Piestar

So there’s been an apology from Amazon top brass for remotely deleting books customers have paid for.  Very sincere – except it’s not.

Sincerity would be removing the ability to do it again via a new firmware.  As is the case with all large companies – doing things like this is never the problem – it’s getting caught that is the problem.  And especially problematic if the titles you get caught doing it to are Animal Farm and 1984.

Essentially Amazon was found lying on the ground by a ladder with a bucket of white paint.  ‘Sorry, our bad, we won’t do it again’.

So either a: Deliver a firmware fix to prove you can’t do it again or b: tell your customers to shut up and accept what you built and they bought licensed.  And anyone who buys a Kindle after this point without the aforementioned firmware only has themselves to blame when Amazon try to pull the same stunt (as they will).

Update:

Here’s a clarification for those that may not realise what the problem is.  Amazon has the power to remotely delete and alter whatever is on your Kindle.  They were busted using this power and have promised that it was all a mistake and they won’t do it again.  Yet why do they have this power in the first place if using it was “stupid, thoughtless, and painfully out of line with our principles”?  It requires quite a bit of engineering to put this power in place – it’s not an accident that it’s there – and they have not said a thing about removing it.  Words are cheap.

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So I’ve been looking into getting into mobile phone software development for a while.  I don’t want to go for the iPhone as they are facists, and the less said about Windows CE the better, which leaves the obvious choice as Android.  I’ve been following news of the HTC Hero for a while – the G1 was just a little bit plasticy for my tastes – so I thought I’d wait it out and get it when it was released.  And that day has come.

So I heard it was out and visited the Orange website – it’s available on T-Mobile, but not quite yet – to see if I could buy it and yes, it’s there.  So I added it to the basket (getting quite excited) and was asked to pick a ‘plan’.  And guess what?

There is no data plan for it.

That’s right, the latest Google phone is not available with a data plan on Orange.  It’s an exclusive phone so I am assuming they had to bribe pay someone for the privilege of selling it, but apparently didn’t think anyone would want to use a data plan with it?  It’s also not like they don’t do data plans – if I want one I am free to buy a Blackberry off of them and they have a range of plans that include data – just not for the Android phones.  Well, it’s not strictly true they have no data plans – they do, but it’s £1.50 per day extra on top of the already expensive monthly contract.

It’s like Orange are stuck in the 90’s, offering thousands of minutes, free texts and hip, friendly, ‘appeal to the youth’ marketing copy on their website yet failing to see that the whole entire reason for that phone to exist is data! They even name the plans after animals for some reason – ‘Dolphin, best for texting, ideal for 14 year old girls’.

Maybe someday soon, hopefully, one Orange executive may hear about this MySpace thing that all the youth of today are using and make a MySpace Phone that gives cheap access to the internet, but until that time I think I’ll wait for the T-Mobile release.

Update:

On the (unavailable) ‘Panther’ plan – “500MB anytime mobile internet browsing”.  anytime?  anytime?!? It’s like I just had a flashback to the mid 90’s when BT were offering ‘anytime internet access’, where you could connect to the internet at any point in the day! They are advertising that they are not going arbitrarily gouge you on price and access at various times of the day as a feature.  Generous.

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Clarification:  This is only really aimed at the sort of people who say that the future is in FOSS and all software should (and will) be free.  The Stallmanites, if you will.

You hear it all the time “Free as in beer” and “Free as in freedom” used to describe FOSS.  But this question seems to be missed:

“Where can I get free beer?”

No pub will just give it to me, if someone buys me one I am expected to buy them one back at some point.  I could brew my own but I still need to buy all the equipment and spend a lot of time and money.  Guess what?

“There is no such thing as free beer!”

I get the whole “Free as in freedom” thing, I really do.  In an age of excessive DRM and activation the ability to have access to the source is incredibly useful.  As a developer dealing with PHP on a regular basis I am often stumped by ‘compiled’ PHP which makes a problem a customer is having impossible to fix as the original developers do not give their customers permission to fix their own problems.

It’s this whole “Free as in beer” craze that makes utterly no sense.  Name me any other discipline where you expect to get anything for free.  Architects will not design you a free house, Lawyers will not defend you for free (unless it is in their best interests), People will not wash your car, house, clothes or computer for free.  And pretty much nobody will fix your computer for free.  Yet is expected and even considered immoral to charge money for software!*

Developing software is hard.  It takes a ridiculous amount of time and effort – I should know, I do it full time.  Yet Under the FOSS regime I am expected to work for months on producing something then not only provide the source with the product (which I can accept and often do), but to also give away every single one of my rights as its creator, giving me no more ownership or rights over it than any random yahoo off of the street?

And the FOSS solution to this?  Sell ’support’.  What?  So as the softwares creator, to recoup the months of investment I need to provide bottom rung email and phone support which I wouldn’t even do if I was paid.  I would rather be unemployed than tech support, yet in the FOSS world that is my only option to even consider recouping my investment if I decided to have a career in software development.

“But big companies support FOSS”

Fantastic! Instead of working on what I want to work on, and creating innovative software that I think will fill a niche which I will then sell to make money to fund further development, I should instead go to work for IBM who will tell me what to write if they even hire me at all?  That doesn’t sound like any freedom I have ever heard of – it sounds like being a wage slave to enrich a large corporation.  “Free as in freedom to work for IBM”, but not “Free as in freedom to write your own software”.

“But Linux Torvalds wasn’t supported by IBM”

There are two types of FOSS projects:

1. Spoilers:
   Commercial software companies that realise their pay-for software is largely no longer saleable – Mozilla, Sun, OpenOffice etc.  It’s normal, conventional, closed source software that was ‘opened’ in response to the market.  You can’t sell browsers anymore (see Opera) so you need to either give up, or find alternate revenue.  Firefox makes its money from Google, OpenOffice is crap compared to MS Office and is given away in an attempt to provide value to the systems it’s given away on – and also as a ‘fuck you’ to Microsoft.
2. Students:
   The bulk of the non-commercially contributed FOSS code is made by students.  That is people that are being funded externally to learn about computers and use their knowledge, resources and free time to create ‘free’ software.  Obviously they largely don’t want to sell it as then they will have to deal with large amounts of problems (including actually finishing it) and it’s fun to create it, not a job. By giving it away free rather than charging they are not beholden to their customers for quality or bugs.  “Fix it yourself” is the mantra of the student developers.
   

There is one, very notable, absence from this list:

• Conventional, small, development shops working on producing free software full time – that is the non-corporate, individual development house.  They are the one business that simply cannot survive under the FOSS model, which is ironic as it’s probably the best situation to be in as a programmer.

Lets face it here, you can’t make money writing FOSS software.  You can use it to assist in an aspect of your multi-faceted business as, in theory, community contributions will improve your software for free – If I run a business selling special widgets and make a FOSS special widget tracker, then other people selling these special widgets would improve the software if they used it also so I (and my business) would benefit from it.

What FOSS does not allow is for someone to say “Aha!  There is a market for software for companies selling special widgets, I’ll make some.” – your going to be able to sell a few at best before someone takes your code, rebrands it and gives it away.  You essentially have to compete with yourself.

This is the point where some FOSS advocates offer up other ways of monetizing my Special Widgets software – Selling support (bleh), customizing for individual businesses, support contracts (bleh).  But what they are asking for is for me to dump a business model that has worked for thousands of years – you give me something, I give you something in return – and instead adopt an entirely unproven method of “you give me nothing, I give you something in return and then try to figure out how to make money at a later date.”

Why should I have to dump a perfectly functional business model to adopt something incredibly uncertain and very likely to make me bankrupt simply because some idiots on a crusade say I should?

Whats really needed is the ability to decouple this moronic notion of ‘Free as in beer’ from ‘Free as in freedom’, as unless everyone, including butchers, bakers and candlestick makers also give everything away for free** then it’s just not going to work.

* Yes, I know you can sell software for money according to the GPL.  What everyone loves to gloss over is the fact that anyone you sell it to can just give it away for free – so you will very soon be competing against your own product, but free.  The GPL is fundamentally incompatible with conventional for-profit software sales.  There are some choice early RMS quotes where he basically says this – the only reason for-profit sales are allowed is that they are unworkable.

** Yes, it’s been tried, no, it hasn’t ever worked and yes, it’s called ‘communism’.

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I’ve said for years that Apple would be a much, much worse company than Microsoft when it comes to monopolistic practices if they were the same size.  In fact it’s largely been down to their everything in-house, un-interoperable anti-developer attitude that has kept them marginalised and being The Beast of Redmond for so long.

It is unarguable that Apple is having massive success now.  Their unwavering focus on user experience in emerging markets has led to some great products that are, rightly, doing well.  Apple ‘get it’ when it comes to design and the fact that even now large amounts of people and companies think that it is just down to bling and marketing show how far away the competition largely is from understanding this.

That being said the latest action against Palm shows their true colours.  For those not following the story, when Palm released the Pre they made it appear to iTunes as if it was an iPod, thus enabling easy native sync.  Now Apple have disabled this little workaround in the latest release of iTunes, with this cute little note ‘addresses an issue with verification of Apple devices.’ Basically Apple do not allow any non Apple devices to easily sync with iTunes.  It’s funny how Apple does not make iCameras and thus all cameras can sync with their photo software, yet they do make mp3 players so feel the need to block competitors.

Lets look at Apple’s market share for iTunes (from Wikipedia):

• Steve Jobs announced in his “It’s Showtime” keynote that Apple had 88% of the legal U.S. music download market on September 12, 2006.[44]
• Apple announced that the iTunes Store had sold more than two million movies, making it the world’s most popular online movie store on April 11, 2007.[53]
• Apple announced that iTunes Store surpassed Best Buy to become the second biggest music seller in the USA behind Wal-Mart on February 26, 2008 and eventually became number one on April 3, 2008.[1]

So Apple, that biggest music retailer in the world, let alone online, is deliberately breaking and blocking access for 3rd party hardware to leverage sales of it’s iPod and iPhone products.  Isn’t leveraging a dominant market position in one market to assist a product in another market anti-competitive?

Didn’t Microsoft get in trouble with bundling IE with Windows to increase its browser marketshare?  Aren’t the EU still getting all worked up over this issue?  Yet what Apple are doing is not only considered bundling, but actively blocking competitors.

Look at the App Store.  You have to pay money for the privilege of developing software, then you are limited on what apps you can actually write to ones that do not compete with Apple’s own apps (and a bunch of other draconian rules).  Then once you have created your app you can submit it to be approved.  And if Apple do not like it for any reason (or even no reason) it’s tough luck, with no recourse.  So what you spent 6 months writing it – just spend another 6 months writing something else, maybe that’ll be approved.

The question ‘are Apple a monopoly’ and ‘are they breaking laws’ is entirely irrelevant.  Maybe they are, maybe they aren’t, but their attitude and behaviour make Microsoft look like a box of kittens.  What if Microsoft decided that Windows Media Player would only sync with the Zune from now on?  What if they decided that Windows CE (or whatever they are calling the mobile phone OS these days) would only run ‘approved’ apps, and that you could only use IE on it?  What if Microsoft stopped iTunes from being installed on Windows?  The community of Microsoft haters would go utterly batshit insane on a previously unseen level before.  There would be an epic bashfest to end all bashfests and you wouldn’t hear the end of it for years.  It would be the new BSOD.

Yet Apple has a level of paranoid control that Microsoft could only dream of, yet everyone still thinks MS is the ‘big bad’ of the software world.  I just don’t get it – answers on a postcard.

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