Free software can be expensive

4 September 2008 - 13:03

People often claim that one of the good things about GNU Linux is that it is free software. Free as in "free speech", not "free beer." But free software usually turns out to be free as in beer as well, because the fact is that if you make the source code freely available, you can't stop people from compiling free copies of your product so they can avoid paying for it. This means that it's hard to make a living from free software, which discourages professional developers from getting involved. In my opinion that is preventing Linux from becoming a viable alternative to Microsoft's Windows.

The open source business model - of which "free software" is a subset - just does not work for the kind of applications that most PC users buy and use. It's only possible to make money from open source if:
a) you're a hardware company like IBM, and your profit comes from selling the equipment to run it on, or:
b) you develop mission-critical software for which users will always buy a support contract.

Linux distribution companies make money selling packaged CDs of the operating system, but most people seem to use the free open-source version. Companies like Red Hat survive because their products are being used to run mission-critical systems in big companies, who are prepared to pay for it. Because Linux is mostly given away, there is a lack of money to pay programmers to work on it. And it shows, not just in the OS but in the applications you can run on it.

Spend an afternoon trawling Sourceforge and you'll find that most projects have taken years to get from inception to a still-unfinished version 0.x. Many more have been abandoned or not seen any new development for years. With the prospect of making money, a comparable Windows product would be finished and on the market in a few weeks or months, and will probably have been through several major version updates. The lack of high quality, actively developed and supported applications makes Linux, whatever its other qualities, unattractive when compared to the proprietary alternatives. The free software ideal, having given birth to Linux, is now strangling its hopes to become a real alternative to Windows.

The operating system itself shows signs of underdevelopment. The Linux desktop - whether KDE or GNOME - looks dated compared to the visual sophistication of Windows Vista or Mac OS X. The standard desktop themes and icons look like they were designed by a six year old. Control and management features are inconsistent. Some tasks can be carried out from a GUI control panel but many more require the use of command line tools or editing a text file. The fact that scarce time and effort is wasted developing competing desktop window managers for Linux instead of focussing on just one is an illustration of how the lack of a financial imperative results in unfocussed development.

The lack of applications means that adopting free Linux can turn out to be an expensive decision. I'll illustrate with an example. I have a Huawei E169G UMTS (3G) USB dongle for mobile broadband access. The manufacturer provides a Windows application that lets you connect to the Internet and also send and receive text messages. Since the E169G isn't a phone, and because the phone company sends text messages to it from time to time, I needed an application that could receive one.

To connect to the net I use UMTSMon. This is an excellent piece of work which, when finished, will be a perfect Linux equivalent to the Windows program supplied by Huawei. But currently in version 0.8 it can send, but not receive text messages. I am sure that a shareware developer looking to sell this program would have finished it and have version 1.0 on the market by now. But because UMTSMon is only being developed as a hobby, we have to be patient. However, I needed a solution now.

First I tried out gnokii which was in my distribution's repository, but this didn't work with my Huawei. Then I spent some time investigating Gammu and Wammu but they didn't work either. My searches located a couple of other promising-looking applications that turned out to be abandonware. One of these was KMobileTools which appeared to be just what I needed. But according to the last developer update posted nearly a year ago "Unfortunately due to the lack of man power not many ideas could be realized."

The last version of KMobileTools actually does a lot more than I need, but it looks like an application that people would willingly pay for in an environment where users are accustomed to paying for software. It's a tragedy for Linux that it apparently isn't going to be completed. Unfortunately there was no binary package of the last release for my Linux distribution (another major obstacle to developing a commercial software market for Linux) and I couldn't compile the source code, either. Eventually I found an older version that would do what I needed, though it had a bug that prevented it from deleting text messages.

Although I am not a C++ programmer, I was able to find and fix the bug. That's something I wouldn't have been able to do if KMobileTools had not been free software, and this is exactly what the founders of the Free Software movement had in mind when they started it. But I would rather have just emailed the developer's technical support as a paying customer and have him fix the problem for me.

I guess I would have paid about $29 for a program like KMobileTools or UMTSMon had they been "shareware". Instead I spent about a day and a half trying to find a solution that worked, including fixing a bug in the software. Free software can be expensive.