Perplexed looking for a guide

Digital Rights, RIAA & Open Source

I'm sitting here at 1:00AM trying to futilely guess when the winter storm is going to hit, and wondering if my plane to California will leave tomorrow morning, as scheduled, in the evening, or not at all. The later the storm hits, the greater the chance that my flight will leave, more or less on time, so here I sit reading the paper and waiting for the snow to fall. Why not just go to sleep you ask? You know the old proverb, "A watched pot never boils."? Perhaps the longer I watch for the snow to fall, the longer it will take to start falling and the better my chances are.... or perhaps I'm just over tired.

One article that caught my eye, was about Steve Job's latest missive urging the music industry to eliminate the digital rights management for music. Among Steve's arguments is that (1) the music industry already release music without DRM (CD's), which can be easily ripped, (i.e., the cows are already out of the barn) (2) this is better for the consumer, because then any player can play music purchased from any store, (3) any DRM system can be cracked by smart people, so promise to the music industry to protect their music from illegal copying is specious.

While all of these are true, I think it misses the key point. By making it easier for consumers to use their music wherever and however they want, you lower the barrier of entry to using digital music, and thus you've increased the size of your potential market. You make up for any loss due to illegal copies by the vastly larger number of customers to whom you can now sell. As a minor point, you've also become one of the "good guys" to consumers. That's always a good thing.

In essence, this is the same basis we have used for open sourcing Java, Solaris, and the Sparc architecture. By eliminating artificial barriers to their use, we increase the number of users of our technology, a percentage of whom will actually purchase something from us, i.e., hardware or services. I think the customer also feels better about this, since they are paying for products and services that have real value. Fundamentally, exorbitant technology licensing fees try to monetize a market position, without providing an real value for the license fees. (Is $200-400 for an OS exorbitant?) Both hardware and services are things that provide real value to the customer.

It's great that Sun has invested tens of thousands of hours great engineering into Java, Solaris and other technologies that we have now released into the open source community. What engineer wouldn't want to be able to share their masterpieces with the widest possible audience, and create a community around their work? At the same time, we understand Java, Solaris, multi-core and multi-threaded processors, etc. better than anyone else---we both invented them and have more experience using them. Use Sun's technologies to make your world better, and if you need assistance using those technologies advance your organization you know how to reach us.

It feels good to be part of a company that charges for things that deliver value to the customer and tries to eliminate barriers to the technology's use. Now where is that storm?

Posted at 11:45AM Feb 14, 2007 by rezippel in Sun  |  Comments[0]