Gimlé

For the last few weeks I’ve been asking anyone who will listen if it isn’t weird that our economy is based on software, more and more, yet users don’t want to pay for software.
Dave Winer—Who will pay for software?

Mark Bernstein and Dave Winer have been throwing out several interesting comments on the value of software in the last few days.

Dave’s comment, quoted above is, unfortunately, to the point and truer than we’d like.

People don’t value quality.

It doesn’t matter whether we’re talking about innovative software, inspiring and moving books, mind-bending and touching world cinema—

Or music.

Of course it doesn’t help that they are only confronted with rubbish. Microsoft’s software is notorious for its security problems. Mac Classic crashes like a two-legged doberman hound driving an SUV without a driver’s license. Mac OS X is slower than a salted snail stoned out of its mind on pot and 50 kilos of pure, unadulterated swedish granite wielded by a brat on ritalin.

The book industry pushes stories with plots so thin and wispy that they’d make a jellyfish self-conscious.

The movie industry pushes chunky shit so smelly that X-Men 2 and Matrix Reloaded qualify as the artistic and intellectual highlights of the year.

And it’s a catch 22. Developers and creators don’t make well crafted stories and software because they see a distinct lack of demand for the stuff in the marketplace. Those who could appreciate the craft can’t find or aren’t exposed to it due to the dominance of the large players in the marketplace.

Just the appreciation factor is bad enough. The fact that most people aren’t willing to pay a small amount of money for your hard work that, as Dave clearly demonstrates with regards to software, is actually a small fraction of your actual task-related outgoings…

That has to be one of the most despiriting things that can happen to any sort of developer or writer.

A new paperback is half the price of a DVD, will work in any country, provides many more hours of entertainment and yet qualifies as a bestseller if it moves 100 000 copies.

That’s in the US, a post-industrial, wealthy, high-tech country.

The sales of a single volume of Byron’s Don Juan sold over ten times that, easy, in what was an industrial country in its infancy, with a fraction of the current US of A’s population.

Sure, you can give away free copies of the software you commissioned. The recipients don’t pay you – the software seems ‘free’. But, sooner or later, value of some sort flows back up the system. If it doesn’t, nobody will do it again. And that value is always something convertible to money: that’s why they call it money.
Mark Bernstein—Costs

While I do not necessarily agree with Mark’s statement that value, in software or craft (and storytelling is a craft), is always convertable to money, the point needs to be hammered in that there is both immense value and work in GPL-compatible software.

(Otherwise called ‘Free Software’, I use ‘GPL-compatible’ here for want of a better term, “Free Software” is too ambiguous, and GPL-compatible unambiguiously includes popular Open Source licenses such as the BSD and X11 licenses).

Software under GPL-compatible licenses are frequently distributed, deployed and used as if it had little to no inherent value.

The point and purpose of GPL-compatible software is to give the user the freedom to participate in the software development process.

It is one of the few things that can promote a general understanding of programming in the general populace as well as amongst the craftsmen of creative artifacts. Which is something that, according to Mark, needs to happen if computer-mediated works are to mature.

Free Software (capital ‘F’, capital ‘S’) such as Ruby, Python, Mozilla and GCC is much more likely to promote a general understanding of programming and programming skills than proprietry software.

The fact that some of the features of the Ruby programming language are implemented in Ruby, meaning that a humanities academic like myself can learn about the language by reading through the files of the implementation, is mind-blowing.

That ability is such a basic and fundamental thing, granted and protected by GPLed software and is, by definition, impossible in closed-source software.

That alone is of immense value, monetary or otherwise. In fact, it makes Free Software much more valuable to me and other content creators than closed-source will ever be.

Again, monetarily or otherwise.

Which makes it especially disheartening to see how few people are willing to pay money for GPL-compatible software.

Would I prefer that my University spend my tuition fees on GPL-compatible software rather than closed-source software such as Director or Peak?

Even though the GPL-compatible software could, in theory, be deployed for free, without payment to its developers?

Yes and yes.

The value that the students and lecturers of an Art, Media and Design faculty stand to gain from being able to participate in the process of software development as a part of their courses, research and content creation—

That value far outweighs the value and benefits of more ‘sophisticated’, bug-ridden and unreliable industry-standard software such as Macromedia Director.

But for that to happen, Arts and Humanities people would have to get over their fear of code.

Which is about as likely as Britney Spears writing a literary masterpiece on par with Jane Austen’s Persuasion.

Baldur Bjarnason.
Clifton, Bristol.