we give credit to Msft under Bill’s watch?

How about the way that, back when the Personal Computer was killing the idea of timesharing business machines (where computer terminals allowed many users to use a single machine- meaning that the idle milliseconds when a computer wasn’t actually working, it could be working for someone else), Microsoft were promising that their users would be able to work collaboratively on documents on their systems too— just like their competitors’ timesharing systems were already doing— in just a couple of years. That was back in the 1980s. Microsoft delivered on this promise with Microsoft Office in 2007.

Then there’s the way that they lock in their market with their file formats- if someone sends you their work in Word, Excel or Powerpoint format and you haven’t bought a copy of Microsoft’s software (and often the operating system to run it on) then you can have some serious problems opening and editing it.

Going back to Internet Explorer, there’s what they did with the idea of the World Wide Web. When computers were first connected to one another on a network, you had to understand how both computers worked if you wanted to access information on one from the other. The idea of the World Wide Web was a common language that would let people access information between computers, no matter what sort of computer it was. Microsoft did their best to tie their web browser into the operating system, using functions that were only available to Windows- defeating the intention of the World Wide Web. (Not a problem you will have seen, unless you’ve found that a website that uses this for something like security checks won’t work outside Internet Explorer- something that happens pretty rarely these days, but for years was a huge problem for non-IE users.

As for the standards of the web, Microsoft have an interesting time ahead with Internet Explorer 8, which is apparently going to start showing pages according to standards that were set back in 1998 (for CSS 1). Which means that anyone who relies on a web page that they’ve only used with Internet Explorer 6 might want to make sure that it’s not going to be affected by the newer version. (If you thought upgrading to Internet Explorer 7 caused problems, then it looks like you might have a rough ride ahead.)

I’m sure there’s more, but that should do for starters…

The ultimate problem is that whatever market forces and dynamics do, it’s still difficult to move from a mediocre platform to a better one. People are confused by technology, and often scared of it, so moving someone from what they are familiar with and (relatively) comfortable to something new is a difficult job at the best of times.

This means that when something better than Windows (Outlook, Excel, Word etc.) is out there, the additional complications that Microsoft have put in place can make the effort of moving platforms greater than the benefits you get from the better platform.

It’s the kind of thing that you see in keyboards; the QWERTY layout (named after the first keys along the top row) was designed to stop typewriter keys from jamming. Typewriters were designed for blind people to be able to write with (it was about 100 years until someone had the idea of moving the mechanism so that you could actually see what was being typed.) Today, we use the same layout on virtually every computer keyboard- even though better keyboard layouts have been designed that allow people to type faster. But re-learning how to type is more effort for all but the most efficient secretaries that few people are going to bother trying, so the standardised layout we are all familiar with will probably be with us for as long as the idea of the alphabet under your fingers remains.

Hell- it’s hard enough adapting to a foreign keyboard, where one or two letters or punctuation marks are in a different place. Or using an unfamiliar keyboard when buttons like delete or page up/down are moved around. (Especially if you’re a touch-typist.)

So not just the idea of paying for software, but the idea of paying Microsoft every time you want a computer to work in the way you are familiar with is looking likely to be with us for a while yet.

So there’s something else they should probably be getting credit for…

In an age where software development and computer technology is so governed by copyright and legal restrictions, the knock-on effects that this legal licence will have mean that it is probably a more significant release than new versions of most software applications.

Having already talked about Free software and the commons (and still with a few more things to say about it in the future), I thought it would be worth talking about exactly what “Free software” is and what it means to software users and developers.

What is Free Software?

There are two commonly used definitions of “free software.” The first that people naturally tend to think of is free in terms of cost (“free” as in “free beer.”) The second, which people more involved in software may be more likely to associate with the phrase, is free of restrictions (“free” as in “freedom.”) The Free Software community is focussed on the second definition of the word.

To try to sidestep the ambiguity of the word “free”, a number of other terms have sprung up- such as “open source” or FLOSS (Free/Libre Open Source Software), but for various reasons none has really taken off as well as the catch-all term that “free software” covers.

According to Richard Stallman and the Free Software Foundation, software is ‘free software’ if people who receive a copy of the software have the following four freedoms:

• Freedom 0: The freedom to run the program for any purpose.
• Freedom 1: The freedom to study and modify the program.
• Freedom 2: The freedom to copy the program so you can help your neighbor.
• Freedom 3: The freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements to the public, so that the whole community benefits.

However, because of the grey area that lies around these freedoms, Free software is ultimately defined by the licence that a particular piece of software is released under.

International copyright laws automatically give the author certain rights over their work, but in order to allow users to enjoy freedoms like those listed above, permissive “Copyleft” licences have been created. Rather than the EULA ‘contracts’ frequently seen when installing software (where you agree to a number of restrictions on what you can do- ie. not to copy, reverse-engineer, sell or loan the software you’re about to install on your computer- or to blame anyone responsible if it does anything wrong), Copyleft licences work the opposite way in granting certain rights to the user which are usually exclusively given to the author- although sometimes with the restriction that they must also be passed on to any subsequent recipient.

Alternatively, there are permissive Free licences (such as the FreeBSD or MIT licences) which give users the rights to modify or distribute the software, but without the restrictions to ensure that the code remains free. This means that software licenced under these permissive licences can be freely incorporated into closed source commercial applications. The downside of this is that improvements or fixes don’t have to be shared back with the community, or passed on as free software. For example, it would be perfectly legal to take permissively-licenced Free software, rebrand it and sell it to customers who are unaware of the freely available software.

There are a number of different licenses offering different degrees of freedom, depending on whether they are focussed on ensuring the freedom of the end user, or maintaining the free status of the code and any derivative works, the General Public License being the most prominent. Broadly speaking, they break down into three groups;

• The GPL licence— about to have it’s third version release— is aimed towards ensuring that the code remains free. The Linux kernel is currently under Version 2 of the GPL licence (although whether future versions of the kernel will be released under the GPL v3 licence is yet to be seen.) It guarantees that the source code is accessible and modifiable, so that anyone can use and modify any GPL software in any way they like. However, the main restriction is that any software which incorporates GPL code must also be covered by the GPL licence. In other words, you can’t use a piece of GPL code in a project which you intend to keep closed source— if the project contains some GPL code, then the entire project must be released under the GPL licence (something which has been referred to as a “viral” nature- because if you choose to use GPL code, it “infects” your own code; although as I see it, that’s not unlike the way using proprietary code in a “Free” project renders the entire project legally liable.) This also means that any improvements made to the GPL’d code must be made available to the community- so, for example, if a company finds and fixes a security flaw in the Linux kernel, that fix would be made available to be incorporated into the next release.
• BSD-style licenses— so called because they are applied to much of the software distributed with the BSD operating systems— are aimed at ensuring that the user is free to do what they want with the software. The author retains copyright protection solely to disclaim warranty and require proper attribution of modified works, but permits redistribution and modification in any work, even proprietary ones, again, for as long as the author wishes.
• Public domain software – the author has abandoned the copyright. Since public-domain software lacks copyright protection, it may be freely incorporated into any work, whether commercial or non-commercial, proprietary or free. Importantly, software released thus goes completely out of control of the author, who, even if he subsequently so desires, cannot impose any restriction on its use, making the software truly free in every sense.

It’s often interesting to see how people like Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer and Bill Gates talk publicly about free software- quick to focus that it’s not really free of cost, pointing at issues like total cost of ownership or making vaguely threatening statements about software patent liability, but rarely if ever referring to the concept of software freedom, or the costs of forced upgrades or migrations when the developers withdraw support or abandon their products entirely.

(Note- This is a slightly late post, breaking my self-imposed “one post a week” rule for the second time, but I’ve simply been too busy to find the time to write this to cover enough information to make the post worthwhile. And not just busy on Facebook… However, any forseeable gaps between posts in future will be filled by shorter articles instead.)

In a similar way, the issue of copyright and software licences (that is, “Free” licences vs. proprietary licences) isn’t really about copyright and licencing; it’s about freedom. The complication is that both sides of the debate believe that they are arguing on the side of freedom.

On one hand, there is the idea that something belongs to whoever made it; they should have the freedom to decide who uses it and what it’s used for, and to charge money for their work if they like. If they build a chair, or write a song, or some software, or paint a painting, then they are free to either give it away or sell it. (Or chop it up and dance on the pieces, if they prefer— the point is that they are in control of what they do with it.)

On the other hand is the idea that someone who buys something should have the freedom to do whatever they want with their purchase- to shorten the legs on a chair, to copy a song from a CD to their iPod, to use a piece of software on their computer at work as well as the one at home, or to change how it works so that it works better for them.

The debate tends to focus on either the rights of the user and the rights of the creator (whether that’s a designer, software developer, artist etc.) It rages about which is “right” or “best”, and I don’t think that there’s a resolution that suits both sides— it’s too broad a subject for a “one size fits all” solution— so I’m not going to try to look for one. I’m also not going to address issues such as DRM (where technologies are used to restrict what can be done with a digital file— such as the restriction to only play music on authorised devices) and closed source software and reverse-engineering; they are complicated topics which warrant their own posts. Instead, I’m going to try to approach it from a slightly different angle- from the perspective of ownership.

The Concept of Ownership

This planet has – or rather had – a problem, which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movements of small green pieces of paper, which is odd because on the whole it wasn’t the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy.

From “The Hitch Hikers’ Guide to the Galaxy”, by Douglas Adams

Money isn’t a “real” thing; it’s a human creation— an abstract representation of the ownership of something. It dates back to the earliest days of the development of human society (possibly as early as 100,000BC), and is without a doubt an invention that has played a key part in the development of society.

By trading for something with an intrinsic value (such as rare metals, cows, food grains etc.), people were no longer reliant on a “coincidence of wants”- that is, that a buyer would happen to want what a seller was selling at just the same time that the seller happened to have something the buyer wanted, and was willing to trade. With money— a portable and durable representation of ownership— you can sell your fruit when it is ripe, then use the money to buy wheat when the wheat harvest comes in. Money made all commodities become more liquid, and allowed for scarce or perishable resources to be better distributed among the community. Money provided an incentive to trade with your neighbours— for example, to sell on some of your food before it rotted, so that you could eat later in the year.

But money is still an abstract concept. First, a system of something valuable (such as metals, cows or food grains) became representative of a unit of value (the shekel referred to a specific volume of barley in ancient Babylon.) With this system, metal coins were established to have a particular value beyond that of the metal itself (which could be melted down and used to make weapons or tools.) The next stage in the development of money was purely representative money- where the money itself would have no intrinsic value (such as with paper money), but would represent a set value backed up by a figure of authority. Around 330BC in ancient Egypt, warehouse receipts would function as representing a quantity of grain in a warehouse, and could be used for trade. The same basis system is still in use today; the Bank of England’s notes carry a “promise to pay the bearer on demand the sum of” the value of the note.

Intrinsically connected to and predating the idea of trading— probably predating human society itself— is this idea of ownership; of something belonging to someone. Somewhere along the line, some soft, shiny yellowish metal in the ground became somebody’s metal, before being turned into someone’s coins, and then into a governments gold reserves, being represented by some banknotes in circulation. (Actually, the first money is thought to have been red ochre rather than gold, but the point’s the same.) A farmer might grow enough crops to feed himself and his family, as well as to provide the seeds for the next seasons crops, and still have enough left over to sell. By doing the work to produce crops— or any other goods— he can make money.

The Tragedy of the Commons

“So you think that money is the root of all evil? Have you ever asked what is the root of money? Money is a tool of exchange, which can’t exist unless there are goods produced and men able to produce them. Money is the material shape of the principle that men who wish to deal wlth one another must deal by trade and give value for value. Money is not the tool of the moochers, who claim your product by tears or of the looters, who take it from you by force. Money is made possible only by the men who produce. Is this what you consider evil?”
Ayn Rand

The “tragedy of the commons” is a social trap that involves a conflict over resources between individual interests and the common good. The classic example is of a number of farmers keeping cattle on a common patch of land. It’s in the interests of each farmer to have more animals on the land- they can sell them, sell the milk etc. While each additional cattle brings benefits to the individual farmer, there is a penalty— the quality of the pasture they live on is degraded. However, the degradation of the quality of the pasture is spread equally amongst all the farmers; the benefits for the individual farmer for having an extra cattle will always outweigh the costs for the individual. However, what’s best for the individual is obviously not always the best for the greater good.

The same principle applies quite clearly to subjects like environmentalism; where factories pump waste into the atmosphere, decreasing air quality for everyone on the planet. Or to see the principle in action on a smaller scale, just watch people step over a piece of litter in a public place— even the same people who care enough to go out of their way to put their own litter in a bin.

The idea behind the theory goes as far back as Aristotle who said “That which is common to the greatest number has the least care bestowed upon it”.

Ownership of Ideas

What they did was sell invisible things. And after they’d sold what they had, they still had it. They sold what everyone needed but often didn’t want. They sold the key to the universe to people who didn’t know it was locked.

From “The Wee Free Men”, by Terry Pratchett.

Before the printing press, there was simply no need for the abstract concept of ownership of an idea or copyright protection. The work needed to copy a book (for example) involved writing the entire book out again by hand, and before the printing press made the widespread availability of texts a reality, literacy was so low that very few people would have been able to read the copy anyway; copying books simply wasn’t a profitable venture. Stories weren’t something people read on their own- they would be told, or acted out as a play. The important factor of a story wasn’t who came up with the story first, but who was best at telling it. (It is speculated that the works attributed to authors such as Homer and William Shakespeare weren’t actually written by the individuals in question; in the case of Homer, it’s widely agreed that the poems are the result of the oral tradition; stories, poems and songs that were passed on through generations before being written down in the unchanging form that survives today.)

However, the invention of the printing press meant that texts could be copied cheaply and quickly. It also meant that written works were more easily made and distributed, which in turn led to a significant increase in literacy. Not only was there now a way to cheaply copy written works, but there was also a growing market that would be interested in buying them, and an increasing value in the texts themselves. Along with the shift from an oral tradition to a written one that came with the increase in literacy, the idea of “intellectual property”— ownership of an idea (or more accurately, the expression of an idea) was starting to take shape.

However, the first copyright law passed was in England and had nothing to do with the rights of the author, but was a means of controlling publishing; a Royal Charter was given to the printers guild in 1556, granting them a monopoly on the use of printing presses in order to prevent ‘offending’ (ie. Protestant) texts from being circulated in Catholic England (as well as the right to confiscate or destroy unauthorised printing equipment or printed works) but eventually moving on (in 1710, under Queen Anne) to give certain rights exclusively to the author— specifically, the right to copy, modify or distribute their works for fourteen years (renewable once), after which the work moves into the Public Domain.

However, this made the idea of ownership much more complicated. If you held the copyright then you could sell something, while at the same time keeping hold of it and still having it to sell again, with little additional work involved. In addition, there was the possibility of selling a modified version of someone else’s work, ruining the market for the original goods (such as in Wheaton vs. Peters, where Richard Peters published an abridged version of Henry Wheaton’s court notes— the case led to copyright laws covering derivative works, as well as the original works themselves.) Also, copyright laws were national, rather than international; it was possible to cross a national border and legally copy foreign works, then import the copies back into the country of origin.

However, although the cost of creating copies was quite cheap, it relied on heavy and expensive equipment that was beyond the reach of the general public.

Digital Communication and the Information Age

The situation of suddenly changing values is being echoed today with the introduction of computers and digital communication, an increase in computer literacy and the creation of the internet. The photocopier in the 1950s, followed by home video in the late 1970s and early 1980s set the precedent for copying media for personal use. The landmark legal case of Sony vs. Universal Studios in 1984 ruled that it was “fair use” to record television broadcasts to be watched at the viewer’s convenience— a practice referred to as “time shifting.” Similarly, the practice of taping music became commonplace— either from the radio, or from purchased tapes and CDs.

In the space of a few decades, computers have become commonplace in the office and in the home. In the same way that what we now see as valuable “intellectual property” were first freely available (in the form of the oral tradition— stories being told and passed on), then became more valuable as technology replaced the oral tradition with written copies of texts (which turned them into a physical commodity that could be traded with), computer software has gone from being something that, broadly speaking, was something that was given away with computer hardware so that it could be used properly, and later became a very valuable commodity that is used by millions of people on a daily basis.

Free Software and Software Licencing

Proprietary software is built on the principle that the software is owned and maintained by it’s publishers, and that it’s users are granted permission to use it under certain conditions. Free Software (that’s “free” as in “freedom”) works on the principle that everyone who uses it owns the software; the software is covered by a licence, which grants the rights that copyright law usually gives to the author (to copy, reproduce and modify the software) to anyone who receives a copy of the software— often under the restriction that the same rights must be passed on to any subsequent recipient.

With Free Software, where the software itself is owned by the community; by everyone who uses it. It would appear at first glance that the Tragedy of the Commons would apply; without the drive for competition that capitalism provides with the incentive of money and profits, there should be little reason for anyone to work on it. However, it’s clear from the development of Free software that this isn’t the case.

The majority of email servers and web servers— applications which need to be reliable and secure— use open source operating systems as well as open source mail and web server applications. It is tried and proven to bwork effectively and effeciently; because when it’s found that it doesn’t, it can be quickly fixed or improved without waiting for the publishers to deem it profitable.

Unlike the examples of the farmers sharing grazing land, or chemicals being pumped into the environment, the costs and benefits of Free software development aren’t shared in the same way; in fact, it’s the reverse. While the costs are shouldered by the individual (the cost of development), rather than by everyone in the community, because improvements can be shared with the community, the benefits are multiplied by every user, rather than being purely reaped by the individual; if one programmer has a problem with a piece of software and does the work to solve their own problem, the rewards can be reaped by everyone who uses that piece of software. If one user finds a bug or potential security vulnerability, the patch can be shared with everyone. (With the internet, this can happen across the world incredibly quickly.)

A conflict comes when different people view the same thing in different ways; when a piece of software is viewed as a tool by one set of people and a commodity by another.

If you’re thinking of software in terms of a tool, as something that you can use, and someone else gets a copy of your software, then you haven’t actually lost anything. You still have what you had before, and you can still use it in the same way as before, and if the new users create improvements, or fix bugs, then you’re actually better off.

However, if you’re thinking in terms of the value of scarce commodities, then you have lost something; value. If you had written and owned a the only piece of software in the world that could perform a particular, vitally important task, you could probably sell it for a large amount of money. Alternatively, you could sell licences to use it for a limited period of time, and rig the software so that it wouldn’t work for more than, say, a year, when you could make people pay for it again and make more money over a longer period of time.

On the other hand, if you gave a copy of the software away to someone else, then you no longer own the only existing copy; it’s value is slightly diminished, as that’s a copy that you could have sold. If that copy was then copied a thousand times and given away, then it would be far harder to sell your “original copy” at the same price.

But how does it pay the bills?

The royalty paid to us, the manual, the tape and the overhead make it a break-even operation. One thing you do do [by copying software] is prevent good software from being written. Who can afford to do professional work for nothing? What hobbyist can put 3-man years into programming, finding all bugs, documenting his product and distribute for free?From an Open Letter to Hobbyists, Bill Gates, February 3, 1976

The break-even operation that Bill Gates spoke of in 1976 went on to be a $44 billion multinational corporation. Meanwhile, work done by programmers doing “professional work for nothing” has eclipsed the 3 man years the early Microsoft put into programming, debugging, documenting and distributing Free software.

A 2006 study found that it would cost around €12 billion to reproduce the existing code base of Free/Open Source Software, a figure representing around 131,000 real person-years of programmers time.

Of course, the €12 billion figure is what it would cost to reproduce the existing code base, based on the rate of earnings of suitably skilled programmers and a proprietary software development model. A significant part of the reason that this huge code base exists, however, is the fact that the code itself hasn’t been assigned a monetary value in such a way; if the code was being sold instead of shared, there would have been an incentive for the programmers to withold their own improvements until they could find a buyer, rather than to freely donate and/or share. The financial costs would inevitably be passed on to the project itself, and the progress of the projects would have been dramatically slowed down.

Last year, HP said that they were finding areas where they were using Open Source solutions to be more profitable than those using proprietary software. The open source MySQL database allows users to pay for a licence that allows them to keep their source code private. Red Hat, a company dedicated to open source software, had a 2006 revenue of $278.3 million. Novell (another distributor of the GNU/Linux operating system) have a revenue of over $1 billion. Even though the software itself is freely available, there is still plenty of money being made in providing services relating to the software— distributing, supporting or installing, for example.

Using open-source software, companies providing a software-related service (such as web hosting providers, developers and designers) can provide and support open-source based services to their clients without them incurring a licencing fee as they can give, rather than sell the software. (Some “free” licences prevent the software being sold for an unreasonable cost— ie. for more than the actual cost of distribution, preventing unscrupulous individuals from profiting by selling software that is freely available to unware customers.)

While it’s unlikely that distributing or supporting open source software will create another giant corporation in the way that selling proprietary software created Microsoft, it seems equally unlikely that another company based around sellingn proprietary software could do the same again. Meanwhile, there are hundreds, if not thousands of profitable companies providing open source-based business solutions, as well as other projects- such as the One Laptop Per Child project, which aims to provide inexpensive (~$100) laptops, built around Free software, to developing countries for use as education resources.

In addition, the Free Software code base is still growing; it doubles in size every 18-24 months, and is projected to continue for several more years. Despite the involvement of multi-million dollar corporations, around two thirds of this code has been contributed by individuals (around 15% is contributed by firms, with another 20% contributed by institutions); not by profit-motivated corporations, but being shared by coders fixing personal problems (or as open-source activist Eric Raymond describes it, “scratching their personal itch”) and sharing the solutions with the world.

A very similar story arose in 2004 (so similar, in fact, that I’ve seen at least one article confusing the two stories— although it may be the same study being referenced), when a consultancy firm’s findings that Linux potentially violates more than 200 Microsoft patents was quoted by Steve Ballmer in a talk to Asian government officials. When the story became public, the author of the study explained the actual findings of the study;

Open source faces no more, if not less, legal risk than proprietary software. The market needs to understand that the study Microsoft is citing actually proves the opposite of what they claim it does.

The number we found, to anyone familiar with this issue, is so average as to be boring; almost any piece of software potentially infringes at least that many patents.

Software patent law doesn’t exist in Europe, and therefore the veiled threat that Microsoft is posing doesn’t apply to companies outside the US. In addition, Brad Smith, Microsoft’s senior vice president and general counsel since 2002, has indicated that Microsoft won’t be suing anyone over the patents. Instead, they have been licensing their patents to other companies in exchange for either royalties or access to their patents (a “cross-licensing” deal.)

As yet, Microsoft haven’t actually specified what specific patents are being violated by Free software.  But Smith does break down the total number allegedly violated (235) into categories. He says that the Linux kernel violates 42 Microsoft patents. The Linux graphical user interfaces violates another 65. The Open Office suite of programs infringes 45 more. E-mail programs infringe 15, while other assorted FOSS programs allegedly transgress 68.

Linus Torvalds (the man behind the Linux kernel) says that the claims are simply FUD;

Can you get a list of which ones? Before that, it’s just FUD, and there’s not a whole lot I can say or do. Is there prior art? Are they trivial and obvious to one skilled in the art? Would we need to work around them? We don’t know, because all I’ve heard so far is just FUD.

If MS actually _wanted_ us to not infringe their patents, they’d tell us. Since they don’t, that must mean that they actually prefer the FUD.

Creating and exploiting fear, uncertainty and doubt about whether it’s “safe” for a company to use Free Software in a corporate environment certainly seems to be more useful to Microsoft as a marketing tool than the possible financial rewards of bringing individual patent violation cases to court; the idea that Free Software doesn’t cost money because you’ll be hit with an unexpected legal bill in the future is a powerful marketing force that won’t go away until Microsoft want it to. If any of the patents were actually challenged, at best it would result in a situation where developers would be able to work around infringing the patents and release “safe” versions of the software. At worst, the patents would be invalidated and Microsoft’s cross-licencing strength would start to dwindle.

So expect the same story to go round a few more times yet…

This wasn’t about 4-8-15-16-23-42 though. This time, the number sequence was 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0. (They’re hexadecimal numbers- instead of counting ten digits from 0 to 9, hexadecimal counts in sixteen digits, following on from 9 with A,B,C,D,E,F- so the number “F” is actually sixteen, and the number “10″ is actually seventeen. Hexadecimal counting is often used in programming, because of the way computers group “bits” of information in chunks of eight.)

What these numbers unlock isn’t a spiritual mystery though- it was discovered back in February that it unlocks the ability to play encrypted HD-DVD movies on a Linux computer. To stop people from copying and distributing HD-DVD video, these discs are encrypted, so that only “trusted devices” (that is, trusted by the studios selling HD-DVDs) can play them back, but can’t create copies of them. Linux computers are exactly what is meant by an untrusted device, as they are built on the idea that a user should be free to use their computer and the software that runs on it as they wish— and if that means making a copy of something for a backup (which is, at least in some countries, legally considered to be “fair use.”) Apparently, the code was discovered and released by someone who was frustrated to discover that they were unable to play a HD-DVD they had purchased because their monitor- although technically capable of playing high-definition video content did not have the right type of cable that “trusted devices” require.

However, it was on the 1st May that this discovery became an event. When the website Digg.com started deleting posts that referred to the number, an online uproar began about the freedom of speech and the site’s right to censor users posts- to the extent that the site was being spammed with the key so heavily that it was impossible to ignore (and difficult to find unrelated news articles!) A subsequent post on the Digg Blog announced that, despite a cease and desist notice they received, Digg was going to stop burying stories about “the numbers.”

The spread of these numbers on the web (appearing on almost 300,000 pages that Google lists at the time of writing) has been compared to the spread of Martin Luther’s 95 Theses, which could not have happened at such speed without the relatively recent invention of the Gutenberg press (which was ironically built to print bibles.)

Ironically, while it’s very easy to find the key, because of the number of blog posts and news stories about it that come from a Google search, it’s slightly harder to find instructions on how to actually use it. So maybe the “system” is working after all…

There’s a quiet battle going on between proponents of freedom of information and protectors of intellectual property. I’m going to try to talk about the history and the principles of this conflict, rather than the politics surrounding it.

One one hand, there are those who believe that a computer is a tool, so if you buy a piece of software for it (including media, such as downloaded music), you should be able to do with it whatever you wish. If the software needs modifying to perform a particular task, then you should be able to modify it. If you want to install it on more than one machine, you should be able to do that freely too. However, that’s not to say that you should necessarily be allowed to do whatever you wish- just because it’s legal to buy a sharp knife, doesn’t mean that it’s OK to stab someone with it.

On the other hand, there are those who are concerned that computers make it too easy to steal their intellectual property- for example, for people to copy and share music, films or software over the internet. If you copy something, then you’re not buying it, so therefore the lost sales cost someone money.

Copyright law offers legal protection for the second group- laws prohibiting the illegal copying and distribution of copyrighted materials date back several hundred years. The principle of copyright originated from the effects of the invention of Gutenberg’s moveable type printing press, which made it possible to quickly and cheaply print lots of copies of texts which previously had to be written out by hand. (Interestingly, although the laws today protect the rights of the author, copyright was originally a form of censorship to prevent the distribution of Protestant texts in Catholic England; the Printers Guild was set up in 1556, with the exclusive right to print and copy texts, and the right to confisicate or destory illegal prints or printed works. It wasn’t until 1710 that the laws were changed to recognise the ownership of the author, rather than the Printers Guild.)

However, the idea of legal protection of the freedom of users is a much more recent issue, and is being shaped by the current progression of technologies. Exemptions for “Fair use” exist- in the US, this allows copyrighted materials to be used for review, or for scholarship. Since the 1984 “Betamax Case“, arguing whether it was legal to use video recorders to tape TV shows to watch later on, it has been “Fair Use” to record copyrighted material for personal use (and by extension to sell video recorders- devices which were sold and marketed to be used to record copyrighted material.) However, DRM technolgies now exist that try to prevent copyrighted material from being copied, despite what is considered to be “Fair Use.” So although “Fair Use” would appear to cover recording a DVD to a computer hard drive, technological barriers have been put up to make this difficult.

Some authors (particularly in the case of software) prefer their works to be freely available and distributable. As copyright automatically protects authors from other people copying and distributing their work, this system has been the basis of the idea of permissive licencing, where instead of restricting certain rights to the author, the copyright is modified to extend the rights to use, modify and/or copy the work to anyone who receives it- with conditions, such as any copies or adaptations must also distributed under the same licence, or the original author must also be credited, or the work can only be freely used for non-commercial purposes. There are a number of different licences available, each with different areas of focus; the most popular are the GNU General Public Licence (and the GNU Lesser General Public Licence), the BSD Licence, the Mozilla Public Licence, the MIT Licence and the Apache Licence. There is also the Creative Commons movement, which aims to make artistic works such as music and photography freely available in much the same way.

Now for the editorial part; my own generation grew up videoing films off the TV and making tapes for their friends or for their cars. I remember making tape-to-tape copies of my sisters music and friends’ computer games- I even have vague memories of setting up a Fisher Price “My First Tape Recorder” with it’s built in microphone next to a story tape playing on my parents stereo, so that I could record both sides of the story onto one side of a longer blank tape (and learning a lesson about background noise and degradation of signal in the process.) Even though so much music and film was freely available to me through my friends, I still spent a huge amount of my disposable income on tapes and videos (and later, CDs and DVDs.) If I had a tape I liked, I would go and buy the CD.

One of the main factors behind the explosion of the World Wide Web is freedom. On 30th April 1993, CERN announced that the World Wide Web would be free for anyone to use, with no fees due. Most web servers run a Linux operating system, which is released under the free GPL licence, and use Apache software, which is also released under a free licence. The principles of freedom are deeply ingrained in the culture of the Web.

Without the freedom to use the internet and the freedom of the World Wide Web, it is undoubtable that it would not have it’s place today as a wide reaching global platform. However, if manufacturers continue to rely on technological barriers to protect their intellectual properties, the issue of copyright could easily become a matter of what you can do, instead of what you should- and as long as sound comes through a pair of speakers, or video gets plugged into a screen, there will always be a way to copy media. As long as computer code runs on a computer, there will be a way to hack it.

I believe that the important factor is in people’s minds. If the issue of whether you can take something becomes a simple case of whether or not it’s been nailed down and protected enough, then what happens to media that isn’t properly protected? What happens when the “stealing” isn’t someone copying a DVD for their laptop, but someone copying someone elses design and selling it on? If people aren’t trusted to know what’s right and wrong, then what reason is there for them to care? If they can copy someone else’s work, then there is the danger of the assumption that they are allowed to, so proper education is essential. If all you do is put more locks on something, all you end up with is better locksmiths (not to mention immense frustration when one day you forget your key.)

For an individual, giving a copy of a DVD to a friend might result in a loss of earnings of a few pounds by a multi-million dollar studio. But for a professional, copying a photograph for their website or catalogue, or using GPL’d software in their commercial project- that could result in a loss of earnings of hundreds of pounds or more.