The Illusion of Free Software
There is no such thing as free software. Period. It does not exist. Certainly not in this world where everything seems to come at a certain price. There is no such thing as a free product or a free service. Forget about it. The following comes from that Schwarzenegger movie called “Commando”, but it fits very well with the idea of “free” software: Somewhere, somehow, someone… is going to pay.
So they say it’s free software? Take a good look again. I’m sure you’ll find that somewhere, somehow, someone is actually paying for it. It might even be you! Yep, but ya just don’t realize it….yet. You see, it’s all about the business model. There can be many various ways you can choose to do business. But at the end of the day, someone is going to have to pay for it one way or the other, if you want to keep doing business. Some people may choose to tell their customers their product is actually “free”…..but that they need to pay for the service, or in other words, to be able to use it. Other people just charge a certain amount for their product……and that’s it. These are just two examples. And I don’t have a problem with either one of them. It’s just that the first example often gets abused by people to fool their customers. People always seem to like the idea of “free” stuff. And perhaps you can’t blame them, but it can get them into trouble when they later get confronted with the costs to be able to use their “free” product. This can cumulate to quite some cash after a while. And this is when, if they didn’t know about it before, they get introduced to the concept of Total Cost of Ownership. And if they already knew about it, they get to really know about it.
Take Google for example. Right now all of their services are “free”. That’s right, you can log onto the Internet and just start searching stuff on Google, use Gmail and many other Google services without paying anything. But is it really free? If it was, how would Google be able to make enough money to keep their servers running? How would they be able to make enough money to pay all those Ph.Ds? It’s not free, someone is paying. And in Google’s case, their advertisers are paying for it, and indirectly, you are too. You see, Google’s product isn’t search, or email or other services. Their product is viewers. And that’s what they are selling to advertisers. And every time you search for something on Google, you’re helping them, and in fact, working for them, to sell their product. So the fact that you think you’re using a free product is just an illusion.
Some mobile phone providers give their customers a “free” cell phone. Others throw in various other stuff like a “free” MP3 player, a “free” DVD player etc. Do you honestly think it’s free? Do you believe they are really giving away free stuff just because they want you as a customer? If you believe so, you’re naive, and chances are you’re often very happy in the world you live in. No my dear reader, it is not free. As soon as you sign up for their service, they’re making money on you and without you realizing it, you and many other customers are going to be paying for all the “free” stuff you got from them. In fact, they are going to be making muuuuch more than just the costs of the free stuff you got from them. And there are many more examples like this, I’m sure you can name a few yourself.
No business is going to be giving away things for free; you can bet they will be making money off of it somehow, somewhere. And someone is going to be giving that money to them.
Take Sun for example. Jonathan Schwartz, President and COO of Sun, would like nothing else than for you to believe that Sun is giving away free software and hardware. He writes:
Free is a compelling price to drive adoption. Best of all, it’s not subject to bizarre multipliers based on the number of cores or threads on a computer’s microprocessor.
And as much as my friend Linus helped change the world of operating systems, something tells me Postgres and MySQL are going to have an interesting blowback effect on the database marketplace – and JES (stay tuned for a momentum update) will bring the same to web application platforms.
After all, why spend money when the free stuff is setting performance records.
So tell me, Mr. Schwa…may I call you Jonathan? – thanks, so tell me, Jonathan, if nobody spends a single dime on all of this “free” software, one way or the other, how exactly are you going to keep that business running? How exactly does Sun make enough money to be able to pay you every month? What? Oh, you make money selling services based on the “free” software? Aaaah…I see. So that’s how people pay for your software. Do you think it’s really free software when you expect people to pay for the services? And he went on to say:
Do I worry about enterprises or corporate customers taking OpenSolaris and not acquiring a subscription to someone’s (hopefully our) service contract? No, not in the least. Do you really think a hospital, or an air traffic control authority or a Minister from an African nation would run their institution on unsupported software? No. No way.
I’m sorry, what? I thought you said a while ago: “After all, why spend money when the free stuff is setting performance records”. So do you think that the Minister from that African nation who is, like you said, likely to buy support for their “free” software, is not spending money doing so? Because I don’t understand why you ask “why spend money?” when you’re saying they will be spending money anyway. I’m confused.
Anyway, you see my good reader, how people can easily get fooled into thinking they are getting free stuff. Linux is just another example. A lot of people are going to want to make you believe all that open source software is free. It’s not. You’re going to be paying for it one way or the other, and often much more than their alternatives. How do you think Red Hat is making all that money right now if Red Hat Linux was really free?
You know, in an ideal world, most people would actually stop and think about it some more when someone tells them they can give them something for free. Especially when you know normally you’d have to pay for it. But not in this world, instead people often jump at any opportunity where they have the impression they are getting a good deal and free stuff. And a lot of people and businesses are abusing this.
Do you think customers will worry if businesses are able to make enough money to support themselves, when they can get free stuff from them? Most of them probably don’t even think about continuity. They don’t realize that if they don’t pay (enough) for the product, the manufacturer won’t be able to make enough money to be able to keep making the product and to support it. Frankly, they don’t even care about that or don’t realize it. The customer is always going to want to pay as little as possible, and they won?t care if they screw you over. They don’t realize that in the end, they’re going to lose as well.
In the world we live in, nothing seems to be free. Not even freedom is free. Everything comes at a price. And so does software. The sooner you realize this, and keep remembering it when you see the “free” software ads, the sooner you’ll be able to benefit from that knowledge. Just remember: Somewhere, somehow, someone is always paying.
This entry was posted
on Monday, October 10th, 2005 at 7:05 pm by Karel Donk
and is filed under 
October 11th, 2005 at 12:16 am
I had a good laugh reading this. All that babbling … just to make people skeptic of… what… free software?. The key here is free as in FREEDOM not free as in “no price”. Look at the success of the APACHE WEB SERVER, still powering the majority of the web sites on the net according to the latest Netcraft survey.
You can get the ?free?(= no cost) version, or you can get a customized/branded version from IBM (IBM HTTPD web server) with additional plug-ins and 24/7 tech support. The model works.
The same applies with Linux. You can choose to go “totally free” (ie leech a UBUNTU or Debian from the Net), or you can PURCHASE A COMMERCIAL DISTRO (I choose to pay $75 to Sun for Java Desktop System R2, most prefer SUSE or LINSPIRE). Thus, they pay for tech support or the ability to have patches installed. What’s wrong with that? NOTHING OF COURSE.
Want another example? The government of Buenos Aires city built a city map that rivals Google Map in ease of use and features, built on top of entirely open source software:
http://mapa.buenosaires.gov.ar
Would I have preferred they spent thousands of my tax dollars to purchase a closed, proprietary solution? Of course not!. This way, the knowledge they gained in this development can be used by others, and thousands of dollars have been saved by re-using existing knowledge, like knowledge is re-used in libraries and schools around the world on a daily basis.
Only someone either too naive (or a Microsoft fanboy with an anti-OSS agenda like it seems to be your case) or too biased goes to the length you have gone to write a negative-headline story on FOSS software.
Just my $0.02
Fernando
PS: Learn to spell, it’s “lose” not “loose”.
October 11th, 2005 at 3:27 am
Thanks for your response Fernando. You’re mistakenly assuming that I am confusing the OSS free with the no cost free. I’m not. You should give the article another good read. All the examples I used were clearly about the no cost free.
FYI, I have absolutely no problems with OSS. What I have a problem with, is people using it to fool others into thinking the software is free, as in, no cost free, and misleading them into thinking they don’t have to pay anything to use it, while clearly the real costs of that “free” software come when you start using it. Just look at my Sun/Schwartz example. Did you even read that part? That’s where you really should have laughed.
Plus, I’m not a MS fanboy. But I understand why you may think so.
Thanks for your spelling corrections.
October 11th, 2005 at 8:19 am
“Just remember: Somewhere, somehow, someone is always paying.”
That’s really extremely obvious. No one looks at a for-profit company with heavily traded stock and high paid CEOs and doesn’t think they are trying to make money. It’s ridiculous to claim that companies such as Sun or MySQL are trying to fool people about this. They very openly discuss their plans to make money and stay profitable. That’s a very common point of discussion as well.
The point of OSS is NOT that everything is 100% free and no one ever has to pay money. The main reason that most for-profit companies use OSS is ease of adoption, friendly licensing terms, and increased innovation and widespread support.
No one who buys a support contract with Sun or RedHat or MySQL was fooled into doing so any more than people are fooled into buying anything else. No one is fooled into thinking that everything was 100% free. That’s absolute nonsense.
This sounds like the “insight” of someone who is very new to the industry.
October 11th, 2005 at 8:40 am
Gamigin, my example of Sun still stands. You should be able to see why Schwartz’s statements are misleading. It’s misleading because people can be tricked into thinking Sun, for example, has an advantage because their software is free compared to competitors who charge for licenses upfront. But if you would compare those two business models, you’d see that it’s basically the same thing in the end, you just pay money for the software and/or to be able to use it.
October 11th, 2005 at 8:44 am
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/philosophy.html
October 11th, 2005 at 10:29 am
I guess all that “free” software I get from sourceforge.net is gonna put me into debt some day soon.
The only costs I pay with most of the free software I use, comes from the tiny bit of bandwidth I use to download it. If you do not have the knowledge to use the software, then it will cost you to educate yourself in its use. You can of course pay someone else to help you with your software. Now if you click on “free” screensavers and other malware-laden “freeware,” there are definitely costs of ownership you will be paying.
October 11th, 2005 at 1:03 pm
This sounds like someone sat around, made a posit then tried to prove it. It’s a bunch of hooey.
Free to me is what’s free.
Sam
October 11th, 2005 at 1:50 pm
I see you backpedaled on “free as in freedom”, which is really what OSS is all about, but even your “free as in beer” argument is wrong. A lot of people give away their improvements to OSS projects (after having invested their time and energy) for free. The reasons are various, but you can indeed get OSS “for free” thanks to the cooperative environment that people _naturally_ want to participate in since they derive more benefit than the cost of their investment in improving whatever features they have the skills and incentive to improve. We all win by sharing.
October 11th, 2005 at 2:16 pm
If you view my comments as an attack on open source you’re missing the point. It’s not an attack on open source. So I’m not backpedaling simply because I wasn’t even pedaling in either direction on OSS.
This is just about those people trying to mislead others with “free” software. Free as in: You don’t have to pay anything, when clearly you’re going to have to if you want any kind of guarantees.
October 11th, 2005 at 3:08 pm
If this isn’t “an attack on OSS software,” then it’s a colossally ill-conceived phrasing to lambaste “free software” — the term of choice for GNU/Linux, the Free Software Foundation, and open-source advocates — without ever once distinguishing it from freedom/OS software.
Pardon me while I prepare a post attacking “Idiotic Blog Posts.” What? –Nonono, I’m not calling YOUR blog post idiotic, what on Earth could ever give you such an idea? That’s just silly.
October 11th, 2005 at 9:05 pm
I understand the point you’re trying to make with your article though I’m not entirely certain I understand what it is you’re trying to warn people about. Granted “common sense” isn’t as common as it probably should be, but most folks seem to be aware of the fact that few things in life are truly free.
Sure, someone is paying Google to stay in business in exchange for the ads that show up when people are checking their emails or using the search engines, but the beauty of Google is the fact that their ads are so unintrusive that I can ignore them just fine much the same way I ignore 95% of the ads that show up on my television. For some folks those ads are useful and they click on them and that makes advertising on Google useful for the advertisers which allows me to enjoy the service without spending a dime on it myself. Not truly free, but free enough to earn my patronage.
Same is true with the OpenSolaris. As long as I’m knowledgeable enough to work with the software without purchasing a support contract then it’s free for me. The fact that corporations may be paying for a support contract for the ‘free’ software doesn’t really change the fact that they didn’t have to pay for the software itself in the first place. They’d be paying for similar support contracts for anything Microsoft puts out as well in addition to the cost of the software to begin with.
The simple truth is people need to read the fine print to be sure they understand how the “free” offer is being paid for. With cell phones, for example, you’re usually signing up for a year or more contract. As long as you don’t have a problem with the terms and can stick to them then you’re getting a deal even if it’s not truly free.
October 11th, 2005 at 9:35 pm
Straw Man
October 12th, 2005 at 12:14 am
“You should be able to see why Schwartz?s statements are misleading. It?s misleading because people can be tricked into thinking Sun, for example, has an advantage because their software is free compared to competitors who charge for licenses upfront.”
I really don’t see how you can accuse Sun of misleading people on this. Their licensing policies are very well publicized. You even quoted him discussing license fees. I’ve worked with IT organizations who’ve used and Sun products (some paid for various products and others didn’t) and I’ve never heard an actual client of Sun who felt mislead or manipulated.
I’m not saying that they are saints or all their products are golden or anything like that but I don’t see them being a particularly manipulative or deceptive company.