Let’s pretend for a minute that software packages are food products and companies that manufacture software are companies who manufacture food products. Microsoft manufactures a very popular, useful, and generally tasty instant meal collection called Microsoft Office that they charge $2.99 a box. Microsoft doesn’t provide the ingredients list on any of their products. So when consuming their product you have to trust that they aren’t putting anything unhealthy in the product. (We’ll have to suspend our disbelief in this metaphor, because thankfully food products are required by US law to put an ingredients list on their products, unless they’re manufacturing cigarettes or medicines, but that’s an entirely different type of discussion) Not only do they not put the ingredients list, but they lobby to keep their list of ingredients a secret with the government and put extra efforts into hiding the list by making their recipes harder to figure out and having special boxes that prevent investigation. Microsoft also has special tamper prevention and rules limiting your ability and rights to change the recipe or use it for something different, because they want you to buy one of their other food products. They also spend billions of dollars a year lobbying with congress trying to make laws making it illegal to change their recipes or use their recipes in casseroles instead of pizzas. The Document foundation also makes a very comparable product called LibreOffice. Some say it’s the same while others say it’s not as good. You can download the recipe for free and make it yourself or you can buy a box for the same price. (This isn’t real as LibreOffice is free of cost regardless, but I wanted to keep my similes on the same page) Not only is the recipe freely available, but The Document Foundation encourages the community to read it and improve it if they can. The community is built on trust so only the healthiest ingredients and most efficient methods are included in the recipe. Because they encourage modification and changes, if you want to add a bit of salt and butter to make it taste better, or even go crazy and add chocolate syrup and sprinkles, go ahead. There’s no protocol to stop you; you’re free to modify it, share it, and spread it around the world. The Document Foundation maintains the main recipe, but they don’t care if you improve it and distribute it with friends, family, or even if you sell your version. The only thing they will be upset about is if you don’t give the people you share with the same freedom they gave you. While the capitalist in me believes that businesses should be able to do business the way they want. If it’s a bad decision the market should decide. That system hasn’t really worked with mainstream software like Microsoft Windows. A long time ago Windows and Dos were very, very good systems compared to the alternatives. Since then Microsoft has spent billions, perhaps trillions of dollars, browbeating companies to install Windows instead of other operating systems. They’ve taken losses and invested lots of money so businesses use their service. They’ve created proprietary formats so when these businesses might want to change later on they cannot because so much of what they’ve done can’t be changed without significant expense. Recently they’ve lobbied and pushed the hardware industry to use protocols that specifically favor them. UEFI and Secure Boot both had the potential to grant users quite a bit of features and security on their system, but instead with the way Microsoft has dealt with certificate authorities, it’s outrageously and needlessly difficult to install anything but Windows on most computers. They didn’t do this to make computing better, they did it to eliminate competition. They’ve marked to consumers making it seem like installing something different is somehow immoral. When I tell even the most level headed person that I use Linux instead of Windows, they tend to assume the worst; that I’m some kind of unethical hacker or I’m just being shady. I use Linux not to anything weird, but because of the rights it affords me and its quality. I’m not saying we should make laws limiting how companies like Microsoft make and release their software, but I am suggesting that we consumers vote with our proverbial wallets and use software that’s made by companies, foundations, and entities that don’t abuse their end users. I want to use software that doesn’t hide its recipe, and is transparent enough to show me how it works under the hood instead of spending billions hiding their activities. Perhaps Microsoft is an upstanding company and the only reason they hide their source code is to protect their business interests, but there’s no way to know if they aren’t doing anything else under the hood. It has already been confirmed that intelligence agencies like the US’s NSA and the UK’s GCHQ have been utilizing exploits in Microsoft Windows, Google Android, and Apple’s IOS and OSX systems to spy on citizens. I don’t feel it’s that big of a stretch to assume that these same types of agencies encourage or push similar security problems into code. I’m absolutely certain it happens in China, and reasonably confident it’s happening in the US as well. Open Source software isn’t precisely immune to the problems, but because of its nature it can be audited by anyone and repaired in a public and transparent way. It doesn’t matter if you don’t have something to hide or you trust a company completely. Protecting your information from tampering and your habits from the eyes of major companies and establishments should be general habit. This protects everyone from being abused by establishments. If it’s normal to be private then the people who have to worry about their own safety won’t seem odd since everyone thinks about keeping their data and habits private and safe. Relationships, and this includes business relationships between consumer and company, is built on trust. When someone is proactively hiding things, you have reason to be suspicious. If you’re paying someone for a product or service, then they really shouldn’t be hiding how they provide that service from you.
Posted on: Fri, 14 Mar 2014 17:34:30 +0000
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