I smite thee! ...The Diary of Nod

Beware of FREE

Ian Murdock wrote about his love for GMail. I found this highly strange and more than a little ironic: The creator of Debian, the GNU/Linux distribution most blessed by the FSF, is using and promoting an application which is not only closed-source but hosted on foreign servers.

IOW, Ian has no control over this product. If Google wiped all of his data, where would he be? If Google folded, closed the service, sold it, changed it's Terms of Service (TOS)...what recourse would he have? He even recognizes that Google may disable the service if he uses it in ways they don't like but he thinks are legitimate.

One of the many distinctions made in F/OSS is between "free as in beer" and "free as in speech". Unless you own the box, how much can you own what's in the box?

Too often we're lured by "free" online services without considering the incidental costs or the cost of loss--once you've begun to rely on these "free" services, what is the cost if you lose it? If you have an account with a social networking site/group, what would it cost you if that account was shut down without notice? If the only email people had was your "free" one that was suddenly dropped, what is the cost to YOU? Numerous vendors moved many of their services to pay products (even if they continued "free" versions with fewer features) or discontinued them entirely because they weren't worth the cost of operating. Ian uses Google's paid Premier Edition but that only gives him more features, not transparency. Even with a commercial product you have very little recourse other than a lawsuit which may garner you money but not what was lost. Most services have a clause that they owe you no more than you've paid them.

These business practices is one reason F/OSS was developed; not only as an option but an antithesis.

Hey, I'm writing this using a "free" service. If I lost it...I'd shrug and move on. I should keep backups of my posts (quite easy and permitted under the TOS) but otherwise I'm fine: Only a few friends read it and I use it more as a personal journal than a community resource. The loss of this wouldn't impact my business or personal life.

We need to see these products as what they are--provided without charge but not without cost.

posted by Lachlan @ 7:09 PM