Submitted by We are heading towards a world where we no longer own the hardware we buy — and there is no point in having free software if you can’t own your hardware.
We are heading towards a world where we no longer own the hardware we buy — and there is no point in having free software if you can’t own your hardware.
Nothing more to say…
The article is largely aimed at ownership of
cellphones. That still leaves PCs and so on.
Also, technology may put the “hardware restricters”
out of business. Look at this –
http://www.physorg.com/news199886118.html
It’s a new technology called “beam-pen lithography”.
From the article –
“Beam-pen lithography could lead to the development
of a desktop printer of sorts for nanofabrication,
giving individual researchers a great deal of
control over their work.
Such an instrument would allow researchers at universities and in the electronics industry to rapidly prototype – and possibly produce – high-resolution elctronic devices right in the lab.”
So, an enterprising person could set up in business
by buying one of these gizmos. Let’s call them
foo.com. Then, if NastyCorp refuses to let me own my gizmo, I say “fine – I’ll go to foo.com and get them to make one for me. One that *I* own.”
Edited 2010-08-02 07:04 UTC
So in a way it’s the advanced version of fab@home ?
It seems that almost any small company can call Asia to make them a smartphone/tablet/laptop according to their specifications that can almost rival the best a huge company like Nokia, Samsung and Apple can do. Sure there will be locked down phones but doesn’t this developer think there will be brands that keep it totally open so you can put your own OS on it?
Here is an example of exactly that (from over a year ago now), which I bought for myself:
http://www.kogan.com.au/shop/kogan-agora-netbook-pro/
Here are a few examples that I haven’t bought:
http://www.pioneercomputers.com.au/products/info.asp?c1=183&c2=185&…
http://www.pioneercomputers.com.au/products/info.asp?c1=183&c2=185&…
http://www.pioneercomputers.com.au/products/info.asp?c1=183&c2=185&…
(Please note that although these devices from Pioneer show Windows running, and the specifications say that the device “supports Windows OS”, Windows is not actually included. If you go to the “build your own” page you will find that Ubuntu is the only OS available at no extra cost beyond the base price. Any version of Windows would cost extra).
Pioneer and Kogan are small Australian companies who have done exactly as you suggest … they have arranged with an Asian OEM to make them a smartphone/tablet/laptop according to their specifications. These specifications do not include an OS … the OS is added later in Australia at the customer’s order. It does indeed give the customer more choices.
This then seems to me an eminently satisfactory way to do it. The customer here truly does own the hardware he or she buys, and the customer chooses what software wil be installed on the machine they buy.
Edited 2010-08-02 10:54 UTC
I’ll give you the tablets on potential but that netbook seems pretty stock, except you don’t pay for Windows by default.
On the tablets though, I’d still put my money down for the iPad if only for the ease of the interface, tight app store integration, branding and of coarse Apple’s focus on all customers being happy.
From what I can tell these come with either Linux or Windows and well all I can say about that is – bad idea. The OS needs to be built from the ground up to be for touch tablets and trying to retrofit a desktop OS onto a tablet is doomed.
Do these things even have an app store?
… it is stock … the only feature of note about this netbook was that the default OS did not require you to pay the Windows tax. There is no Windows sticker on the machine. If you don’t want Windows, but you do want a netbook, then you shouldn’t have to pay for Windows.
That is a good thing. A very, very good thing. An absolute win for consumers.
http://www.osnews.com/story/23630/KDE_SC4_Architecture_and_What_it_…
In fact, Plasma provides such a comprehensive level of abstraction that it can easily (but doesn’t currently) accommodate a desktop expressly built for use on a touch-screen tablet.
Run KDE on one of these and one can easily have a repository dedicated to it.
Run Android on one of these, or perhaps Meego, and the app store needs only to be an Android/x86 or a Meego/x86 app store, a common app store across any number of particular machines.
Edited 2010-08-02 12:17 UTC
Yeah, somehow I just don’t think it’s going to work.
Right. Especially if you are not doing a phone but e.g. a WiFi only tablet, it’s commodity hardware through and through. You can’t go to a website and make an a’la carte component setup yet (like you can with desktop PCs), but that’s probably not far off.
Translation: we don’t need to be worried even if a few phone companies decide to lock down their gadgets. Free hw is here to stay.
Not too long ago I bought a Samsung Spica. I instantly wanted to explore it and tried to access various parts of the filesystem just to find that everything was read only and I had no way to get root. I was just shocked by this. A free operating system that does not let me do stuff? Not only could I not access areas, there wasn’t even a su or sudo command.
Later on I also discovered that I will not get the latest Android version because the Phone appearently is “too old”. In my deluded world I thought updating would be something in the lines of apt-getting the latest code from some repository somewhere. Oh how ignorant I was. I have tons of really old hardware at home and the problem of beeing “too old” has never occured to me as a problem.
I could install a fresh Android version on it by rooting but I don’t expect anything to work because the drivers for the different pieces of hardware isn’t open source so whats the use. The phone is not a particulary interesting device to play around with anyway so I just gave up and now uses it marely as a phone. It saves me a few braincells but hurts my heart a little.
but it gets some other day to day things wrong.
Like battery life.
Excellent point – but I’d rather recharge every day than live as a serf every day. 😀
And that’s why GPLv3 exists. You may not like him, but Stallman is a visionary.
Yeah, mark me as one of those who didn’t see the future coming until it was too late. I didn’t think it would be necessary and was too distracted by the patent related sections to realize the genius of the anti tivo section.
I do care, and I try to only get hardware that will allow me to tweak it.
But normal people couldn’t care less, and this is where all these companies win.
They get free software as a means to lower their development costs, not because they share any kind of ideals with the open source community.
Using the mobile phone manufactures as an example, if you would be able to upgrade the installed OS, the technical support costs would increase and people would not buy new phones to get the new OS version.
This is absolutely not true. Free Software doesn’t necessarily lower the development costs, esp. when you are doing all the development from your own budget (as Nokia is doing with Qt, for example).
Doing free software has the promise of being ubiquitous, and palatable to wide mass of developers (because free software ensures a company can’t screw you over if/when you decide to “buy in” on a given technology). Both Google and Nokia get this, and it’s pretty much compatible with ideals of the open source community to me.
Actually Nokia does not get this 100%.
It all depends on which Nokia unit you are speaking about.
I’m serious.
As a software developer I’m happy more and more software is free as speech. If also pattens in software could disappear…
But I’m also happy software is less and less free as beer.
Sorry, but it make a lot of sense to share your work with other developers for free, but it makes no sense at all to share it with end users.
I think we (as industry) are getting it right finally.
For say 99.9% of people, software is a cost. Nothing more. It makes sense for these people to seek a means of obtaining the best quality software at the lowest cost.
Even for people who write software, software is a cost. Most of the software they use is software they did not write themselves.
Given this fact, coupled with the simple observation that software has essentially zero marginal cost of production, then the approach of creating software via a consumer’s co-operative organisation makes absolutely perfect economic sense.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consumers_cooperative
Now consider a group of companies such as these:
http://www.patentcommons.org/
or this group:
http://www.openinventionnetwork.com/about_members.php
or this group:
http://www.webmproject.org/about/supporters/
Now, suppose, instead of each paying for development of their own products, or all of them buying someone’s expensive software product, they all co-operate on some software project(s) and each pitch in a share of the effort (this still employs programmers, BTW). Pretty soon they all have a much better software product, created at far lower cost to themselves, which they can all use as a tool for their main business lines.
Neat, hey?
There are two ways to increase profits, not just one: one can either increase prices, or reduce costs.
Software made by a consumer’s co-operative organisation is an absolutely excellent way for businesses (the vast majority of whom are net software consumers) to reduce their costs.
Edited 2010-08-02 11:49 UTC
The main problem I see with this is that most companies know very little or nothing about software development. This, combined with the general nature of corporate behaviors, can easily make software much more expensive to develop in-house, even if several companies collaborated together.
If a piece of software was developed in-house by three companies working together, it would probably start out strong with clear goals defined. Following corporate trends, it would quickly become so feature-full that it would be impossible to complete on time, once it was completed it wouldn’t work right, and even more money would be spent after completion to fix these problems due to over-engineering and bloat. So then they are left with a half-ass piece of bloated software that is costing more money than it generates.
Its not just programmer costs you have to consider, either. Consider how much R&D goes into some of the bigger software projects. Then you have design teams, Q/A teams, managers, etc.
In a Utopian environment, I think this would be an excellent idea. But in reality, I think it would create even more bloated, expensive, garbage software that just got in the way of production and innovation.
This exact system of collaboration in software development in a consumer’s cooperative organisation, involving companies whose main product is not software, has already produced a significant number of very fine, very low cost, general purpose software products that participating organisations can use to significantly reduce their costs.
Some examples of companies & organisations saving millions for you:
http://www.blackducksoftware.com/development-cost-of-open-source
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/google/google-axes-windows-saves-millions…
http://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:Tv_dvUonEzYJ:www.opensour…
http://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:YzentgjnO7kJ:pascal.case….
http://www.ursolutions.ph/node/128
http://www.linux-magazine.com/Online/News/IBM-Throws-Out-Microsoft-…
http://gearcrave.com/2009-03-12/french-police-adopt-ubuntu/
http://www.cio.com/article/463664/Open_Source_in_Every_Business_wit…
http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Linux-and-Open-Source/Linux-Arrives-on-500…
http://www.silicon.fr/fr/news/2009/01/23/55_000_collegiens_equipes_…
http://www.bytebot.net/blog/archives/2010/07/05/open-source-saves-m…
http://blueoxen.com/paper/foss-adoption-in-brazil/
I could go on, but I think that is enough to make the point.
Some companies/organisations don’t have to employ more than a handful of software people of their own in order to enjoy almost for free a software product that cost billions to develop:
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/australian-it/insurer-slashes-1m-fr…
End users are developers-in-training. Developers are also end users. If I buy the hardware I own it and should be able to do or not do anything I like with it. This is not negotiable! The user should be handed ultimate power and be left to choose whether or not to use it, because the user is me and I am a developer, and a hacker and one day I may want to do something with my phone that the distributor did not expect or permit.
End users are developers-in-training.
This is lunatic.
The user buys a phone or a tablet.
The developer an SDK and some hardware for testing.
They live in very different worlds, and have very different needs and expectations.
Thanks for the laugh.
99% of the population could care less about having access to the source, and that includes most programmers.
Stallman’s vision is unrealistic and deluded. There are economic issues he can’t account for like how to create software like Autocad that costs hundreds of millions to develop and doesn’t require support. His basic response is “just do it” since he has no real answer.
Most software cannot be sold through support contracts, especially when there is free help online for just about everything.
Ads in GPL software won’t work because they can be ripped out.
There is clearly software that needs to remain proprietary. Declaring AutoCad to be immoral is not a viable business model. Stallman like many ideologists before him believe that ideology will create the solutions.
Stallman’s unrealistic ideology reminds me of a quote from Putin related to Communism: Like a run-away cart it is moving and you can get on it but it won’t take you anywhere.
They could care less, but they are not. They care more every day.
Btw, do you ever get tired of trolling and being wrong?
I’ll happily take 1% or 0.1% of the users. When I say users are developers in training I mean that the consumer version must be the same as the developer version because that way “impulse” cross-overs are possible. Though I have the knowledge I don’t hack most of my devices, but I like to buy ones where I can if for some reason it becomes important.
First, whenever I say free software in this post, I mean as in beer.
I don’t think this is true. I’m pretty sure that more software is becoming free. Either way, it doesn’t really matter how many projects are free, just what amount of software usage is free software. I’m pretty sure that people are getting more software for free now than before. Even on the iPhone, I think that the vast majority of purchases are free apps (and very few purchases are greater than $5).
And if software really is getting more expensive, maybe that explains the increases in piracy?
It may not make sense to you, because you want to make money. But the user wants to get as good quality software as possible for as little price as possible. Thus, users prefer free software, unless it is bad quality. And in a world were free software is abundant, selling your software is often (but certainly not always) a great way to make sure that nobody ever uses it.
Also, all of those developers were “just” end users at one point. If they couldn’t freely experiment with software development, how many of them do you think would be programmers today?
Being able to freely experiment with software development is a new phenomenon, that mostly started in the 90`s (for normal people).
I had to pirate my Turbo Pascal, you insensitive clod ;-).
Being able to freely experiment with software development is a new phenomenon, that mostly started in the 90`s (for normal people).
Normal people were writing – and publishing – software for the eight bit micro in the late-seventies and early eighties.
Atari even had an “app store” for hobbyists writing commercially viable games in Atari BASIC and assembly.
Yes, using exactly the stuff the machine came with. There were no free libraries or development tools – just the BASIC interpreter, and possibly an assembler.
I’m not talking about software development in general, I’m talking about getting free stuff from others (which is where open source is relevant).
That is inaccurate. In the beginning of computer industry, all software was free under MIT like license, under public domain or with no license at all, which again meant public domain at the time. Not distributing source code would be a deal breaker. Just look to testimonials of DEC employees and PDP users. Watch Jon Maddog Hall speeches sometimes. DEC was praised for collaborating with their users on software and even hardware designs. IBM mainframes also shipped with free software until 1978. Just look at this list http://www.ibiblio.org/jmaynard/
The dark era started in second half of 1970s and event that marked start of proprietary software is Bill Gates letter to hobbyists http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/14/Bill_Gates_Lette…
Other event could be AT&T’s commercialization of UNIX.
Before that, something distributed in object code only form, was not even called software.
Most programmers found this new world order despicable but they got prisoner dilemma when the got offered jobs at newly founded proprietary companies. So they stopped complaining ‘couse they at least got access to source code. Nevermind that others didn’t.
But big number of programmers didn’t want to remove fun from computing just to make money (because money can also be made without removing fun), and one guy particularly got frustrated when he didn’t get printer driver he needed just because nasty EULA which his friend choose to obey. He did some thinking about situation and made his move. He quited MIT, started working on his own OS and then he wrote GNU manifesto in 1983 asking people to join him. We know who that is.
We call that system Linux today because some dude felt he can get all the credit just because he wrote the kernel and slotted it into nearly complete system which he didn’t wrote.
Edited 2010-08-04 17:29 UTC
Only a very small elite group even had access to the hardware that ran this “free” software.
The rest of us were storing our monolithic BASIC programs on audio tapes. The only free software you got were the printed program listings in hobbyist magazines (and I don’t even know what kind of copyright they were under).
Only a very small number of people had computers at all.
I don’t know what time frame you are talking about, but I am pretty sure that in first half of 1970 there was little or no proprietary software. Home computing only took off in 1980s, and it was Gates and AT&T who made the mess.
I don’t know what time frame you are talking about, but I am pretty sure that in first half of 1970 there was little or no proprietary software. Home computing only took off in 1980s, and it was Gates and AT&T who made the mess
In 1979, MS 8080 BASIC was the first micro-computer product to win the ICP Million Dollar Award.
ICP was the “International Computer Programs Directory,” launched in 1964, as a guide to off-the-shelf commercial products.
The awards program was launched in 1970, with about thirty – mostly mainframe – candidates showing sales worth over $1 million.
The micro lowered the barriers to entry dramatically – and the rewards could be substantial.
“Caverns of Mars” for the Atari was written by kid in high school and would return $100,000 in royalties –
something like a quarter of million in today’s dollars.
You’re focusing too much on mobile and even on the iphone the best games are 1 or 2 bucks. Only a total lame ass has a problem with coughing up a few bucks for a game. People in NA and Europe have no problem paying 3 bucks for an espresso so I think we need some pricing context here.
Mobile devices can be locked down and desktops can be used for development. Most developers would likely prefer it this way if it meant having proper DRM that eliminated piracy like the PS3. FSF demands are out of alignment with most users and developers. And by FSF I really mean Stallman.
http://www.jfplayhouse.com/2010/07/richard-stallman-answers-your-qu…
True, but that describes 90% of the population. I’ve paid for many games on my iPod Touch, but most of my friends with iOS devices have 100s of free apps and 2-10 paid apps. So my guess is that the average purchase price for an app in the App Store is ~$.05.
Why do we need this dichotomy?
By most developers I think you mean you. You do realize that the PS3 is pretty much the only DRM that has worked, and I really hope you aren’t suggesting that is a good model to follow. I really don’t want to see a world where you have to pay big money just to develop a little game (or even $100…).
True. RMS sometimes reminds me of the fundamentalist Christians.
Here is the only demand that FSF actually makes:
http://www.fsf.org/working-together/demand/
“We demand software freedom now”.
Here is what they mean by their term “software freedom”:
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
What user could possibly object to this?
As for developers … the FSF makes absolutely no demand that developers must make free software. Their only demand is that developers are ALLOWED to make free software if those said developers want to.
Stallman is not the FSF.
Here is the website of the FSF, check it out:
http://www.fsf.org/
Here is who they are:
http://www.fsf.org/about/
It is about defending the rights of computer users, nothing else.
I just thought I would quote some URLs bring a bit of reality, sanity and balance to the picture.
Here are some Free Software programs that everyone can enjoy:
http://www.fsf.org/working-together/gang/
and here is more:
http://directory.fsf.org/
Fill your boots. Enjoy the benefits of Free Software. It won’t bite you.
Edited 2010-08-03 12:42 UTC
Most of those products don’t spend too much time trying to prevent newer software from being installed. If you really can’t upgrade the software, its more likely an accident, rather than a detailed plan to thwart us free software lovers. Of course, the hardware is typically less powerful than more recognizable brands.
‘We are heading towards a world where we no longer own the hardware we buy’
What the hell on earth? That sounds very unreal
I certainly do own my HW and I would not agree for nt owning HW I buy, so It may be just that *you*, dear author, allow others to dictate you things, or *you* just like to follow the IT trends
Cheers