Monday 18 September 2006

Pic of the day: Save the piggy bank!

Better for nothing

Still playing Master of Magic in the DosBox. Not all day, of course, but now and then. And it strikes me how amazing this really is, that I could just download DosBox for free. I mean, yes it has limited value; it is almost exclusively useful for running old games from before Windows 95. Then again, the program really has no competition. If they wanted to sell it, they would have a monopoly. But instead you can get it for free.

It is not the only one, either. Take OpenOffice.org, an alternative to Microsoft Office. While not identical, it has mostly the same functions and can import and export to pretty much any well-known format. You can download it for free, either directly from your browser or via (legal) file sharing. For instance with Azureus, a BitTorrent (filesharing) client running in Java. It has grown pretty awesome over time. Let us imagine I have a hundred files that I share separately. I can go to work leaving my computer running at home. It will then automatically check which files don't have any uploader, and share them, the ones with the most requests first. I only have to set a couple simple rules, and the program takes care of priority by itself.

For that matter, it was quite nice of Bram Cohen to make the BitTorrent protocol available for anyone to create their own BT client. It had great business potential, since it allows the customers to provide most of the bandwidth for downloading a product, whether it be a song, a movie or an operating system.

Speaking of which, there is Linux. (And there is Linux... there are a lot of competing variants.) While not all of them are free, nearly all are. I have used this operating system, and it still has a way to go before it is as userfriendly as Windows. But some, such as the steadily more popular Ubuntu, are quite good enough for everyday use for most people. You can browse the web, write letters or calculate using spreasheets, write a book and publish it on the Net, connect to chat rooms and message services, and of course send and receive e-mail. Supposedly you can also play music, not that it ever worked for me. It supports most PCs and equipment out there, and much of it is plug and play. Modern games won't run without a special (not free) program, though. But this could be a matter of time; the operating system improves fast.

I find it very encouraging to see all this. Not out of personal greed, although I don't say no thanks to free, legal, useful software. But the most important part is the realization that there are already people in the world who are willing to share for free what they could have sold. People working together for the common good, like an imperfect foretaste of Humankind version 3, where everyone will cooperate seamlessly instead of competing and trying to suck as much money as possible out of everyone else. Indeed, the very concept of money will one day be utterly alien to your descendants. But that won't happen for a while. Meanwhile, before you buy software, you would be well advised to check on the Net whether there is something just as good or better, for free.