{"id":394,"date":"2003-07-06T17:33:23","date_gmt":"2003-07-06T21:33:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/benadida\/2003\/07\/06\/tim-has-some-excellent-points-but-wh"},"modified":"2003-07-06T17:33:23","modified_gmt":"2003-07-06T21:33:23","slug":"tim-has-some-excellent-points-but-what-about-the-user","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/ben\/2003\/07\/06\/tim-has-some-excellent-points-but-what-about-the-user\/","title":{"rendered":"Tim has some excellent points, but what about the user?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a name='a7'><\/a><\/p>\n<p>\nTim O&#8217;Reilly <a href=\"http:\/\/www.oreillynet.com\/pub\/wlg\/3405\">says<\/a>:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li> paradigm shift: software as a commodity. Small, reusable pieces\n<li> new killer apps: Google, Amazon, eBay, Paypal\n<li> open-source licenses don&#8217;t work because no redistribution occurs for these killer apps\n<li> the value in software is moving up the stack, specifically to lock-in via user data.\n<\/ul>\n<\/p>\n<p>\nThis is a very interesting and useful analysis. Noticing lock-in via user data is particularly insightful.\n<\/p>\n<p>\nBut I have to disagree on one point: <b>software licenses do work and are becoming more important<\/b>. As the killer apps become more and more dependent on collecting, processing, and redistributing user data, the underlying architecture of these applications comes into play: what data is my software sharing with Amazon without my knowledge? How secure is my exchange with PayPal? What are the underlying rules? <b>What is the code<\/b> of this online world, and can I change it if I need to?\n<\/p>\n<p>\nWe will never have (nor will we need) the Amazon source code. It makes financial sense for Google to build its search engine <a href=\"http:\/\/lists.ibiblio.org\/pipermail\/iglod\/2003-June\/000012.html\">using Linux<\/a>, but if <a href=\"http:\/\/www.alwayson-network.com\/comments.php?id=588_0_5_0_C\">Microsoft can do better<\/a> using Windows, the user will switch and there&#8217;s nothing wrong with that. Yet when it comes to <b>the user&#8217;s end of the transaction<\/b>, we do want the source code and the freedom to change it.\n<\/p>\n<p>\nSo maybe software licenses will be relevant to a smaller domain of software: infrastructure software (browers, etc..) . In a world where the user&#8217;s control over her own machine and data is continually eroded, infrastructure software is what counts! <b>Free software lets users stay in control<\/b>.\n<\/p>\n<p>And that matters.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Tim O&#8217;Reilly says: paradigm shift: software as a commodity. Small, reusable pieces new killer apps: Google, Amazon, eBay, Paypal open-source licenses don&#8217;t work because no redistribution occurs for these killer apps the value in software is moving up the stack, specifically to lock-in via user data. This is a very interesting and useful analysis. Noticing [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":93,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[130],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-394","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-free-software"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/ben\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/394","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/ben\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/ben\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/ben\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/93"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/ben\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=394"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/ben\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/394\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/ben\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=394"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/ben\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=394"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/ben\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=394"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}