Symphonious

Daniel Jalkut has an interesting piece on the perception people have that simple software should be free. It's a perception that I actually share - it annoys me when people ask for money in exchange for really simple applications. It's not that I don't appreciate the effort that goes into software, it's just that I'm a make the world a better place kind of guy. I believe simple things, which cost effectively nothing to reproduce, should be released for free on the basis that you both give and take from such a system.

To give an example, I've recently given my old computer to my father in law and spent quite a bit of time setting it up so it works the way he wants, has all his applications and documents etc. He's happy with the result and I'm happy to help, not least of all because before my wife and I moved in together I spent pretty much every night at their place and they happily fed me without asking for anything in return. Of course, I know him and it's pretty much a given that we'll do things to help each other - that's what friends and family do.

The same idea applies on a wider scale though. If I see someone looking lost I ask if they want directions and help them out. I'll never see them again, but it's a nice thing to do. Turns out that recently I was lost and someone was nice enough to ask if I wanted help, pointed out that I was in fact heading in completely the opposite direction and set me straight. Karma. We all do nice things and we all make the world a better place.

The key thing to note in these examples is that being generous or helpful isn't costing me my livelihood or really costing me all that much at all. Certainly setting up the computer cost both time and money (or at least the potential of it if I'd sold the computer instead of giving it away) but it's insignificant compared to what I have so I can afford to share it. This of course leads in to the argument that always comes up about why you should pay for simple software. As Daniel says it:

Software costs money, time, and resources to develop, just like many of the other products in our lives. And just like those peanuts on the bar, many companies with other things to sell you are in a good position to give away freebies that help to promote their business; to encourage you and your friends to give them money for different reasons.

But smaller companies don’t often have the variety of products and sevices that lends itself to such a complex strategy. Given a good product idea and a market to sell to, they’re forced to adopt the simplest of all strategies: pure payment. Build something brilliant, and be rewarded with money. This money translates into a great motivation for the developer, which in turn translates back into product greatness. It’s easy to understand why the majority of great products in this world do cost money to obtain.

This argument makes the assumption that there is a viable business model around making really simple software and expecting people to pay for it. If you can't make your livelihood doing something you wouldn't do it at all and so the software wouldn't exist or wouldn't be as good. The trouble with this logic is that most of these really simple products are created as a hobby in people's spare time rather than as some grand business plan to put food on the table. How many of these developers quit their day job to write a utility to make it easy to add things to delicious? If they created it in their spare time, you don't need to pay for it to support their livelihood - their day job does that so earning a living doesn't come into it and you need to find a better argument.

Of course, that doesn't mean that it's wrong for people to charge money for simple software, if they can make it work then good for them, but it does help to explain why people don't like it. To a lot of people it comes across as a little bit selfish or greedy, like not wanting to share your toys. The reality is that it's just a different view on the world and I'm sure they're very nice people who are generous in a whole range of other areas, but that's the perception. It's like charging 10 cents to help an old lady across the street - it might be how you make your living (however unlikely that is) or you might give all the proceeds to charity but it still seems like you're being really cheap.

Robert Scoble posts about saving Pandora:

…Tom talking about how the business of Internet Radio is under pressure due to coming changes in how the music industry wants Internet Radio stations to pay for the distribution of music (basically the costs will triple, if the proposed changes go into effect). After we talk about the challenges that Pandora’s business faces if the fee changes go through Tom gives me a preview of their new Sprint/mobile service.

I got a pretty neat summary of the issue from Tom not too long after they recorded that interview (at least I think I got that timing right). I asked, how the new licensing fees affect pandora, Tom's response was basically "we're stuffed". They can't even drop the big record company music and stick to indy artists who'd love the opportunity to get that exposure because the licensing fee is mandatory.

It's a real shame too, after meeting Tom it occurred to me that I should go back and use Pandora again while I was in the US - I'd tried it out quite some time ago and found it good. That was my only source of music while I was over there - it just kept finding interesting music that I liked. Now I can't even go back to get the list of songs I'd given the thumbs up because Australian IPs are blocked, so I guess I won't go buy that music now.

On the plus side, Tom seemed to have a fair bit of hope that political pressure could save them just because so many people like internet radio and are writing to their political representatives. So all you US people, please get writing… and Tom, any chance of adding my IP to the allowed list?? I promise I won't blog about it.

As part of planning our wedding next year, the lovely Janet and I have begun looking into photographers. It seems that at least some photographers apply the same dodgy lock-in practices as software companies do by holding onto the copyright of the pictures they take at your wedding and forcing you to go back to them for reprints.

Apart from the fact that I'm somewhat uncomfortable with anyone owning the photographic memories of our wedding, the terms and conditions from one particular photographer are just ridiculous. This particular photographer will quite happily provide you with a DVD of all the photos they take in high resolution - you just have to wait two and a half years after your wedding and pay an extra $750. I'm not sure what happens if he happens to be hit by a bus in those two years or if for some other reason he goes out of business.  As we left our meeting with this photographer I felt quite uneasy about this terms - just feeling that something was wrong, however as I thought more about it, I thought of more and more situations where it would really come back to bite us.

We plan to go live in the UK for a time, and if we happened to move over there and want another picture of our wedding to hang on the wall, we'd have to call back to Australia and have it printed over here, then shipped to us in England - not to mention paying ridiculous prices for the extra copy. If we owned the copyright and had the negatives or full resolution digitals, we could just go to any printer to get copies.

There's no indication in the conditions of how long our photos will be stored and made available to us for reprints. If in twenty years our house burns down and our wedding album is lost, there's no guarantee we'd be able to replace it, even if the photographer is still in business because he may have deliberately deleted the photos or just lost them because his backup strategy wasn't good enough. If we owned the copyright and had the full resolution originals we could just have it remade - particularly so if we had all the layout/design work that went into the actual album as well as the pictures.

It sounds like the best approach will be to pay a photographer to come and take the pictures, thus making it a work for hire so that we actually own all the copyrights. It will be interesting to see what the cost difference is, both up front and over the longer term.

I just have to wonder how many people have been caught out by things like this.