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Open Source And The Obligation To Recycle
Lisa writes "Tim O'Reilly has a piece called "Open Source and the Obligation to Recycle" in his weblog, where he urges every company whose products are "obsolete" to consider making them available under an open source license, or putting them in the public domain, thereby enriching the soil of our collective commons. (Interestingly, the first posting on the weblog disagrees, saying "...Giving away the software of failed companies could turn every corporate failure into a disaster for everyone else.)""
Giving away the software of failed companies could turn every corporate failure into a disaster for everyone else.
I'm probably taking this out of context, but this is a silly thing to say:
1. Corporate failures are not directly tied to bad software.
2. You can still learn something from the source code of bad software, even if it's only what not to do.
-------------------------------------------------
charlton heston is more of a man than yo
Although I agree that on the surface it would be great to open source, and free up all products that are no longer supported. But wouldn't this cause a trend of people not buying commercial software, and just waiting for them to go out of business so they could get it for free?
Yes, if BeOS could open-source it...
However, they can't: they don't actually own all the code on that BeOS CD, and it would cost a reasonably large amount to divest all the non-BeOS code from the code that they could legally open-source. Besides, doesn't Sony own it all now anyway?
I was half expecting him to mention Eazel and Nautilus as a perfect example of what he's talking about, but I guess he missed that. Heh.
I feel his pain, there are some really old programs that I would love to play around with now. Anyone remember Geos? I used to run it on my 286 and was years ahead of its time....
I remember reading up the other day on a game called Star Command.
/MIGHT/ be upgraded to something modern and ported all over heck and such, but shoot, reality is that it would cost them MONEY when they are already a struggeling small company.
/ALL/.
/REDUCE/ the copyright limit. ~7years for computer programs and ~25 years for books and other documents sounds nice. (Some books stay in print and keep on selling for longer then that though)
When asked why they didn't release the game for free or open source it, a person in the company (CEO/Lead developer or some such high up person, small company anyways) said that it would take too much of their time and money.
First they would have to try and FIND the source code (doubtful if it still existed), then if they managed to do that, reassign some people from another money making project to taking an old (in this case DOS game) and removing the protections and security checks they put in there and scanning in the documentation, bundeling it up, setting up a server for distribution (or maintaining a sourceforge account, granted they could pass it on to somebody, but then that entales the legal issues involved), all just to make a few people happy that they could now freely get an old DOS game.
Sure it
Not to mention cases where the rights to a program are split across a few gazzilion people and numerious corporations. This is especialy true when one company has the rights to the game and another company has the rights to distribution. Icky situation there. And if by some chance somebody sold off merchandising rights. . . . oh man, no hope at
A good first step though would be to
At least it would take care of the legal hassles somewhat, but it still wouldn't help with finding the sourcecode.
"umm, lets see now, where did I shove that 5.25' disk. . . . . "
Need help treating your acne? Come here!
I think the correct wording is (bold words mine):
Interestingly, the first posting on the weblog appears to disagree, saying "...Giving away the software of failed companies could turn every corporate failure into a disaster for everyone else."
While the software of failed companies seems at first blush like a bad idea, in actuality a lot of the code is quite good and useable. Having a huge base of code, good or not, to work from can be quite a boon; the trick is to be choosy with what you actually end up using.
So, while having the software available may be a good idea, actually using it may not be.
I am disrespectful to dirt! Can you see that I am serious?!
My first candidate for free source to a discontinued product would be the DOS version of word perfect. The reason why is that I would like a console only (no X) version of WP for linux.
What others ?
Ryan T. Sammartino
"Ancora imparo"
But if you look at the complete Open Books list, you'll also see a number of out of print books. These books were open sourced not because we wanted to spread the software or the ideas, but because we felt an obligation to make the material available to those who could make use of it even after we were no longer able to sell the books profitably ourselves. This is recycling in action.
If had you bothered to read the article, he mentions that he has.
At the very least, opening the source of dead software allows these former employees to consult for the former customers without the intermediary corporate leaders and their marketing department.
Even if a product as a whole was not viable, there may be components that could be packaged up as valuable contributions to the OSS community. And there are definitely engineers (like me) with enough time on their hands and the strong desire to see something of value come from the ashes of old dead projects.
...Nothing interesting here. Just move along...
The debate over abadonware has been going on for awhile now (though it usually centers around the gaming arena).
It's good to see someone with ranking stature taking on such a muddled but oddly important issue. The reason most companies would be against giving away outright their copyright on "abandonded" products is the fear of repackaging and their loss on what could be someone else's gain. However, if legislation (or a license) could be produced to qualm these kinds of fears while still allowing legitimate uses of abandonded products to take place, I think a happy medium between both sides would be found.
"Moving through the masses like a fish through water." syrup
I presume what the poster means is that by giving away the software, the company destroys the market for the competitors.
Well, that isn't quite true, as we have seen again and again. In fact, in real life, the source code and executable are only a small part of the value of a software product. Most of the value is in the ongoing maintenance, business relationships, trademarks, the user base, the books that have been written about it, in short, the "network" that surrounds it.
To the degree that it is true, well, software companies simply have to get used to the fact that, once created, it costs nothing to give software to additional people--that ultimately has a lot of influence over how software can be priced and licensed. There is no use whining about basic economic realities.
Yea, that's all we need... a bunch of Windows 3.1 clones! Maybe Attack of the Clones isn't so far-fetched anyhow?
If you read BrettGlass's argument, you'd realized that he wasn't arguing disaster due to bad code, but disaster due to individuals using a free alternative over a superior still-commercial product, driving the developers of that commercial product out of business..
His argument that freeing abandoned software would eliminate all incentive to produce is indeed flawed -- there are many fields in which quality free software exists, is being actively (comercially) developed, and has commercial competition which has not been killed as a result.
Before responding to an argument, perhaps you should read it first.
"...Giving away the software of failed companies could turn every corporate failure into a disaster for everyone else.)"
I have to emphatically disagree. The rise and fall of a software product's success has far more to do with market dynamics, marketing itself, business decisions, and any variety of other dynamics than it does software quality or the usefulness of source code to the community.
C//
All this really does is to express evidence of a need to change the IP so to better support what they were intended to support.
See my journal for more.
I've often wondered why more companies don't release the source code once the product is no longer viable. When I was younger and less experienced in the corporate world, I'd always thought it was because corporations were made up of evil bastards who want to control everything. As it turns out, most corporations are just made up of people who want to keep their jobs.
:)
Anyway, a really good reason for not releasing the source code is that no matter how hard you try, you ALWAYS end up supporting it. I'm sure in most cases it would be a hassle and an unnecessary expenditure. Not to mention any legal issues that might arise if it becomes evident that a company has *ahem* borrowed code from someone else's product. I bet we'd be amazed to see the amount of IT espionage that happens between major competitors.
You know, there are quite a lot of game companies that I wish did this though. Besides id.
My sigs always suck.
Does he mean GPL or public domain? I would much rather prefer the latter, since it would probably be the fairest way to do it.
Got Freedom?
Thinking?
You may want to look around on the Web for 'abandonware' sites, which make such programs available (sometimes without the proper permissions). Simply searching google for the keyword 'abandonware' with the title of the game in question should get you somewhere. The line is pretty blurry between abandonware and warez sometimes though, beware.
You can learn a lot from failed software. My experience has been that software fails when requirements are vauge and the developers spend time architecting kewl stuff and polishing it rather than letting the marketing dept make sure it gives the users a few key features, and push it out the door when it's barely good enough (this is what makes MS what they are today).
Anyways the sad truth is that failed software often has really neat code. Beos, anyone?
My Karma: ran over your Dogma
StrawberryFrog
(IANAL)
With regards to solvent companies opening "obsolete" software...
It occurs to me that part of the problem may also be in terms of companies and protecting their existing intelectual property. If a company decides that a particular software product is too old, or not selling well enough, and they release it to the public (either as source or binary) then might it be argued that they are no longer actively protecting their IP and leave themselves more open to their competitors?
For example, you can no longer (I think) buy a copy of Doom or Quake, and while the *engine* code has been released under the GPL, the rest of the games (graphics, levels, sounds, etc) remain copyrighted to id.
(/IANAL)
Companies in bankruptcy can't give away assets; they have to be sold to pay off creditors. (Though if software is truly worthless, perhaps the highest bidder might be someone who would pay $1 to open source it.)
software is an asset, if I company just gave it away, its value would decline.
Right or wrong, That is how it would be seen in the financial and business world. That also happens to be the world you need to look good in to survive.
If a company goes chapter 11, that asset is delegated by the courts.
Plus, what happen if someone releases a crappy product, has no sales, then someone come along, puts in 2 week worth of work, and creats a product thats in demand? The company would look bad, and you don't want to look bad to the market.
Are these reason pretty stupid since that compnay wouldn't be making money from the product anyways? yes, but what dpoes that have to do with business?
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I agree with the recycle concept of obsolete software, there are a few companies that do this, ID Software as mentioned here last week, and a few others,
:) People actually feared for not only their status after peer review but their jobs as well.
:)
Many companies , especially smaller ones have issues releasing their code even after their demise because of Ego issues, yes Ego, they write stuuf and will sell it , and some of it is a lame horrid hack. Even if it isnt people are afraid of rejection of their coding practices,
Dont belive me, ask some people over at sun what it was like when they made their source avaiable, developers panicked, at the thought of open review of their code, I saw so much code bashing BEFORE a single line was released I thought shit, anyone ever get to my code Im in trouble
Granted It may be different when a company dumps into ch11 but not a whole lot, Ive written code I am truly proud of , the stuff that people I think are out of my league have said I dont know how it can work, thats one of the nicest pieces of code Ive ever seen......AND Ive written code I myself looked at 5 years later and yelled who wrote this shit, only to see it was me...
I wouldnt want that code out there....(well some of it is....anyone running Apache on Windows
Ego.....makes the world go round.....
Sig went tro...aahemmm.....fishing........
Software that gets orphaned by a company that goes out of business most likely is not obsolete and its release to the public could have damaging effects on competitors. However, if that's the case, it's the job of the bankruptcy judge, trustee, or whoever is shutting down the company to recognize that software still has value. If the software is still so competitive it could put someone else out of business, chances are someone will want to buy that software. And that value should be returned to creditors or shareholders of the defunct company that otherwise would receive nothing.
Abandonware on the other hand, is software that its "parent" deems obsolete and of little or no value anymore. There are a lot of other programmers (both hobbiest and professional) that could take advantage of recycling "useless" code. O'Reilly's example of a user wanting to share "obsolete" software for a niche application is something I have experienced myself and it is frustrating. I say encourage companies to release their abandonware to the public.
In either case however, the decision should be voluntary, and in the case of bankruptcy, with input from all interested parties.
I can understand why companies (especially the big guys) are reluctant to share abandonware. The support issue really never goes away. In some cases there might be some lingering IP that you carried through to your current products that your competitors still don't have, and you might not even know it. I think a lot of companies hold onto abandonware because they don't want to unknowingly form the basis for someone else's business or worse yet, aid their competitors.
-z
In Soviet Russia, the Beowulf cluster imagines you!
Does he plan to make all the out of print books
text available?
This article illustrates the complete failure of the only constitutional purpose of modern copyright law with respect to software -- a failure to establish a public domain, in both senses of the word.
The first sense is the idea of public domain as "uncopyrighted" or "expired copyright." Had Congress resisted the urge to tamper with the copyright laws in 1976, things would be different. Under the pre-1976 copyright regime, copyright lasted for 28 years, with the option to re-register for an additional 28 year term. Under this system, abandonware from the early 1970s would be now regularly entering the public domain. In two or so years, we would start to see the first generation of abandoned PC software enter the public domain -- old Apple II software, games and system software from long-lost companies. Instead, by repeatedly extending copyright, and removing the renewal requirement, Congress has essentially consigned the history of computer software to destruction. Very few of us will live long enough to be allowed to legally copy the software that was written before many of us were even born. Even if we did live long enough, the media will have long decayed, any software from the early days of personal computers will only survive as illegally made copies. In essence, Congress has criminalized the work of the historian and archivist, with no real benefit to anyone.
There is another sense of the "public domain" in which the copyright laws have even more drastically failed. This is the sense of the "public domain" as "the body of work available to the public to read and learn from." The problem is that by allowing copyright on object code, and by allowing software publishers to treat source code as trade secrets, in essence, computer programmers are forced to learn their trade from scratch. Imagine if a student expressed an interest in becoming a writer, and was told, "If you want to be a writer, you will never be permitted to legally read books written by successful, popular authors." I doubt that the result would be better literature, but that our public policy with respect to software -- both by attaching copyright protection to object code, and by allowing the attachment of licenses to software that forbid reverse-engineering -- a technical term for "reading" software.
The primary purpose of copyright was to place knowledge into the public domain. That's why patents must be openly published, and why, originally, only published works were eligible for copyright. Now, with copyright protection automatically attaching to all works, whether or not they are ever published in a form that adds to the public domain, we are back to the bad old days of proprietary licensing of -- and the subsequent destruction of learning and knowledge -- the very problem that copyright was designed to put an end to!
I believe that the real revolution in free software is not a better business model. It is not the sense of community that it fosters. It is not the reduced costs or the improved quality.
The real revolution in free software is that it in effect reestablishes the public domain that has been systematically destroyed by Congress in passing ever more restrictive, destructive copyright legislation. In the year 2002, free software is the public domain. It's the software that you can download, study, modify, improve, sell, and give away. It's the software that you can learn from, instead of just use.
Unlike proprietary software, free software is the software that promotes the progress of science and the useful arts, and anyone who is interested in promoting progress in the field of computer science should strongly consider releasing their software under the GPL, after its commercial potential has been exhausted.
I really disagree with Tim's proposal to force abandoned code to be made available at the source code level. That's not free speech, it's forced speech. Sure Lotus Improv is out there already, it's been abandoned, let people copy the binaries as they wish. But to force Lotus to cough up the source is an unreasonable burden. Hell, the source code could be near impossible to find even for the original programmers. Finally, the source code can represent an asset for the company that will be valuable when they sell off.
-sk
BrettGlass' objections to the GPL are just that - GPL specific. Really this is easy to work around; (1) if you don't like GPL, don't release it that way; and (2) if you don't like GPL, don't use GPL code, including obsolete code. The publisher can and should decide which way (GPL or something else) is better.
What I don't see is the downside. What possible harm could come from code being out there? Sure, it's harmful to competitors, but so also is newly written GPL (or BSD, or ...) code that's out there, free as in beer/speech, and in any case protecting competitors shouldn't be our business.
If it's bad for the publisher, for example if it increases support costs or cannibalizes sales of the current product, then of course the publisher may choose to trash it. But if it isn't, there's zero (0) harm to anyone else, so let's encourage this behavior!
sulli
RTFJ.
What about Opera? You may disagree that it's better, but it's clear that the company is certainly trying.
Opera?
Did I claim that the "free" OSes are superior? I think you're putting words in my mouth. (Incidentally, I like them, make good money working with them, and have all the apps I need... but that's not a battle I want to fight right now).
:)
Anyhow, IE hasn't stopped all browser development. I use Galeon, and consider it the best browser out there. However, Mozilla is still being developed with commercial support (my company is providing some of it -- we provide an OS layer and stock apps to folks building embedded systems, and offer Mozilla as one of our browser options) and Opera is still in business too.
Incidentally, btw, the OS layer we make good money selling and supporting is Linux. Chew on that, bucko!
had something similar in Wired a few months ago. He proposed that software be held in trust by the patent office, (or was it copyright?), and when the patent(copyright) expired(a shorter time than regular copyright, because of the nature of software), be put out to the public. Sounds good to me.
Damnit, Jim, I'm an anarchist, not a F@#$!^& doctor!
I'm such a cynic.
-- Oh Well
-sk
Brett's example doesn't exactly help his case.
By his argument, Evolution should sound Outlook's death knell*, just as Outlook drove under ECCO, Sidekick, et. al. But Brett forgot one thing: Microsoft is a monopolist. Outlook got ahead because OEM pre-loads and corporate standardization forced it on to every desktop. Outlook isn't ahead because it is "gratis". Nothing in Office is, regardless of the delta in price between versions. Microsoft's monopoly power allows it to set the price of Office to whatever it damn well pleases.
Even in a market with ideal competition, TANSTAAFL. It's that whole Total Cost of Ownership thing. If the commercial product is cheaper and easier to maintain, it will eventually win. If the freed legacy app comes with high training and migration costs, it's screwed.
*: In a perfect world, Evolution would, but....
This sig intentionally left blank.
The request sounds simple in theory, but as always it's more complicated than this.
// we have to do it this way because Intel is a bunch of fucking idiots
// Bob Martel isn't at the company anymore, so I can safely say that this is the worse piece of shit code I've ever seen. I'll rewrite it when I get a chance
... sort of like quickly straightening up the house before visitors show up. I don't want people seeing my dirty laundry. If I don't have time to straighten up, I'd rather not let people in at all.
What if somebody is scanning through the code and finds
Would you really want that being leaked into the public? Particularly if you have a close working relationship with Intel?
Or how about:
Not to mention potentially plagiarized code, or patent violations, or any number of other nastiness buried in the code. Sure, it *probably* doesn't contain any of the above, but do you really want to scan through all two million lines of it just to make sure?
Further, every time somebody wants to see my source code, I find myself preparing it a little more thoroughly. Removing a few of those ugly hacks, documenting the ones I can't remove
Source code is the same way -- you generally don't want other people looking over it until you've had a chance to clean it up a little bit. If you don't want to clean it up, you just don't release it. Releasing source code *always* costs time and money to a corporation.
ZFS: because love is never having to say fsck
Heh. From what I've seen of failed companies or read about their failures, not that many failed as a result of poor software (or any other product). Rather some spectacular administrative screwup, boneheaded marketing decisions, or just bad timing seems to have been more at fault.
Heck, if bad software could sink a company, Microsoft would have been history over a decade ago.
IMHO, turning over the software assets of failed companies to some site that would make them available to all-comers for inspection and cannibalization would be great. Sort of a farewell gift:
(My pessimistic side senses that this'll never happen as some lawyers will find a way to make it impossible.)
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
While protecting competitors shouldn't be our business, neither should destroying other businesses.
-sk
See for example the massive collection of PDP-10 (the architecture that the Arpanet and early TCP/IP stuff was done on, and certainly the source of much of the hacker culture) software at
or the large number of historically interesting OS's and tools (including many early Unix releases) that you can run onThat said, these only scratch the surface of vitally interesting stuff that needs to be preserved, so anything to further similar projects is 100% goodness.
Ignore the fact that they catalyzed the web market (either as Netscape or as their preceding life as the Mosaic free university-ware browser) by making it easy to view pictures and text on the same page, as opposed to the previous ftp-like interfaces. And those Bad Bad Netscape Monopolists destroyed the chances for REAL HYPERTEXT which the Xanadu project was planning to ship Real Soon (after a mere 25 years of development :-).
Also, people *do* make superior browsers. The World Wide Web Consortium W3.org has done a variety of browsers that are cleaner, smaller, and more correct than the big MS and NetscapeZilla product suites. Opera has been lured away into bloatware by the evils of flashiness and feature creep, so they're no longer the lean, mean, fits-on-a-floppy browser that their wonderful early versions were, but they're still a lot smaller than their major competitors. And there are bunches of EMACS-based browser hacks, which were the original integrated browser/mailtool/newsreader/wordprocessor suite. (It's no longer "Eight Megabytes", but it's still "And Continually Swapping".
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Netscape was selling their browser (on a "try me first" plan) until Internet Explorer under cut their price, $35 as I recall. Plus tax and shipping.
So it's improper to claim that Netscape destroyed the browser market. They were trying to grow their market (wasn't it web server software?) so they were selling it at cost, or slightly less. And not worrying too much about the individuals that ripped off copies. (Does AOL worry about copies of the subscription CDs?) But they were selling them until MS started giving away IE.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
I have to disagree with him on the degree of harm that would be caused to commercial development efforts by this. The market has already shown a tendancy to go with commercially supported solutions.
You're being kind.
He is basically arguing that if a failed package in a given market becomes free, it will automatically overtake the previously victorious competitor, even if it is missing features or buggy.
Unfortunately, historical fact proves exactly the opposite. StarOffice/OpenOffice hasn't made even a fractional percentage dent into Microsoft Office's sales. Interbase has taken exactly zero customers away from Oracle.
Now, it is certainly true that a pre-existing free product may discourage further development in the niche it occupies. Thus do we have the complete paucity of alternatives to GCC on the Linux and BSD platforms. But that's a very different scenario than the one Glass is addressing.
News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters? Like hell.
I've found W3's browsers to be buggy and crash a lot. That said, they often have interesting features...
Be, Inc just got bought by Palm, Inc. BeOS was a great software product, and now probably has no use to Palm anyway. People are petitioning for its source code to be released.
The problem with this is licensing conflicts. I'm sure it would take a lot of work to just strip out the code that can be released without being sued. Plus go through all the mundane release procedures, prepare announcements, package the code, etc. I know Palm doesn't want to invest man-hours into that, for basically no reason but a small group of peoples' affection.
Too bad things have to be so difficult...
Bad linux grammar makes me barfen. And what the hell is u*ix? Do you meanen *nix? They maden unix only.... go aheaden and usen the whole word.
Right on the money.... who cares about source code? I don't want to hack Bard's Tale, just to play it again....
It's not about using code. And it's not about giving away source code, just removing copyright protection. Briefly, if word processor company x went out of business and removed copyright protection from their program, anybody could then use it for no cost - nothing to prevent people copying it and giving it away. So that word processor company y would have a smaller group of people to sell to and their business would suffer. The assumption being of course that we should give a rat's ass about a soulless multi-nat or naive start-up. Which I don't, so the argument carries no weight with me.
I owned Bard's Tale on my old Amiga. Don't have the Amiga any more, can't buy the game for the PC. Now I could copy it from any of a dozen abandonware sites and nobody would come after me, but I would be doing something that's technically illegal. Things that should be permissible and whose sanctions are not enforced shouldn't be illegal. It's illegal to have oral sex in Virginia. That law and copyright protection for abandonware have equal (that is zero) moral weight. Now I've never let these silly laws get in my way, but it annoys the heck out of me that just living my life, harming nobody, marks me as a criminal.
And the earlier posts about Frogger and Pac-Man - offbase there. You could remove copyright restrictions on the games, but still retain your registered trademark so that nobody else can make Frogger 2002, but people can play their childhood favorite for free.
With all due respect, if an actively developed, marketed, and supported product cannot withstand the horrific onslaught of an unsupported, unmarketed competitor that didn't succeed in the market in the first place, I doubt that even protection could help it or its manufacturer.
That is all.
I reject the notion that as a creator of code, I have an obligation to release this to the public if it becomes obsolete. It may be generous, it may be a good thing to do, but the proposition that I am obligated to do so is ludicrous.
And frankly, I find Tim O'Reilly's constant railing on the open source issue to be quite hypocritical. Almost all his books, it seems are under a license which would be roundly discredited if they were code, and I doubt that all his older books are all available for free. If O'Reilly believes so strongly in openness, why not release electronic copies of ALL his books, under a GPL-style license ? What makes book publishing so fundamentally different than publishing software ? Is it that he is making a pretty penny selling books to the crowd that is producing and studying this open source code ?
Suddenly, the market climate changes dramatically. A product similar to mine is available to consumers for free! Ironically, the failure of my competitor is likely to kill my company, too -- EVEN IF MY PRODUCT IS SUPERIOR.
I'm surprised that Brett's caps didn't trigger the lameness filter (I don't know if it will as I'm typing this.) Anyway, the reason he types in all caps is that he wants you to consider his conclusion rather than the logical conclusion of his argument. He implies that the best products will be less popular, hence reducing the quality of software in general. That's not correct. The correct conclusion is:
Now:
Firms charge users the value their software adds.
Recycle-world:
firms charge users the difference in value created between their product and the best free alternatives.
microsoftword.mp3 - it doesn't care that they're not words...
Wonderful! Imagine what it would do the programmers if they knew that in some years, maybe three, maybe seven, their code would be posted for anyone to read. Imagine a programmer explaining to a manager that the code he's written may solve the problem today, but he won't have his name going public with it, because frankly, it sucks, and given another week, he'll write a much neater implementation of the same algorithm...
Imagine if a company had a clause releasing all their software under GPL in case of bankruptcy or takeover (keeping the copyright and honouring all existing license agreements, of course). Great guarantee for customers, and a bit of extra stability for the company.
If I had to buy mission-critical software, I would love to have such conditions in the agreement. Wouldn't you?
In Murphy We Turst
What is it about lack of copyright, exactly, that causes people to behave the way the GPL would have them?
You, sir/madam, are the ignorant one.
"I have a good idea why it's hard to verify programs. They're usually wrong." --Manuel Blum, FOCS 94
I have to argue with you on this point. When the source code is available it does not make the game free. Available source code lets you learn from other people's programming techniques.
See with the release of the Quake 2 source. Nowhere does it say "Free copy of Quake 2!". It instead is an invitation for you to look at something done by an excellent and renown bunch of developers who continually push the edge on what you can pump through a graphics card.
You still have to buy Quake 2 if you want the maps, sounds, and textures.
All you gain is the ability to see what was going on inside that AI's head or that translucency routine.
O'Reilly is exceptional because they're closely affiliated with free information and open source software, so a lot of their authors are willing to let their books pass into free electronic distribution. Sorry, but that isn't what most writers want, and it isn't what most programmers want, either. Book contracts typically have clauses saying that if the book goes out of print, the rights go back to the author, who can then try to sell it to another publisher, self-publish it, give it away on the web, or transcribe it in crayon on toilet paper as a kind of performance art. Authors in general are very interested in getting their rights back in this situation.
What gives people the idea that they deserve to have their free information presented to them on a platter? Should Britney Spears be forced to produce music so that every antisocial college student in the world can download it for free? Why should commercial software companies be expected to give away their source code? We've all heard the Eric Raymond propaganda about how open source is such a superior method of development, destined to rule the planet, etc. If so, then why does the free information movement need a free handout? Open source software has a few huge success stories to brag about, e.g. Apache and Perl. But if the open-source movement doesn't do as well in other categories, it doesn't have a god-given right to be subsidized.
Find free books.
Mr. O'Reilly,
I would like to post a comment to your discussion of "The Obligation To Recycle", but the links to "must be a member" and "comment..." both lead me to "Bad username/password combination" with no way to say, "Of course it's bad, where do I sign up?"
Comment: I believe the real fault has been in the abusive extension of "copyright" enforcement beyond any rational meaning of "limited time". If copyright were given the same weight as patent, 7 years, such problems as the Lotus Improv one addressed in your article would be moot. If intellectual efforts after 7 years moved into the public domain just like physical efforts, we would all benefit.
Especially in computer terms, software more than 7 years old (dare I say two years?) is not something anyone is going to make a profit by keeping closed.
Releasing under GPL has a further problem: Later products from the same company may very well re-use code, so placing the earlier product under the GPL would backstab the later products. I have no wish to hinder people who want to sell closed source software if they so choose.
For centuries "we" have had the public domain for ideas that have run their commercial course. It is time that the extreme efforts of the entertainment lobby that has corrupted copyright, and destroyed the idea of the benefits of public domain, be rolled back.
Yes, Disney would loose their enforcement of a character invented early in the last century. But I would finally be able to put three black circles together any way I wanted to without asking anyone's permission for the first time in my life.
Bob-
The Ludwig von Mises Institute. The reasoning individuals economics
Actually, I have said the same thing several times. Just not as well.
Bravo, JMS. Bravicimo! Omedito! Salud!
Bob-
The Ludwig von Mises Institute. The reasoning individuals economics
About the Glass comment.. he says that a cheaper product will hurt a successful company charging more? Is that right? He doesn't believe in competition and free markets? What is he, some kind of... Communist?
I guess he's like the folks who want to make sure cheap alternative fuel sources never make it to market, so the oil companies can stay rich.
Never mind the fact that there are plenty of examples of similar products where the more expensive version is still more popular. From music, to software, to automobiles.
And the anti-GPL comment is meaningless. I suppose if I looked at Microsoft Windows source code with a Microsoft representative nearby, and then released something vaguely similar, I'd be okay? No, I'd get one hell of a "poison pill" from Redmond.
It sounds like half-completed thoughts. Kinda like when distributors of copyrighted works complain about how they won't be able to afford distribution if the public can copy their work for free... not realizing that they don't NEED to distribute it themselves any more.
That is an absurd statement, for several reasons.
I had an amiga then... original disks don't help me now. Hm, still available huh? I'll try to hunt it up.
argh... hit "submit" instead of "preview" (no caffeine yet today)... to continue:
What you seem to have missed about the GPL is that it is a license, not a law. That is, it is an agreement between the licensor and the licensee. It affects only what the licensee can do with the licensor's code in the future.
There is nothing about the GPL that prevents the company from turning around and licensing the code they wrote to someone else (or themselves) under a different, closed-source license.
What they can not do is take someone else's new, GPL-ed contributions to their now GPL-ed code and re-license them to someone else. Why? Because those independent contributions are not their code. That's one of the beautiful things about the GPL. I am unlikely to spend my own time debugging and fixing a program for a company if that company is going to turn around and try to sell my own code back to me. If they're not GPL'ed they can write their own damn code.
GPL-ing one's code, then, can (if one wishes to think of it this way) represent a sort of code fork, after which point the open- and closed- versions of the code assume lives of their own. However, in practice, since we're talking about supposedly-obsolete code, there would be little reason for any consumer to buy the closed-source version, unless the company later made modifications to it to make it more attractive than the GPL-ed version, like Tripwire has done.
To answer your question more specifically, Microsoft could GPL Win95 and continue to sell WinXP as a closed-source product. They could not take someone else's GPL-ed modified version of the GPL-ed Win95 and apply the changes therein to the closed WinXP (unless they made specific arrangements to re-license the code of the modifications from their author or authors), but if they didn't GPL Win95, there would be no such patch in the first place, so that's not really something to complain about. In fact, Microsoft could GPL WinXP and continue to sell and develop WinXP under a close-source license, though it is questionable whether anyone would buy it.
One reason for a company not to make their software public domain or BSD-licensed is that it might allow a competitor to start selling a modified version of the software and put them out of business (or, in Microsoft's case, force them to acquire the competitor). That's that advantage of the GPL again -- it prevents people from running off with your code and trying to sell it back to you.
Finally, let me direct you to this portion of the GPL FAQ, which also addresses these issues.
Don't believe the FUD.
... in my parent's basement :)
Actually my disks for that game got corrupted in the weirdest way... the power supply kept going out so the machine would crash randomly and I was playing Bard's Tale pretty much all the time. So in the constant crashes something got corrupted and some of the classes stopped getting their special abilities. My hunter's couldn't critical hit. Weird...