This whole "intellectual property" mania is a mental illness
that deserves its own entry into the Diagnostic and Statistical
Manual of Mental Disorders. It's like that great movie, "Aguirre:
The Wrath of God." Give yourself a treat and watch it; it's a
wonderful film that takes place after the fall of the Incan empire.
Lope de Aguirre, played by the perfectly mad Klaus Kinski, leads a
band of Spanish conquistadors on a quest for El Dorado, the
legendary City of Gold. The quest is doomed, of course, as they
struggle through hostile terrain and hostile locals, pushed onward
by their own greed and ruthlessness.
The best scene of all is the final scene (spoiler! I warn you!)
Aguirre, the only survivor, floats down a river on a decaying raft,
boasting of his grandiose plans to a little gaggle of monkeys:
"I, the Wrath of God, will marry my own daughter and
with her I'll found the purest dynasty the earth has ever seen. We
shall rule this entire continent. We shall endure. I am the Wrath
of God!"
I think of that a lot when I'm reading tech news. Like Apple
sending a cease-and-desist letter to Wired for publishing
a video podcast to the Gadget Lab blog that showed how to
install an "illegal, hacked version" of Mac OS X Leopard onto an
MSI Wind netbook. You might remember how a couple years ago Apple
was jackbooting everyone
for using the words "pod" and "podcast". Thankfully that failed
and "podcast" has entered our vocabularies as a word we can use
with little fear from the word police, and I can still grow pea
pods.
In these two examples people are using Apple's products, and
talking about Apple's products, in exciting ways. They're not
badmouthing them, they're giving away the kind of cool publicity
that money can't buy. But Apple thinks that is wrong and bad and
must be stopped, and in their crazy quest to own words and ideas
they are missing out on an opportunity-- customers want an Apple
netbook, and instead of recognizing this, Apple would rather punish
them.
Just like the entertainment industry, which for decades has
resisted delivering music and movies in formats that customers
really want, and would rather force manufactured shlock on us
instead of nurturing real talent that we would gladly pay for. They
should be on their knees in gratitude that we have stuck it out
this long, figuring out our own workarounds (independent radio
stations, custom mix tapes, ripping to digital formats, PC-based
music servers) instead of telling them to take a long walk off a
short pier.
Killing the Golden Goose
The tech industry is notorious for thuggish Tony Soprano tactics.
How did this come about? Pepsi doesn't make you agree to a EULA.
DeWalt doesn't tell you what you can and cannot do with your own
DeWalt tools that you have purchased. The fashion and automotive
industries copy each other openly, and don't waste time suing each
other for poaching ideas. Instead they stick to the business of
trying to win customers the old-fashioned way-- by making cool
things that people want to buy.
The proprietary software industry nearly succeeded in killing
off the second-hand software market, and then had the two-faced
gall to whine about copyright infringement-- they tolerate it when
it opens new markets and shuts out the competition, but sooner or
later those
bad pirates have to pay up. Every other industry has a thriving
second-hand market, instead of this loony game of wink-nudge
"piracy", and it benefits everyone-- it opens new markets, and
reduces the financial risks of early adopters and customers who buy
new.
Microsoft has devoted considerable energy to trying to kill off
the second-hand hardware market as well by going after schools and
non-profits that use old, donated equipment, and forcing them to
purchase new software licenses. Most OEM Windows PCs come with
crippled versions of Windows that can't be moved to different PCs,
but are locked to the original.
Don't even get me started on the unhealthy dependence of an
entire multi-billion dollar "security" industry that wouldn't even
exist if Windows were not such a porous piece of poo. They're not
going to put any energy into actually solving the problems, not
when their livelihoods depend on manufacturing marginally-effective
splints and bandages.
The market-share debates over Microsoft vs. Linux, and
proprietary software vs. FOSS are endless and hampered by the
difficulty of collecting reliable FOSS usage data. But one fact is
crystal clear: people choose FOSS because they like it, not because
they are coerced into it as they are with so much of the
proprietary gunk.
Microsoft is Aguirre, and the rest of the doomed band are all
the companies who have tied their fortunes to the insane
conquistador. They have mad dreams of world conquest where they own
the entire market and control everything their customers do, and
force them to pay, and pay, and pay for the privilege. But I have
hopes that thanks to FOSS it's not going to happen; they might as
well be boasting to monkeys.
