mec's Journal: Indies versus thieves

First, I need a word for the category of informational products: software, music, movies, news, and stuff like that. I'm going to call them informationals.

There are four major distributors of informationals today: governments, companies, indies, and thieves.

You may not think of governments as producers and distributors of information, but actually, they generate a lot of informationals. Consider the weather bureau; the SEC' Edgar system; the publications of the NIH; all the business statistical data from the Department of Commerce.

Companies, obviously, produce and distribute information in exchange for money. As a libertarian I think this is a very good thing.

Indies are people and organizations who produce their own work like companies do, but distribute it with little or no corporate structure. Sometimes they do this for free (like the FSF) and sometimes they do it for money, like bands who produce and sell their own music without a big corporate label. Again, as a libertarian, I think that indies are really cool.

Thieves don't actually produce anything. They just distribute other people's informationals without permission. Thieves also don't like to be called thieves -- they prefer terms such as "copyright infringer".

I'm an indy. And I'm getting sick of the thieves.

The first problem is that the thieves make it harder for indies to gain more users for their informationals. I've talked to plenty of people about Open Office who tell me "why should I get Open Office for free when I can get Microsoft Office for free, too?" Free-as-in-stolen software makes it harder to sell free-as-in-freedom software -- or even distribute it as free-as-in-beer.

The second problem is worse. The second problem is that corporate enemies of the indies are lumping us in with the thieves. As SCO says: "I don't pay for my music -- why should I pay for my software?". SCO also says -- in both their legal filings and their PR statements -- that an indy operating system cannot possibly have enterprise features unless it contains stolen code.

Both of these memes have some traction in the IT press.

My experience is that developers and users of open-source software have far more respect for copyrights and licenses than developers and users of closed-source software. We take pains to follow the licenses of the informationals that we use and that we put into our distributions. I swear, if I put out a useful package that said "you must dye your hair blue and e-mail me a jpeg to use this package", my mailbox would get a lot of pictures of blue-haired people.

We've spent decades of hard work to build a complete, free operating system (as RMS says). As a Microsoft vice-president said: "it's as if people were making car axles in their back yard, and General Motors were buying them!" That's right. That's exactly what it's like.

And now a bunch of David LaMacchia types come along and stand close enough to us so that corporate types are confused. And the enemies of indy software in the corporate world are tarring us with the same brush. The software corporations of the world are going to use anti-thief DRM as anti-indy DRM, as well.

To me, a thief -- a pirate -- a copyright infringer -- is no better than a spammer. Spammers intrude on people's attention in a non-consensual way. Informational thieves use other people's informationals in a non-consensual way. They are both non-consensual.

So, thieves ... cut it out!
And, indies ... disengage from the thieves!