[updated Fri Jul 18 12:36:24 PDT 2008]: As the comments illustrate, I can’t argue against a position I don’t understand. Don’t like the iPhone, iPod, whatever? Don’t buy one.
Some helpful hints:
- Tell people what the trade-offs are when they “buy” these new devices/services (buy is in “quotes” since increasingly, we are buying access or a license to use something, rather than an actual thing).
- Explain what happens (not what might happen or what it means in moral terms) when these fail or the hidden pitfalls of the relationship are exposed.
- If possible, show people where they lose money, as opposed to freedom or other philosophical principles: the man in the street understands one better than the other and being unwilling or unable to frame your argument in terms that are mutually understood means you’re wasting your time.
As skeptical as I am of the free market and consumerism, it makes me itchy to find myself defending it against an agenda I don’t understand. I don’t think the free market is an unalloyed good, as I don’t believe it is truly free. It’s a rigged game. The Invisible Hand is in my wallet.
As best I can tell, the LPF/FSF/GNU folks admit to no such weaknesses or trade-offs. The response will be that I need to read all their back-catalog of position papers and manifestos. <sigh>
Gruber points to this from the FSF:
Wait, locked up? Prison? It’s a phone. Aren’t we being a little extreme?
[From 5 reasons to avoid iPhone 3G – Free Software Foundation]
The FSF is something I would like to support but the claims they make are so extreme, I just can’t. There’s an underlying elitism there, that only people who can program computers should have them (can anyone argue that without shrinkwrapped software, we would see fewer computers and likely a lot of industries might never have been born (is there a freeware DTP application that rivals PageMaker or it’s successors? For that matter, I’m still looking for an office suite that works as well as the Leading Brand . . . ) Would the internet be as ubiquitous as it is without the millions of commodity (read: Windows) PCs out there? Hmm, maybe it would be better if it wasn’t . . .
I think the bottom fell out when I saw the bit about Steve Jobs hating competition. He introduced a new phone platform in a mature market against a whole array of entrenched players — Nokia, Motorola, LG, Samsung, RIM, Palm — and seems to be doing quite well. There were digital music players before the iPod: where are they now? I think he craves competition, or he might have been content to run Pixar and count his money. And there is something a little disingenuous about a MacArthur grant winner arguing about business models. $240,000 over 5 years isn’t a bad wage. For someone obsessed with fairness, how fair is it for a grant recipient to offer products and services that compete against organizations that are not grant-subsidized?
Seriously, I think there is a need for the work the FSF is doing but I wish they could make their case without the exaggerated claims.
And a bit more from the thoughtful Gruber:
One of the Free Software Foundation’s complaints regarding the iPhone (and Apple in general) is the lack of support for “free” media file formats such as Ogg Vorbis. Here’s what I wrote last year:
With regard to Ogg Vorbis, or the idea of “free” codecs in general, the consensus seems to be that this is an ugly patent lawsuit waiting to happen. Yes, the creators of Ogg Vorbis have released the format (and source code for encoding and playback) openly, but the holders of the patents behind MP3 (and other patented codecs) very likely consider part of Ogg Vorbis to violate their patents. If Apple, or any other company with a serious amount of money behind it, were to use Ogg Vorbis in a mainstream widely-used product, it could lead to an expensive lawsuit.
Do software patents suck? Yes. Is it possible that Ogg Vorbis does not actually infringe on anyone’s patent, but that some patent holder could sue and win even though they shouldn’t? Yes. The point is, Ogg Vorbis is intended to be free, and it would be great if it were free, but no one with deep pockets has yet tested the water to see whether it really is. Worse, there are some experts who do believe that Ogg violates at least one significant patent.
The same goes for why Apple chose to create the Apple Lossless format rather than use FLAC. For Apple to support Ogg Vorbis would be to take a potentially large risk (a lawsuit, by, say, Fraunhofer, an MP3 patent holder) for an utterly minuscule financial upside (whatever handful of people exist who won’t buy an iPod or iPhone now but would if Apple supported Ogg Vorbis).
In short, Apple supporting Ogg Vorbis makes wonderful political sense, but no business sense whatsoever.
★
The last paragraph sums up everything I have ever thought or said on this: didn’t Janis offer us the pearl that “freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose?” It’s easy to lobby for a change that doesn’t cost you anything. I don’t know if anyone has raised the issue of indemnifying Apple if they were to use FLAC/Ogg/et al. Again, people understand money and the risk of losing. Speak to them in a language they understand if you want to communicate something.