Disclaimer: arguments are very emotional things. As much as we would like to think that they consists of logical statements and counter statements with the “best” arguments winning, in real life the acceptance or rejection of a given argument very much depends on the frame of reference of individual persons. With this in mind, I believe that Tudor and me have very different frames of reference (him being a Microsoft employee and me being an open-source enthusiast) and as such I’m quite sure that nothing written by me here will change his mind (and conversely, nothing written by him will change my mind). Still, I think that this is a useful exercise to get things off my chest and to document arguments for more open-minded people

1. His first argument is that installing and using pirated software is harder that legitimate software because mechanisms like WGA – I don’t think that this argument holds water, since most people (the “average user”) can’t install an OS, regardless if it is pirated or legitimate. Just ask yourself the following question: how many of the non-technical people you know installed themselves the OS on their computer? I would bet you that the number is very, very close to 0.

   If the OS is installed by the “neighbor kid from the 2nd floor”, then this argument doesn’t hold. Even more, many geeks pride themselves with being able to perform complicated tasks, like disabling the WGA, and as such, for them the existence of protection element is a positive thing (a challenge to be solved).

   Finally, the inverse of the argument (that legitimate MS software is easier to use than pirated one) isn’t true either in my experience. I had numerous occasions where (completely legitimate, bought with the computer OEM) Windows failed to validate, a (again, completely legit, boxed version) Win 2k3 SBS suddenly refused to work because it needed to be a DC (and it told me after 3 months!), the Windows 7 beta deactivated itself periodically, VM’s deactivated themselves after moving from one machine to the other for purely technical reasons (even though the one-machine / one-owner / one-copy rule was always observed), etc.

2. The second argument is that there is no peer-pressure to pirate in Romania (that not “everybody is doing it”) – I would suggest him to visit any campus in Romania and check out the (pirated) software which can be found on the network. And not only that, but music, movies, books, etc. Or to go to repair shops and ask for MS Windows / MS Office being preinstalled on the computer – the answer will almost always be positive. Even more, the next generation feels entitled to these freebies (and it isn’t something specific to Romania either, thanks to the abundance of the freemium business model on the Internet).

   In the long term (IMHO) less and less people will be willing to pay for things which they perceive as basic needs. The only options for old-style software companies (like Microsoft) are to include more and more technical measures to try to prevent this (even though the current measures already make MS Windows annoying to use) or to raise the level of punishment associated with piracy (which shouldn’t be possible in democratic countries because of public backlash)

3. Piracy doesn’t help the software companies by making their product more well known – if this would to be true, why do you think that there are associations in people’s mind like Microsoft – Windows, Office – Microsoft, image editing – Photoshop, CD burning – Nero and so on? Most people use whatever is already installed on the computer to accomplish their jobs. This is why OEMs get big bucks from software companies to preinstall their product.

   I don’t buy the “starving programmer” argument either. The cost of copying software is minuscule. Which means that over 80% (this is of course a number pulled out of my rear, but I’m quite sure that the real number is somewhere in the ballpark) of each sale is pure profit. Which means that (a) a freemium type model can easily be sustained and (b) that even a few sales mean that the company makes a nice profit, and excessive focus on this part (ie. “we are loosing X billion of USD to piracy” – which BTW is not true for at least two reasons – first because the method to determine the number of pirated copies is questionable and second, because it assumes that every person who “pirates” would buy the product if s/he didn’t have access to the pirated version) is pure greed – which, let us remember, is one of the seven deadly sins.

   Also, as a programmer, you don’t have to write commodity software. Let me tell you, there is very good money to be made from writing custom software for a small number of clients.

   A final point I would like to make with regards the relation of piracy to innovation: remember that all three “big” powers (USA, Russia and China) started out (and some are still) by rejecting patents to bootstrap their industry. Something worth thinking about…

4. That people buy because somehow they are convinced that it is “the right thing”, not because of fear – I’m not seeing it. At least at the individual level I don’t know anybody who bought a single Microsoft product (including myself, I’m living off my MSDN AA licenses). At a company level the motivation (arguably) is mostly fear. They buy licenses for the same reason they pay taxes. Also (as I’ve already said at point 2), the willingness of people will only go down, not up.

5. Software is not overpriced, especially when considering the income level of Romanians – this is IMHO the best example for the “pink sunglasses” Tudor is wearing and how his frame of reference distorts his perception. The average (net) income per month in Romania for 2008 was somewhere around 400 USD (this would mean 4800 USD per year for those of you who use this frame of reference). Given this figure, is it reasonable to expect that people give more than half of their monthly income (or even all it, if we consider that a computer would need MS Windows + MS Office + AV) for software? May I venture a guess that (a) Tudor has at least five time the average net income and (b) he has free access to all of Microsoft’s software, and as such, he might not see the real situation? My challenge to Tudor would be: how much of the software he has right now on his personal machine did he pay for?

My conclusion is that software piracy is here to stay. Especially in more poor countries like ours. To give Microsoft what is due: they do really excellent software (not that they don’t do mistakes, like Vista – which is abysmal – I’m speaking from a first hand experience, having played with it on two “Vista certified” laptops and in VMs). Even so, their expectation is unrealistic at a minimum and even unethical. Also, as a developer, if you develop using a technology (OS, libraries, components, etc) for which you don’t have the source code, you will hit “undebuggable” issues sooner or later.

PS. Vista is the new ME – just worse:

Update: fixed some typos and errors in expression – thank you to my dear readers.

Why should you license your work?

• because it makes clear under what conditions can it be reused / quoted / etc
• because it is more probably that others will use it and use it in a way you are comfortable with
• because if you have to enforce your license (think of splogs), you have clear terms others have to comply with
• because choosing one license doesn’t mean that you can’t change it in the future (if you are the sole copyright holder of the material or if all copyright holders agree, the work can be relicensed – also the same material can be licensed under different licenses in the same time)
• even if you don’t specify a license, there are implied rights (given by the fact that you made your work public) and a license can help clarify the issues

Why use creative commons?

• because it is a well understood license and the compatibility between it and other licenses has been largely explored
• because there is an organization behind it, which can help you with legal matters
• because it has variants to cover almost all possible cases (do you want attribution? do you want to permit derivative works? etc)
• because it is much more likely to hold up in a court of law, should it ever be challenged, than a home-grown license
• because there is a whole lot of material out there already under a CC license, which makes can be reused by you (for example the pictures attached to my blogposts are all under a CC license)

PS. All work on this blog – unless explicitly specified otherwise – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

Picture taken from Jayel Aheram’s photostream with permission.

Now that I had to use it again (although it will be only until I make some time to reinstall Ubuntu), I got hit by a curious problem: it was shutting down after 1:30 of use. My first reaction was that somehow a malware got installed on my system, but that wasn’t the answer. The solution to the quiz was in the eventlog and read like this:

The server was shut down because it did not comply with the EULA. For more information, contact Microsoft.

Now admittedly I never read the EULA and hacked Windows Activation (because I don’t want to send any data to MS), but this was a little intriguing. A quick Google search turned up this Knowledge Base article: Windows 2003 Small Business Server Shuts Down Unexpectedly; Events 1001, 1013 and 1014 are Logged. It turns out that I didn’t install the AD server on the machine… This really seems over the top. Admittedly it is MS’s right to sell their software under whatever license they want, but this is just one more step which distances me from any MS solution. And by the way – they state that Win2K3 SBS can be used with a maximum of 5 clients, which is totally artificial. I can get how different product features can go in different versions of the product (like Basic, Home, Pro, etc), but artificially limiting something is just plain wrong.

Fortunately there is a happy ending to the story: I just used the SysInternals ProcessExplorer (which now ironically is owned by MS) to suspend the SBS licensing process (you can recognize it either after the name of the executable – sbscrexe.exe – or its description – SBS Licensing Service). You could also try killing it, but most probably Windows won’t react well to something like it (they treat Licensing as a key component, for example on Vista your box will die if you try to mess with it)

PS. A bonus tip – for salvaging data off your ext2 / ext3 drive (yes, it will work with ext3, because if is backward compatible with ext2), you can use either the plethora of free drivers which can mount ext2/3 on windows (I would recommend this one, because I used it in the past and had very good experiences with it), or a program called explore2fs. To recover your Firefox 2 session, just copy the file sessionstore.js from the directory /home/<your user name>/.mozilla/firefox/<a directory with random name>/sessionstore.js and either extract the links manually or drop it in your Firefox installation and restore the session.

• At home I dual boot between Ubuntu and Windows 2k3 SBS which was a gift from MS. What kills me is the text on the box of Windows: Includes 5 Microsoft Windows Small Business Server Client Access Licenses for Devices and/or Users. This is a typical example for MS trying to get more money than it should. If I want to have a stronger server, I should pay for the hardware not the software!
• The updates last week went seamlessly on the few boxes I’m responsible for, however on one of them it kept insisting that I don’t have a valid license. Now it must be known that we are a big company and only buy equipment from big vendors in big quantities so surely that computer had a valid license! But because of MS I had to waste several hours to find the site admin and ask him to check the situation so that finally I can apply the patches. What should have been a 30 minutes top outage for that server (yes, server!) became several hours. Thank you MS!
• Read MS’s reasoning for the restrictions: less than X% of the users need this. First of all: how do you know that? Was it told you by a market research company team / company? I’ve read yesterday a report issued by market research company who claims to have more than 30 years of experience in the field about technology and they couldn’t get even their wording about economics right, let alone technology! Secondly: get it into your head: that X% covers your enthusiast base (you know, technical evangelist) and techies who do the support work and the recommendations. The most valuable people you have! Thirdly: usually I’m don’t talk politics, but I see a very good analogy: let’s eliminate the constitution, because only Y% needs it (and I’m sure that Y < X). Think about it!

My opinion: move to free software where you don’t have to put up with this crap and you can concentrate on doing what you have to do!

Update: as the guys over at the Splitcast forums pointed out, I’m not the only one dislikeing MSs business practices.

He mentioned several improvements which went into the Vista kernel. My feeling about it is that it is very nice, but who will program against an interface which isn’t on the market yet, won’t be the version used by the majority for several years and there is no backward compatibility (one example which comes in my minds is the new Private Namespaces feature). I know that Microsoft is in a difficult position, because on one hand if they would offer an update kernel for Windows XP, they would kill off incentives to upgrade, but if they don’t very few people will program using the new functions until Vista becomes a significant piece of the market. Compare this with Linux where there are very few reasons not to upgrade (one being that it breaks something you really care about – but this is a very rare case and usually updates come out very quickly for the given software). Having such a long release cycle really limits the options Microsoft has in my opinion.

An other feeling that I’ve got from the presentation (or better said: I’ve had this feeling for a long time and the presentation only reinforced it) is that Windows as an operating system (and I’m talking about the NT line here) is quite secure, the problem being the default policies and the way that they’re trying to get people to adopt a new security policy in Vista for example. Because of fear for their revenue they (and I don’t mean the technical people) are not imposing all the security restrictions they should, but rather come up with things like LUA, which IMHO is a semi-solution which can be used to blame the user if something happens (because they clicked yes without reading the message box – what percent of the users reads the dialog boxes anyway?).

Now for the fun part: all the source code that comes with this program. It is composed from three parts as you can see from the main site. I’ve looked at the licenses first (take care, because there is a different license for each component). The key points that I dislike:

• You are not allowed to reverse engineer the tools which come with the curriculum. While I’m sure that there is a lot of information in the curriculum itself, probably there will be times where you wonder: how exactly does this tool do that?
• IANAL, so the definition of derivative work is a little fuzzy to me, and I don’t know exactly how this would apply later in your career if you choose to do this line of work (working at a security company for example and doing kernel level development).

Personally I will stay away from it, I think there is enough information out there which doesn’t come which such restrictions. Also, for the moment I don’t see how such access would be useful. It’s nice to have, sure, but I’m not sure that it’s actually useful (none of the two major Universities that we have here use / present kernel level code in their OS courses for example).