The hidden benefits of free software

Most conversations about the cost of free software deal with its effects on the software industry. Microsoft people often talk about how much money the proprietary software industry can add to a developing country's economy. At the same time, proprietary software vendors tell us the total cost of ownership (TCO) for their products is often less than cost of running competing open source products, even though in developing countries the cost of labor is almost always low enough that license fees for proprietary software are huge by comparison. All these conflicting numbers get wearisome. Perhaps we need to look beyond the software industry -- and beyond software pricing -- to see what effects free and open source software have on a country's economy.

* As license fees that go to a foreign corporation * As local spending to modify a free software package

Money sent to a foreign corporation does nothing to bolster the local economy. Money used to pay local developers gets spent locally on food, rents or mortgages, services, and in many other ways. The businesses a local software developer patronizes spend money locally themselves. The total multiplier effect of that $1,000 may be anywhere between three and six, depending on the economic model you use, but in any case we're saying that $1,000 put into the pockets of local software developers is worth between $3,000 and $6,000 in value to the country where it is spent. In the case of free software modified where it is being used, the country doing the spending reaps that benefit. If that same money goes out of the country as licensing fees, it will most likely benefit a North American or European country, since North America and Europe are home to the overwhelming majority of proprietary software companies.

I've gotten all the free software tech support I've needed in the past seven or eight years from email lists and IRC channels. Several of the email lists I'm on are primarily tech support for and by people who use free software in their jobs. And yet, over and over I hear that support is one of the great advantages of proprietary software. "Ah," says the proprietary software proponent, "when you buy software you have someone to blame when it messes up. You have a company that stands behind it."

Has anyone ever read a proprietary software licensing agreement? (Here's a PDF download of Microsoft's license agreement for Windows XP Pro, in case you haven't.) Have you noticed that you never get any kind of warranty that matters, or that support beyond basic installation usually costs beaucoup bucks?

The "companies can't accept free tech support, they need someone to blame," argument has been done to death, and I have trouble believing it. I know plenty of corporate IT people who rely on free IRC and email group support for both free and proprietary software. And in countries where most proprietary software is obtained illegally, it's obvious that most proprietary software tech support isn't coming through formal channels.

None of this casual support registers as economic activity, but it obviously has some sort of value. How do we measure it? Can we measure it? Should we even try?

Companies that provide software support are as threatened by free software support as proprietary software companies are by free software, but we don't have IT support company executives making thunderous speeches about how helping your neighbor with a computer problem is going to ruin the economy, do we?

I've said the following words (or similar ones) while speaking in several developing countries:

One reason I support free and open source software everywhere is self-interest. FOSS is the greatest training tool for programmers ever developed, and for all I know the next world-changing genius programmer is here, in your country, not able to afford college. If we put a computer running GNU/Linux and open source applications in that person's hands, or give that person access to a public computing center that runs GNU/Linux, everyone in the world -- including me -- may someday benefit from that person's work.

There is no reason to believe that the next great genius programmer will be white, male, and European or American. For all we know, a shoeless slum child in Brazil, Egypt, or Mexico has more programming talent than Linus Torvalds. We must make sure she has access to computers, and specifically to computers filled with software she can take apart to see how it works, not software whose source code is hidden from her.

Learning how to push buttons in Windows is nice, but it won't teach you how the software behind the buttons works. We realize that most users will never look at source code, but it is an invaluable training tool for anyone who may need to write or modify code one day, and any school or other public or semi-public computer facility that doesn't make plenty of open source software available to youngsters who are interested in computers is short-changing them.

Some of the kids whose eyes are opened by open source will become programmers. Many -- possibly most -- won't, but will probably end up in jobs where computer knowledge is useful in one way or another.

Does it matter whether these jobs are in "the software industry" or in auto parts warehouses, marine biology research labs, and other non-software businesses? Does it matter whether someone who writes (or helps write) a program that makes work easier at his place of employment is called a "software developer" or carries another title?

Either way, the software gets written and used -- and hopefully saves labor or has other economic or non-economic benefits. And as far as I'm concerned, this is the point of free and open source software, no matter what effect its existence has on the software industry as it exists today.

There are just a lot of things in KDE that could be better handled by walking you through with a wizard or providing more instructions.

For example, when you network a printer. If you already know how to do it, it's a process that takes about 3 minutes. If you don't, it can take weeks.

When I wanted to connect my laptop to the printer on my desktop in my upstairs office, I ran the Add Printer Wizard in KDE. Now, this works great, most often perfectly, if you're adding a local printer.

But, when you add a network printer, it gives you two options (TCP and IPP). All I needed was a recommendation to know where to start, but since I didn't know which would be the best method, I was off to Google. Eventually, I settled on IPP.

Then, I had to get my laptop to see the printer on the network. It asked me for the IPP address of the printer I wanted to use. So, I went to the upstairs office and found it: ipp://office:631/printers/psc1210. Easy, right? Selected the driver, clicked OK, and waited for it to print a test page. Nothing happened.

After a few days of trying to figure this out, I finally realized that you have to find the actual local IP of the computer that has the printer attached to it and substitute it for the hostname (office) in the line above. As soon as I did that, presto, worked perfectly.

Without a WAG, there's no way to know this. The documentation needs to be in place to explain this more thoroughly, especially so that someone walking through it for the first time can at least know what to try without having to fall back on Google and endless hours of searching.

I've networked printers in Windows before, and it's way more straightforward than this. There's no reason that I see that it couldn't be that way in KDE.

I don't want to make it sound like I don't like KDE. The ways you can customize it are mind boggling. But, there are places where it needs to be a little more user friendly.

On the other hand, I have to say that networking printers in KDE is completely automatic in a lot of cases, so for 90% of the time, this isn't even an issue. You just hit "print" and it works.

Money sent to a foreign corporation does nothing to bolster the local economy.

Apparently written by someone outside the U.S., like most of your sources. For those of us actually IN the U.S., and who want to see the U.S. succeed, WE would obviously prefer the opposite - money coming into the U.S. to buy our products, not having our products replaced by free ones created outside the U.S.

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