Topic 19: One Microsoft Way: the World of Proprietary Software
What could the software licensing landscape look like in 2015? Write a short predictive analysis.
Economic downturns tend to accelerate change in the IT world. People with budgetary authority take a fresh look at what they are spending money on (including IT investments) and what to do differently going forward. Given the situation of the past couple of years, we are most likely to see the growth of open source software also in the years to come, and definitely in the next five.
The open source versus proprietary software battle will continue. There is nothing to stop organizations making a move en masse to open source (for example, Linux and Open Office versus Microsoft Windows and Office), especially in academia, government departments and non-profit organizations, particularly in nations that do not have deep pockets.
As smaller companies have already found open source software beneficial, more and more larger companies are showing the same trend. Using open source software and participating in open source communities to build it, helps to spread out the cost and risk with partners in those communities. "The currently underreported and future trend is the shift of the development of non-business-differentiating software within companies to open source," predicts Bruce Perens, creator of the Open Source Definition and co-founder of the Open Source Initiative, on InfoWorld. We are past the days when people asked if Linux or Apache was safe to depend on in business.
However, the issue is not so much whether open source will win or not, but rather how long it will take and what niches and markets will remain proprietary source. Those niches and markets will always be there, and always be significant – either for commercial, security, or market size reasons. But they will no longer be the mainstay of the software market. In the "open source era", the software revenue will come from services and support, not proprietary packages.
One market niche where proprietary software will continue to be popular is probably the one of creativity software (both web design and design in general, photography, digital art), with Adobe products leading the way. Because of iPad's great success, the Apple's iOS software, with the latest version 4.2.1, is another example of closed software that is very likely to stay around. However, the closed and proprietary nature of iOS has garnered criticism, particularly by digital rights advocates such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation, computer engineer and activist Brewster Kahle, Internet-law specialist Jonathan Zittrain, and the Free Software Foundation.
As for the free software licensing, I believe the GNU GPL analyzed in the previous task, will be most widely used to ensure the freedoms of copyleft, even when the work is changed or added to. The permissive free software licenses, such as the BSD licenses, are of course an alternative, putting works licensed under them relatively closer to the public domain.
The thing that most evoked my feelings in favor of open source, was pointed out by Chris Pirillo, founder and maintainer of Lockergnome, in one of his YouTube videos The Future of Software is Open Source. He argues that there is a huge reason why open is better than just free.
Trying to retell, it is basically what he says: If I create a proprietary (closed) piece of software, and refuse to share the code with others, that goes away when I die. When you share code because it is an open collaboration, there is always room for someone to step in and take over. If one developer knows of a way to make a piece of the software work better, they can add to it when it is open-source. An open-source program can be enhanced upon until the end of time, basically. So your value in this world will be seen long after you are gone.
| You are an absolute fool to believe that the future of software is anything but open. Are we there now? Obviously not... but in good time, proprietary software will become a thing of the past. – Chris Pirillo |
Topic 20: The Digital Enforcement
Write a short analysis about applicability of copying restrictions – whether you consider them useful, in which cases exceptions should be made etc.
Everything to 100% can never be open and free. The world needs some copy protection and copying restrictions – to a certain and reasonable degree.
What makes open source good, is the passionate open source community – one with significant influence on technology directions and options, working together to solve problems and share the fruits of their labors with others. But people write for many reasons. Some for pleasure, others for money. An author wishing to profit from their work must find some way to limit access to that work to customers willing to pay for the privilege.
As I wrote in one of the previous posts on intellectual property, copyright is meant to protect creators. New innovations are often both creatively and expensive endeavors. The creation of copyright laws has protected innovators from investing huge amounts of time and money into a project, only to have it stolen. Creative Commons, a non-profit organization devoted to expanding the range of creative works available for others to build upon legally and to share, also states that it is not anti-copyright per se, but argues for copyright to be managed in a more flexible and open way.
Take for example music or movies. We are all willing to pay tribute and contribution to the artists we appreciate for their work that we find entertaining. At least those of us with right values do. Once we have done that, copying restrictions shouldn't be overly constrictive, as it used to be, for example, with the music files bought from iTunes before. For the same reason, in January 2009, Apple removed anticopying restrictions on all of the songs in its popular iTunes Store and allowed record companies to set a range of prices for them. With the copying restrictions removed, people are able to shift the songs they buy on iTunes among computers, phones and other digital devices. Industry pundits had long pointed to DRM as one culprit for the music companies' woes, saying it alienated some customers while doing little to slow piracy on file-sharing networks.
Yet, the case with science business shows us where exceptions should be (and could be) made, perhaps not by moving copying restrictions in full but by making information more openly accessible.
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