taler-merchant-demos

kragen-software.html (11882B)

---

 <!--#include virtual="/server/header.html" -->
 <!-- Parent-Version: 1.96 -->
 <!-- This page is derived from /server/standards/boilerplate.html -->
 <!--#set var="TAGS" value="thirdparty" -->
 <!--#set var="DISABLE_TOP_ADDENDUM" value="yes" -->
 <title>People, Places, Things and Ideas
 - GNU Project - Free Software Foundation</title>
 <!--#include virtual="/philosophy/po/kragen-software.translist" -->
 <!--#include virtual="/server/banner.html" -->
 <!--#include virtual="/philosophy/ph-breadcrumb.html" -->
 <!--GNUN: OUT-OF-DATE NOTICE-->
 <!--#include virtual="/server/top-addendum.html" -->
 <div class="article reduced-width">
 <h2>People, Places, Things and Ideas</h2>
 
 <address class="byline">
 by Kragen Sitaker
 <a href="mailto:kragen@pobox.com">&lt;kragen@pobox.com&gt;</a>
 </address>
 
 <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">
 schneier.com [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>
 </div>
 
 </div><!-- for id="content", starts in the include above -->
 <!--#include virtual="/server/footer.html" -->
 <div id="footer" role="contentinfo">
 <div class="unprintable">
 
 <p>Please send general FSF &amp; GNU inquiries to
 <a href="mailto:gnu@gnu.org">&lt;gnu@gnu.org&gt;</a>.
 There are also <a href="/contact/">other ways to contact</a>
 the FSF.  Broken links and other corrections or suggestions can be sent
 to <a href="mailto:webmasters@gnu.org">&lt;webmasters@gnu.org&gt;</a>.</p>
 
 <p><!-- TRANSLATORS: Ignore the original text in this paragraph,
         replace it with the translation of these two:
 
         We work hard and do our best to provide accurate, good quality
         translations.  However, we are not exempt from imperfection.
         Please send your comments and general suggestions in this regard
         to <a href="mailto:web-translators@gnu.org">
         &lt;web-translators@gnu.org&gt;</a>.</p>
 
         <p>For information on coordinating and contributing translations of
         our web pages, see <a
         href="/server/standards/README.translations.html">Translations
         README</a>. -->
 Please see the <a
 href="/server/standards/README.translations.html">Translations
 README</a> for information on coordinating and contributing translations
 of this article.</p>
 </div>
 
 <p>This text is in the public domain.</p>
 
 <!--#include virtual="/server/bottom-notes.html" -->
 
 <p class="unprintable">Updated:
 <!-- timestamp start -->
 $Date: 2021/10/02 08:31:21 $
 <!-- timestamp end -->
 </p>
 </div>
 </div><!-- for class="inner", starts in the banner include -->
 </body>
 </html>