by Carla Schroder
Managing Editor
I’ve been doing a lot of work on my house this year. It’s ten
years old and a good, stout house. But houses always need something
fixed somewhere, and I’ve been doing some remodeling. Nothing
major, just knocking out a wall or two, adding some windows,
painting, putting down pretty wood floors, electrical work, the
usual fun.This place is festooned with decks, four of them. They’re all
crap, built poorly and cheaply. I have my ace carpenter rebuilding
the front deck. (Hi Jose! Thank you!) A simple one-day job has
turned into something a bit more major because part of it is behind
the foundation, and that part is rotten. Fortunately we won’t have
to tear up any floors to attack all the rot, but in another year or
two it would have been a real nasty job.Naturally, as I sat here working amidst the hammering and sawing
noises, I got to thinking what if my house were closed and
proprietary? I wouldn’t be able to do most of the work I’ve done.
Just the painting; all the rest would have closed off to me. No
opening walls, no ripping up the porch, no new windows, just
trivial cosmetic changes. My own house that I paid for and live in
would be controlled by the manufacturer. I would depend entirely on
the manufacturer for repairs, upgrades, and changes, and be
completely at their mercy. No choice of doing it myself or hiring a
contractor, no competitive bidding.In my case that would be akin to buying a software application
created by a lone independent programmer, because the builder of my
house was also the owner. It was going to be the happy-ever-after
dream house for him and his wife. But they lived in it only a few
months and then she ran off with a traveling salesman (really, I am
not making that up) so that was the end of the dream. So to
continue the comparison, I would have been without recourse because
he is long gone, and I would have been stuck with a house that I
could not do anything to, nor could anyone else.OK, so these aren’t particularly deep thoughts, and the analogy
is a bit strained. Still, it’s not that daft in this brave era of
business people without conscience who see nothing wrong with
exploiting us in every way possible, by collecting, mining, and
trading our personal data, and micro-managing what we do with our
own property that we have purchased. Look at the latest offender,
Palm, with their shiny new Palm
Pre WebOS, complete with spyware that phones home on the
customer’s dime. How nice to see Linux used to abuse us, now that’s
innovation!Thank you to everyone for all the nice birthday greetings
and compliments in last week’s editor’s note! That was very nice
and unexpected. You are the best!