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+<!--#include virtual="/server/header.html" -->
+<!-- Parent-Version: 1.77 -->
+<title>People, places, things and ideas
+- GNU Project - Free Software Foundation</title>
+<!--#include virtual="/philosophy/po/kragen-software.translist" -->
+<!--#include virtual="/server/banner.html" -->
+<h2>People, places, things and ideas</h2>
+
+<p>
+by <strong>Kragen Sitaker
+<a href="mailto:kragen@pobox.com">&lt;kragen@pobox.com&gt;</a></strong>
+</p>
+
+<h3 id="SEC1">Software</h3>
+<p>
+Software is ideas. Information. It's different from people, places,
+and things; it's infinitely reduplicable like fire, at almost no cost.
+This is a truism, even a cliche. But it seems that there are
+particular consequences that aren't well-explored.
+</p>
+<p>
+One is that it doesn't work well to sell it the way you sell slaves,
+places, and things; any of your customers can make an unbounded number
+of copies at cost, or less. Market friction currently makes selling
+software a viable business model. Perhaps branding does, too; there's
+a question as to whether Red Hat sells CDs for $50 because people like
+Red Hat's brand, or just because they don't know they can buy
+essentially the same CD from CheapBytes for $2.
+</p>
+
+<h3 id="SEC2">The past and the present</h3>
+<p>
+The traditional way to deal with this is to lock ideas up inside
+people, places, and things. A lawyer can get quite a bit of money
+simply for spitting out the appropriate ideas, not doing any actual
+creative work, or simply for applying rote procedures &mdash; most
+wills reportedly fall in this category. I have to go to the Georgia
+O'Keeffe Museum to see old Georgia's paintings, because they don't
+allow photography. Then they can charge me admission. (Great museum,
+by the way. If you go there, don't get the four-day pass; their
+collection is rather small.) A book can be sold for more than the
+cost of printing it because the ideas are difficult to separate from
+their physical manifestation.
+</p>
+<p>
+Software makes it much easier to separate ideas from people, places,
+and things. If I buy my computer to send email with, and I want to
+make fractals, I don't have to buy a new fractal machine. I just have
+to download some fractal software. If I want to calculate the yield
+force of a strut, I don't have to hire a structural engineer; I can
+download some <abbr title="Finite element analysis">FEA</abbr>
+software and simulate stressing it until it yields. I don't have to
+go to a museum to look at my neighbor's fractals; I can just pull them
+up on my screen. (Once I download them, of course.)
+</p>
+<p>
+This is a spectacular change.
+</p>
+
+<h3 id="SEC3">Software locked up: the future?</h3>
+<p>
+And it was the nature of computer applications, in general, until
+recently. But now we have the Web, and people are talking a lot about
+application-specific embedded computers. Suddenly people can deliver
+applications like the ones they used to deliver as computer software,
+but they can lock up the software &mdash; the ideas &mdash; inside
+places and things.
+</p>
+<p>
+As an example, I have a CD-ROM containing aggregated US phone
+listings. Given sufficient time and expertise, I can extract these
+phone listings and put them up on a web site. (I need to
+reverse-engineer the database structure they're stored in first.) I
+can run correlation tests to see if people with certain last names tend
+to have more biased exchange distributions within a city. (Which would
+indicate that they lived close to their families, perhaps, or that the
+city was ethnically segregated.) I can find out which spelling of
+Cathy is most popular (Kathy? Cathi?), and I can see if people's
+choices of spellings of Cathy are correlated with their last names.
+</p>
+<p>
+There are also several web sites containing the same set of phone
+listings, or newer versions. I can't do any of these things with
+these web sites, because the phone listings &mdash; an idea &mdash;
+are locked up in the web site &mdash; a place or a thing, depending on
+how you look at it.
+</p>
+<p>
+Another tack is to lock information up in things. The
+<abbr title="National Security Agency">NSA</abbr>'s Skipjack algorithm
+was classified for several years; implementations were widely
+available, but only in special hardened devices. This allowed them to
+deploy it widely behind the iron curtain that surrounds classified
+research, and they intended to deploy it widely in the outside world,
+too. (So far, I'm outside that curtain.) Recently, circumstances
+forced them to distribute software implementations of Skipjack, and so
+they declassified it. (See
+<a href="https://www.schneier.com/crypto-gram/archives/1998/0715.html#skip">
+http://www.schneier.com/crypto-gram-9807.html#skip [archived]</a>
+for more.)
+</p>
+
+<h3 id="SEC4">Why I don't like this</h3>
+<p>
+Having the phone book myself gives me more freedom. On the other hand,
+it also requires me to install software on my machine, giving that
+software some degree of control over my machine. In this particular
+case, the software runs under Win95, so it demands complete control
+over my machine. So it's actually considerably more convenient for me
+to just visit the web page and fill out a form to look up someone's
+phone number.
+</p>
+<p>
+Information in things is also considerably more convenient than
+information in software; a special-purpose thing is often considerably
+easier to use for that purpose than a general-purpose computer is.
+Because of this, many industry pundits have been forecasting that
+general-purpose computers will fall out of use in favor of
+special-purpose devices.
+</p>
+<p>
+I'm somewhat worried about this trend. I like using general-purpose
+computers &mdash; though admittedly they are often difficult to use.
+I like the freedom it gives me. The computer is just an extension of
+my mind.
+</p>
+<p>
+Web sites and special-purpose hardware are not like this. They do not
+give me the same freedoms general-purpose computers do. If the trend
+were to continue to the extent the pundits project, more and more of
+what I do today with my computer will be done by special-purpose things
+and remote servers.
+</p>
+<p>
+What does freedom of software mean in such an environment? Surely it's
+not wrong to run a Web site without offering my software and databases
+for download. (Even if it were, it might not be feasible for most
+people to download them. IBM's patent server has a many-terabyte
+database behind it.)
+</p>
+<p>
+I believe that software &mdash; open-source software, in particular
+&mdash; has the potential to give individuals significantly more
+control over their own lives, because it consists of ideas, not
+people, places, or things. The trend toward special-purpose devices
+and remote servers could reverse that.
+</p>
+<p>
+What does it mean to have free software burned into a ROM? Is the
+software still free if I have to desolder the ROM to read the source
+code and burn a new ROM to run a modified version? What does it mean
+to have free software running a remotely-accessible application on a
+Web server? Even with the best of intentions, these technologies seem
+make it difficult to give people the same kind of freedom they enjoy
+with PCs.
+</p>
+
+<h3 id="SEC5">How to fight it</h3>
+<p>
+It's more expensive to buy a new device than it is to download software
+and install it on my machine. So people won't use special-purpose devices
+if they provide no advantages.
+</p>
+<p>
+But they do provide advantages. They're *much* easier to use than
+current general-purpose computers. A button for every function; no
+funny modes in which the buttons do something else, or nothing. A
+display for every state variable; you don't have to click on things to
+make them visible. I suspect that this is not an inherent limitation
+of general-purpose computers, but a limitation of their current state.
+</p>
+<p>
+Another big issue is that they just work. General-purpose computers
+often don't, particularly when running Microsoft OSes. Even in the
+best case, you still have to do a couple of seconds of irrelevant
+stuff before getting to work on what you want to work on &mdash;
+typing a letter or whatever. More typically, you have to click around
+for ten seconds or so. At worst, you have to reinstall Windows and
+the application, reconfigure some peripherals, and reinstall their
+drivers before you can get anything done.
+</p>
+<p>
+A third big issue is that they require software installation. If I
+want to start using my machine for writing email different, I have to
+install email software on it. While this is considerably less
+expensive than buying a special-purpose email machine, it's
+considerably less uncomfortable, intimidating, and confusing. (Or so
+I'm told.) It also takes longer.
+</p>
+<p>
+If general-purpose computers are to survive the onslaught of tiny,
+cheap special-purpose boxes, they must become as easy to use, reliable,
+and easy to install software on as those special-purpose boxes.
+This requires a totally different operating environment than anything
+we're using on the desktop today; not surprisingly, GNU/Linux is closer
+than anything else I've used. (Squeak might be even better, but I
+haven't tried it yet.) But GNU/Linux is an incredibly long way away.
+This will require different hardware as well as different software.
+</p>
+<p>
+The forces behind remote servers are similar &mdash; ease of use
+because of uniform interfaces through a web browser, &ldquo;just
+working&rdquo;, and no installation &mdash; just using. But they have
+a couple of other advantages as well: they can provide services that
+require massive storage or computational resources that can't
+reasonably be provided on your own machine, unless you want to spend
+wads of cash. (Downloading AltaVista's database every day would be a
+very inefficient way to search the Web.)
+</p>
+<p>
+I think these extra advantages are probably impossible to overcome at
+the moment &mdash; although I'm interested in research on distributing
+big computational jobs over many machines.
+</p>
+
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+<p class="unprintable">Updated:
+<!-- timestamp start -->
+$Date: 2015/08/18 16:21:27 $
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