Idealist, Not Cheapskate

One of the more curious responses to my comparative review of Quicksilver and Launchbar (now out of date, thanks to the release of the brilliant Launchbar 4.0 Beta 2) came from Jim Roepcke, in his post Stiffing Developers Feels Good?.

Jim - quite reasonably, since my closing aside on open source software wasn’t as clear as it could’ve been - takes a pop at my mention of the warm glow I get from using free software:

How can knowing you contribute essentially nothing (not even good intentions!) to the very people who make your computing experience a simple and pleasurable one (except for Apple) make you feel good?

I continue to register shareware programs that I use, and continue to feel good doing so. Funny that he mentions donationware as something different than shareware. ;-)

To take the last point first, my distinction between donationware and shareware was not meant to suggest that I favour the former because it allows me to get the software without paying. I’m an absolute stickler when it comes to both - all my shareware is licensed and I always pay the suggested donation. Like Jim, I like supporting small software firms and independent developers - if they’ve made something I find useful, they certainly deserve payment. When it comes to commercial software, my point was that I felt bad in the past for stealing stuff like Word or Photoshop because I couldn’t justify spending large sums of money on applications I rarely use, so another part of my feeling good about using open source software comes from finding an alternative to ripping off commercial developers.

The first point is more interesting, I think, and raises questions about the role of the user in the open source community.

For me, the principal attraction of open source software is political. It never ceases to amaze me that people are willing to devote so much time and effort to provide software that anyone and everyone can use, for no financial reward, and I’m very grateful that they do. Not because it means I can use that software for free, but because the whole process of its development and distribution dovetails neatly with my rather naive, essentially Socialist, ideas about the way the world should work. In short: I’m an idealist, not a cheapskate!

But, as Jim points out in his post, I am not a coder, and so don’t contribute directly to open source projects. Casting aside the implication that only coding contributors to open source projects should be able to use them - which is plain silly - this gave me pause for thought.

True, we don’t pay cash money for the open source software we use, but I believe users have a role in the open source community; not equal to the programmers who put in the hard work, but a significant one nonetheless. First, as a non-coder, I can and do contribute directly to open source projects in a number of ways, be it beta testing, writing documentation or submitting bug reports.

Beyond that, the user’s role in open source is harder to define, since ‘payments’ are made by expressing support, spreading the word, simply using the software. (Sci-fi author and weblogger Cory Doctorow has coined a term for one aspect of this interaction between creators and consumers: whuffie.)

Perhaps I can better explain the role of the user by responding to Jim’s next point. He says:

When I find Jack’s art journalism work I’ll remember to use it thoroughly but not support it in any material way. Obviously Jack will understand completely and feel good about it.

Please do! Strip the sarcarsm from those two sentences, and you’re left with the truth. I do indeed feel good - bloody great, actually - about people using things I’ve written without offering any material support. An interview I did with the designer Helen Storey has been used by Primary School children in a project about science and the body. The thank-you email from three of the kids is worth a hell of a lot more than the twenty-five quid I got for writing the piece. The Q & A interviews with Jim Lambie and Martin Boyce on this site have both been cited by undergraduates in three art history dissertations that I know of and, again, that’s a lot more satisfying than the money earned from publication of the finished articles. This certainly isn’t selfless altruism on my part; I’m getting paid in full, just not in an easily quantifiable currency.

And this is what, I assume, drives the open source movement: the developers’ knowledge that there are users out there benefitting from their efforts, and that those users are grateful.

I suppose I’ve failed miserably to pin down how the user fits in to the open source community here (perhaps any developers reading could enlighten me) but it seems to me that these intangibles - gratitude, support and the like - play a role in the movement, and an important one at that.

Posted at 3pm on 22/04/04 by Jack Mottram to the politics category.
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Tags: applications, foss, politics