The Problem of Freeware.
I’ll come right out and say it: “I’m a hypocrite here. A big one.” Here’s the thing: I have this big belief in the power of making something free. Anything. I believe that when someone makes what they make available to as wide an audience as possible, they’re saying that they believe their product is valuable enough that everyone who can use it should use it because it would improve their lives that much. Something in me just screams, “Yes! That’s the way to do it! Nothing else makes a lick of sense!”. After all, if the idea or product is so important, why would you make it impossible for the vast majority of people on the earth to obtain it (as in, most products made for consumption in the U.S.)?
I see a lot of this in Christian organizations especially. It really bothers me that people will put copyrights on Bible translations and charge licensing fees for worship music and sue for plagiarism for books on theology. What bothers me so much is not that they’re getting paid, but quite simply that their attitude seems to infer a sense of ownership over this stuff. I’m a pretty firm believer in the doctrine of Total Depravity and an outworking of that doctrine would indicate that nothing good can come of us. “Every good and perfect gift comes from above” (James 1:17) is one way that I might choose to prove this. In other words, in a very real sense, works of theology and doctrine and works of glorifying God (such as a worship song) are not of us. I don’t like the idea of getting ultra-possesive about something that was given to us that we could never have hoped to produce on our own. Also, it’s a little self-defeating. The point of God giving us gifts is so that the wider body of Christ can benefit, not so that we can have a better experience or be a little bit more admired (1 Corinthians 12). If that’s the case you should make the gifts that God has given you available to as much of the body of Christ as is possible.
However, that gets somewhat rantingly off the topic. Maybe one day I’ll finally write my book, “Christ Was Free: What Christians Have to Learn from the Open Source Movement.” Till then, moving on…
Back to that issue of power. See, the power of giving something away because of the belief you have in its value comes down to this: The very fact that I know someone is sacrificing to give me something because they believe it’s worth that much to me makes me desire to give something back to them! The feeling is completely different than the feeling I get when I look at that 320 GB hard drive that I want so badly for my laptop. Seagate’s charging money for that. They’ve made a business decision that if you can’t pay for it, you don’t need it and thus they show their disinterest in making the world a better place (Honestly, who can fault them? We used to get buy just fine on MBs of static storage and KBs of RAM. Sheesh, what do I possibly need 320 GBs of internal space for?) through gregarious giving. Thus, I wouldn’t feel a bit of regret if sometime down the road they realized, aghast, that they had been undercharging for their product. It’s a business transaction at that point. They’ve fixed their price point and that’s what they’re sticking to. If they go belly up because of it, tut tut on them.
But someone who believes so much in their product that even though they’d like to get paid for it, they’re willing to put selfless time into it and give it away to people because they believe it will make their life better… Well, that person deserves something in return, don’t they? At least, that’s what I believe.
Really… I do.
Now comes the problem, though, because I’m a dirty, rotten, no-good, inconsistent hypocrite. You see, even though I say that… Even though I believe that someone who gives their stuff away will be rewarded for it in the end because when they ask for money or to be supported in what their doing, they’ll receive it from people who are grateful for their generosity (i.e. me), I don’t actually, usually, in reality… buy software that I can get for free. Ugh. Now my dirty laundry’s out there.
I’m not a liar. Don’t misunderstand me here. I do desire to give back to a person who has given to me much more than I desire to give anything to someone who expected something of me before they’d do anything in return. The problem then comes down to action. I’ve bought plenty of software that I could obtain in no other way than to buy it (because I don’t do illegal software, right. You don’t either, do you?). I don’t think I’ve ever even donated a dollar to a project that I could obtain for free (like OpenOffice.org or GNU Emacs). However, in my heart, I believe that I would.
I know I don’t, but I still think I would!
I can chalk it up to all sorts of lame excuses… “If I had more money I’d give something”, “If I used it more I’d give something”, “If the project made it easier to donate I’d give something”.
Lame!
But that’s the problem with Freeware (As in beer and as in freedom) isn’t it? The problem is that once you make something available for free, people that could have paid for it begin to feel like they can defer it. “Maybe it’s not so valuable after all.” “I’ll just give it a trial period before I decide what it’s worth.” “Thank God I don’t have to pay for this now, I need to upgrade OS X!” And suddenly you’ve been using a product for a decade that’s being developed by an army of volunteers working on their own time and all they’ve ever asked you for is to donate a few bucks via paypal and the only excuse you can come up with is that you haven’t gotten around to it yet.
If I truly believe in this stuff, I need to get off my butt and start paying for the software that I use or contributing in some other meaningful way. And I do. I truly believe that this is the way to go, not just for software but for everything. Worship leaders shouldn’t let their record company copyright their stuff. Christian writers should allow pastors and people from around the world free access to the material. We should stop believing in the myth of ownership when it comes to these things and instead focus on helping people. But that requires that people are then generous in return.
I hope they’re not all like me…
Gah, now I want to donate to Wikipedia.
Interesting… You should take an economics class. The whole premise of our economic system (in an ideal world) is to responsibly regulate scarcity of resources. The idea is to be good stewards of the scarce resources available to us. So a perfect economy operates without any greed using money simply as an exchange tool. However- there is no perfect economy- so building ones bottom line and increasing ones profit usually ends up being the goal!
I appreciate your heart here and do agree with you- I guess I am just more of a realist. In the same way I’d love to see a Theocracy, I am fully understanding that will only come when Christ returns and sets up his kingdom again on earth. So I merely look forward to that and let every reminder of bad government aid me in aching for his return.
Anyway- you better copyright your future book title, “Christ Was Free: What Christians Have to Learn from the Open Source Movement.” Someone else might beat you to it now that you’ve freely put it out there :)
@Alex: Hah! I probably should take an economics class (last one I had was in High School)
I like how you stated that. What I like most is that while it most definitely applies to physical resources like trees and steel whereas it’s not so clear whether or not the resources we’re dealing with today are truly scarce. For example, is there really a scarcity of resource regarding theology? We’re dealing with an infinite God, right? Will there be a point where God simply ‘runs out’ that makes it necessary for us to make sure we don’t cause him to run out too quickly? So are works of theology in need of scarcity management? I’m inclined to say no.
Beyond that and on a more applicable level, are bits really scarce? Is software something that can be described as scarce? Is knowledge something that can be described as scarce? Is bandwidth as scarce as our ISPs want us to believe it is (so they can keep charging us the ridiculous cuts that they make)? Again, I’m inclined to say no. That’s one of the great possibilities of software. When software started out, there was a feeling in the community that it should be shared. However, it then slowly shifted to the point where software was thought of exactly as hardware had been thought of (i.e. a scarce resource) and thus the software market was born. Big cardboard boxes were erected around tiny CDs and floppy’s to make people feel like they were buying something visceral rather than just buying bits that they were going to copy from one place to another.
But that’s kind of the point I’m making here. At the end of the day, it costs someone very little to get something like software into the hands of as many people as possible (at least compared to the costs of physically shipping that same product to the same people) and that’s what enables freeware and open source software. These resources simply are not scarce (not in the same way as physical resources of the past have been scarce). But they do cost resources to produce and so they need to be paid back in order to survive. That’s where I (fail?) to come in.
If someone else wants to write that book, I’d welcome it. Lord knows I’ll probably never get to it with my track record. :) However, if I were to write it, it’d be Creative Commons without a second thought.