[Fsf-friends] No free lunches for me - LIFE HACKS INSPIRED LIVING by CHARLES ASSISI

[VMK]

LIFE HACKS INSPIRED LIVING  No free lunches for me  CHARLES ASSISI 
  
 My once-socialist-now-capitalist heart skipped a beat the other day. The catalyst was a news report. Apparently, the V S Achutanandan-led communist government in Kerala has decided to put its might behind the free software movement. Achutanandan, it seems, dislikes monopolies. And free software sounds a hopelessly romantic idea which his government is in love with.
 What it means is this: children in the 12,500 high schools across the state will be weaned off proprietory software of the kind Microsoft builds. Long-time friends will impale me for saying this. It is a bad idea.
 As far as ideas go, free software is too damn nice an idea. And nice guys finish last. For that one reason alone, my guess is free software will always remain on the fringes of the mainstream.
 Having said that, I must confess that until a few years ago, I swore by free software and all that it stood for. My interest was stoked after I first heard Richard Stallman talk at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR). His contention was a simple one. If something goes wrong with your car, you take it to a mechanic. He opens the hood, peers under it, figures out what’s wrong with it and doesn’t waste much time fixing the car. With software, things don’t work that way. If something goes wrong with an application, software companies don’t let you look at the lines of code that have gone into building it. This means you can’t figure out where the bugs are to re-write the code. So you just wait until the company issues a fix.
 “Would you buy a car if you couldn’t open the hood?’’ Stallman thundered. “Nooooo,’’ I screamed with the rest of the crowd. “Then would you buy software you can’t rewrite?’’ he thundered again. “No friggin’ way,’’ the crowd screamed again. If I’ve paid for software, I ought to have the freedom to fix it if it’s broke. That, Stallman said, was free software. “Free as in freedom, not free beer,’’ he said and pumped his fists into the air. I was sold.
 Over the years, I’ve mellowed down. I don’t care much today whether I can fix software. I don’t fix my car when it’s broke. In any case, there is a fundamental difference between fixing a car and fixing software. An analogy I can think of is what I do for a living. While writing, what emerges is the outcome of ideas that have occurred to me. When somebody tinkers with it, two things happen. Firstly, while the kernel may be mine, what finally emerges may not necessarily be mine. In fact, it may turn out to be a highly evolved version of what I had originally thought up. The collective is always better than the individual.
 But by thinking something up and offering it to the collective to improve upon, I stand to lose my livelihood. In fact, for somebody as selfish as I am, it leaves me with no incentive to write. On the contrary, I’d think up something else to earn a living. I’m willing to bet  most people think the way I do.
 It’s much the same thing with software. Take away their incentive to create it and the world will have fewer pieces of software to work with. Cars are a different proposition. I wouldn’t mind too much if a few thousand mechanics tinkered with what I built. They wouldn’t have the muscle to build cars in the first place. And I wouldn’t want to waste time fixing what’s broke. Maybe, I’m not a nice guy. I don’t care. 
 

 		
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