How Pursuing Software Piracy Hurts Proprietary Software Firms

from the highlights-the-alternatives dept

While organizations like the BSA and the SIIA play silly games and announce bogus numbers about the "costs" of software piracy, it's nice to see the whole thing beginning to backfire. We've already pointed to the backlash against the BSA for its activities, and now we're seeing how these kinds of crackdowns are doing exactly the opposite of what BSA/SIIA members would want: they're looking for open source alternatives. Following the ongoing "international crackdown" on software piracy, it appears that the Vietnamese government is the latest to start promoting open source alternatives. Of course, for proprietary software makers, this should be seen as worse than piracy. After all, as Microsoft and others have long admitted, you're much better off if someone is using an unauthorized version of your software, than if they're using the competition (especially if that competition is free). If they're using an unauthorized version of your software, then at least there's a chance that they'll either buy it at a later date or convince others to buy it. However, by putting such a big effort into cracking down on software piracy, all the industry has done is highlight why people are better off going with free alternatives. This is a key point we've tried to highlight in the past. The issue isn't piracy at all, but the fact that the competition will eventually learn to embrace "free." Focusing on "piracy" only helps accelerate that process.

Filed Under: open source, software piracy, vietnam
Companies: bsa, siia

Open Source Rough Justice

from the vigilantes-and-justice dept

As legal scholar Yochai Benkler is fond of pointing out, there are three main ways of providing public goods. You can create property-like rights, as we've traditionally done with intellectual property or emissions vouchers, in order to more fully internalize the costs and benefits of their provision. Government can provide the good directly, as in the case of national security. Or, especially in a world of cheap computing and ubiquitous connectivity, you can rely on distributed peer production, a method most often associated with software.

But as a pair of articles in the Los Angeles Times make clear, peer production can also take over such archetypally governmental functions as punitive enforcement of the social contract. The Times recounts the sad tale of Megan Meier, a Missouri teen who killed herself last year after the vindictive parents of a neighbor girl fabricated an online persona, "Josh Evans," who struck up a MySpace friendship with the girl, then cruelly ended it. The adult's actions, however, don't appear to have been criminal — presumably because any statute that sought to limit such speech would quickly run into First Amendment difficulties. But, perhaps poetically, community members have used the Internet to exact their own form of rough justice:

In an outburst of virtual vigilantism, readers of blogs such as RottenNeighbor.com and hitsusa.com have posted the Drews' home address, phone numbers, e-mail addresses and photographs. Dozens of people allegedly have called local businesses that work with the family's advertising booklet firm, and flooded the phone lines this week at the local Burlington Coat Factory, where Curt Drew reportedly works.

There's plenty of precedent for this sort of distributed posse formation: In the now infamous stolen Sidekick case, Internet users mobilized to locate and hound people who had found (and were refusing to return) a lost mobile device. A student in China, known as the "Bronze Moustache," had to drop out of his university after outraged users answered the call of a distressed husband accusing him of having an affair with the man's wife.

In a way, this is a validation of the characterization of the Net as a "global village": Formal, governmental enforcement mechanisms are a substitute for older reputation-based methods that use social pressure and shunning as primary sanctions — methods that had become impractical as social cooperation expanded beyond the village level. But it may be worth worrying whether the resurgence of this sort of social sanction doesn't leave some desirable procedural checks by the wayside — especially since it's hard to determine who's accountable for the actions of a distributed mob, where it may be that no one individual's actions rise to the level of harassment.

Filed Under: open source, vigilantes

Apple's Conquest Of Mobile Browsing Continues With Google Phone Platform

from the open-source-browser dept

Google's GPhone (non-)announcement wasn't a big surprise, but some of the tidbits that are now emerging about the Android mobile OS are intriguing. For example, in a new video, Google's Steve Horowitz mentions that the default Android web browser will be based on Webkit, which he says is "the industry standard these days." Webkit is the open source package of web browser libraries that's at the heart of Apple's Safari web browser, and was originally based on the Linux Konquerer browser. Nokia gave the libraries a big boost last year when it announced a WebKit-based browser for its own mobile phones. And this year, Apple used WebKit as the foundation for the iPhone's web browser. The Google announcement further consolidates WebKit's status as a leading platform for mobile web browsers. The choice of WebKit for mobile browsing makes sense. Mobile browsers need to be fast and have a small footprint, and Apple originally chose the Konquerer codebase because it found it to be much leaner than Mozilla's codebase. The growing popularity of WebKit is good news for Mac Safari users (like me), who are less likely to see those annoying "your browser is not supported" messages when they visit websites. It's also good for the broader web-browsing public, as it represents the rise of a third major competitor in the browser market. As WebKit continues to grow in popularity, it will make more sense for website developers to focus on conforming to standards rather than customizing a site to the quirks of a particular browser. That, in turn, will force Microsoft (and Mozilla, but mostly Microsoft) to focus on conforming to the standards themselves, contributing to a virtuous circle of standards compliance that ultimately makes everyone's lives easier.

Filed Under: browsers, mobile, open source, webkit
Companies: apple, google

The New York Times Finally Gets The Web

from the it's-about-time dept

Techdirt has beat up on the New York Times a lot over the years for its bone-headed use of the web. For years, it treated the website as an afterthought, serving up warmed-over versions of its print coverage and charging for the privilege. As we pointed out repeatedly, the web is different from older media. Success online requires that you be part of the conversation. Users expect a faster-paced, more connected experience from a website than you get from a newspaper. But in the last six months or so, the Times has made a series of decisions that suggests they're finally starting to understand that the web is its own medium with its own unique rules. They've dropped their paywall, launched a ton of great blogs, produced podcasts and videos, and added new personalization features. This summer, they unveiled Open, a blog by and for geeks about the use of open source technologies at the Times. And now they've launched Blogrunner, a news aggregator they snapped up last year and are integrated in various places around the site, starting with the technology section. Integrating links to other sites into their subject-specific pages makes it more likely that people will make that page their starting point for information on that subject. None of these developments are that Earthshaking by themselves, but when you add them all up it starts to look like the Grey Lady is finally taking the web seriously. Now if we can just get them to give us full-text RSS feeds of their blogs!

Filed Under: business models, newspapers, open source, websites
Companies: ny times

Is The Google/Firefox Relationship A Conflict Of Interest?

from the trust-but-verify dept

CNET's Chris Soghoian raises some concerns about Google's close relationship with the Mozilla Foundation, the non-profit that owns the Firefox trademark. He points out that the vast majority of Mozilla's revenue comes from Google, and notes a number of ways that Firefox is configured to use Google as the default for various online services. Soghoian is right that close scrutiny of these sorts of relationships is healthy. However, it's pretty hard to get too worked up about the specific problems he cites. First, he notes that Mozilla has chosen not to include a couple of ad- and cookie-blocking plugins with the default Firefox package. Soghoian thinks that's a sign of something fishy going on, since those products would deprive Google of revenue. But there are thousands of plugins out there, and all sorts of reasons they might have chosen to exclude any given one. Soghoian offers no evidence it was at Google's behest. But more to the point, even if it were Google's doing, I don't understand why that would be a bad thing. Google makes a profit by selling advertising and shares a significant share of those revenues with Mozilla, which Mozilla then spends on making Firefox better. That sounds like a win-win-win proposition to us. Finally, given Google's excellent track record of making ads actually useful, relevant, and non-intrusive, it's not at all clear that users even want Firefox to block its ads. As long as Mozilla doesn't try to stop users from installing ad-blocking plugins themselves, I don't see the problem.

Filed Under: firefox, open source
Companies: google, mozilla

Open Source Business Strategies Had A Bubble Too

from the now-its-growing-again dept

Matt Asay points us to a fascinating paper (pdf) by Oliver Alexy of Technische Universitat Munchen (TUM) Business School, that looks at how the stock market reacts to companies that announce open-source software releases. The paper looks at how stock prices move the day the news is released in an effort to gauge how Wall Street evaluates open-source-oriented business strategies. The study found a couple of interesting things. First Wall Street reacted positively to open-source announcements in 1999 and 2000, negatively in 2002-2004, and then positively again in the last couple of years. This suggests an open source bubble that coincided with the broader tech bubble. That was followed by a period of open source pessimism while the technology industry was in the doldrums. More recently, as open-source-related business strategies have matured, investor attitudes have become positive once again, and source code releases are rapidly becoming standard in some parts of the software industry.

Second, Alexy finds that Wall Street reacts more positively to business models that use open source as a way to directly cut costs or enhance revenue (for example by selling support services) than they do to longer-term strategies aimed at using open source as a "competitive weapon." Asay suggests the paper shows that a business will do poorly "if a vendor is more worried about pulverizing its competitors than it is in serving its customers," but that's not exactly what the paper is focused on. Rather, "competitive weapon" is used in the paper as a kind of catch-all term for source code releases focused on long-term strategic concerns rather than short-term revenue generation. For example, releasing a product as open source might help a company's preferred file format or networking protocol become the industry standard rather than a competitor's format. Alexy suggests that it's harder for companies to explain such long-range strategies to investors, and harder for investors to evaluate their effect on a company's bottom line. As Wall Street has become more familiar with the long-term benefits of open source software releases (for example, IBM's 2001 support of Eclipse) investor attitudes toward decisions to release software for long-term strategic reasons have become more positive.

Filed Under: bubbles, open source, stock market, wall street

Steve Ballmer's Prophecy Comes True: Former Microsoft Execs Sue Red Hat, Novell Over Patents

from the funny-how-that-works dept

Jon writes in to let us know that a small patent holding firm, IP Innovation, has sued Red Hat and Novell over patent infringement concerning a ridiculously broad patent. As the Groklaw report outlines, the suing company is actually a subsidiary of Acacia, which is considered to be one of the more egregious firms in using bad patents to squeeze money out of companies. Groklaw also notes that Acacia has recently hired a bunch of execs from Microsoft, leading to the conspiracy theory that Steve Ballmer's recent predictions of patent lawsuits against Red Hat were more than random speculation. I'm not willing to go that far just yet, but as you can see from Ars Technica's breakdown of the patent earlier this year (when the company sued Apple), it describes very broadly the concept of workspaces in a computer user interface. This is yet another example of the worst of our patent system at work. Companies that offer innovative products getting sued using vague, overly broad patents on obvious ideas that never should have been granted in the first place.

Filed Under: linux, open source, patents
Companies: acacia, microsoft, red hat

Microsoft Can't Resist: Ramps Up FUD On Linux Patent Pressure Again

from the gotta-keep-people-afraid dept

Apparently, Microsoft's new strategy against open source is to keep repeating over and over again that open source software violates patents. This is a practice the company started years ago, and repeated earlier this year, with Microsoft execs ominously saying that open source products violate Microsoft patents. Of course, Microsoft has yet to show a single patent where this is true or actually do anything to prove it's true in a court of law. Perhaps that's because it knows the backlash would be a lot stronger than what was seen against SCO (who eventually failed in following a similar strategy). But, that won't stop Steve Ballmer from repeating the threats that Microsoft could sue the likes of Red Hat at any moment for patent infringement. This time, he lobbed in an extra suggestion as well: that open source providers may also face lawsuits from the likes of Eolas, the patent holder that Microsoft recently settled with. Folks from the open source community have asked Microsoft to put up or shut up before -- and it doesn't seem like the company plans to do either thing. Little surprise, really, since apparently the strategy of making people afraid works. The biggest reason companies avoid using open source software is an irrational fear of opening themselves up to patent liability. Still, this is another clear misuse of the patent system to hold back innovation in the market by making companies far and wide afraid of adopting innovation. That's not what the patent system was intended to do at all.

Filed Under: fud, linux, open source, patents

Why Is Microsoft Using Patent FUD Against Linux? Perhaps Because It Works

from the not-too-hard-to-figure-out dept

Earlier this year, Microsoft made some news by claiming (not for the first time) that Linux violated all sorts of Microsoft patents, though it refused to name a single one. This seemed like a pretty sleazy strategy not just to get companies to license patents from Microsoft even though there was no proven need to do so, but also to scare some companies off from using Linux in the first place. It appears, unfortunately, that such efforts are having some effect. A new study found that the number one inhibitor against open source adoption was fear of patent or copyright infringement. Of course, the news isn't that bad, since it sounds like the benefits of open source software (price, stability, features, etc.) tend to outweigh that one fear in many cases. However, don't be surprised if Microsoft continues to play this card over and over again. Once again, though, it shows how intellectual property isn't being used to promote innovation, but to hold back innovation by creating uncertainty and fear in the market.

Filed Under: fud, linux, open source, patents
Companies: microsoft

Latest Shot At The Personal Mobile Hub Looks A Lot More Open

from the about-time dept

If you've been in the mobile space for a long time, you may recall the buzz from nearly a decade ago about the concept of the "personal mobile hub." The idea was that computers don't need to be big (even laptop big) general machines, but rather you could break out the components and make for interesting combinations. That is, you could have a small core unit that was basically just a CPU with some wireless connectivity, and then add in additional components as necessary (or simply let other things connect to the hub). So, your mobile phone could connect to the hub to get better wireless capabilities. You could also have a separate storage module for extra storage. Then, perhaps you could have different screen technology depending on what you needed. Or different inputs. The whole idea was to make computing a lot more modular. Unfortunately, pretty much every attempt at doing so failed (often miserably). For years, the concept was championed by a company called IXI, who got a lot of hype but produced little in the way of a product for quite some time. In 2004, it finally came up with a product called the ogo, which was a messaging device sold by AT&T Wireless. However, the other components (the whole point of such a system) never appeared and the device mostly died off (though, it's been revived at times elsewhere).

There's some buzz going around about a new startup called Bug Labs that is in some ways bringing back this very concept with more of an open source/DIY/hacker ethos. Right now, exactly what Bug Labs is doing isn't entirely clear, but it sounds like they're producing something quite similar to the general idea of the personal mobile hub -- but making it very open and encouraging everyone else to develop apps and systems for it. In fact, it sounds like the company doesn't plan on being in the hardware business at all. This is definitely a step forward from the IXI way of doing things, but it still remains to be seen whether or not the market really buys into the idea of modular computing in this manner. The good news for Bug Labs, however, is that if such a concept is going to succeed, it's probably going to take an approach similar to what Bug is doing.

Filed Under: mobile hub, open source
Companies: bug labs, ixi