Argh Me Hearties, It's All About Freedom and Software.

[tcpip]

With my new role as President of Linux Users of Victoria, I attended the two Richard Stallman talks this week at the University of Melbourne and RMIT distributing leaflets for LUV and Software Freedom Day, both attended by around four hundred people each. In the former presentation, Stallman discussed the core principles in the free software movement and in the second presentation he discussed more the role of copyrights in history and why their current misuse is damaging. In both presentations Stallman was very persuasive, arguing in a manner not unlike Benjamin Franklin - that is you surrender a freedom for convenience, you'll end up with neither. Essentially he is arguing that software is not just about functionality, but also has a moral component and the rights which are allocated to software comes with serious long-term effects. Stallman also gave a very good argument on why Linux, whilst capturing the public imagination, is really GNU Linux, that is, the Linux kernel plus the GNU utilities (one could also refer to Android Linux and GNU Hurd).

Yesterday was Softare Freedom Day which was hosted at the State Library in Melbourne. With the usual combination of distributions, local organisations, commercial groups and a great collection of talks and events. Yes, IT's favourite federal member of parliament, Senator Kate Lundy, was there as well. I was particularly taken by the gaming area and received a thorough introduction to Glest, a very attractive Age of Empires-like game which I had hitherto completely missed. Finally, to end a very strange week, today is Talk Like A Pirate Day, which perhaps not so strangely, does have a strong crossover with the free software movement. Maybe it's something about "piracy"?

Comments

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

they'd lower the wages other surgeons could command. That's economics.

Not necessarily; with a fixed supply demand would have to already be at maximum for that to be true.

Lost me at the title "Saying You Can't Compete With Free Is Saying You Can't Compete Period.

That's unfortunate, because it discussing the economics of near-zero transaction costs for replication.

I'm also hoping for that research your mentioned.

[zey.livejournal.com]

Not necessarily; with a fixed supply demand would have to already be at maximum for that to be true.

True. If 50% of these hypothetical suburban Médecins Sans Frontières staff are clones of Patel, demand for medicine could continue to increase exponentially ;). We may have reached the limit of this analogy's usefulness.

it discussing the economics of near-zero transaction costs for replication.

Sounds very tiresome.

I'm also hoping for that research your mentioned.

I wasn't expecting to be able to find it again (the last time I looked into it deeply was 3 years ago), but, you're in luck!

This quote provides a pretty good backgrounder:

“Colin Messitt, a shareware developer did an informal study in which he produced two nearly identical copies of a shareware printing application that he published. In this application there was a print option. As a control, one version of the software printed every fourth page as an order form for the software, requesting that the user purchase a registered copy. The second version of the application claimed this crippled functionality, but did not mangle every fourth page like its counterpart.

He arranged his website to allow every other download to alternate between the two versions, providing a relatively equal distribution of the control application, and the uncrippled version. After nearly a year of steady sales, he determined that the registration rate on the crippled version was more than 5 times the registration rate of the uncrippled version.

His experiment shows that statistically, registrations are five times higher when a user is forced to register software to continue using it unhampered. This statistic points to two related conclusions. First, without a mechanism to enforce closure of a sale, a developer stands to lose a lot of money. Second, it shows that honesty on the internet is not nearly as widespread as it used to be. Some of the early shareware developers merely placed a message in their software asking for registration fees and were flooded with checks. Now, people can’t even be bothered to open their wallets to pull out their credit cards.

As a shareware developer, it is up to you how to enforce this closure. It can be with time trials, limited functionality, randomly changing functions, or just about anything else. But this simple experiment is estimated to have cost over $17,000 in lost registrations. It’s up to you to decide whether or not adding a few registration incentives is worth the time and effort.”

Source.

Personally, I think an empirical study like that, conducted by a software developer who simply wanted to know and didn't have a vested emotional interest in the result either way, beats an advocacy article from a website whose readers are GPL fans.

There are other studies like that around the place, though you sometimes have to look.

(Anyhoo, I'm retiring from this thread. Too much of a time investment for the middle of a work week.)

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

Sounds very tiresome.

Hey, I find it very interesting :)

an informal study

... from 1995? I'm not going to give that too much attention..

[zey.livejournal.com]

... from 1995? I'm not going to give that too much attention.

Hehe. Touche.