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Re: [PLUG] OT: Suspected hacker attack - Can anyone advise?
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On Tue, May 23, 2000 at 11:26:01AM -0400, Michael Leone wrote:
> > I used to use a contact manager that was proprietary. The license
> > didn't prevent me from doing what I wanted (keeping track of contact
> > and calendar info). The app was better than any other I have found
> > before or since.
> >
> > The company that made it went out of business. The intellectual
> > property (source code) was sold from one company to another, but never
> > resurrected as working code. When I got a Pilot, I found that there
> > was no working sync software for my contact db, just a buggy
> > first-draft sync thing that worked once in a while.
> >
> > Now, if it had been open source, I could have (in principle) fixed
> > this. At least I would have had the choice.
>
> True; you could have. But then again, how many users of that software (in
> reality) actually could? How many are programmers knowledgeable enough to
> fix it; re-compile it, etc?
>
> Suppose *I* had fixed the problem in question, and - being a nice guy -
> posted the fixed version for anyone to download. Now you've got it, and are
> using it.
>
> Now a bug pops up. In the meantime, I've stopped using the software, and
> stopped supporting it. Now you've got to wait until some other kind soul can
> fix it for you (presuming that this kind soul knows what they're doing, and
> won't introduct new bugs).
This is one of the oft cited risks of free software. The dangerous
fallacy lies in supposing that because one person doesn't want to or
can't fix the software, that that person is SOL.
Now, it's true that this can happen. But the point is that there's
freedom to fix the problem, even it's not worth it. In other words, we
are not islands, isolated particles.
If I'm one of only a few people using this product, it's true that
there won't be much help around. But if lots of people use it,
statistics and the law of large numbers starts playing a bigger
role. The system stops behaving like a few particles and starts
behaving like a fluid or a gas. This is a huge conceptual difference,
and the root of this particular fallacy.
Consider real estate as a parallel. In Microsoft House, when it turns
out that my roof leaked, I can sue MS, but they'll claim shrinkwrap
licenses and that they're not responsible, that they didn't warrant
the house to be habitable anyway, etc. But I sure can't fix the roof,
let alone the wet plaster, without violating copyright law. I can
move, but that might be expensive.
My best hope in MS House is that the company (in my silly example, MS)
will fix the house for me. But they might take a long time to do that,
and they might not fix my favorite bugs, since there are so many. In
other words, I'm still depending on the kindness of others, I'm just
paying them for it.
With a "free" (speech, not beer) house, I can fix the roof and the
plaster if I want. Or I can pay someone else to. Or I can decide it's
not worth it and move anyway. So I still have all the options I had
before, but I have some additional options, too.
In the software realm, unlike hardware, my neighbor having fixed his
house would suffice in getting mine fixed. Indeed, It suffices that
someone in the world bothers to fix the problem.
If you haven't read it, check out Homesteading the Noosphere for ESR's
comments on motivation for free help
<http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/writings/>. It's an excellent analysis and
how non-monetarized incentives can operate.
> At some point, it begins to resemble "On the Waterfront " - "I've always
> depended on the kindness of strangers".
Isn't that from Streetcar? (Doesn't matter.)
--
Jeff Abrahamson
610/270-4845
abrahj01@molbio.sbphrd.com
(home email is jeff_abrahamson@purple.com)
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