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Free Software Has No Pirates!

Jonathan Schwartz's Weblog: Free Software Has No Pirates

Now, I've heard from a few stockholders saying, "What? Sharing? Free Software? What's up with that! Go make some money!" And so I thought I'd put down, once and for all, why we're committed to sharing, to open source, open standards, and eradicating the digital divide. Ready?

Because we're going to make more money.

How? It's trivially simple. Why do carriers give handsets away for free? Because they make money on the subscription necessary to receive the handset. Why do banks give away free checking, or free credit cards? Because they acquire new customers. Why do Google and Yahoo! give away free search? Because there's a fortune in the end result.

So why on earth would we give our OS away for free?

Because it'll ensure those without the economic wherewithal to pay for it will still consider using it. Companies that suffered from piracy a decade ago now know the lesson well - piracy is a good thing so long as the pirates are folks who could never afford your products. So stop calling them pirates, call them users. Free software has no pirates. As I've said forever, there's value in volume, even if you're not paid for it.

Do I worry about enterprises or corporate customers taking OpenSolaris and not acquiring a subscription to someone's (hopefully our) service contract? No, not in the least. Do you really think a hospital, or an air traffic control authority or a Minister from an African nation would run their institution on unsupported software? No. No way.

Are we guaranteed to get that business? Nope. But we are guaranteed the opportunity will be greater than if we kept Solaris locked up. And I'd rather get 20% of a business that's planetary in scope, than 100% of a business with 17 customers. Like I said, there's value in volume. (And I haven't even touched upon the impact of open sourcing on innovation.)

Sometimes people ask me why I use -- and write -- free software. This is why. Sometimes people ask me why my music is released under a Creative Commons license that allows anyone to download it and make copies for their friends. Same answer.

Measure twice, burn once

OK, I'm an idiot. But at least I managed to avoid a major embarassment when I decided not to start burning disks last night -- a wise decision, given that it was nearly midnight and I'd already printed a batch of 10 jewelcase inserts upside-down -- and give the CD-ROM part a once-over in the morning. Damned good thing.

In addition to leaving out the copyright license notices on the index page, I had succeeded in leaving out the .ogg and .mp3 files that were the main reason for having the disk in the first place! It took me about three hours to clean up the mess. It's presently held together with spit and baling wire, but somebody reading the CD-ROM in a web browser will at least have valid local links to visit if they start at the top, and somebody browsing the files directly will find the audio in places that at least make sense.

Also discovered that my nice new Plextor drive doesn't seem to want to write any faster than 8x, though it could conceivably have been the media that I did the initial test burns on, or something else I was doing on the machine at the time (since it worked fine at full speed a couple of days ago). OK, I now have two side-by-side boxen in the office, Harmony and Trantor, and they both work.

Burn, baby, burn!

Even as I type, my two Linux workstations (Trantor and Harmony) are burning copies of About Bleeding Time. I blew selkit's mind by pointing out that both copies of k3b were running on the same display. They're in the same relative positions as the computers, of course, each with its own terminal window underneath -- mainly because the nodename is in the titlebar.

I'm getting about 6 disks/hour on each machine, so 12/hour total. I've also punched out the jewel-case inserts, of which I have 78. That may be enough for the con.

( Geekier details than most people will want... )

Which starts on Friday. (Urk!!)

I supposed I should have expected this one...

... and in fact I did expect it, and then forgot about it. My two copies of k3b are stepping on one another in my home directory. Apparently it only happens if they're trying to create an ISO file at the same time. I'm going to call it quits for tonight after I get to 50, so I'll live dangerously for the moment, and run the second one under a different user tomorrow.

There are several good reasons why I use simple, non-interactive scripts whenever I can. One is that they don't give you nasty surprises about what files they're using.