daverea.com

Thanks to a pile of work and some poorly-placed meetings, I ended up taking a rather late lunch on Friday. On most other days, my lunch break would be spent enjoying conversations with colleagues or taking in a walk around the picturesque village into which our little corner of GM is tucked away. But on this particular Friday, walking into the cafeteria a little after 1PM, I found myself eating solo.

Which gave me a chance read a few pages of the Wall Street Journal while I waited for my soup to warm up.

Which kind of made me lose my appetite…

I read exactly one page – B3 – of July 10th’s WSJ, the “Business Technology” section. Pretty much every article on the page was about business software, and the players in the software business. Knowing most of the players and taking a passing [*cough*] interest in the software world, I read with interest. And, ultimately, outright disgust.

Of the 7 articles on the page, 3 of them described ways that the software industry is bleeding people’s and businesses’ freedoms away, as the very same people and businesses happily shell out aggregate billions of dollars for the privelige.

The first article was titled “Who Wants to Be Millionaire Snitch?” [sic] … If you haven’t already guessed that it was about the Microsoft-sponsored “Business Software Alliance”, you haven’t been reading this blog long enough. The BSA is pretty much an industry-endorsed, government-condoned goon squad that encourages (read: bribes) employees to rat out companies that (whether accidentally or intentionally) haven’t fully paid for all the software they run. Once the BSA receives a tip on a company, it invades and demands to examine all of their computers and licenses. The company willingly obliges, when threatened with court trials and heavy fines – and in most cases, they settle out of court for a sum between 2 and 3 times the price of the missing licenses.

Of course, the WSJ article doesn’t paint the BSA as the secret police of the software industry that they are. Rather than exposing them as practitioners of bullying and extortion, it presents a glowing interview with the BSA’s senior “director of enforcement” that makes out the alliance to be some sort of altruistic administrator of software licensing vaccinations – sure, it’s going to hurt a little as you write that check, but we’re here for the good of your company… You do want to be in compliance with all your software licenses, right?

Which brings me to the topic of the second markedly distasteful article on the page. The headline seemed innocuous enough: Intel to invest in virtualization leader. But reading into it offered no solace after my re-education on the mission of the BSA. As it turns out, virtualization (or software that lets you run multiple “virtual” PCs or servers on one physical computer) is a pretty hot ticket in the software industry right now. As if anyone who even sees computing news sites once in a while didn’t already know that. But what’s new is this: Microsoft is shaking in its boots when it comes to virtualization. So much so that they’ve added a new clause to the magical EULA (thats “End User License Agreement”) that governs people’s use of Microsoft Windows. According to the EULA – a legal document which windows users must accept in order to use Microsoft’s software – you can’t install virtualization software on that fresh new Vista laptop you just bought. That’s right – you’re simply not allowed to. Never mind that you bought and paid for your operating system – the only means you have to access your bought-and-paid-for PC – and that you bought and paid for your virtualization software (like VMWare, perhaps). Thanks to Microsoft’s new EULA clause, you’re not allowed to put the two together – even if your whole goal is to run a bought-and-paid-for copy of Windows 2000 or XP underneath Vista!

Unfortunately, most people don’t read the EULA that appears when they start up their new PCs for the first time. They don’t realize how restrictive it is, and how many ways Microsoft invades their privacy and erodes their freedom. If Microsoft can ban the use of virtualization software on Vista PCs, what’s the keep them from banning the use of GPL-licensed (read: free) software that has the potential to introduce users to the massive field of freedom-enhancing alternatives to Microsoft products?

The third article made me cringe even more – because it involves more than just my hard-earned consumer dollars. No, now my carefully-extorted tax dollars have been pulled into the fray too! The article describes an effort by Cisco, Microsoft and EMC Corp (the parent company of VMWare, whose very software now-partner Microsoft has banned) to harmonize the security systems used by government agencies to share data. The source for their developments? “…existing software applications, networked storage and networking technologies, including Microsoft’s digital-rights management technology.” (emphasis mine).

That’s right folks – rather than encouraging our government agencies to employ open standards-based security technologies that have already achieved widespread interoperability, the software industry would like to hand those agencies a melting-pot of the most restrictive software there is. By creating new standards based on the suffoccation of freedom, they’re garnering praise from the media while creating a proprietary-software-based vendor lock-in condition that will fill their coffers with our tax dollars for decades.

We as consumers demand competition and choice when it comes to buying gasoline, or choosing a utility provider, or selecting a damn fast food restaurant for cripe sake. Yet the very same “we” as taxpayers don’t demand that our politicians and government agencies adopt software policies that insure they have a choice when it comes time to build interoperable systems. While governments around the world adopt open-standards software – some of the most secure software available – we stand by and let our own agencies become the cash cows of the American software industry.

You and I have a choice.

Businesses and their IT departments have a choice.

The government has a choice.

It’s an important choice, and very few of the people in the groups above know how important it is.

We all can choose software that enhances our freedom, or we can choose software that restricts our freedom. We can choose to support a company that decides just how we can and can’t use our computers, or we can choose to support a movement that gives us an alternative.

We can choose.

Choose wisely.