Ruminations on software freedom

The failure of Microsoft's anti-piracy servers over the weekend would seem an easy entree to some Redmond-bashing, but there are far more important issues to consider. It is sometimes easy to forget about the "freedom" in free software, but that is exactly what protects the users of Linux and other free systems from this kind of misfeature. Using proprietary, closed source software with a decidedly one-sided license agreement is not wrong, per se, but should be considered carefully – not just entered into blindly as is often the case.

With a name that seems like the straight line of a joke, Windows Genuine Advantage (WGA) is the "service" that Microsoft uses to attempt to detect and semi-disable copies of Windows that it concludes have been illegally installed. Each copy checks in with a remote server, sending over some hardware and software profile information to determine if it is properly licensed. Any number of things could happen to a "pirated" copy, but currently XP users get a popup that alerts them to their piracy, while Vista users get some – supposedly non-critical – features disabled. All of which might be reasonable for a truly pirated copy, but for users who are properly licensed, it is annoying, at best, to be treated as a criminal.

For approximately 19 hours starting on Friday 24 August, the WGA servers were not working correctly; some 12,000 machines that checked in with them during that time were marked, incorrectly in the vast majority of cases, as pirated. The first responses from Microsoft technical support indicated that it might be several days before the service was back: "kindly try to validate again on Tuesday 28 Aug 2007." In fact, the WGA team identified and fixed the problem in less than a day, but it highlights that the default or failsafe condition for WGA is "pirated." Vista users were particularly incensed as they had to endure reduced functionality of their fully legal copies of the software.

The reactions of some users to the WGA blog posting announcing the fix were rather telling. Thanking Microsoft for fixing the problem – which they, of course, created – so quickly and over a weekend, while writing off any angry users as cranks, makes it seem that everyone should be thankful that they have any software at all. Many users are willing to cede control of their software to the vendor.

Microsoft is not alone in the practice of software and hardware validation, many copy protection and license key schemes depend on some kind of matching between the key and the hardware it is licensed for. Other vendors snoop on their users, in the interests of cheating prevention in games for example, and report back to central servers. Skype was recently found to root around in Firefox profiles for unknown (possibly benign) reasons. It comes down to a question of who controls the system, both hardware and software, that one has purchased.

The control issue comes in other forms as well. Proprietary data formats are one of the current battlefields. It is rather amazing that folks will pay lots of money to lock up their data in a format that they will probably be unable to read in ten years time; unless they periodically convert it to use the latest format. So-called Digital Rights Management (DRM) is yet another control scheme that imposes restrictions, determined by the vendor, on books, videos, music, and the like. These restrictions are not arbitrary, the sellers try to optimize their income by imposing constraints that won't chase away the majority of their customers.

There are tradeoffs here, folks are generally willing to trade their freedom for the latest whiz-bang software feature or a copy of the latest movie. They rarely think of it in those terms, however. The copyright owners may be within their rights to try to get buyers to agree to their terms; so far, they have largely been successful. There are hopeful signs that people are waking up, recognizing these schemes – DRM, proprietary formats, anti-piracy authentication, etc. – for what they are, an unabashed attempt to control as much as they can get away with.

It will be very interesting to watch how the "iPod generation" reacts when the iPod is no longer the music player of choice. All of the music that they "bought" from iTunes will not play elsewhere. Apple will, in all likelihood, make it as hard as possible to migrate to another player, even if their market dominance in digital music players has passed. Users will be left with no choice but to "buy" the music again, which is great for the record companies, but not so much for the users.

Google Video users ran into the same problem recently, their DRM-infected videos were to stop playing after 15 August. After initially mishandling the revocation, along with a poorly received refund plan, Google has since relented, offering a full refund and extending the life of the videos until February 2008. With luck, users who have been bitten by these schemes will demand DRM-free versions when they make their second purchase.

Users of free software and open formats are largely immune to this kind of silliness. There is no "Linux Genuine Advantage" server running in Linus Torvalds' basement, checking to make sure we are properly licensed. Even the commercial Linux vendors, whose livelihood depends on support subscriptions, cannot get away with enforcing WGA-like schemes; free software can be rewritten, legally, to avoid them. Red Hat, Novell or others cannot reduce your functionality or hold your data hostage, there is no lock-in.

Free software and open formats provide freedom, which is easy to overlook when using them on a day-to-day basis. One can feel very secure that a file created using OpenOffice.org or Gimp today will be readable by something – those applications may be long gone – in 50 or 100 years. Assuming that the data stored on our backup media today can be retrieved in the distant future (and that may be a big assumption), the documents, music, pictures, etc. that were stored there will undoubtedly be retrievable. If someone can find compatible hardware, distribution Live CDs will boot and run, without authenticating anywhere. Proprietary and closed format users have no such assurance.