| Think about this for a second. Buying a piece of studio hardware seems
straightforward: you see adverts for a product in a magazine, you find
a shop which stocks it, you buy it, you take it home, you unpack it,
you use it. For some time (usually a year) the manufacturer provides
warranty service on the product: after that, you pay to have the item
serviced, either by the manufacturer or by some third party. If you
wish, you may have the item modified or customised. At some
stage you might decide to sell the item, trade it, or even give it
away.
So what about software? You see adverts for software products in
magazines. You buy one in a shop, take it home, unpack it, use
it. Here the similarity ends. You will probably find that you have
no warranty - if the product does not work properly or proves
unreliable, you have no rights over and above what the retailer might
offer in terms of refunds. You will be forbidden from modifying the
package, and nobody but the original vendor will be permitted, or
able, to maintain or fix it. And there will probably be legal
restrictions enforced by the original vendor on selling or trading the
package.
Of course, what is happening here is that you are not buying anything:
you are licensing it, just as you licence the music in your CD
collection or the films you have on DVD. And since software can in
principle be duplicated almost without effort, viewing it in the same
way as a piece of hardware is misleading.
The dissonance in this situation is most apparent when one considers
copy-protection. It doesn't make sense to sell something as if it were
a product if it can be duplicated for free - so copy-protection
schemes attempt to enforce a bogus real-world property of physical
objects. The expensive product becomes a fragile key disk, an
encrypted data block on a hard disk, or a one-off response key
obtained after days or weeks of phone calls to an over-burdened,
under-staffed help desk.
As a product, software is essentially worthless. Think about the most
recent software-only product you bought and what you paid for it. Now
imagine that the vendor has just ceased trading: no more upgrades,
fixes or support, ever. How much is it worth to you now?
Everything about the marketing, distribution and sale of music
software packages attempts to suggest that one is buying a product,
not a licence-to-use. One has to ask: why? The answer is this: vendors
want all the advantages of offering licences (guaranteed revenue
streams, restrictions on duplication and use, monopoly hold on
customers) and none of the disadvantages (chiefly: accountable,
long-term, good-quality customer service).
This monopoly hold works by forcing customers to go back to the
original vendor for all service and support: the software is closed
and binary-only, and often uses proprietary file formats and protocols
so that the customer cannot easily move to a competing
product. Clearly, if the vendor ceases trading or supporting the
product, the customers is helpless. Perversely, this situation
hurts the vendors themselves: they are extremely sensitive to media
rumour (since the value of their products is dependent on the public
perception of their ability to offer continuing service), and they are
pressured to offer continuing "upgrades" on otherwise mature packages
into which customers are locked.
A solution to address these problems? How about giving all the sources
of the software away for free?
Since there is so much talk in the IT media at the moment about the
"open source" software movement and business model, let me clarify a
couple of points: firstly, free source code is not a new idea -
open-source editors and tools were common twenty years ago, and the
move to mass-produced, commercial shrink-wrap "products" is relatively
recent. Secondly, open source does not just mean free: it also means
that no vendor is allowed to restrict the availability of
modifications to it, although they are free to charge for service and
distribution.
The key is in the words "service" and "distribution." Software vendors
are largely service and distribution companies already: a lot of a
company's efforts are maintenance and bug-fixes of the software
(especially the copy-protection). By contrast, open source projects
are maintained in a parallel, distributed fashion by the programming
community at large, in a manner which leads to extremely robust and
reliable products. (More than half of the web sites you visit will be
hosted using an open-source server, for example.)
Of course, few musicians are programmers; but that's where the
commercial companies come in: offering distribution services and
support (CD-ROM distribution, printed manuals, technical support,
online help, updates and bug-fix releases, installation and
customisation). Users can choose the best support package for their
needs, without committing themselves when choosing a product.
I am painting a simplistic picture here: it is clear that no music
software vendor could release all their source code tomorrow and keep
trading without a glitch. But as I write this article, Doug Wyatt (the
original developer of Opcode's OMS) is petitioning for Gibson to
release OMS to open source. Doing so would relieve Gibson of the
maintenance effort for the package, allow Wyatt and others to do
maintenance and enhancement, and would allow hardware vendors of MIDI
interfaces to develop and ship their own OMS drivers. As with MIDI,
such a move to an open, licence-free standard benefits everyone
involved.
|
