With all the talk/debate on this blog about patents and intellectual property, the question of open source software presents itself. Even aside from IP issues, no libertarian can possibly question the right of a company to keep its code proprietary, and certainly the techies I know believe that Microsoft gets a bum rap: its dominance is due mainly to its superior products, not its IP.
On the other hand, open source software is making huge advances in the sector that will have an impact on public opinion, namely end-user software. Two new developments:
The essential 
Firefox browser now has a wonderful google bar available, one stable (for the risk averse) and one Beta (for those who live on the bleeding edge). The bar is especially useful for the smart set, with its quick university searches. And Google local, scholar, image, and the rest, are built right in–along with a nice interface for customizing what you want on the bar itself.
Also, this is a landmark week in the history of Open Office. Its version 2.0 is out, and it is over-the-top wonderful. No user of MS Office will feel lost: the interface is the familiar but better.
It strikes me as a massive improvement over Word in every way, and if the PowerPoint and Excel features are as good (I haven’t tried them yet) it could easily rival the MS suite. The iconography of seagulls says it all: no more crazy and confusing license issues, no more messy codes, no more boggy functionality. (Because of crushing demand, downloads have been slow for a few days.)
{ 19 comments }
Some commentators are keen to cast the battles over IP rights and open source software as “big company vs little end-user”, but that actually understates the pro-freedom case. Most businesses are not software-selling businesses, and many of the largest companies in the world are large end-users of open source software like Linux and Apache. If special interests manage to interfere with the right to develop Free Software, these companies will be among the biggest losers.
You talk to the wrong “techies”. Many simply assume that market dominance implies a better product. Consumers are not generally offered a choice.
I’m not sure what you mean by “keep its code proprietary”. Does that mean they can prevent me from interoperating with it? That they can create a contract that would force other noxious terms so I could not legally use other software? If they sell something to me, do I own it or not?
Microsoft can pay congress and the EU to adopt a patent regime that will block opensource alternatives (most of which use copyright to remain open). If they can win on technical grounds, why is most of their effort toward marketing and legal lock-in?
“No libertarian,” huh? How about those few libertarians among us who recognize that Microsoft’s market dominance is due to its early lobbying to have software covered by copyright law instead of patent law, and early work to establish and use the BSA as its proxy of thuggery?
Indeed, Microsoft is not the hero of the piece, embodying the free market–it is a study of a powerful special interest enlisting the heavy hand of government monopoly enforcement to create “property” where none is necessary. Sorry, but Microsoft has nothing to do with the free market.
I believe what Jeffrey is saying is that even completely absent any IP laws (copyright, patent, trademark, or other), MS could still use EULAs, which they should have the right to do.
The argument that consumers don’t have a choice is non-sense. Anyone can buy a computer from a main OEM, wipe out the OS on it, and install Windows. They can also buy a computer without any OS on it. They can even buy a computer with a Linux distribution pre-installed. See RayServers.com.
However, there is a point about proprietary companies lobbying to socialize the cost of enforcing their proprietary EULAs. There’s also a point about blocking the development of open-source software, and using IP laws to prevent compatability engineering.
“MS could still use EULAs, which they should have the right to do”
Completely absent any IP laws, EULA are quite difficult to use. Stolen from legal possessor once, software can be distributed freely without breaking any law.
You can not just say that the code is “proprietary”.
No libertarian can possibly question the right of a company to keep its code secret, protected by encoding, keys, troyans, etc, without any regard to “fair use” concept. Only contractual obligations matter. Stolen software should be able to destroy computer, that will be a solution in the absence of IP law.
Vvagr,
The stealing of the software from the person who posesses the rightful license to use it would be criminal in the first place; the crook who did such could be held liable for damages to both the person he stole the software from and the company.
I find it difficult to get excited about redundant and bloated pieces of software like word processors, open source or not. Further, slideshow presentation software like Powerpoint is both redundant and obnoxious.
About the only thing I really like in any office suite is a spreadsheet. Excel is wonderful, the openoffice version is about as good. No complaints there.
I have used openoffice for a few years because it was one of the few things that would let me view MSWord documents created by others. 90% of the time these documents are simple in structure and would have been just as effective in plain text (and certainly easier for me to import and read).
Strange how some people think that the word processor is the thing that they have to use to compose such documents.
Anyway, the OpenOffice word processor is tolerable, i use it when I have to but usually prefer to simply compose text and then markup as i need to with tex or html. I find that my writing is a lot better that way.
I will note that neither the OpenOffice word procesor nor MSWord let you see the markup tags the way you could (or can) with WordPerfect. This leads to sometimes infuriating results.
But each to his own, i certainly don’t expect everybody to go out and learn tex. Just please stop sending me two paragraph MSWord documents, OK?
Mr. Tucker, I must agree that the “techies” you have been talking to must be MCSE types.
Microsoft got into the position they are in because of marketing. First, they convinced government contract writers that it is easier to write “Windows compatable” than to specify the exact parameters of the computers to order for projects.
Then, by changing file formats often, they were able to convince the world that the only “compatible” office software was Microsoft Office. However, anyone who tries to open a Word 5 or earlier document will discover that Microsoft has left vast libraries of “Microsoft” documents unreadable if the poor slob didn’t follow the approved upgrade path. Or even the Windows Media formats, which continue to, ahem, “evolve”. Not that I think WordPerfect wouldn’t have done exactly the same thing if Microsoft hadn’t marginalized them as quickly as they did.
Ask the Samba LAN service developers who have to constantly chase down the changes that MS makes when ever they release a new Windows, or even many service packs, in order to merely remain interoperable. This is even though Microsoft has been ordered to cooperate with the Samba team by the European court that convicted them of unfair business practices.
Lastly, they locked the PC makers into “You shall install Windows on every machine” contracts, and then have refused to honor their own EULA by not buying back un-used copies of Windows from people like me.
Even today, companies like Dell and Gateway face losing the “cut price” they get to resell Windows for if they offer machines without Windows pre-installed (much less preinstalling Linux or BSD). In order to not be priced out of the market, they cannot expand their product lines to include non-Microsoft OS’s.
Remember what I said about the “upgrade path”? One of the biggest selling points of the “Open Source” style is adherence to established, open protocols. That means a RedHat 6.2 server is exactly as useful today as it was the day it was installed. Everything it offered when it was first installed is perfectly usable by what is being used today.
Not that this as anything to do with patent or trademark, actually, except that Microsoft has tried to use their collection of patents to prevent interoperability with their products. That is, to crush innovation and usability.
I fear a world in which Microsoft is able to completely defeat open source. Such a world would require legal protection of a Microsoft monopoly around the world. I don’t need to explain to this audience how bad that would be. The negative aspects of that option have nothing to do with Microsoft either.
In the end, unless Microsoft gets a legally protected monopoly, there is no way that it will continue in its present form. All industries change over time. Software has been changing faster than most. Microsoft has gained its current position by producing products that are good enough for its market and then marketting them very effectively. Whether one agrees with their specific tactics or not, it is clear that in every case, they have defeated competitors with products that were equal, or initially better. They did it by selling more effectively.
I fear a world where anyone thinks that MS has ever come up with a “superior” product.
Mind you, I’ve been a “techie” for over 25 years, so I left my naive tech-ignorance behind long ago.
I can’t believe anyone takes EULAs seriously. An EULA is not a contract.
A contract involves negotiation of an exchange between two parties who cannot otherwise acquire what they want. Every buyer-seller exchange is a brief contract, and contracts can include non-monetary exchanges that include commitments to perform certain actions.
What’s more, a contract is not something you can be “tricked” into without consent. Consent does *not* consist of one party making the terms of acceptance something the other party was going to do anyway.
“If you breathe, you owe me $10″ is not a valid contract.
“If you eat the sandwich I just sold you, you agree not to eat my competitors’ sandwiches” is not a valid contract.
“If you install the software you already own, you agree to these extra conditions of mine” is not a valid contract.
Just imagine if, after completing the purchase of your new house, you arrive at the front door to see an EULA taped to the door – an EULA denying your ownership to the house and imposing limitations on using the house. Would it be a real contract? Of course not.
Nor is an EULA a valid license. No one needs a license to use a product they own. EULAs are simply sticks to bully your customers with. They are the horny fantasies of parasitic lawyers with nothing productive to do.
By the way, the design of Open Office is heavily based on and financially supported by Sun Microsystems and their proprietary StarOffice software. I don’t mention this to diminish from the potential quality of the software, but we should keep in mind that Open Office is a commercially-sponsored product that borrows heavily from both StarOffice and Microsoft Word and could not exist without them.
The same goes for Firefox (and googlebar). Google employs the lead developer of Firefox and has sponsored the development and marketing of the browser. Even Linux, the epitome of “open” software is driven by closed-source proprietary software such as Red Hat’s “Enterprise Linux AS” line.
“Open” source or not, the driving force of all these projects comes from leveraging innovation in proprietary intellectual property.
We do not mind. There are only so many words in any language, but endless stories to tell. The whole idea behind (most) open source sofware projects is to get solid frameworks out there upon which IT businesses with high hopes can develop for-profit technology solutions.
I hear your point about the possible loss of arms-length artistic control; gotta watch that.
hz, the last few version of Word have a feature very similar to the reveal tags feature of WordPerfect, only more user-friendly. It’s called reveal formatting.
Try as i might the closest i have come to a ‘reveal tags’ feature in Word (as of Word 2000) is the “What’s This?” on the help menu and revealing some field codes and paragraph marks. Still have a hard time finding where the markup starts and ends when I get in trouble. Maybe MS has included something like this post-Word2k.
A couple of other thoughts on this topic:
as suggested by others, i don’t think it’s prudent to archive your documents in a fairly closed proprietary format like MSWord. There is actually a fair probablility that in 10 or 15 years finding something that can read your document in Word2000 is going to be non-trivial. There is a reason Project Gutenberg stores all their electronic books in ASCII. If you spend 3 months on a report, you should at least spend 3 seconds saving a version as text… you might be glad you did.
We are facing this at work right now. I work at an old engineering firm, and we have paper files going back to the 50s that take up dozens of file cabinets. Yet it is a chore to dig up an electronic version of a report that was done 7 years ago. Part of that is a filing problem, part of it is a format problem.
PDF is a fine [binary] format, and I certainly hope the format doesn’t change over time such that a lot of the stuff we are archiving in pdf right now becomes difficult to read in the future.
I think the new OpenOffice beta stores files in XML, which makes me feel a whole lot better about archiving. And the last few versions of OO have included a decent pdf writer that I will admit I find handy.
[quote]
no libertarian can possibly question the right of a company to keep its code proprietary, and certainly the techies I know believe that Microsoft gets a bum rap: its dominance is due mainly to its superior products, not its IP.
[/quote]
You can’t be serious.
Granted, no company should be forced to reveal trade secrets and it they can find a technology which allows them to “lock” their source code, more power to them (setting aside the fact that open-source software is more far more likely to succeed because of its increased memetic fitness). But to assume that Micro$oft gained market share as a result of “superior products” is laughable and simply wrong. M$ gained market share the same way all megalithin corporations of its scale do, by tapping into the neo-mercantilist stream of State-corporatism.
ESR (Eric Raymond) is both a hacker and a market-anarchist and I suggest you read The Cathedral and the Bazaar (both the book and the brief essay) so that you may eschew your misconceptions about the nature of open-source software and the role of IP in market share. IN closing IP is wholly without defense from a free-Marekt perspective and open-source software is doing much not only to defuse it but is also proving that the flailing attempts to justify its enforcement are doomed to extinction.
Paul D: Your argument seems to make sense, but there are a few questions/comments I have about it:
-In the example of the house, you find the EULA taped to your door *after* you buy the house. Couldn’t Microsoft (say) fix this problem by saying assenting to the EULA was “implicit” when you bought the software from the store? Here I have in mind the kind of “implicit” contract to pay for a meal when you sit down in a resaurant. Or are you suggesting there is no moral obligation to pay when you sit down in a restaurant?
-You mention that “contracts can include non-monetary exchanges that include commitments to perform certain actions”. What limits are there on these actions? If I buy a lawnmower and part of the contract I make with the seller is that I will no longer drink milk, why or why not is it still moral to drink milk? If I rent an apartment and the lease prohibits premarital sex am I obligated to shun my girlfriend? If no, why not?
-You say that buyer-selleer exchanges are “brief”. What kinds of time limits do you have in mind? To take JTK’s example, if you recite a poem to me on the condition I not recite it to anyone else, is it moral to recite it to someone else, say, in 20 years? If you die beforehand? Five minute after you recite it? Never? A similar problem crops up with the copy of Atlas Shrugged on my bookshelf. I bought it when I was a high school student. Now, years later, am I still obligated to abide by the EULA that came with the book? Or was it never binding in the first place?
_Microsoft: Superior Superiority_
[quote]
Microsoft’s dominance is due mainly to its superior products,
not its IP.
[/quote]
Say instead that Microsoft’s superior products are due to its IP.
Superior to existing competitive software, not to the software
that might have been written in the absence of patents. Forgotten
man, people.
I know of one company that “partnered” with Microsoft on a project
because one had the patent on the concept of a virtual bookshelf
while the other had the patent on the concept of a virtual library.
Microsoft profits from software patents. But who can say how
significant software patents are to their profit?
_Microsoft: Doing Harm Versus Doing Wrong_
I do think that much of the criticism of Microsoft stems from
ignorance of the difference between doing harm and doing wrong.
Aside from their mercantilist expertise, Microsoft is also good at
using more ethical means to maximize the return on their property.
They know that once you develop software that depends on one of their
products, your profits depend on them as well. They are good at working
out a contract or business model designed to extract a share of that
profit. Microsoft gets some criticism for this, much as IBM did in their
day.
When Windows was new, Microsoft needed developers to write software
that ran on Windows. Unsurprisingly, they were nice to developers.
Interfaces were documented and available for standard languages, and
tools were free. But eventually a tipping point came, Microsoft no longer
depends on market growth, and software developers are dependent on
Microsoft instead.
By now, Microsoft is utterly unwilling to follow any existing industry
standard, so not only are their interfaces incompatible with other,
previously available interfaces, they are also written using Microsoft’s
own languages. A program written for Microsoft is almost unreadable to
a developer accustomed to a standard language. Documentation is sparser,
and not only is it not free, it is rented with yearly subscriptions.
Even the basic tools used to build programs have gone downhill: A library
of code for interacting with the operating system went from being free
to being bundled with the compiler to being available only to higher
level subscriptions of the compiler. Similarly, the off-the-shelf
Microsoft compiler does not optimize code as previous generations have
done.
I think much of the criticism directed at Microsoft from software
developers reflects this rent-seeking trend. Yes, developers have
been harmed by Microsoft’s changing policies. But doing harm is not
necessarily doing wrong. Setting up a lemonade stand across the street
from yours harms you, but you are not entitled to use violence to remedy
the situation.
Some of the criticism is justified. For example, Microsoft had an
agreement with Sun Microsystems to allow a Java component to be
bundled with Windows. Java was developed with the goal of operating
system independence; Microsoft’s component was dependent. Sun
complained that Microsoft’s component did not conform to the definition
of a Java implementation. Sun was adept in their definition of Java
and in their writing of the contract, so contract law provided a remedy.
I have no doubt that, in deference to its shareholders, Microsoft will
continue to explore the limits of legality in making money from their
property.
_Microsoft’s Competition_
In the ’80s, MS-DOS was an alternative to IBM PC-DOS. They were pretty
much identical. Existing programs written for PC-DOS would run on
machines using MS-DOS. Then Digital Research came out with DR-DOS.
DR had some minor extra features, plus disk compression was a timely
innovation. Existing programs written for PC-DOS or MS-DOS would run
on machines using DR-DOS. But soon, new versions of Microsoft programs
were released that wouldn’t work on DR-DOS. Technically, Microsoft
never said they would. The problem was that Digital Research was unable
to promise the inverse, that new versions of popular programs would be
able to run on existing DR-DOS machines.
In the 90′s, Netscape’s browser depended on Microsoft’s operating
system for mass acceptance. There was no non-compete agreement between
Microsoft and Netscape, and they may well have gotten into trouble with
the U.S. Department of Justice if they tried. We as consumers win when
Netscape comes out with a new product. We also win when Microsoft
“steals” our business by giving away a competitive product.
Sure we still pay for it when it’s bundled into the operating system.
But ultimately all we have to go on is the price. How much do I have
to pay for an ecru box that sits on my desk and helps me do X, Y and Z?
You could argue that we are stifling future innovations from Netscape
by buying from Microsoft. Why is that my problem as a consumer? I’m
no expert at innovation. If there are fewer innovations to steal/bundle
into the operating system, it will be Microsoft that feels the pressure.
It should be Netscape and Microsoft wrangling over a contract, not me.
_OpenSource Innovations_
The OpenSource community does have its share of raging free code flower
power socialists. But there is still plenty of room for capitalists.
One aspect of the OpenSource movement is the exploration of ways to make
money from an innovation that is less susceptible to, well, getting bundled
into the operating system.
some risk and uncertainty to the buyer.
installation and support is another business model.
your brand name is a money maker.
Comments on this entry are closed.