Software For Ransom

rbp writes "I just received a message from Adam Theo on the Jabber Developers Mailing List about what he calls "The Ransom Model" for software publishing. The principle, according to the above linked site, is that the "rights to the source code remain restricted until a set amount of money is collected or a set date passes, at which point the code is freed". Seems like a very interesting way to make money and produce free software. I think it's worth discussion. Take a look at the Ransom Model webpage and join the Ransom mailing list! (You might also be interested in recent news about Blender)" Reader Apreche adds a link to a Freshmeat editorial piece which draws on Theo's idea, writing "This has some obvious problems, but it is worth discussing. The biggest problem I see is where vaporware fits into the equation."

Comments

I think we're forgetting something

[ekrout]

Rights to the source code remain restricted until a set amount of money is collected or a set date passes, at which point the code is freed.

What happened to the "more eyes = better code" paradigm that so many Slashdotters and Open-/Free- Source gurus so frequently praise.

Listen, people -- if these new, deviant "random" coders start projects with expiration ("freed code") dates of 10 years down the road, no one will ever learn, improve, or assist innovation in the realm of software engineering. We will simply end up with thousands of under-funded vapourware applications, which in turn will stifle innovation for years to come when one considers all that *could have* been produced in the same amount of time with a more reasonable development model, such as Microsoft's Shared Source or ESR's Open Source.

Re:I think we're forgetting something

[Austenite]

There's a lot of problems with the above post!

First, let's get the nitpick out of the way: Why do you call someone starting a new software project "deviant"? "Free software is a matter of the users' freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve the software." Surely this also includes the freedom to fork or start new projects.

Next, the vaporware point - there are two counter-arguments here. If you don't like giving money to vaporware, don't! Support released projects, if you feel it's worth it. Also, the page linked to in the article specifically mentions: "Details: In short, Authors (the programmers of the software) first publish their work under a Ransom License (a special proprietary license)." (My italics.) It's not about paying for vaporware, it's about buying software if you think it's a worthwhile investment, with the possibility that it may become Free in the future, with all the associated benefits.

I believe that this model may be suitable for a great number of projects. I am sure many people's gripe with Microsoft, RIAA et al is not that they sell their digital information as a commercial product, which we can choose to buy or ignore, but that the business model they use does not reflect the real costs. It costs a lot of money to design, code, and market a product, but then it's cheap to duplicate that product. Trouble is, we are made to pay for these items long after the amortised cost of development has been returned - hence the astronomical profits of some successful companies.

These factors apply at different scales to many different products - and some scales are currently out of reach for Free Software. The principle is that it does take an investment of time and money to do some things (whether you personally think they should be done that way or not), and that this method may be a good way to gain a reasonable return on that investment without locking the product into a higher price in perpetuity than necessary.

Yes, it's similar to copyright - you get a limited time to exploit a body of work in order to realise a return, but then it's available for The Public Good. Do you think a non-profit organisation could have made the LOTR trilogy without being able to deliver some commercial benefit to its backers? How cool would it be, now that it has made millions for the studio, if legitimate high quality digital copies were available for the cost of making the DVD?

I'll finish (finally) with an example - a group of programmers would like to create an advanced compatibility driver set for GNU/Linux, to match or beat the drivers already available for Windows, for a large range of hardware. However, to buy one of each piece of hardware for testing, to look at the detailed product documentation (which is all freely supplied by hardware makers, naturally), to write the drivers, test them, to have somewhere to do it, and to publish them will take money. Say, $500,000 - even if the programmer's time is gratis. More if they need to eat and/or sleep. With Windows, you pay for that cost, a real cost, in every copy of Windows you buy for every computer. Let's say it contributes $5 to the retail price. But with the Ransom model, you decide - is it worth $5 to me to have the advanced compatability set? If yes, you hand over your $5, and when the development group has been returned their $500,000, it becomes Free for everyone.

You still have the product that you decided was worth $5, except now it's Free software.
You may not have decided it was worth $5, but now it's freely available, you can get the benefit, some time later.
The developers were able to access the funds to this project because they were able to show how they would return the investment.
This project got done where it would not have been done otherwise, because of such backing.

Well it looks ok on paper

[mt2mb4me]

The problem with this whole situation is this IMHO... first of all, this will cause people to (a) pirate what used to be free source anyways. (b) cause people like me to wait out the time limit so that i will always be two steps behind what is current unless we will fork out ca$h, (not bloody likely) (c) cause the free source community to stop doing it for the reason they started in the first place... Its a hobby, they enjoy it, and they want to make the computing world a better place. I am not trying to be flaimbait, but if i have to pay for *nux, or any software really, I would just stick with microsoft, due to the full featured compatibily and mainstream acceptance. Granted *nux is more robust, and far more efficient. Overall I am more inclined to do things by my pocketbook.

Money pit?

[Froobly]

Alright, so what happens when you "donate" to one of these projects? You give money, and if enough other people think it's worth their money, you get the software. Doesn't this mean that unless you're willing to finance the project in whole, there's no guarantee that you'll ever see the software? While I can see a good number of people supporting ransomed software out of good will, I can't see it working as a real business model, as people generally want some reassurance that they'll receive that for which they've paid.

Re:open source software eats programmer jobs

[Adam Theo]

I just want to point out that Ransom is not likely to work for people who would otherwise be able to purely open source the project. If a project is so easily done as an open source project, then a competing (fully open source) project will come along and take away the Ransomed project's users. Ransom will work best in areas where traditional (is open source old enough to have a "traditional" label???) open source can't work very easily, areas where the proprietary, corporate developers still rule.

A bunch of issues

[CFN]

I got a bunch of problems with this model. I'll mention them. Feel free to disagree.

I'm assuming that the binary must be free and freely distributable, otherwise, who would ever know about this project, and who, then, would donate money towards it. (Or, of course, this could have already been a commercial product that was not freely distributable, but that has a wide following.)

1) If a user does not care about every seeing the source code, he has no reason to pay for it, because again, he already has an unlimited right to use it as much as he wants.

2) Even if a user would like to see the source, he knows that it will one day be released, regardless of making a donation.

3) Even if a user would like to see the source as soon as possible, unless he can afford the entire ransom amount, he has no reason to believe that his donation will make the source released earlier: either not enough other people donate, so his donation is meaningless, or more than enough have donated, in which case his donation is unnecessary. (Do a google search on Kitty Genovese to see what I'm talking about).

Anyway, it doesn't seem like there is any reason for someone to donate, except for the same reasons they donate to OSS projects now. In fact, people might donate less, because nobody likes to pay "ransom" for anything.

Donation fraud, reputation

[WillWare]

There have been a few expressions of concern about vaporware. The solution to this is simple. What is held for ransom is the source code, but a working executable could be released, sufficient to demonstrate that the programmer really has written the program in question. There would still be an incentive to pay the ransom. An executable isn't as valuable to the average user as a program whose source has been released, because with the latter, it's possible to get peer review, upgrades and modifications, etc.

The server was slashdotted before I could read more than the front page (see Google cache), so I missed the "step-by-step process" description.

People have mentioned concerns about sky-high ransoms, but the free market will vote with its feet so that doesn't worry me. Likewise, the problem of a programmer who raises the ransom after the initial announcement will be solved because people will get disgusted and won't pay.

But there's a problem of fraud. Joe Programmer wrote Foo Program and I've donated ten bucks to have the source released. But I don't know if Joe counted my ten bucks toward the ransom, or simply pocketed it. If I'm patient and trusting, I can wait for market forces and reputation to filter out the programmers who pocket donations.

But Joe can do better by posting a list of donations. For donors who prefer to be anonymous, he assigns them a number and emails a copy of the number to them, so they can verify that their donations have been counted. Anybody can grab a snapshot of the donation list and throw it in a spreadsheet to verify the current tally.

Anybody whose donation was ignored can gripe in some suitable forum (Slashdot, Usenet, wherever) and if there are enough gripes that don't look like kooks, Joe's reputation will suffer.

Re:Eh, maybe its appropriate...

[rmohr02]

Well, it'd probably be in the EULA that the company *must* release the source after x dollars have been made. Otherwise people wouldn't really believe it. If you paid and the company doesn't release the source when specified, then you can sue.

mod parent up

[mattmunz]

A while ago, a friend of mine asked me how he could apply a sound economic model to the distribution of digital (a.k.a. easily reproducible) media. He wanted a system that fully accepted the near-uselessness of DRM technology. I told him about the "Street Performer Protocol".

This is the only model that makes sense to me in that it is clear, well-defined, and simple, yet complete. As the world "gets smaller", the information (knowledge) economy seems to be converging on a sort of minimum -- where the moment a piece of private information becomes public, it becomes public with a capital P (anyone who wants it will get it whether you like it or not). Digital technology allows the game of telephone to be played ad infinitum, and the message at the end of the line is the same as it was at the beginning. Sure, we can try to stretch the Copyright and Patent laws to fight this, but isn't the more intelligent solution to adapt to the new environment in a profitable way?

I have heard economists argue that "secrets" will become the most profitable asset in the information economy (as if they aren't already). This certainly applies to international politics and military affairs already.

In any case, it seems to me that SPP is in sync with all of this. And of course it applies to source code! I think that distributed development deserves a distributed payment system, based on SPP or something like it...

As for practicality, please note that SPP is not new or untested. Public Radio & Television, for example, has been doing it for decades: "We'll give you a quality stream of news/entertainment if and only if you pay us $X by date Y". And guess what -- it works. The government backs out of more of its commitment to funding public media each year, and yet the industry is here.

Probably the name is the worst part of the whole idea. I thought SPP was bad, but "Ransom" -- that's near idiotic -- the kind of name that makes great soundbites for the RIAA. Yeah, "Ransom" sucks. The idea of SPP is great though -- I just wonder why more folks aren't on the bandwagon yet?

BTW, the whole Stephen King experiment is an awful example of this, since there are so many external contributing factors. A fair first experiment with this concept would use a medium that is commonly distributed in digital format. While people do read from computer screens frequently, they do not tend to read novels on the computer. A more fair test would be in the distribution of music, software applications, software documentation, digital images, etc.

OK -- rant done.

Re:Ransom is such a negative word

[Reziac]

I agree, "ransom" is a good choice for simplicity and making its intent obvious. And "ransom" hasn't always had the negative connotations of the present. An older meaning is essentially equivalent to paying to get your property out of hock, more akin to escrow than to kidnapping.

I think it's a reasonable idea. It lets the developer set the return they feel they need to get for their efforts, while in due course giving "extra value" to their product (personally, I view assured eventual source releases as incentive to buy a program now, particularly one I can't live without).

I see it also can optionally tie this to a date after your major market is expected to have come and gone. That way it would function pretty much as copyright was originally intended to -- let the creator derive whatever "limited monopoly" benefit they can in a reasonable timeframe, then give their work to others to build on.

The one point where this gets a bit sticky is if it's an ongoing process where a program has regular upgrades built on the same codebase. Even so, releasing source when support for older versions is retired would be a reasonable thing to do (a la idSoftware), and the goodwill may well be worth far more in future sales than what little commercial value is left in outdated source.

Seems dumb

[jez9999]

This model seems stupid to me.

1. Software is released under a 'Ransom' license.
2. People don't buy the software, waiting for it to become free once x others have bought it.
3. No one buys the software.
4. The software never becomes free, and no one uses it.

It's wholly unfair that some people get to use it for free whilst others pay for it. Opensource developers SHOULD code apps because they like doing so, and because they're useful, and they should make their wages doing maintainance/individual projects for companies.