Joe's Jottings

Category: Entrepreneur Issues

Why are some Open Source support people so damn rude?
Don’t get me wrong – I love Open Source software and have used some of it fairly widely in various development projects that I’ve done. I’m also aware of the fact that people involved in the development and support of such software are typically volunteers, and on the odd occasion I have called upon people for support, I’ve always had good experiences.

I’ve also seen some absolute stinkers of ‘support’ given to other developers, in which the people who’re associated quite strongly with the softwrae have treated people in a rude, patronising and often offensive and abusive manner. Now, in 20+ years of dealing with IT support people – including folks like Oracle, Microsoft. Borland (showing my age) and even Zortech and Nantucket (back in the deep past!!) I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of times I’ve had this sort of treatment from big bad commercial software houses. It’s unfortunate that I’ve seen dozens of examples of this poor customer service from Open Source suppliers in the last couple of years.

Because even if we don’t pay, we are customers – and some of the worst behaviour I’ve seen from companies where users are required to pay for a license when the software is sued in commercial situations. It’s hardly encouraging, is it? I know it can be frustrating to answer the same question several times a day, especially when the solution is well documented, but rudeness isn’t the way forward. After all – it doesn’t exactly encourage people to use the product, or pay for a licence – rather than persevere or even volunteer a fix, folks are more likely to just go to the next similar product on the list.

Ultimately, it boils down to this; piss off enough potential customers and people like me will write articles like this but will name names and products.

So, here are a few hopefully helpful hints to people involved in regularly supporting products and libraries.
1. If it’s your job, you’re getting paid to do it. If you’re a volunteer, you’ve chosen to do it. In either case, if you don’t feel trained up enough in the interpersonal skill side of things, just be nice, and read around material on customer support. If you don’t like it support, then rather than taking it out on customers, quit. Because you’re unhappy is no reason to take it out on other people.
2. Remember that the person asking the daft question may hold your job (or the future of your product) in their hands. You have no idea whether they’re working on a project for a small company or a large blue chip / Government department. Your goal is surely to get widespread adoption – the best way to do this is to make folks happy.
3. Even if the fix IS documented in any number of places, be polite about it. If it’s that common, then have it in your FAQs or as a ‘stock answer’. The worst sort of response is ‘It should be obvious’. Of course it’s obvious to you – you wrote it. It isn’t obvious to other people. This seems to be a particular problem with ‘bleeding edge’ developers who swallow the line that ‘the source code is the documentation’ – it may well be, but if you want your product or service to be adopted you need to get as many people as possible using it.
4. Don’t forget that if someone perseveres with your software, through buggy bits, they may be willing to help you fix it. The chances of you getting a helper if you are rude to them is minimal.
5. If you get a lot of questions or confusion about the same issue, perhaps it’s time to update the FAQs or Wiki? And don’t forget sample code – if you’re generating code libraries PLEASE provide lots of real-world examples.
And to all the nice support folks – thanks for all the help – it is appreciated!
March 29, 2010
The To Do List!
With thanks to Rachel G. who gave me the idea of writing this up!

Over the years I must have tried any number of Time Management techniques – I have to say that whilst I’m much better these days at fitting what I need to do in to the time available, but it’s taken a fair amount of time to get the simple fact through my head that there are only 24 hours in a day and no matter how hard I try I can’t ‘manage’ that time – no matter what I do it still passes me by at the rate of 1 minute per minute. I can’t stockpile it, slow it down, speed it up; just work with it.

During teh 80s I tried to run with a diary, then a Filofax; in the 90s it was a Time Management System. They didn’t help me much at all. Then, sometime in the early 2000s, I came across the solution to my pain which I’ve worked with ever since. The simple To Do List – and today I’m going to share with you the secrets of my listing success! 🙂

The Book

Despite having a Blackberry (I love the calendar function) I still use a hard backed A$ notebook as my main day to day journal. Apart from making notes in meetings, containing my To Do lists and being my general working notebook, it’s also the place where I initially record my dreams first thing in the morning and any bright ideas I have. Each of these notebooks last me between 6 months and a year, and I label them up according to the first and last day recorded in them. I have a stack of old ones upstairs!

The Time Slot

I was terrible at being on time for appointments and estimating task duration and completion dates. My wife realised the problem; I tried to fit too much in to the time I had available, and was making unrealistic expectations of myself. So, I started working on the concept of a ‘time slot’ for tasks. the commonly used slots are as follows:
- 0.5 hours – absolute minimum time for ANY item in the list.
- 1 hour – simple programming tasks – simple bugs, basic functions.
- 2 hours – programming tasks that involve modifying screen layouts, new database tables, etc.
- half a day – any task requiring time away from home, client meetings.
Fitting my tasks within the day in to these slots sometimes results in me underestimating what I can get done, but it gives me ample time to deal with unexpected problems, making tea, combing cats, playing with Twitter, etc. It also means that I can usually under-promise / over-deliver.

The List

The actual list consists of….well….a list of tasks that I want to get done within a day. I try to write things down in order of importance (rather than urgency). The first thing I do is take a look at yesterday’s list; anything that wasn’t done I’ll consider bringing forward on to today’s list. Otherwise, I’ll try and split jobs from the previous day’s list as follows:
1. Not that important, more of a ‘nice to have’.
2. Something that I am waiting on someone else for – i.e. I need information or resources to do it.
3. Something that I am prevaricating over.
4. Something that is now no longer relevant.
If it’s in category (1) then I’m likely to just leave it on the previous day’s list and make a note for today to ‘take a look at yesterday’ if I have time. If (2) then I check whether I have the resources; if I don’t then I’ll waste no more time on it but list it. If (3) then if important I’ll prioritise it. If (4) then it just gets dumped. I also take a little time out to determine why I’m bringing stuff forward. For example, did I hit snags with other tasks that caused me to over-run? Did I try to fit too much in?

Once I’ve got the list I go through it and attach a rough time to each item, and prioritise based on the ground of urgent/important, important, urgent. If the amount of time taken is longer than the working day, then stuff gets carried over to the next day’s list.

I’ll often put the list together the night before the day to which it refers; that way I have the list ready to go when I hit the desk.

The ‘Special List’

This is a list not attached to a particular day but that consists of things that need doing at some time over the next few weeks. It gets prioritised and ‘timed’ like my daily list.

And that’s it!

I work through the list, sticking with the priority order I’ve set as far as I can. If I get bogged down with soemthing, I allow myself to flip around the list a little, but will attempt to clear all the urgent/important and important stuff that I’ve allocated to myself for that day. I don’t get myself too hung up on the list; some days there’ll be stuff that’s not finished; other days I’ll get the chance to eat in to the ‘Special List’ a little.

Things to bear in mind If something takes significantly longer or shorter than I estimated, I’ll note the actual time donwn, but NOT less than half an hour.

If you want to try this technique out, then the following may prove useful:
1. Old books are a guide to timings; I often estimate jobs by looking back at how long previous jobs took.
2. If jobs keep getting moved around the lists, take a good hard look at them to see whether there are any subconcious reasons why you aren’t tackling them. Take a look at my article on Banjo playing JEDI.
3. Don’t try and fit too much in to the day.
4. Sometimes you may get benefits from ignoring the priorities you initially set and just getting jobs ‘knocked off’. This works well in terms of your lists getting shortened but just remember that the aim is to get the jobs on the list done, not make the list look good!
February 24, 2010
UK Government Data Release – much ado about nothing?

Back in January the UK Government opened a web site up that was described as “a one-stop shop for developers hoping to find inventive new ways of using government data”.   The site, http://data.gov.uk/, aims to pull together government generated data sets in a form that application developers can use to create ‘mashups’ of data from different sources of public and private data, create map based information from the data, etc. In other words, the idea if to open up public data for private use.

I was pretty excited; professionally I’ve used some public data in the past and acquiring it is usually quite hard going. Even if you know where to find the data, it’s not easy to just grab and download, and then it comes in various formats that need pre-processing to make useful. So, I was pretty excited when I heard about this project. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that my nipples were pinging with excitement, but there was definite anticipation.

So….my thoughts. Bottom line for me at the moment is ‘Sorry chaps, sort of getting there but there’s a long trail a-winding before you reach your goal’. Now, this may sound rather churlish of me, but allow me to explain….

Nature of data

First of all, a lot of the data on the site has been available in other places before now – however it is at least now under one roof, so to say. The data is also available in disparate formats, like CSV files, etc.   The data is also pre-processed / sanitised – depending upon how you want to view it. In some cases the data is in the form of Spreadsheets that are great for humans but dire for automated processing in to mashups. The datasets are not always as up to date as one might expect; for example, on digging through to the Scottish Government data, I found nothing more recent than 2007.

Use of SPARQL and RDF

Although the SPARQL query language has been implemented to allow machine based searching of the site to be done, the data available via this interface seems to be pretty thin on the ground AND, to be honest, I’m not sure that the format is the best for the job. SPARQL is a means of querying data that is represented in the RDF format to search what’s called the ‘Semantic Net’ – a way of representing data on teh Internet that is more easily made meaningful to search tools. But for a lot of statistical data, this isn’t necessarily the best way to search for data, and the SPARQL language is not widely used or understood by developers.

No API

There’s no API available such as a Web Service to get at the data. The site acknowledges this and states :

“The W3C guidance on opening up government datasuggests that data should be published in its original raw format so that it’s available for re-use as soon as possible. Over time, we will covert datasets to use Linked Data standards, including access through a SPARQL end-point; this will provide an API for easy re-use.”

I think this is a rather facile argument. Apart from the data not being that up to date, one can surely publish the contentof the data raw – i.e. no numerical alterations – whilst still making it available via a SOAP, JSON or other similar API that more developers might have experience of and access to.   As it stands it just seems that some of the time spent on this project could have been spent in getting the data in to a format that could be served up in a consistent format to a wider range of developers.

This current interface – wait for the heresy, people – may be wonderful for the Semantic Web geeks amongst us BUT for people wishing to make widescale, real use of the data it’s NOT the best format to allow the majority of non bleeding-edge developers to start making use of the data available.

Summary

This is an early stage operation – it is labelled ‘Beta’ in the top right of the screen, and as such I guess we can wait for improvements. But right now it just seems to be geared too much towards providing a sop for the ‘Open Data’ people rather than providing a widely usable and up to date resource.

February 17, 2010
Espresso Entrepreneurs and Cargo Cult Capitalism

An item caught my attention recently – so much so that I actually replied to the other blog! It suggests that in order to succeed as a startup you actually need to be in Silicon Valley or a similar place. My reply is below:

“Bit of tough luck for us Europeans, heh?

Most start-up entrepreneurs need a good dose of reality, I’m afraid. It’s quite likely that 99% of us will NEVER create a ‘winner takes most of it’ let alone a ‘winner takes all’ business.

For most people, moving to SV or it’s environs simply makes you think you’re doing something of value to the startup – the money spent and disruption experienced could be better spent on achievement within the business.

In the film industry there’s what are called ‘Cappucino Producers’ – people in Hollywood or London who are in the right place, at the right time, with the right ideas, meeting lots of people, but who never actually manage to get a project off the ground because they’re distracted with the lifestyle.

Don’t become an Espresso Entrepreneur. “

There’s nothing new in what I’m saying, and I’m the first to say that I doubt that I currently have the nous to put together a world-beating company that takes first place in a market place. And I’ve failed on more than one occasion….but, hey – that gives me a different perspective. 🙂

My current business thinking in terms of getting my new baby off the ground has been very much influenced by the book ‘A good hard kick in the ass’ by Rob Adams, in which he disabuses several common myths about startups, and in that book is focus on what he calls becoming an ‘Execution Oriented’ company rather than an ‘Output Oriented’ company. Execution orientation refers to the tasks and processes undertaken by the company that progress the business plan and actually get viable product closer to the market place – i.e. those things likely to make money. ‘Output Orientation’ refers to the things done that are peripheral – e.g. doing lots of market research without using the results, focusing on office furnishings, etc.

My own thoughts are that a lot of folks seem to be buried in the minutiae of Output Orientation; involvement in tasks and activities that at first appear to be progressing the business but actually don’t add much to the execution of the business plan towards profitability. It all looks good, you can get out and about and meet other entrepreneurs doing the same thing, and there’s a general whirl of activity – much of which will not help establish sound businesses.

I call this ‘Cargo Cult Capitalism’. In the years immediately following World War 2 natives on Islands that had been occupied by the US or Japan started behaving very strangely; they started building mock-ups of air strips and all the associated paraphernalia to try and bring back the aircraft that had been supplying the troops on their islands (and hence giving them lots of stuff as a by-product). These ‘Cargo Cults’ were basically an attempt at sympathetic magic; by mirroring what they’d seen the soldiers and airmen doing, they thought that they could induce aircraft to appear and land. Cause and effect was something of a lost cause…

And so it is with lots of startups – folks involve mirror the public behaviour of what they feel are successful startups, whilst neglecting the behind the scenes private behaviours that actually deliver the goods. So…perhaps it’s time to consider whether what you’re doing is actually output orientation or Cargo Cult Capitalism; and if so, just ditch the Espresso and get executing!

February 15, 2010
The next, next, next thing!
Hands up whoever has heard of the Red Queen’s Race? That was the athletic event in Wonderland where the participants had to run very hard to stay exactly where they were. I’m becoming convinced that we’re entering in to that sort of event in the online marketing and PR world – and probably beyond as well. And it worries me.

The article that sparked this off is here – nothing major, really, but it did get me thinking. Does anyone ever give any online or software technique any realistic time to show whether it can deliver the goods anymore? Or is it all a case of ‘MTV Attention Span’? Does everything have to prove itself within a 30 second elevator pitch? If something does the job, does it effectively and meets whatever targets are set for it, why do so many people jump ship as soon as the ‘next, next thing’ comes along?

There seems to be no scope today for a technique or technology to get time to prove itself. Of course, there are going to be some advances that are just so awesomely great that it’s obvious even to a relative techo-Luddite like me that they’re worth using immediately, but for other things, how can you know whether you can get more out of an upgrade when you probably haven’t even measured the value of your current process? If you’re using online tools like Facebook, Twitter, Search Engine Optimisation to market your business, then do you actually know how much business comes to your site via these various channels? Because if you don’t then simply changing techniques to fit with the current ‘fad’ is likely to be a waste of time; you simply don’t know whether the new tool is worse or better than the old one!

Impatience with results from all online marketing methods has always been an issue; people still seem to think that making quick money is posisble on the Internet; I’m afraid the only way to do that is probably to sell people on the Internet ‘Get Rich Quick’ schemes! But flicking from one technique to another and then to another without giving time for them to work or even knowing whether they ARE working is pointless.

So…my advice?

Well, bearing in mind that I am certainly NOT a marketing expert and not a millionaire, all I can say is apply good, sound, marketing techniques, such as:
1. Measure your traffic to your site or business before you start, using a metric that matters – whether that’s page impressions, money earned, downloads made, whatever suits your business.
2. Introduce new marketing channels in such a way that business from them is identifiable.
3. If your business is cyclical in any way, let new techniques run for at least a fair part of that cycle.
4. When you have your baseline, make changes to the channels one at a time and measure any effects based on those changes.
Just remember the old adage that you cannot manage what you can’t measure; just because the technology changes doesn’t mean that common sense approaches to marketing should change as well.
February 1, 2010
Blippy – how do you feel about sharing your purchases?

I recently commented on whether Web 2.0 had ‘jumped the shark’ in terms of strange applications, and also remarked on whether the biggest threat to online privacy was ourselves. However, I don’t think I was prepared for Blippy – a web site that allows you to share details of products and services that you’ve bought via different routes– Amazon, iTunes, Mastercard, Visa, etc. Now this I find very weird and, dare I say it, slightly compelling viewing. The system was on an invite only basis until late last year, but now seems to be open to all comers.

It’s sort of like the online version of being in the check out at the local Morrisons Supermarket and peering in to the basket of the person next in the queue. I took a look on the site and randomly selected a user. From 5 minutes looking at their recent transactions I was able to work out that they either lived in San Francisco and had recently traveled to New York (or vice versa), that they had a baby / toddler, that they’d done some DiY recently and various other aspects of their lives based on the purchasing records that they were willing to share.

Now, there’s nothing here that falls in to the ‘blackmail’ category, and I’m quite sure that people using Blippy would keep their ‘special’ purchases off of the system, but to be honest I do find it a rather strange thing for someone to want to do. Maybe I’m just old. It wasn’t long ago that people were protesting about the use of RFID tags in goods to track our shopping behaviour in shopping malls; now we seem to be falling over ourselves to give the information away for free, along with the amounts spent!

The Blippy owners said last December that they weren’t yet sure how to monetise the project. Well, I think they were being rather disingenuous because it appears that Blippy have joined forces with the people who bought you the (now scrubbed) Facebook Beacon project. And then there’s the very direct link between the data that Blippy collects and what has been called the ‘database of intentions’ – data that allows the prediction of buying activity based on past behaviours. You have a large collection of data on buying habits; you have an individual with a recent history of purchases; it’s a relatively trivial software process to take the individual’s list and use the collection of data to predict what other items might be of interest. You can then contact businesses in those market sectors with what is at least a warm prospect for a sale.

Blippy is again an interesting example of how people are willing to put lots of information in to this ‘database of intentions’. Their lack of concern about their own privacy impacts upon us all by making it easier to predict our behaviour even if we only ‘leak’ small amounts of data.

January 20, 2010
Social Media Bubble….here we come!

Are we heading for a ‘speculative bubble’ effect in the portions of the media and IT economy that are tied up with Social Media and Social networking? Regular readers will know that I’m something of a cynic about the importance of Social Media and Social Networking; whilst it’s clearly an important aspect of marketing for the future, I am rather concerned about the importance that the ‘industry’, if we can call it that, applies to itself.

Take the following article, from a Canadian newspaper, for example. Real world businesses are still doubting the importance and relevance of Social networking and Media to their ongoing business activity. Unsurprisingly, the practitioners are effectively saying ‘Ignore us and you’re doomed, doomed I tell you! Doomed!’ Now, some of us who were out of school in the late 1990s can probably remember the comments made by a number of folks with possible vested interests that anyone without a web presence would be out of business within 5 years. What actually happened was that within 5 years a lot of web companies were out of business, and many businesses with no web presence or strategy whatsoever were going along quite happily.

Just because you find something sexy and interesting doesn’t mean it’s important; passion is a wonderful thing to have but one also needs to be pragmatic along with it. In a recession, surely any business is likely to be most interested in keeping existing customers and is likely to be playing a ‘safe hand’ with it’s resources. It’s unlikely to want to adopt techniques that it’s customers may not actually be aware of or care about. There is absolutely no point in extensively using social media and social networking technologies if your customers are not aware of them! It’s rather like advertising in French when you have no one in France reading the ads!

The arrogance of Social Media zealots in assuming that real businesses are lagging behind is astonishing; surely Social Media / Networking is a support function for most companies, part of marketing and advertising. It’s not as disruptive a technology as the web itself is, and shouldn’t be treated like it is. Take a look at this definition of a bubble – the phrases that immediately struck me were “emerging social norms”, “positive feedback mechanisms”,”they create excess demand and production”. I think it’s fair to say that we’re seeing all these effects.

In addition, it’s difficult to value the Social networking / Media market place and individual services and companies within it. And then we have the other issues often associated with bubbles:

Moral Hazard– how much of the market place is supported by ‘other people’s money’ – if supported mainly by VC capital then companies may take risks that they wouldn’t take with their own money.

Herding– the more folks who say it’s good, the more the markets are likely to follow.

All in all….I think a ‘correction’ to the emergent Social Networking and Media sector is likely. And then we can get back to realistic use of this technology as part of an integrated marketing strategy for businesses.

January 18, 2010
Too soon for Social Media Experts?

The Greeks had the Oracle at Delphi; we have consultants. A recent comment on Twitter suggested that the Apocalypse would be heralded by everyone on Twitter being a ‘Social Media Expert’ – sometimes this is how Twitter feels, with everyone who starts following me appearing to be the online equivalent of those guys who clean your car windows when you stop at junctions…

It set me thinking – is the whole Social Media field (that part of the media / Internet that deals with interactive and group based applications and developments, like Facebook, Twitter, Blogging, etc.) too young to have real experts?

Years ago I worked with a guy who hated the word ‘expert’. His take was that an ‘ex’ was a has been and a ‘spurt’ was a drip under pressure. Which sort of summed it up… A more widely heard belief in IT is that an expert is someone who’s read 3 pages further in the manual than you have….

Whilst I wouldn’t go that far, I think that at this stage in the social media game it’s too soon to tell what is true expertise and what isn’t. It’s similar to the many people who thought they were successful property developers during the UK housing boom; the market added value; they did nothing, and when the market slipped the dilettantes got whacked.

At this stage in the game I believe the best policy to be to encourage the client to adopt the generally stated ‘best practice’. This may be a conservative approach, but it allows the client to develop their social media expertise organically and as part of their normal marketing strategy. Having said that, a recent discussion with a practitioner in the field suggested that we may not yet even have the maturity needed for ‘best practice’ to have evolved, so that approach may not yet be of value.

So, what is the answer? Perhaps it’s time to stop going on about Social media as a separate discipline and start looking at the technologies and techniques it encapsulates as being just different aspects of existing business practices. For example, a company may use Facebook to establish brand awareness and communicate with customers. OK – that’s a new approach for both Marketing and Customer Care to learn. Someone else may be using a blog; that Public Relations / the Press Office. Twittering to announce special offers? Sales, anyone?

The technology is new, and there will be a steep learning curve, but the business processes being supported are the same as we have seen in businesses for the last 60 years. Any technology or technique applied to a business must surely have one objective; to ultimately increases the value of the company or organisation to it’s stakeholders. We’re just using new methods, which means that we’re going to have to learn them. Most of these technologies are so cheap to implement (and are usually pretty straight forward to set up in the first instance) that perhaps we just need to try a few different approaches out and take note of what works for us, and then implement what works, rather than expect ‘expert’ guidance to solve all our problems.

In the classic comedy series, The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’ the only guidance offered to cultures that hadn’t yet mastered the new technology of fire was ‘Keep banging the rocks together’.

Good advice.

January 7, 2010
The Social Media Numbers Game
I’m old enough to have used an address book and still have a Rolodex on the phone table. When I actually sit down and think about the people with whom I have reasonably regular ‘quality’ contact in a 3 month period, either electronically or face to face, it probably amounts to no more than a hundred or so. I guess it’s safe to say that in the world of networking I’m a ‘quality over quantity’ sort of fellow. I’ve never been a great collector of large numbers of business cards or people details – collections are fine for stamps, coins and locomotive numbers but are kind of creepy for people. 🙂

Back in the late 1990s / early 2000s I used a networking site called Ecademy – I stopped after a while because it seemed that people were making contact with you purely from a sales oriented viewpoint. Allow me to explain – if I’m interested in AI, and someone brings something to my attention that’s even vaguely related to the field – that’s cracking! That’s exactly what I’m there for – and hopefully I’ll be able to reciprocate. On the other hand, if someone steams in with a ‘Hi, I’m Fred, I’m in marketing, blah, blah, blah’ I get the feeling I’m receiving a boilerplate message which is likely to end up as a boiler room selling attempt. The site seemed to encourage numbers of contacts over quality – and that’s one of the reasons why I eventually jacked it in.

I’ve noticed in recent days that I’m being followed by people who are following thousands of others. And the odd thing is most of them appear to be selling something that is as relevant to me as a comb to Sir Patrick Stewart. The ‘Bio’ of one such follower (soon to be ex-follower in my daily purge) – “A Business Dedicated to providing free online MLM training videos, articles, books and webinars”. If I received an email like this I’d call it spam – pure and simple. I know that Twitter has policies around spam, but my point is that most folks following 20,000 people seem to be in the MLM, ‘sales and marketing’, ‘social media consultancy’ sort of areas. They’re cold calling – they sure ain’t networking.

Bottom line – there is NO WAY, realistically, that the content generated by the 20,000 people these bods follow is ever registering in any meaningful manner with these people – I assume it’s simply being harvested electronically and searched for keywords that might suggest a sales lead.

Joe’s categorisation of Twitter users…
1. Vast number of followers, smallish number of followed – publisher / celeb.
2. Vast number of followers, vast number of followed – probably sales / mass marketing
3. Smallish followers, large number of followed – probably spammer
4. Smallish followers / smallish followed – personal / business networking
OK – it’s not a brilliant classification but it works for me. Just watch out if you’re in category 2 or 3 ‘cos I’m binning you!

Whilst I was drafting this yesterday, I came across this piece on the same topic: http://juliorvarela.wordpress.com/2009/12/28/when-twitter-numbers-are-meaningless/

Don’t get too hung up on your numbers on Twitter. If you’re following lots of people, just check WHY. Do they add value to your day? Amuse / entertain you? Educate you? Guide or enlighten you? If not, ditch ’em. And those following you – just take a look at their numbers and think about what I’ve said.

And I hope you don’t chuck me off your lists. 🙂
January 1, 2010
The Dr Johnson License….

I appreciate that this is likely to be one of those posts that will annoy some folks, but, here we go. A couple of days ago I was invited by two or three separate people to join Facebook Groups and sign petitions against the UK Digital Economy Bill. Now, I believe that we need a Digital Economy Bill like I need a hole in the head; what we actually need is less red tape and a more hands off approach from Central Government to let entrepreneurs get on with the job without requiring a chit from a bureaucrat to go to the toilet. However, I didn’t sign any petitions or join any groups; why? Because the total pre-occupation of everyone was whether it’s right to have a legal structure in which it’s possible to remove or restrict someone’s Internet access if they’re guilty of or accused of sharing copyright materials.

There are some truly stinky parts of that bill, like there are with most pieces of New Labour legislation – but I want to look today at the filesharing issue in a wider sense.

Let’s start with the ‘The Internet is an essential part of modern life and it shouldn’t be possible to be cut off from it.’ argument. Bollocks. Water is essential. A roof over your head is essential. Electricity and Power are pretty important. And yet you can lose all of these by simply not paying your mortgage and utility bills, ultimately resulting in being thrown out of your house and living in a cardboard box. If that’s possible, why on Earth does anyone living in the real world and not in Second Life think that your Internet connection should have some sort of God-given right of protection? And as for essential – quite a few people manage quite happily without an Internet connection, thank you very much.

In the context of this argument, what the Internet HAS done for some people is to allow them to access, free of charge, a large tranche of media that they would have had to borrow off of their friends 20 years ago. The actually physical act of borrowing and copying probably restricted copying in that few people had the brass neck (or stamina) to borrow 20 CDs from a friend and copy them in one sitting, for example. The Internet is, no doubt, an essential tool for people in ripping off media. I’ve heard most of the arguments, and there are some good points on both sides of the debate. Rather than re-hash the usual debates, here are a few observations to provide food for thought for anyone approaching this argument with an open mind.

We have a number of open licenses like Creative Commons, Open Source, etc. Why shouldn’t it be possible, therefore, for a creator of software, film or music put their material out through a proprietary license that requires payment to use the material? After all, I am restricted with what I can do within the GNU licence, for example; I have to allow other people to copy the material – it’s part of the GNU licence and I am more than happy to play along with that. If you want to have a recording of a film, then you should surely, by the same logic, abide by the license of that film. Typically pay money and don’t copy it. No one is forcing you to adopt that license – you have the choice not to buy the DVD. Similarly with Open Source; if I don’t want to pass on my source code to other people, I choose to write my own code and not use the GNU license. I can see no difference.

I’d be interested to know how many people who regularly engage in file sharing of copyrighted materials have ever created something non-trivial and original and have tried to sell it. I may be wrong but a quick poll of folks I know (outside the professional digerati) would indicate that the answer is ‘not many’. Perhaps to have experienced running a small business that deals with created works like software, or publishing a book, etc. might change people’s attitudes a little. Same argument as above; if I wish to place material I create in the public domain or under GNU or CC, then it’s my right to do so, and your right as consumers of media to take advantage of my action. If, on the other hand, I choose to publish under what I might start calling the Dr Johnson License (‘Only a fool writes and doesn’t get paid for it!’) then you have a right to not purchase what I produce, and I have the risk of not seeing my works go out in to the world. If you make an illegal copy of my work, then I have a right to pursue you to make you abide by my Dr Johnson License – just as the creators of software licensed under the GNU license can pursue someone who breaches that license under the law.

I’ve heard the argument of ‘try before buy’ and it’s a good one. Which is why I have a Spotify account – legal music downloading, free of charge, some advertising, no actual physical ownership of the music outside the service even if I pay a monthly fee (which removes the ads). I have to say that I find the latter a pain in the rear – there are some advantages to having physical ownership of the files – but then again, it’s THEIR license and I choose to go with them or not. It’s an imperfect system. If you download stuff on a ‘try before buying’ basis, then perhaps the case could be made to allow you to download any piece of media with a built in duration, that renders the media unplayable after, say, 30 days unless you buy it – the act of purchase then generates an unlock code. The argument has been expressed that downloaders tend to be purchasers of music – again, I’m yet to be convinced. Anecdotal evidence from people I know would suggest that whilst they may purchase material, the value of that that they download illegally vastly exceeds that which they purchase.

To all the freetards, can you explain why wrong for me to put the material I’ve created out in to the world, want to be paid for it, and take action when I’m not? I am exercising my personal, creative freedom to want to be paid for my work. If my view of my own value is wrong, don’t pay me – but don’t copy either.

December 8, 2009