I consider myself a gamer. Luckily I am a console one, name the console and I probably have owned it. So I never really had to jump through hoops and Wine to run Windows games. Bar perhaps Championship Manager, but even that I quit since I discovered its such a time sucker.

Despite that, the news of  porting World of Goo to Linux was refreshing. The more devs and hardware vendors who recognize Linux as a market the better. Eventually we will get to the tipping point and have mass recognition.

But to be honest, I never heard of the game before, the story was slashdotted which piqued my interest.

World of Goo was designed by a small team of two ex-Electronic Arts developers, Kyle Gabler and Ron Carmel, who used their entire combined savings of $10,000.00 USD to create the gooey game aimed at guiding goo balls to salvation.

I was skeptical actually, didn’t want to get overly excited only to get disappointed at the end. There was only one way to find out: download the demo.

All in all I was overly impressed, the game installed without a hitch and worked straight out of the box. Visually, the game was amazing and I loved the gooey eye popping graphics. It was a no-brainer for me, forking out $20 for this game was actually a privilege! Here watch it for yourself:

World of Goo is DRM free, meaning you can install it on all your systems with no limits. Sadly this also makes it wide open for piracy. I really do hope that people will do the right thing and actually buy this game, after all we already have discussed how piracy actually hurts Open Source, and we don’t really wanna do that now do we?

Gaming is Linux’s Achielles heel, and it is one of the main reasons a lot of people are steering away from it. “It won’t play my games” a lot would lament! But you know what? No developer really thinks of Linux as a viable market. Luckily World of Goo gave us Linux users a chance to dispel this myth once and for all. According to the developer’s blog:

It’s only been 2 days since the release of the Linux version and it already accounts for 4.6% of the full downloads from our website.  Our thanks to everyone who’s playing the game on Linux and spreading the word.  Here are a couple of nifty stats:

• About 12% of Linux downloads are of the .rpm package, 30% are of the .tar.gz package, and 57% are of the .deb package.
• More copies of the game were sold via our website on the day the Linux version released than any other day.  This day beat the previous record by 40%. There is a market for Linux games after all

So if you care about Linux, do the right thing and buy the game.

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Time and time again I made it clear how disgruntled am with the mobile phone industry and specifically the dreaded iPhone.  Luckily, over here in Saudi Arabia, carriers haven’t yet discovered (or maybe don’t have AT&T’s clout) locking phones as a “business” model. So the issue doesn’t affect me directly – bar for phones exported from the States.

However, “liberating” the mobile industry in the States will have a domino effect that will be witnessed around the world. First off, mobile carriers will think twice before locking their consumers down. But most importantly, US companies will not longer have the motivation to export their draconian measures internationally.

So Let’s Free Our Phones…

This is what the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) wants to pull off. According to the EFF, telecommunication companies are locking down their phones to protect their business models rather than protecting copyrighted material.

So every 3 years the US Copyrights Office convenes to consider exemptions from DMCA‘s ban on circumvention of “technical protection measures.” The EFF filed for an examption of the phone industry.
In a press release, EFF Senior Intellectual Property Attorney Fred von Lohmann said:

“Apple locks its iPhone to AT&T and prevents users from installing any software that has not been pre-approved by Apple. Consumers need a DMCA exemption to lift the cloud of legal risk that otherwise serves only to reduce competition and consumer choice.”

EFF Civil Liberties Director Jennifer Granick said:

“Companies are using the DMCA to threaten customers out of exercising their consumer rights. The Copyright Office needs to hear real stories about how these software locks frustrate consumers and developers.”

What You Should Do…

Simple, just visit FreeYourPhone.org and sign the petition. Also, make sure you share your cell phone frustrations. EFF will also help people officially submit those stories to the Copyright Office before the February 2 deadline. The Copyright Office will hold public hearings on the DMCA exemption requests in Washington, DC, and California in the spring, and the final rulemaking order will be issued in October.

Also, word of mouth is paramount! Tell your friends about this, blog it, tweet it…The shackles around your hands won’t break themselves!

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In an earlier article we established that piracy of software is basically a given in today’s world where information is so easily shared and duplicated. We also established that no matter what DRM measures are implemented by commercial software developers, no matter how advanced or how draconian they are, someone’s always going to find a way around it. With that in mind, perhaps, if we’re able to figure that out, surely so are they…?

Epic Edits Weblog, through their own original research, discovered that very nearly 60% of their poll participants were using a pirated version of Adobe Photoshop. That’s a good deal more than half of them, which means more than half the copies of the program among that sample are illegitimate ones that didn’t come from Adobe themselves.

Indeed, I’ve installed Windows copies on many peoples’ computers, with the CDs they themselves have provided me. I have yet to see one that came from a boxed, retail copy of Windows. While it’s a point that gets often awkwardly tossed aside in discussions among IT folk, it’s true; widespread software piracy isn’t just some peculiar phenomenon trickling into our society, it’s the norm.

I’m willing to bet a good few of those reading this blog are using pirated software, and, until I switched to Linux last year, I myself was quite content to be one of those few. After all, who’s going to keep tabs on you closely enough to send the police kicking down your front door because you’ve got Deluge downloading Office 2007? But, when you hop on your favorite torrent site and then have yourself a copy of Adobe’s entire creative suite within the hour, you may not be aware of all the implications that using pirated software could have in the software development community.

Pirates Still Support The Developers

It seems a somewhat common attitude I’ve seen among people; they’ve got an axe to grind with the bigwigs like Adobe or Microsoft, and then thus choose to pirate their software as their quiet little way of ‘sticking it to the man’. It’s easy to understand that mindset; if you download the program illegally instead of paying the company for the right to use it, they’ve lost your purchase there – these rich corporations are charging hundreds for a program that’s hardly worth a fraction of that price, so if you pirate, they’re just getting what they deserve! (Gleeful cackle)

Microsoft chairman Bill Gates, in response to the massive degree of piracy in China of their Windows operating system, has been quoted as saying that “while it was terrible that people in China pirated so much software, if they were going to pirate anybody’s software he’d certainly prefer it be Microsoft’s.”

And it’s interesting to think of the fallout from this. A commercial software company would certainly prefer that you pirate a version of their software, rather than avoiding it altogether. While they’re making less money, they still have your support in using it, and that often leads to more revenue for them down the line.

Adobe’s products are a good example, especially their Photoshop program. If you look in a newspaper for job advertisements in the field of graphic design, illustrations, logos, or anything of the like, you’re likely to have seen that an employee must be familiar with Adobe Photoshop and/or Illustrator. When I was a student of TAFE in Australia, the programs we were using were Adobe programs, and with good reason; Adobe Photoshop, Dreamweaver, Flash… these are all industry standard programs. So even if something better becomes available, people will still be using Adobe, because it’s the industry’s standard. Most of my student friends were using pirated versions of Photoshop at home because they couldn’t afford the real thing, and because it was what they were learning to use in class. I showed a few of them the benefits of using GIMP instead, and the response was total rejection of GIMP. It was unfamiliar, it had no perceived benefits over Photoshop, and most of all, it wasn’t even any cheaper than a pirated version of Photoshop.

It makes sense, that if they’re going to continue with their careers and don’t want to land themselves in hot water for using illegitimate copies for their own commercial endeavors, they’re eventually going to shell out that $800 for it, as a few of these friends of mine have already ended up doing.

The lesson is, that even if you haven’t yet paid for the use of the software, the company may well have already sold it to you anyway. You contribute to upholding the industry standard, and then you’re halfway to doing Adobe’s promotion for them.

Microsoft Windows hold 90% of the desktop market, and for much the same reason. It’s what most people are used to, and that goes a long way to securing many more sales of Windows for more and more prospective computer users. Microsoft don’t desire losing money through piracy, but in the long run, they more than make up for it by having their product supported by pirates and legitimate users alike as a product that’s accepted by the mainstream market.

Who’s Losing?

We’ve all heard plenty of spiel from software companies lamenting the disadvantages of using pirated software, but often while they come up with valid points, they’re often only points that are in their interests. Adobe moans that covering for pirated software hurts the global economy, leading to losses of jobs, legitimate users where money that could’ve gone into R&D instead goes into simply keeping the company afloat, and finally users of pirated software due to often (sic) defective or virus-laden copies circulating on the net.

While the validity of that last point there is certainly up for grabs, there’s other, less documented implications that are especially relevant for proponents of Free and Open Source Software.

Firstly, legitimate users are certainly losing out; prices raised up due to piracy (or using piracy as an excuse, as the case may be) leads to legitimate customers paying more to use the product; effectively meaning that they’re paying for pirates to use the software without paying a dime.

How FOSS Is Feeling It

But there’s also going to be an often unseen impact on FOSS developers; FOSS isn’t about generating revenue, but public interest and user support is the FOSS community’s lifeblood; if you choose to download a copy of MS Office 2007 instead of OpenOffice.org, OOo’s developers have lost a user, lost a supporter and possibly, lost a contributor. Louis Suarez-Potts, community manager for OpenOffice.org, has said as much himself.

Customer support is a goal that both free and corporate developers have in common. A customer that chooses to use Kompozer over Dreamweaver, is a score for the open source community that now has a supporter, and a loss for Adobe, who’ve lost a potential profit.

Even the spread of trial or ‘stripped-down’ versions of commercial software will be making an impact on the FOSS movement; if you’re using Photoshop elements, you’re still doing Adobe’s word-of-mouth marketing for them, and then potentially drawing in more customers for them, while free alternatives are never even explored. If too much of the userbase goes to a single company, that gives them an opportunity to put a stranglehold on the industry.

A good example of this is Adobe Flash; as of right now Flash remains a closed format, and the only way you can competently develop Flash at the moment is with Adobe’s software. Basically, Adobe has established a monopoly here, and there are almost no alternatives at all (besides, perhaps, OpenLaszlo, in a very limited kind of way). If you develop with Adobe Flash, whether it’s paid or pirated, you’re going to be supporting Adobe and tightening their hold on this standard in the industry.

The lesson to be learned here is that any proponent of free software shouldn’t have any interest in using pirated software; if the best choice for you is to pay for the real thing, then so be it; but if one’s really interested in ‘sticking it to the man’, or at the very least doing your part to promote the virtues of free software, then the best way to do it is to hit them where it hurts; not just the hip pocket, but their mainstream credibility. If that credibility goes instead to open source developers, that puts them in a position to make something that outshines the competition for everyone. And then, no one’s going to have to pay for it.

If one can make it known to all that the support of these industry giants isn’t needed, that’s when some real difference can be made.

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The Information Age: Where Everything Is Free

I once was having a light conversation with a student friend of mine and told him about OpenOffice.org; I said that it’s free to get and use, it does nearly everything that Microsoft Office does for none of the money. It’s got a word processor, spreadsheets, maths, presentations…! I asked him if he was interested in trying it out. He told me, of course not. He already has Microsoft Office. It’s better than OOo, and thanks to the gift of the Internet, that was free too.

And I’ve seen this fact swept under the rug quite a few times in software related discussions in the politically correct business world. But among my student friends, it’s bandied about so carelessly you’d be forgiven for thinking that there’s absolutely nothing strange about it at all.

The fact being: It’s cheaper and easier to use pirated software than to pay for the real thing.

Ever since practically the dawn of recorded media, piracy has been an issue that every single developer and publisher of music, software or other media alike has had to contend with; in the eighties we didn’t have torrents, but we had tape trading. Then, when CD burners became commonplace it was no problem to just get a friend to burn you a copy of Windows or whatever latest games were making the rounds. Now, we’re headed into the latter years of the 00′s, and high-speed Internet is so cheap and commonplace, downloading a copy of whatever you like is often simpler in practice than making the effort to go to the store and fork out your hard earned cash for it.

Solution? Handcuff em’

Now, with software piracy running totally rampant, the worth of software available on retail shelves begins to sink, and software companies begin losing money. Clearly, this isn’t a minor trend to deal with; it’s a potential catastrophe and of course, there’s plenty of reasons, which are perfectly legitimate, for companies that make their bread from software sales to find a way to curb piracy and keep their user base honest.

Software consumers have a binary choice:

1. Purchase a legal copy of the software and begin using it legitimately. You pay for the right to use the product entirely legally, and you’re able to rest easy knowing that you have legal right to use it.
2. Obtain a pirated copy. It’s breaking the law, but it’s also law that’s extremely difficult to be enforced. You’re not using it legally, but chances you’ll get away scot-free anyway. Obtaining it was quick, simple, and above all, it cost you nothing.

For folks where money doesn’t grow on trees and in many cases (I’m looking at you, Adobe) the software’s pricing doesn’t exactly correlate with the complexity or quality of the program, option B is going to be the preferred choice for a lot of people. So, software companies, unable to influence their users by mind control, are also left with two main options when they’re producing and distributing their software:

1. Accept that piracy is going to be there, and help sway customers by giving extra incentives to purchase the product legally. This can come in a number of forms such as exclusive help and support, security updates, extra features via member subscriptions or something similar.
2. Design the software in such a way that the software is crippled or deactivated for those deemed to be illegitimate customers, and forcibly limit consumer rights in an effort to wipe out any possibility of illegal use. This includes Digital Rights Management schemes, product activation, rootkits and so on

Now, this isn’t exactly a binary choice. Many companies have opted to use both options here, and to varying degrees. But clearly, if anything’s proven by the trends it’s that leaning too heavily on option B can have the opposite effect to that which is desired to software companies.

Spore: The Last Straw

A classic example of this has happened just recently, in the form of a computer game named Spore, the baby of Maxis founder/Sims franchise creator Will Wright.   Spore has generated massive, massive hype in the gaming community and was thus released to huge sales, and, thanks to its SecuROM software, a nice amount of controversy as well.

SecuROM comes bundled with the game. It’s not advertised on the box and for all intents and purposes, the customer is entirely unaware of its inclusion until they’ve bought it, taken it home and installed it. The software cannot be uninstalled, even if the game is. Upon installation the game must be activated online, and it can only be activated on five different systems. At first this seems to make sense, until it’s made clear that the software’s methods of determining whether it’s a different computer or not aren’t bulletproof; changing the computer’s hardware may register to the game that it’s an entirely different system and thus, another activation is used. After all activations are used, the game will not play and to a completely legitimate consumer, the game is rendered useless. Pouring salt in the wound, the SecuROM software is still bundled even if the game is purchased and downloaded through Steam, itself a powerful anti-piracy measure by its very nature.

The fallout from this calamity is pretty obvious now; the game’s ratings on Amazon average one of five stars due entirely to the game’s DRM measures, and thanks to the friendly pirate community, copies downloaded illegally through file sharing and torrents have had the DRM measures deactivated or removed – effectively making the pirate copies of the game superior to the real thing. In short, if you buy Spore from a shop, you get a worse version than the one that pirates are getting for free. And what was your crime?

Spore was downloaded over half a million times in its first four days of release, and is well on its way to being the most widely pirated game in history.

Kick DRM Out!

The fallout from this debacle leaves us with two lessons.

a) DRM is not only ineffective, it also diminishes a product’s value.

b) Crippling and punishing consumers for being honest isn’t healthy business practice.

We’re in a new age, where information can be generated, modified and exchanged extremely quickly and easily. Adopting old-age methods to curb free sharing of files by strong-arm tactics clearly isn’t working, and all the while Free and Open Source Software community are enjoying fantastic software, legally, and without paying a cent. You’d never find me shelling out $700 for Photoshop, and why? It’s because I already get $650 worth of its value with GIMP, and I pay nothing for that. Half a grand saved, half a grand earned.

If commercial software publishers want to win their audience back, they’re only going to accomplish it by penalizing illegal users instead of their legal consumers, and they’re only going to do that by giving legit users something that’s better.

Picture credits: 1- Zdnet blogs 3-Penny Arcade Webcomics

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• iPhone completely blocks free software. Developers must pay a tax to Apple, who becomes the sole authority over what can and can’t be on everyone’s phones.
• iPhone endorses and supports Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) technology.
• iPhone exposes your whereabouts and provides ways for others to track you without your knowledge.
• iPhone won’t play patent- and DRM-free formats like Ogg Vorbis and Theora.
• iPhone is not the only option. There are better alternatives on the horizon that respect your freedom, don’t spy on you, play free media formats, and let you use free software — like the FreeRunner.

It’s a really interesting read, Johns goes on into more details on each of these points. If you are thinking of getting an iPhone 3G then i highly recommend reading FSF’s 5 Reasons to Avoid iPhone 3G to it’s entirety first before going out and splurging $400 to handcuff yourself.

The Free Software Foundation has done it’s part in preaching the dangers of the iPhone, but defective by design took it a step further and took action! Yesterday they issued an iPhone challenge called Ask Apple About the iPhone. The challenge urges everybody to reserve an appointment at the so called Apple Genius Bar using an online booking system. And ask these so called geniuses a series of 5 questions. Then rate them on a scale from 1-32 on each question, bringing the total to 160 IQ points (Einstien’s IQ):

• Why do all developers have to submit their applications to Apple before they can be loaded onto an iPhone?
• Why does iTunes still contain so much DRM-laden music?
• The iPhone 3G has GPS support. How can users be sure that the GPS cannot be used to track their position, without their permission?
• In ‘Thoughts on Music’, Steve Jobs said, “it is useful to remember that all iPods play music that is free of any DRM and encoded in ‘open’ licensable formats such as MP3 and AAC”. If Jobs really wants to see open formats, why doesn’t the iPhone play Ogg Vorbis, Ogg Theora video and FLAC?
• Why can the iPhone 3G only be activated by Apple and AT&T?

Check out the ideal answers in the original Ask Apple About the iPhone article.

Of course one doesn’t really expect sincere and honest answers from these corporate geniuses, who have been probably spoonfed some marketing boo-ha! They already have been corrupted by Apple’s groupthink, but we will have to wait and see!

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