There is much in your post I agree with but I take issue with this
bet:
So the actual bet is this. If I expect to add more to the
system than I got
"for free", then I would want the paid license with its known
up-front
and per-unit costs, which let me keep and conserve my "added
value"
such that people would have to come directly to me to get those
features.
If, however, I expect to make fewer modifications and additions to
the code than
I got "for free", then the GPL model serves me best. That
disclosure
means that people will not have to come to me for my
additions.
I've written a lot of software. Most of it was for
other people but some I've sold and now I'm exclusively writing software under
the GPL. My reasons for using the GPL have nothing to do with what I expect to
get back directly as code contribution due to clauses in the GPL.
I have
not gotten a lot of code contributions to the software I write. From this you
might conclude that write very bad software. You might also conclude that I
write very good software. Most of what I get back from downstream are bug
reports. Even if we include code contributions, I have seen no significant
change in what I got back when I sold software and when I released it under the
GPL. Nor did I expect it.
I've disliked using Microsoft software since the
early 80's
shortly after the IBM PC was released. The IBM BIOS, in contrast,
was easy to work with. It was written in assembly and the source code was
available for about $100 in their Technical Reference Manual. The Microsoft
code was always slow and buggy; it was broken in stupid ways.
I think this might
be due to psychological problems the closed-source mentality inflicts on the
subconscious of many (but not all) of their programmers.
Years later when I
was working as a sysadmin, I was given Windows-NT servers that would crash on a
daily basis. The problems were pretty much impossible to debug without more
access to the internals of the system. I bought an early version of Red Hat
Linux to try it out. Almost everything became easy and the rest was doable. I
was able to do much more with much less (time and money) and the mysterious
daily crashes were gone.
I switched to the GPL because I wanted to give
back and because I wanted to join this "club" of people giving away great
software for free. I could totally relate to this passage from Neal
Stephenson's In the Beginning was the Command Line:
Linux,
which is right next door, and which is not a business at
all. It's a bunch of
RVs, yurts, tepees, and geodesic domes set
up in a field and organized by
consensus. The people who live
there are making tanks. These are not
old-fashioned, cast-iron
Soviet tanks; these are more like the M1 tanks of the
U.S. Army,
made of space-age materials and jammed with sophisticated
technology
from one end to the other. But they are better than
Army tanks. They've been
modified in such a way that they never,
ever break down, are light and
maneuverable enough to use on
ordinary streets, and use no more fuel than a
subcompact car.
These tanks are being cranked out, on the spot, at a
terrific
pace, and a vast number of them are lined up along the edge of
the road
with keys in the ignition. Anyone who wants can simply
climb into one and drive
it away for free.
This brings me to another aspect of FOSS
that I think is very
important. You cannot continually give tanks away for
free.
You cannot even continually give light bulbs away for free.
This is
because these things have non-zero recurring costs.
With mass production you can
bring the recurring cost down
but you can't get it to zero.
Software is
different. With software the recurring cost is
naturally extremely close to
zero. Following the reasoning
in your post, an argument can be made that the
recurring cost
of GPL software is actually negative because you get more
bug
reports and code contributions, and sometimes even
developers.
An
argument can be made that the cost of selling software
is much higher than the
income you get from the sales.
You have to worry about DRM and keeping the
source secret
and setting up payment systems, etc. All of these are
frictions
that limit the flow of your software out into
the world. These frictions
effectively create a recurring
cost where there was none before. For material
things
like tanks and light bulbs, you need to add them or else
you will go
broke because you have essential recurring
costs that you cannot reduce to zero.
In addition, since
you already have essential non-zero recurring costs,
adding
the costs of a sales force and advertising and
marketing and so forth, are just
a fraction of your
total costs.
If you want to distribute software under
a FOSS license,
you just post it somewhere. As Linus said:
Only
wimps use tape backup. REAL men just upload their
important stuff on ftp and let
the rest of the world mirror it.
It's a bit like super
conductivity. Selling material goods
is like sending electricity down a normal
copper wire. The
wire naturally has resistance, which is a friction.
Adding
some other resistor to the circuit in order to meter the
electricity
doesn't really change things much because, you
can make the added resistance
much smaller than the intrinsic
resistance.
Distributing FOSS (or any free
software) is like sending
electricity down a perfect superconductor. You can
send
as much current as you want with zero cost (friction,
resistance). The
resistance can actually go negative if
there is enough current flowing through
the wire which
reflects the added help you get from downstream. When
you add
the resistive element of metering the software then
all the benefits from
superconductivity disappear.
To some extent, this phenomenon is what is
causing the
big corporate media companies to wage war on their customers.
Their
job is to help produce and distribute
content. It used to be that the natural
friction of their
distribution model was so large that they could insert
their
meter into the distribution wire and use
the added resistance to fund their
entire enterprise
This is called "getting a piece of the action".
Their
mindset, their reality, was just not prepared for
superconducting distribution.
It scares them because if
the natural resistance is zero then how can they fund
their
enterprise with a small fraction of zero? The only solution
they see is
to add resistance to the circuit to keep it
out of the superconducting state and
to sue into oblivion
anyone who tries to make use of this new-fangled
superconductivity.
The reason this upsets their customers is because it
is
the exact opposite of their original job description!
Their job used
to be to reduce the friction of distribution
as much as possible and then take a
small cut out of the
resistance that remained. Now that the natural
resistance
is zero and they haven't changed their mindset, they
think their job
is to increase the friction instead of
reduce it. They want us to pay them so
they can make our
lives more difficult.
This is the essence of the struggle
between big content
and everyone else in the world (and her dog). People
are
willing to pay for content but they are not willing to
pay for added
friction.
---
In a time of universal deceit -- telling the truth is a
revolutionary act.
-- George Orwell
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