By Suzann Dodd, ContributorAFTER THE recent Linux forum at the PCJ Auditorium, folks came up and asked me, 'What's the catch?'
After all, here's a free programme which is better than what you're paying for. Must be something 'wrong' with it.
There isn't. And the reason requires a touch of history.
In the 1960s, the United States military had extended it's ARPNET (what would become the Internet) to universities and companies with which it did business. The proto-geeks who were involved developed many protocols for themselves.
For example, say Airdog is a programmer and he created a game one night and wants to play it with Forge, who is at a university 500 miles away. Well, Airdog has to figure out how to send the game, Forge has to figure out how to receive the game, and they both have to figure out how they can play it together.
So they work on uploading/downloading protocols, bring in their geeky friends and then, considering how many bytes the game takes up, how to squash it down so it can be sent faster. They bring in more geeky friends.
PROTOCOLS
At the end of this session they've developed FTP, PKZIP and other such protocols. Well, this is really cool and they tell everyone they know about it, and send these files all over the place and put them into their university's archives so that no one calls them when they're taking a shower to get these files.
As time passes, Airdog and Forge graduate university but still want to keep the relationship and so develop a modem to modem protocol, which grows into Bulletin Board Systems, where a lot of people can be connected to each other at the same time.
All of these creations were not capital driven. They were done by people for themselves and shared with others. The idea of being hired to create these protocols never arose.
The entire Internet was built on freeware/shareware/careware and Open Source documents. No one could copyright something which had to be worked on, something which was round-robined among dozens then hundreds then thousands of geeks who would rewrite code, add options, etc.
PROPRIETARY SOFTWARE
In the '90s, the idea of proprietary software overtook the concept of Open Source and people were hired to write programmes which would be sold to the public.
This offended the original bunch of geeks, who went about writing Open Source Operating Systems, protocols, programmes and applications, working in a collaborative manner.
Today you have a choice.
You can buy software or you can get it free. As there's no money to advertise free software but lots of money to saturate the market with ads for purchasable software you don't know what exists.
You want to do webpages, you buy a programme. I want to do webpages, I download a programme. You pay whatever the market will bear, I get mine for nothing. Mine happens to be better than yours, but you believe, as mine is free and yours cost an arm, a leg and your favourite kidney, yours has to be better.
There is no 'catch' in Open Source. The 'catch' is being convinced to pay for proprietary software by sales clerks who don't even know what's out there.
Suzann Dodd is a writer and an attorney.
