Why Should I Care About Free Software?

As smaller and faster computers hit the market in an "iForm " factor, computer users are seeing a world of mobile media...but there is a dark tale, underneath it all.

Free Software. Free, as in beer. And ideology. The idea that anyone can use a piece of software, even enhance it (or pay someone else to enhance it) and make it useful to them, as long as it remains free for someone else to do the same.

Why should anyone care about these matters?

Isn't this just hippie geek hype?

No.

The Free Software world is determined to create a whole computer ecosystem built around the idea that software should be open, freely shareable. An inalienable right. Now, before you see this as some commie scam--realize that they do believe a company should be able to seek profit, just in other ways.

Red Hat Linux, for example, one of the largest commercial Linux distrubutions makes money off of supporting their customers.

In this way, when issues arise--and bugs loom--Red Hat knows about it quicker because it's people are constantly involved with deploying their product and introducing it to new customers. Besides that, Red Hat is the basis for more than a few other distributions.

Linux currently resides mostly in business and government sectors, utilized in serving web users and databases. However, Android has invaded the iPhone OS space and is currently dominating. While these small devices currently have their limits, one RISC-based company is turning the tides.

Soon your new iPhone or Android or Blackberry will be running at 2.5 ghz, dual core . And four core on the horizon.

Microsoft trudges on with it's Windows 7 phone, and I'm sure it may capture some small segment from Microsoft fanboys. But guess what? It'll be running on an ARM too, not an Intel or AMD desktop CPU.

Guess who is winning?

ARM certainly is. But Apple's iPhone was the first major breakthrough device that caught the eye of everyone.

There's problems with the Apple way of doing things, and it's closed ecosystem. And these problems could cost you, the dear end user, more freedoms than you may not realize are gone until it's too late.

Oh, and by the way--Intel is trying to do this, as well.

What is "this?"

As it stands, if you want to develop for the iPhone you have to sign up and agree to certain terms. Your software can basically come through one source, the iTunes app store, and to get there, Apple tries to inspect every piece to make sure it doesn't bend rules.

Things like allowing the iPhone to be used as a teethering device in the US, meaning one savvy user could pair the iPhone with their laptop and surf the web wirelessly over their AT&T service. This sort of thing is now possible, for a fee--while it has been available in other parts of the world, largely for free.

As iPads, iPhones, iPods have begun to replace and enhace access to the web on a mobile scale, it has remained a brutally closed ecosystem for developers. For good reason, on Apple's part--they're developing a flash rival, it seems. Oh, and now there's an ad delivering system built right into the iOS. I've seen them..they're actually quite interactive and informative. But lets not fool ourselves, Apple, like Google and Microsoft, have put siginificant ammounts of money into developing advertising platforms into their products.

As the television dies, you and I will be getting Google Adwords on our YouTube sidebar, and Google Ads in the YouTube video. Not to mention whatever ad system Google I'm sure will implement into their Android software stack.

But is it not amusing, how much things change...and remain the same?

Bare in mind, I'm not outright attacking Apple or Google...someone's gonna do it, it's been done before--and it may as well be done by them.

But back to Apple. Apple's closed ecosystem is relegated, currently, only towards their iOS. It's much easier to write software for the full Mac OS X. But Intel, on the other hand, is looking to perhaps do something very similar to your desktop.

Don't believe me?

Intel's recent acquisition of popular antivirus vendor McAfee may seem frustratingly confusing to some people, but dig deeper it's really not: the truth is, they're looking to only allow code signed by a trusted authority to work on their chipsets. If it's not signed, it won't run.

Now, I'm sure there's ways around this--just like it's easy enough to hack an iPhone (although it took me several hours the first time.) but there's really no need to erect these walls to begin with.

If Microsoft was pulling this, anti-trust litigation would soar; the fact is, we're getting computers that are being treated as if they're souped up cell phones.

What's at stake in the handheld sector, and the desktop sector, is user freedom.

By only allowing signed code onto an Intel computer it's severely restricting the pace of software development for it's platform. Apple understands this, but has easily grown with it's install base to accomadate this fact. Yet in the news there's frequent issues with Apple and the developer community.

If we can work hard now to build a set of great software products that can be used by the community of humanity for the better, than why are we still allowing those who create technology restrict our use of it? Is it their right?

By the way--Google Search out the Trusted Platform Module. Microsoft's got it's hands in it, and you probably have one on your computer.

Our freedoms are being stifled by the likes of Intel, Apple, Microsoft, and yes, even Google. Google wishes for all information to be open. Some aren't quite so into that, and I can't disagree with any objection.

But lets not fool ourselves, there's bigger business here than we realize.

Apple has the iTunes app store. But remove the app store, and you still have a medium for distributing media content. Microsoft's Zune, with it's Windows DRM, just the same. In fact so many products over the years have been crippled by restrictions--it's ultimately what killed the mini disc, which only opened up to MP3 and WAV instead of just Sony's ATRAC format after it was losing ground to the early flash based MP3 players on the market.

Sony's PSP, too, utilizes the UMD--the same technology in their minidisc format. They use Sony memory sticks, and to my knowledge, all audio is ATRAC. Not MP3, even though the movies are encoded in blu-ray/DVD format. (Okay, I know, I'm getting really technical..I'm sorry!)

The funny thing is, even with this proprietary disc format's digital restriction management system, it's been cracked. Just like the Dreamcast's GD-ROM, which was, essentially, a CD-ROM standard that laid out the disc a certain way to allow nearly a gig of information on it. (This is why you can stick a Dremcast game into your computer and get stuff like wallpapers, etc..but a normal CD-ROM can't read anything more than 32MB or so of data, because the rest is packed in a non-standard way.)

DVD's been cracked. And so, too, has blu-ray. All of these proprietary formats are being whittled away and set free. And who is at war with who? Is it media companies versus thieves, or media companies versus general consumers?

I propose we stop trying to implement these expensive restrictive formats. How expensive are they? Well, I'm sure it would be just as cheap for SEGA to have implemented DVDs instead of GD-ROMs (which, like the PS1(CDRom)/PS2 games before, have been cracked) but the hardware was new and rather expensive and the only land who loved their last console, the ill-fated Sega Saturn, was the native Japan.

The fact is, more and more of your content is coming through the internet. And ultimately, this is where a lot of people want to go. But their reasons vary. What if, for instance, you stopped paying for Microsoft Office every time a new version came out--and just paid for a web-based version that had more or less the same features delivered in your browser. So now a product that Micorosft put out would net them $179 a student, for example, would be something like $5-10 a month per person. You do the math.

Oh, and let's switch back to the PSP for a tick--their ill fated PSPGo product, a redisgned version of the first PSP sans minidisc drive was supposed to herald in the age of media-less gaming. Internet-only delivery. The problem is, most developers aren't set up to do this quite yet--and it's hard to stop selling hard copies when they're still flying off of shelves.

But as it stands, my friends, one day you and I will remember fondly what it was like to step into a used book, movie, music, and video game store. Because when software developers, movie studios, and record companies get into bed with each other it's usually never good.

All things being even, and all things binary, when a book, video game, movie, or audio recording is little more than ones and zeroes, it is endlessly replicatable. In other words, the supply of these proudcts is limited only to bandwidth and hard drive size. In the minds of many, the sooner the physical media is dead--the quicker more money can be taken from consumers.

So, let's review:

We're entering a possible world where we wil be told how we can program our computers, and the very media they're designed to create and display will be tightly secured because not only will it have software-based restrictions, it will already be a process to go forth and install any applications meant to circumvent these things. And they'll be plenty of ads for new media, right in your face. Suck it up, brother.

And that, my friends, is why--in probably too many words--why we need open source software.

Not for piracy, but for basic freedoms. The freedom to create my own program, and run it. The freedom to decide how my hardware operates. What my computer consists of.

The freedom for it to be more than a tool to consume media that I license from one company or another, to view, listen to, play, or make a document on.

an open source, community developed phone. Mockup and study done by Mozilla Foundation, and one Billy May.

Note, that, this is not in any way a design intended for production.

The future is riddled with ethical potholes, such as these. But it's just as bright. That, however, is for a different article...