Slashdot Mirror
South African Minister Locks Horns With Microsoft
naheiw writes "The South African minister of public service and administration on Monday addressed the opening of the Idlelo 3 free software conference in Dakar, Senegal, saying that software patents posed a considerable threat to the growth of the African software sector (video). Microsoft responded aggressively, saying that 'there is no such thing as free software. Nobody develops software for charity.'"
Okay, so in the strictest sense of the terms, he's probably right. Software development isn't a charity.
Free Software (GPL/LGPL) is definitely not a charity, it's a give and take trading system. You put in, and you get out, and it largely self-improves through feedback, patches, bug reports, etc.
BSD comes closer, but still required attribution in the past, and of course, the developers were (back in the day) originally producing it as part of various university projects (ie, they get status in return), and more recently, are developing it as for-profit work, but are releasing it. Again, not charity.
That said, whether the argument's been taken out of context, or is accurate in other ways is another matter.
My jaw dropped too to see that South African Microsoft executive claim that. I've done a few transcriptions for CastingWords of recordings of discussions among Microsoft figures, and it's amazing how out of touch they are with the Free Software world. Granted, if you are working at Microsoft you are probably ideologically against the Free Software crowd, but most geeks are curious about other software projects going on just to get fresh coding perspectives--Jobs took a lot from PARC, for example. Microsoft just exists in its own little bubble.
Like the people in the RIAA, Microsoft just doesn't get it. The fundamental issue is not about whether software development is a charity (although sometimes I think that is a motivation), but about Economics 101 and prices in a competitive market. If they had paid attention in class, they would remember that, in a competitive market, the equilibrium price is found where price = marginal cost. The marginal cost of an additional unit of any digital work is very close to zero. So MS, the RIAA, and many others are engaged in an attempt (futile in the long run, IMO) to construct an economic perpetual motion machine by legal schemes and other rent-seeking behavior.
Microsoft in their arguement has managed to demonstrate a clear lack of understanding of the core issue.
Software is not a charity, nobody is discussing it as such.
Software is, however, a written tool, in the end. Control of that tool is the key to empowerment. South Africa, actually all of Africa was held under oppression for many centuries by corporate interests such as microsoft, who held the keys for livelihood out of the masses hands in order to force the yoke.
Microsoft cannot understand why people with such a memory would not jump at the option of putting a new yoke on their necks, to work themselves to death in order to enrich a new foreign master.
Karma Whoring for Fun and Profit.
Even since the days before Stallman, the reason people shared software (that is, they gave it away for free), is because it is practically cost-free to reproduce. A community of hackers use the same OS and tools. In my life, it's been DEC TOPS-10, then UNIX, then Linux, but no matter. We all run into the same bugs. Better for one of us to fix and share, than for each of us to find and fix the same bug. Better for each of us to write a tool and share with all, than for each of us to have to write the same tool, most of us doing it poorly. It seems so obvious.
Why did Bill Gates become fabulously wealthy? Because he produces a great product? I think not. Because he produces (and markets) an ok product that he can reproduce for pennies and sell for hundreds of dollars each. And he has managed to lock people into using his products.
The point is that economically speaking, there is a strong argument for sharing (and thereby dividing up) the cost of production of tools if you can reproduce the tools for no cost and with no restrictions. Microsoft may not like this, but a developing nation should understand the point.
If that's Microsoft's position, than clearly this organization is just another profiteer.
You've *kind of* touched on an important point. ;)
.NET, silverlight, VBScript, MSSQL, on windows server 2003, and not patented.
The Minister slammed software patents. Microsoft is slamming FOSS. While MS's slam, in and of itself, is flawed, it's also somewhat irrelevant. A piece of software that isn't patented isn't necessarily FOSS.
Consider the one-click buying patent, a favourite whipping boy(rightly so). This could be implemented with
The MS exec is trying to make a flawed implication(that absence of software patents == FOSS), because they think it helps their argument. That it doesn't help their argument is part and parcel to MS's failure to understand the FOSS movement.
In other words, MS is doubly wrong, and Linux pwns Steve Ballmer in the ear.
the 2 things MS is terrified of having to compet on.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
... if you don't allow patents, and therefore don't allow programmers to get money in exchange for coding... Huh? I'm calling shenanigans on you. Patents are not a mechanism by which programmers get paid for coding. They are a mechanism by which legal departments of companies harass their competitors, and by which companies that produce nothing engage in extortion. Programmers get paid to build software.He minus well have said - we need slavery, nobody will grow cotton on the plantations for free. The point being that copyright and patent are nothing like a normal property right and are the anti-christ of freedom and free markets. Every 'value' that they have is coerced at the expense of someone else, is asserting control over things they have no right to control, is an artificial monopoly.
and if you don't allow patents, and therefore don't allow programmers to get money in exchange for coding
That's called a non sequitur.
Most people who receive money in exchange for their work do so without having monopoly rights. There is no evidence that monopoly rights are necessary for monetizing software development; in fact, there's a vast array of evidence suggesting it's not at all necessary.
That evidence ranges from open source companies on one end to the vast majority of programmers hired for coding specific purpose software which is never released and for which copyright or patents is irrelevant.
On the other side is, eh, Microsoft. Claiming that they need software to cost money or they have no business model.
No shit. Wonder what makes them say that then.
I agree, that is the original intent of patents.
But has anyone heard of a little guy using a patent to stave off a large corporation from stealing his ideas in the last decade or so? It only works if the little guy has lawyers good enough to go to bat against the megacorporations likely to steal his patent. Which, of course, means he's not a little guy.
The patent game is a game played by companies with teams of lawyers on the payroll. IMHO, the little guy was bounced out of this arena sometime around 1950 or so. I know I haven't seen it be otherwise in my lifetime.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
There's another camp---indeed, the largest camp of all---the people who code because it solves a problem they have. In the absence of it being a competitive advantage for a corporation, there's no good reason not to share that with others so that it will help solve their problems, too. Lord knows I've done that quite often. Sure, I like name recognition, but I'd still do it even if nobody ever heard of me.
Similarly, when I run into a problem that prevents me from getting stuff done, I fix it and submit patches. They don't always get accepted, but at the very least, they are out there for other people who run into the same problems to use if they need them, and they make the original developer aware that people want a particular enhancement.
That said, there's still a payback. I'm getting useful functionality out of the code---functionality that I would not get without writing it. So pedantically speaking, the Microsoft rep is technically right. That said, since I had to write it anyway, from the perspective of the system as a whole, the existence of the software as a public resource is as close to "free" as you can get; if you don't consider that "free", then there's no such thing as "free" at all, and I would argue that this is a silly way to look at the world. If something occurs for no additional cost (or negligible cost) as a result of a process that you have to do anyway, that something is, by definition, free. Now the act of giving it away isn't free, mind you; there's a possible opportunity cost because perhaps you could have sold it and made money. However, this is lost potential revenue, and the effort that you would have to spend trying to obtain that income usually won't pay for itself anyway. As such, releasing it as open source often truly is free....
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Microsoft have used software libraries that were released by the BSD community in their products for years. They "incorporated" tools written by hobbiests into DOS, back in the day, without any note to the contributors. It only proves they move blindly towards the money, never look behind, and never clean the people they step on off the bottom of their shoes.
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
"98% of the source of new code does not come from software patents and I can prove it:
Mac OS X"
And MS-DOS, and Windows, and Word, and Excel, and... MS wouldn't exist in its current form if Digital Research had software patents on CP/M, or Apple had them on the original Mac and QuickTime, or Dan Bricklyn had patented the concepts in VisiCalc, or MicroPro had patented various WP concepts, or Borland had patented the IDE, or software patents had been present on any of the legion of other programs and associated software technologies that Microsoft have blatantly ripped off over the years.
To paraphrase Alastair Crowley: "Do as I say and not as I do shall be the whole of the law".
I'm not going to change your sheets again, Mr. Hastings.
Microsoft, in spite if its using the word to death, is simply too large and complex to innovate. Real innovators are far too likely to feel stifled and leave the company.
They aren't capable of admitting, or possibly even acknowledging this any more.
They came to my uni in 2002, and the main speaker, their head of whatever they call their hiring department (he did introduce himself, but I was only there for the pizza) went on what I can only describe as a polite tirade against 'hackers', meaning the proper meaning, not the criminal one. They didn't want them, they wanted people who thought like microsoft did, and were able to do things the microsoft way. A way we were assured was nothing like open source, and far superior.
Their problems quite obviously run deep, and to be frank it was obvious from that one meeting, I was not alone in coming away with that impression (note, not one person at that meeting went to work for them). They want to distance themselves from their hacker origins, but those very same people are what's driving the real innovation in the industry.
The answer, to me, is that F/L/OSS is charity, a charity that produces information the same way the above charity donating to a library produces information, and is a charity that turns a bunch of metals and chemicals into a finely-honed computing tool, the same as the above charity created a park. What we do is indeed charitable, not because we deprive ourselves, but because we enrich others. The cost to ourselves is zero, because we would have scratched our itches anyway. You can't rationally add as a cost of sharing the cost of pleasing ourselves.
Charity obviously allows for return on investment, it just means that others also get a return on your investment. But it doesn't require that others give any kind of feedback at all. If you make a public park and only you visit, it's still public, it was still an act of charity, but it's an act of charity you get exclusive benefit from.
Microsoft's statement, then, is a dark one indeed. No charity, of any kind? It says that they gain no pleasure in the results of their labour, that they suffer with every release, that every enhancement and refinement is a source of pain. Quality must be endless torment (which would explain some things). It is a bleak future when everything is misery and there is an apparent determination to spread that misery.
If they wanted to spread even just contentment, through their freely-donated hot-fixes, patches and service packs, freely-donated Microsoft Research products and freely-donated e-mail service and instant messenger, they'd be guilty of charity. Since they have denounced the charitable and all their works, these things cannot be given for the use of others. But, if they are not usable, even in theory, what are they? Microsoft's comments deride and slander all who would offer service to others, so the only conclusion is that these things are intended to cause suffering and misery, which - to judge by Vista service pack 1 - is indeed what they cause.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Without patents, the result will be predictable: most people will keep their algorithms a closely guarded secret. The result will be that academia will suffer as algorithms go from publicly disclosed patents to trade secrets.
And then a clever hacker will reverse engineer the algorithm and leak it to the world. Short of DMCA-type problems (which is an entirely different mess), there's nothing the companies can do since there are no more software patents, and if the prevalence of cracks show anything, it's that any program can be reverse-engineered.
I disagree with you about the need for patents.
Ultimately, the best idea is to eliminate software patents entirely. Our software industry grew hugely profitable without them, so there is no demonstrable need for software patents (unless, of course, you have some anticompetitive ideas in mind.) Fact is, they are not helping, and so far as the United States is concerned they're not fulfilling their Constitutional mandate (admittedly, not much of anything Congress passes lately does.) However, if you must have them, give the USPTO the funding it needs to be critical about what truly is worthy of protection (I agree with you there) and shorten the term.
Without patents, the result will be predictable: most people will keep their algorithms a closely guarded secret.
So what? If it's secret, I can't use it, and if it's patented I can't use it. If I make a derivative work based upon your disclosed, patented algorithm odds are you'll still sue me. Without software patents, companies which understand that the only real way to maintain a competitive edge is to keep investing in R&D will simply be encouraged to maintain that investment. Maybe then they'll starting hiring fewer IP lawyers and more scientists, engineers and programmers. I'd say the country would be a whole lot better off if that were to happen. Hell, if you want an argument against software patents (indeed, excessive IP law in general) just look at Asia's high-tech economies. They don't have draconian Intellectual Property laws and they're doing just fine, employing a hell of a lot of people manufacturing a lot of products.
When it comes to software, the reality is this: if there's a way of doing something, there's probably a better way and sooner or later someone will figure it out. Furthermore, if something is protected by trade secret law, it's only secret until someone figures it out. And, if they figure it out independently (or do come up with a better approach) there's no patent system getting the way of that technology being commercialized. Software patents have proven to be a millstone around the U.S. software industry's neck and the Patent Office is utterly incapable of managing them effectively. Given those facts, we're better off without them.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
so how do they fail to be technological leaders ? don't get me wrong i think MS makes a lot of good products, sql server and .net are great products. And i think in many ways them being market leader has them in a damned if they do damned if they don't position - think if they REALLY altered windows vista how many compatability issues there would be?
all that aside though there needs to be a fundamental corperate culture shift at MS. they have consistantly failed to engage their customers, there is no grass roots movement on the ms platform anymore. instead of relying on people wanting to use their platform, they try to trap them into it, which hardly endears anyone to them.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
List two software innovations (i.e. something not copied) done by the linux/hobbyist community please.
List two software innovations done by Microsoft, done by not bought by Microsoft.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Exactly, MS stands mostly to attempt to prove that free software can't exist, while doing that they managed to run away from where all the innovation is happening, where it has been happening for the last 20 or more years: the Homebrew/Hacker/Hobbyist scene. Apple saw this, took BSD, cleaned up the kernel a bit, took some free utilities and are now selling a very successful GUI as OS X. MS has to re-invent the wheel with every OS to make it look "new" and distance itself from the free community. This leads to failures such as Vista where it takes a *5*+ year development cycle to produce an OS that is more buggy then most alpha software in the free community. Note to Bill and Steve Ballmer, you can't run a company that ignores a large part of where all real innovation takes place, its ignorent and stupid to act that way.
There is no "disagree" moderation, and troll, flamebait and overrated are not valid substitutes