Sam Danielson

“Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for life.”

So goes the worthy old saw. Good in its day, more than likely, but completely inappropriate for the thrusting, cut-throat, dog eat dog world of modern commerce. I would suggest an alternative version:

“Teach a man to fish, and you introduce another competitor into the overcrowded fishing industry. Give a man a fish, and you stimulate demand for your product”

Mickey the Fish, Sep 04 2000

Taken from Halfbakery

Bingo. I was struggling to cast into words the difference between free software and free service and this munging of a classic meme fits the bill perfectly.

The Golden Rule

The code is the teacher. To hide the code is to keep the knowledge, and with it the power. All the zeefoos, nipees, pangos, (insert cutesy web 2.0 sounding name), have one thing in common. They exists because of open-source software and royalty free standards.

The FLOSS licenses restrict the use of the code but they do not prohibit the use of knowledge gained from that code (leave that to software patents). Even placing restrictions on the use of the code is a little paranoid. Is your code that special? Is your in-house framework so incredibly perfect that if you release the source someone might use it to build an empire and crush you? C’mon. If it’s that good there will be more than one empire built with your code and you will at least be a well paid white-beard for one of them.

The only good reason to hide code is that it is imperfect. Exposing code exposes bugs that could be used by spammers and other generally evil people.

That brings me to the multitude of free services built with free code. For the most part they empower people to communicate and find things. Google helped me find the opening quote for this article. The “don’t be evil” manifesto is a good one. Democracy, monarchy, monopoly, anarchy, aristocracy, etc; the best times occur when an entity with enormous power wields it in a non-evil way. The non-evil quality is an elusive one but we tend to know it when we see it. Perhaps a more specific version of ‘don’t be evil’ is ‘follow the golden rule’.

Did you properly license your DNA?

Imagine what could happen with a proprietary human genome. The copies and derivative works of this genome would be restricted as to how many copies they could make themselves and with whom they could recombine their genes. One would need to check their EULA before sex and use contraceptives if necessary. If any illegal children were born they would either have to be destroyed or become the property of the genome owner. It is my understanding that the genome is currently public domain, a license which does not prohibit proprietary derivative works. It may behoove us to license our genome under GPL, LGPL, or some other open source license. The license must also allow the gemone owner to restrict its use or we would have compulsory free sex, so GPL is not the answer. It sounds crazy and it is.

KISS license

Here is my license. No legal (government) intervention required.

1. I have a right to say and copy what I know and have, no matter what the source.
2. I have a right to keep a secret but it’s my own fault, and therefore my loss, if the secret is revealed.

The success of the Internet is due to the implicit use of the simple license. I can’t read all the source belonging to Amazon, Ebay, Yahoo, Google, Flickr, Digg, Reddit. . . That’s theirs and they keep it secret for their own reasons, as is their right. I can learn all I want about DNS, HTTP, STMP, Ruby, PHP, C, Linux, etc.

Rights and Responsibilities

It’s not my, or your, problem if someone at Google gives out company secrets. We should be entitled to use the information we have as we see fit. I can already hear it, “Gee, we can’t do that. . . How would a big company ever keep secrets?” So what? Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page wrote the core algorithms of Google long before they even had a company. FWIW, they also published the main idea.

The Internet allows us to keep certain things secret while simultaneously delivering a product. It also enables individuals to publish their own works in a very accessable way. The music industry, for example, is a middle-man that will be eliminated by technology. The RIAA’s wild grasps for power are clearly the desperation of impending death.

Personal information like credit cards and SSN’s are of the same nature. The question is not whether the information owner should bear the responsibility of an uncovered secret, but who the owner is. Since the credit card industry has total control over the security design we tend to view them as the owner, and it is their fault when the system breaks.

Conclusion

I feel we have arrived at a fork similar to the division between mercantilism and free trade. If secrets are viewed the responsibility of the owner our information culture will continue to flourish. The public should not be burdened with the individuals inability to hide sensitive information. Free of this burden we can spend our efforts on more noble things like fishing.