Steve Ballmer's Thoughts On Free Software

An anonymous reader writes, "Steve Ballmer during a 3-day visit to India was asked about whether Free software is the future of India. And he effectively circumvented the question and answered that in the future, software businesses can look at a number of revenue streams such as subscription fees, lower cost hardware, advertising and of course traditional transaction. What is amusing is that in answering the question, he refuses to use the word 'free' or anything close to it."

Comments

India and free don't go well together

[dada21]

I was just in India this year (Spring 2006) for almost a month on a tour of Eastern Europe and Western India. The primary focus of the trip was to see how gold bullion affected areas with poverty and reduced labor. I was shocked at the competitive and relatively free market of India -- I also saw why so many people were gaining wealth and blowing open the tech community -- they were driven versus what I am familiar with in the States.

That being said, I don't think Ballmer was wrong to dance around the question. I think his answer hit the nail, head on!

Background on information and "free": When I ran my first multinode BBS starting in 1987, I saw that the future was something similar to client-server (the Internet never dawned on me at this point). My BBS was a pay-for-play gaming system, and people paid in order to connect and use the software that I 'rented' them via their ANSI terminal application. I saw how huge the future would be if the bandwidth could get beyond 2400 bps. I'm seeing that future today with things as simple as Wordpress and Google Spreadsheet. It blows my mind, and I do see how Microsoft wouldn't care about free software because it isn't on their radar screen. I don't know of much free software that is really competitive because truly free software doesn't have the support that it needs to compete with software that does have support. I'd rather see ad-bloated "free" software like Google Mail than bug-ridden memory-leaking software like Thunderbird. I use Firefox, but it is still a memory leaker that competes well with IE in terms of falling apart over a few hours of work.

The Indians will want nothing to do with it. India has a history of thousands of years of being capitalists -- only recently did we really see socialism take over, and it is starting to be pushed out by the millions who want to better their own lives and try to ignore what is best for "society" when they all know that the rest of society is made of individuals who also want to be better than them. The fact that India is growing in leaps and bounds comes because of the hard-driven individualistic atmosphere that exists in that country and seems to be in their blood (note: I have East Indian blood in me, but I am a mutt).

The Indians are already grasping the idea of advertising-funded online media, so maybe the next step is some sort of "use it for free" software -- but we all have to see that paid software seems to be better supported that truly free software. I love Google Mail, but it isn't free -- the ads displayed on the screen are paying for supporting the application developers. Americans tend to be anti-advertising, but the West Asian part of the world is definitely not -- when I was in India, I saw entire houses painted by a corporation to be their logo and color (the owner of the home was paid nicely for allowing it). I saw taxis driving around with vinyl-cut ads from every sort of retailer, small and large. I saw how heavily the "Bollywood-style" advertisements cluttered the mainstream media there. The Indians aren't afraid of finding a way to make money on everything they can -- in order to better their own lives without a big expense to anyone else.

The entire Indian economy is run in a balanced Statist-Anarchist way. If you buy anything large (car, house, land, business) you pay a small portion of "white" money (that is heavily taxed) and a big portion of "black" money (that is under the table, and often comes in the form of bullion). That's awesome -- people realize what a burden the State is, and they work around it. The same will be true of the "free" software drive there -- people will realize that they can gain without causing other people to lose -- by finding a way to subsidize whatever the future is of the software market.

Some Americans care about Open Source because they're anti-corporation, but that isn't the reason for Open Source, not really. Open Source and free software both come out of supply and demand: there is always a demand for som

Re:India and free don't go well together

[Dystopian Rebel]

The entire Indian economy is run in a balanced Statist-Anarchist way. If you buy anything large (car, house, land, business) you pay a small portion of "white" money (that is heavily taxed) and a big portion of "black" money (that is under the table, and often comes in the form of bullion). That's awesome -- people realize what a burden the State is, and they work around it.

And how are they working around the extreme poverty? And social services?

Yes, I thought so.

Re:India and free don't go well together

[El Torico]

Interesting first post; I have been to India twice and have seen many of the remarkable changes brought by Narasimha Rao's and Dr. Manmohan Singh's economic liberalization. It is another example of what improvements can be made when a nation decides to discard the failed ideology of Communism.

However, India has a very serious problem that you appear to view as a virtue.

The entire Indian economy is run in a balanced Statist-Anarchist way. If you buy anything large (car, house, land, business) you pay a small portion of "white" money (that is heavily taxed) and a big portion of "black" money (that is under the table, and often comes in the form of bullion). That's awesome -- people realize what a burden the State is, and they work around it. The same will be true of the "free" software drive there -- people will realize that they can gain without causing other people to lose -- by finding a way to subsidize whatever the future is of the software market.

What you are referring to when you say "black" money is tax evasion, and it is a means of corruption. I don't see how it can be compared to open source software. Can you (or someone else) explain this analogy? I don't see it.

Also, the State can be a burden, but the degree that it is a burden is ultimately under the control of the populace. The State is a necessity; order will always be imposed, contrary to what anarchists fantasize, since order is necessary.

Re:India and free don't go well together

[metlin]

Interesting first post; I have been to India twice and have seen many of the remarkable changes brought by Narasimha Rao's and Dr. Manmohan Singh's economic liberalization. It is another example of what improvements can be made when a nation decides to discard the failed ideology of Communism.

India was never communist -- they had a quasi Socialist economy post independence, for a short while. During this time, the state owned most most things, but the private sector was also allowed ownership of a lot of things.

Perhaps you meant Socialism, not Communism?

Re:India and free don't go well together

[NDPTAL85]

Let me get this straight. You were in Europe, land of free health care, and you went to a black market doctor ANYWAY?

Are you nuts?

Re:India and free don't go well together

[MostlyHarmless]

as more people embrace personal responsibility, thrift and love for their neighbor, we'll hopefully see more people who realize that government IS bad -- and it is better to have a small local government than a large federal one.

Frankly, if people embraced personal responsibility, thrift, and love for their neighbor, we could live under Marxism and we'd do equally well. The extremists on both sides of this argument (small vs. large government) make the same claim: that moving in the correct direction will cause a fundamental shift in human nature. I don't buy it from either side.

Re:India and free don't go well together

[ultranova]

Once upon a time everyone who owned a car was an amateur mechanic. Today we have vehicles that don't need much more than regular oil changes and the odd fill-up. There is no reason to expect that software will not follow essentially the same curve, and it is quite likely that the bottom of that curve for software will be zero support.

Yes there is, at least four reasons:

1. Car engines are relatively simple machines with a few dozen moving parts. An average computer central processor alone has about 20 million transistors.
2. Car engines operate by laws of physics, which have remained unchanged for at least billions of years. Computer programs operate within an everchanging mess of operating system quirks, library incompatibilities and outright bugs, varying amounts of memory, varying timing of operations, etc.
3. Car engines are assumed to operate in a friendly environment where no one actively puts a minefield on the road, fills the gasoline tank with maple syrup, replaces oxygen in air intake with gaseous nitroglycerin, pours fine sand into the oil tank, and runs the engine in redline for hours at the time - and neglects any kind of maintenance. Computers operate in an environment where any and all input is an attack vector one script kiddie or another will be utilizing sooner or later. They also face the very real possibility that some other program (possibly a virus) deletes or scrambles their important data or library files.
4. A car is used for one thing, and one thing only: moving from point A to point B. A computer can be used (programmed) for unlimited amounts of different things, most of which are still uninvented.

Cars and computers aren't comparable in any way. They aren't even near the same order of magnitude as far as technical complexity goes, and computers are infinitely flexible and need to handle any task gracefully while no one excepts a car to turn into a submarine or airplane when needed and complains loudly when it doesn't. Oh, and when a car gets hit with another car it gets taken to a repairman and repaired, while when a computer gets hit with a virus the owner most likely continues using it and lets damage accumulate.

In short: don't hold your breath.

Re:India and free don't go well together

[mha]

On the contrary, free open sourced software has much better support than proprietary software. With proprietary software you, the end user, are at the mercy of the maker of the software;...

Only a tiny percentage of "free software" has good support. The majority languishes after having been started with much enthusiasm. Then the author starts recognizing the amount of time and effort he has to put in. I just added some modules to a PHPBB2 forum I put on some website, and it was interesting to track the evolution of some of those modules. At the beginning the authors almost daily answered questions and posted updates. A few months later the project had been pretty much abandoned. Of course, some of the posts of users of that FREE stuff read as if they had paid a thousand dollars and now almost *demanded* the author to fulfill their wishes. Very few OS projects are (have become) large enough to attract enough followers - and that doesn't mean just users, but people who contribute LABOUR - to be self-sustainable.

As part of the collective...

[Codename46]

The word "free" was not assimilated, as the Borg collective concluded that it was irrelevant.

free software is good, but so is making money

[boxlight]

Free software is good, I use it all the time. It enables me to be more productive as a programmer, and it's great to learn from too.

However, I one day dream of owning and operating a successful software company so I understand the value of a closed source proprietary application. I'm no defender of Microsoft, but they're in the business of *selling* proprietary software -- I totally understand why they are not open sourcing their stuff.

boxlight

Re:free software is good, but so is making money

[mav[LAG]]

If we're talking about Free Software as in the FSF's definition, the free refers to freedom, not price. I used to make quite a nice living writing and selling Free Software.

Defense

[Nerdfest]

No too defend him (too much), but from a businesses point of view, there must be a revenue stream somewhere, be it for development, or just support. At some point, people want to get paid. Free works commercially, as long as someone, generally large companies, is willing to pay for guaranteed support.

Ballmer is a businessman.

[grrowl]

Ballmer is a businessman, and 'free' isn't a word in a businessman's dictionary. Add that to the fact that Microsoft is fairly entrenched in a business market, i'm not sure what else you'd expect. Even Canonical (Ubuntu's parent) has bills to pay, and these bills have to be paid somehow.

lower cost hardware?

[gEvil (beta)]

...software businesses can look at a number of revenue streams such as...lower cost hardware...

I'm assuming by this he means that as hardware costs drop, the overall product cost can remain the same or even increase, thereby increasing the percentage of revenue that's attributable to the software.

Ballmers Idea

[kurt555gs]

I think Ballmers, and M$'s ideas on free software can be sumed up by the following statement:

" Free software is fine, as long as it isn't really free, and we control it "

Anything more is simply a waste of words.

Cheers

Riiight

[The Cisco Kid]

Balmer is one of the top level executives at a company whose profits are made by selling proprietary software (Making it neither free-as-in-beer, except for all the pirating, nor Free-as-in-speech). If any major market decides to extensively embrace Free Software, his company stands to lose large amounts of future profits.

Asking him what *he* thinks of free software is not a fair question, neither to him (how can he possibly be honest) nor to anyone else that doesnt already understand that (they are likely to not understand that his answer is evasive at best)

Try asking a buggy whip exectuve what they think of the automobile, and internal combustion engines in general.

Re:Ballmer's Free Software

[arun_s]

So you'll find some of their free (yes, free) software on my machine.

Ballmer was not asked about free software (i.e. freeware), which he would hardly care about as opposition. He was asked about Free software, as in freedom. What you have of theirs in your machine is the former, which is not what the perceived threat to microsoft is.
You might want to brush up on the free beer/freedom thingies again.

rodent

[AntEater]

This is a classic tactic. Answer the question you want to answer rather than the one which really was asked of you. Basically Balmer didn't want to discuss free software so he discussed revenue streams (which is all software is about in his mind anyways). Anytime someone does this you can be sure that they're not interested in your interests, just their own.

How much support do you need, honestly?

[Weaselmancer]

I don't know of much free software that is really competitive because truly free software doesn't have the support that it needs to compete with software that does have support.

For most people it's email, office applications, web browser, solitaire. I keep seeing this support argument tossed around and every time I ask myself - honestly, how much support does someone actually need?

I used to do end-user support for a living (think Geek Squad-like work). And 99% of the time, it was getting rid of spyware/viruses. Most people really don't need more than that, in my experience.

Re:How much support do you need, honestly?

[Weaselmancer]

Most people, when referring to the support needed, are talking about Companies, not Individuals.

You make a valid point about business. Downtime is lost money and that adds up fast. But - the original poster's point is the following:

I don't know of much free software that is really competitive because truly free software doesn't have the support that it needs to compete with software that does have support.

Most of the computers running today are not business computers. They are end-users. To apply a business metric to these users is incorrect, IMHO. Your average user doesn't need tier-1 24/7 support.

Using this as an argument against open source is misleading.

Re:How much support do you need, honestly?

[phorest]

For most people it's email, office applications, web browser, solitaire. I keep seeing this support argument tossed around and every time I ask myself - honestly, how much support does someone actually need?

Average users are just that, average users. They play solitaire and love it. They consider a computer an "appliance". They have never been introduced to programming, plugins, macros, etc...

People who need support are those that want to gain productivity. I also service computers part-time in PC Land and typically the people who use me would never-ever think to open up a readme file, let alone the actual compiled help files to work around a problem or to gain knowledge about the program they are using.

I pay for support when I get beyond readme's, help files and user-groups (sponsored and unsponsored). I will admit that doesn't happen much but when I need it I almost expect the support-crew to do it for me. After all I am paying, but to some degree I still want to learn it for myself.

Re:Ballmer's Free Software

[petrus4]

Quite amusing. Yes, I hate Microsoft just as much as you do. Utterly loath and detest those despicable bastards.

As hard as I try not to, I'm starting to hate the FSF just as much, if not more. The self-righteousness, the arrogance, and the brutal insistence on lock-step conformity with their "our way or the highway," thinking...not to mention the juvenile name-calling and vilification (and worse, in the case of Laura Didio) which anyone who opposes them is subjected to. The one way I've heard it described which really resonated with me was, "Free as in do as I say."

The response I'll no doubt get to this is a catalogue of all the terrible things Microsoft either has done in the past or wants to do in the future.

The thing is, I really feel that Stallman/Kuhn with the DRM fearmongering is a lot like how I saw George Bush on the one hand, and Sadaam Hussein and the threat of WMD on the other.

What Microsoft *might* end up doing with DRM is causing me a lot less emotional pain than how Stallman, Kuhn, and their followers *are* treating people because of their fear of it.

The other reason why I've realised that I'm no longer interested in being refuted by advocates of the FSF is because I honestly don't believe they think at all. They're a cult...and as such, me arguing with them is pointless...because nothing I say can argue with mind control, their degree of fear, or their equally irrational degree of worship for Stallman. The degree of fear is the most difficult thing to get through.

Ask yourselves this though, guys...If Stallman is as powerful as you think he is...What are you so afraid of?

Which free are you talking about?

[Vellmont]

Why is it so many people on Slashdot only seem to care about the "free as in beer" definition of free? Business guys LOVE the freedom definition of free. Why do you think they like free trade so much? Freedom gives you flexibility, and business tends to thrive on flexibility since you can easily adapt and aren't stuck in one path. Most businesses would love to be free from the lock-in of proprietary software. Most of them just can't do it though because the headlock is too tight, or there's no open source alternative.

Re:"...People realize what a burden the state is..

[ultranova]

The function of the state is to protect capital and regulate its ownership.

The function of the state is to protect its citizens. Protecting their property is just a nice aftertought.

terminology

[bitspotter]

This is where we suffer once again from the a ability to conflate gratis with libre. When a journalist says "free software", it's an ambiguous term, so Ballmer gets to pick which frame which is to his best advantage. Of course, he immediately starts talking about the software //business//, which is the context that Microsoft exists entirely within.

Libre software only partially exists in the business world, however. Industry can benefit from user freedom the same as everyone else.

It bugs me that "free software" is the term de jour when the gratis/libre confusion is mainly caused by the selection of a thing - software - for the object of the adjective. Things have no use for freedom; as such, it's reasonable to assume that free software means gratis. Software has no use for freedom; //users// do. We would be better off referring more to user freedom (eg "the free user foudation") that to free software.