[ox-en] Re: Value of software
- From: Stefan Merten <smerten oekonux.de>
- Date: Sun, 09 Jun 2002 22:52:37 +0200
Hi Graham and list!
That's an interesting thread. Thanks for your thoughtful post :-) .
Because we're both using a rather relating kind of replying style -
which I like most :-) - I keep most of the history so people can get a
clue of what we are talking about.
6 days ago Graham Seaman wrote:
On Mon, 3 Jun 2002, Stefan Merten wrote:
On Mon, 13 May 2002, Stefan Meretz wrote:
Am Freitag, 10. Mai 2002 00:08 schrieb Graham Seaman:
Commercial software is not a commodity, and has no value. It has no
value in the sense that it has no price (you cannot buy software, and
eg. Microsoft's EULAs always say 'you have not bought this software').
I'm not so sure, whether this is the whole truth. Isn't there software
which *is* actually sold to customers? It won't be software with a
wide use of course, because then scarcity would be a problem. However,
in niche markets you may actually sell (all the rights on) a software
you have written to your customer. BTW usually a customer in a niche
market won't be interested that competitors also get "their" software
which they can enforce by buying all the rights at the software.
Yes, some software is sold to customers. It's what my firm does all the
time. But it's not sold as a commodity - it's sold as a 'one-off' item,
for a particular need; it won't be copied, or resold. I don't know what
to call this - I used the term 'commercial software' above to mean
software which is copied in bulk for many people to use for a fee, like
Word or Excel. I believe most programmers write software for sale in the
sense you gave above; but I think this is clearly a kind of service,
rather than production of a commodity, so the question of value is not
relevant here.
Ok, if you see it that way you're right of course. So for a commodity
I conclude there must be an (anonymous) market where the exchange
value is realized. Otherwise you'd call it a service. Is that correct?
But isn't the difference between a service and a (usual) commodity
that, that with a service there is no product involved? This would be
not the case with service software.
However, coming back to self-unfolding the distinction between
software as a result of service and software for a market isn't
relevant. The alienation takes place in both cases and thus
self-unfolding is limited - and thus quality I'm arguing all the time.
M$ on the other hand is another case. They are selling (the rights to
use) software which everyone can use and most people don't give a shit
whether others can use the same software. However, M$ being actually
kind of greedy, is trying to create a M$ tax - which is kind of evil
even in a capitalist sense.
Personally I think the the 'MS tax' is confusing. Some people mean by it
that MS is overcharging relative to other software houses, but that's not
what I'm saying (even if it is also true). Also, the word 'tax'
assimilates it to something quite different, which has a real
justification - ie. funding of public works of various kinds.
Sorry, I just picked up the notion and did not really think about it.
However, in a way the attitude M$ is showing to me looks like becoming
a state in the state and thus the word tax gets some meaning.
Particularly this seems to be true for all the pre-installed Windows
copies you're buying together with a new computer.
Generally I
don't think there is anything particularly 'evil' about MS - they are
simply the largest commercial software producer, and as such have the role
of public defender of the interests of commercial software producers in
general (eg. in trying to block the laws on use of free software by the
state in Brasil/Peru/Argentina/Catalunha/Spain etc, or in trying to stop
the use of the gpl by universities). If they were replaced in this
position by Sun, for example, Sun would behave in the same way.
This is of course true. The point about M$ is, that they not only have
a (near) monopoly but they behave rather disgusting. Other monopolists
did/do better I think.
No, software is not exchanged - at least not with consumers. I don't see
why the situation is different from TV programs: there is a market among
TV companies for programs, and they sell them to one another. But they do
not sell them to the people who watch them.
Sure they do. The more clear form is pay TV (which at the moment flops
greatly in Germany ;-) ) and the other form is that the consumers
"pay" by accepting being harassed by ads.
No they don't - you do not buy the programs you watch on pay tv. You pay
money to watch them, but you don't buy them - after paying the money, you
don't own the program or any part of it (and if you think you do, save the
program on video tape, and then sell the tape, you can be arrested). The
program is never sold to you; you just pay a fee (a kind of rent) to watch
it. It's not a traditional commodity at all.
This is again correct. Thanks for being exact. Rent indeed fits very
well: You get the limited right to use something in a certain way.
If I'm right, saying 'free software is not a commodity' does not
distinguish it from commercial software, which is also 'worthless as
the air we breathe'. One possible conclusion from that is that all
software should be free, as should all formulae for medicine, all
genetic knowledge, etc. etc. (as opposed to having to create an
equivalent, special 'free' version of all the existing commodity
knowledge).
Well, what keep us off from saying: Human activities are "worthless as the
air we breathe"? For me setting some commodities "free" can only be the
first step. I cannot see, that anybody will be more convinced, if you
argue, that 'software is not a commodity' - by "nature" or what is your
ground? All was societal made...
My ground is also social. If something takes very little work to copy, it
is impossible to make it into a real commodity. It is possible to pretend
it is a commodity (put a CD in a big empty box), but it is still not
really a commodity, since commodities are based on work to produce things
for exchange in a market. This is a social fact, not a natural one.
Well, I'd question that this is much more social than other sort of
property. Property is something formal which always explicitly needs
to be enforced - so it's not natural in any case. You can see that
well in South America where landless farm workers occupy private
property not used by their owners. There are of course countless
examples.
The ideology of this society says that you go to work to make money, to
buy goods made by other people who have also worked to make them. Land
doesn't really fit into this well - land ownership is something older than
capitalism, even if it has adapted to it. That 'form of property' was
originally justified by tradition - my ancestors owned this land, so I do
too.
I'm very keen to clarify this point. Indeed I think there is some kind
of "natural" property. There is even a word for it: possession. In
German it is called "besitzen" which includes "sitzen" which means to
sit and the "be" prefix adds "on something". I guess the English word
has the same roots.
This type of possession comes from the visible fact that someone is
using something regularly - be it land, a flat or a laptop. There was
one scene in "Dances with Wolf" (I guess this was the English title)
where one of the Red Indians "stole" the cap of the US soldier. He
found it after the soldier has lost it while hunting IIRC. The
community made it clear, that the cap is the possession of the soldier
and so the finder had to give it back to the soldier - which he did
IIRC.
This is a type of property which needs no enforcement by formalized
powers (aka states) as property in general does. Sure there may be
force - like in the example - but it's of another nature I think. May
be it all depends whether a society / group of people is anonymous or
people are in contact with each other?
This is a rather old question to me, and I'd really like to see some
progress here.
For most things now, the form of property is justified by work - I worked
to buy this, so I own it. If you have a washing machine and a disk with
Microsoft Word in your house, and I take either, then you will see me as a
thief; the property laws in this case have some social validity. The law
which stops me taking your property limits my freedom, but enhances yours;
and in the end most people accept it as a reasonable compromise. This
is a form of property we are all used to ('unnatural' or not).
But here possession as described above shines through. If you take my
washing machine I can't use it any longer. This is different for trash
like a Word disk ;-) . People rarely care whether their trash is
stolen - because they don't want to use it any longer.
Of course this does not hold very well for means of production owned
by a capitalist. The capitalist him-/herself doesn't use the means of
production directly - so in the sense above s/he doesn't possess them.
Indeed I think this is where people start to question whether this is
legitimate or not. And thus this is the point where you "need" some
formal enforcement - laws, police, states, all that.
But if I copy your disk, leaving the original, you won't see me as a
thief, because I have not deprived you of anything.
Yes. With digital copy the notion of theft in the sense of possession
becomes meaningless because I can still use my possession.
So for Microsoft to
have me treated as a thief requires a new ideology ('copying is theft')
and new laws which restrict both our freedoms. This is a different form of
property from the old one; not more or less natural - they're all social -
but different, worse, and easier to fight, since it conflicts with the
old one that people are used to.
In a way it's similar to the property rights on means of production.
Their only sense is to reserve the capitalist the exclusive right to
make money with it. This is similar how M$ argues.
Another difference: most medicines can be produced very cheaply (the value
of a bottle of pills is mostly very close to the value of a CD of
software), and prices are kept artifically high by IP law.
Yes, the medicine sector is an interesting example. Do you know
exactly how much the "copying" of a medicine costs? Is it really that
cheap?
We need to find a chemist. ;-)
Yes. On the German list there is a woman who studied pharmaceutics.
Funnily I met her today on the LinuxTag and I asked her. She'll write
something.
Medicine should
be free (not necessarily as in beer, and not without legal controls over
manufacture and testing, but without restrictions caused by IP law). The
countries asking for the right to make their own AIDS medicines at their
true value are doing so on the same grounds as people who say software
should be free. But if you say software/medicine have value because of an
increased immaterial part, it is harder to see such common ground.
Actually I thought about having this issue on the Oekonux conference,
but I don't have the slightest idea whom to invite and for what exact
issue.
Maybe someone from Generics Now?
http://www.genericsnow.org/
(and get them to talk about their banner: "copy = right"
which seems like a perfect illustration of the common features!)
http://www.accesstoaffordablemedicine.com/
is more general, but american only.
Are there any doctors/chemists on the German list? Would it be worth
asking about this therE?
Thanks for the pointers :-) . Generics now sounds great at first
glance.
An oekonux argument might be: 'They have value, so it's normal to produce
them as commodities. Unless there are groups of chemists designing new
medicines without pay, there is no non-commodity alternative to the
current system'. Maybe that's unfair to oekonux, but it sounds a logical
consequence to me - oder nicht?
May be that's the practical basis of all steps towards a GPL society:
That knowledge workers of all disciplines in their Free time start to
develop Free goods.
I'm starting to feel that this emphasis is wrong; it depends too much on
generalising from what happened with software to other industries.
Seems you're starting a *very* interesting thought here! I already
wondered sometimes where we have to leave the example of Free Software
and may be you found (one of) the points.
My
feeling is that, for example, the right to produce generic medicines and
defense of free software against patent law are two sides of the same
thing; and that the success of either (preferably both) makes the
gpl-society a little more possible - even if there has been no 'hobbyist'
type development on the medical side.
Yes. May be I have to drop the thought that it always needs to be that
type of hobbyist approach we see in Free Software. Of course then
things start to get difficult again because then we don't have a
shining example we just need to look at ;-( . Perhaps this is the
point where Oekonux *really* has to work.
Here the question of the ownership of means of
productions comes into play, which is for sure different between Free
Software (PC) and a medical drug (a research laboratory which lots of
expensive equipment - I guess).
Expense is always the argument used to justify any IP industry ("medicines
take millions to develop" (but in practice most recent new medicines were
developed in universities, with tax money, then given to private
companies); 'operating systems take millions to write" (well, we know all
about that one); "films take millions to produce" (and the more money the
worse they seem to be) etc). I would think that the limitation is more
that medicines have to be guaranteed to be tested. A program that crashes
my x-windows session is annoying; a medicine with similar lack of testing
might be fatal. That means part of the initiative has to come from the
state (ie. people working on it have to be governed by legal rules) not
just from individual chemists.
Hmm... I guess it is actually costly to even develop some new
medicine. The question who pays seems less relevant to me. But you're
right if you say, that results produced by state money should become
public property - which was the case in the US if I'm informed right.
BTW: Does any US citizen know about the current situation in this
field and about its history. I heard everything produced by state
money had to be open, but I think that changed not too long ago.
However, gene technology seems to be
pretty cheap :-)-: .
Don't worry, I'm sure they're working at making it more expensive ;-)
I'm not so sure about this - and whether this is a good thing. But I
don't want to start a debate how useful gene technology might be...
Mit Freien Grüßen
Stefan
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