Category: Journal

I’m still thinking about starting a little shareware company some day. A [microISV](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micro_ISV), as it were. It’s pretty much a back-of-mind thing, but it’s there. The seed of an idea sittting around waiting for the right soil conditions or water or temperature or whatever else seeds in extended metaphors wait for.

Tangentially, we went to see Richard Stallman give a talk at the CSC a while ago. RMS is an interesting guy. He believes, of course, that no-one should be in the business of *selling* software. He goes as far as to consider it practically criminal.

The RMS talk I went to wasn’t a free software talk, incidentally. Maybe I’ll talk about what it was actually about at some point. He started off, though, with his four fundamental freedoms of [free software](http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html):

* The freedom to run the program, for any purpose (freedom 0).
* The freedom to study how the program works, and adapt it to your needs (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
* The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbour (freedom 2).
* The freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements to the public, so that the whole community benefits (freedom 3). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.

And, you know, on a fundamental level, I totally agree with him. On another level, I’d like to build a software product and be able to sell it. Hell, I work for a company that does exactly that.

I’m trying to figure out how I reconcile those levels.

Having followed the ideas of people like Cory Doctorow for a while, I’ll happily talk about how musicians and artists and other people really should start to let go of the idea that they can make a living selling bits. There’s no scarcity in bits. If it can be copied, it will be. I guess to some extent that’s because software “piracy”‘s been around so long that it’s just something I accept as given. I expect musicians and filmmakers and artists have to catch up.

The response to how a musician will make money if they give their music away for free (or it’s taken from them, either way, it’s inevitible) is they’ve got to change the model to making money off concerts and merchandise. From what I hear, that’s pretty much how any small to midsized artist with a label makes any money anyway. The music is marketing. It gets people in the bars or stadium seats.

RMS says something similar about programmers. 95% of programmers, he says, make their money from custom development. So it’s no great loss if no-one can make money selling software. Software developers still have jobs, because custom development will always need to be done somewhere.

But people *do* make money from selling software. Just like people will keep on making money from selling music even after record companies give up suing their fans. The question is, should they? Is it really in their best interest? Giving the content away for free might be, counter-intuitively, profit maximizing. There are lots of musicians out there. Your greatest challenge as a musician isn’t stopping kids from pirating; it’s actually getting an audience. People won’t pay any attention to you if they don’t know who you are.

Taking the music marketing analogy, the open source software you write and projects you contribute to becomes marketing for your skills as a developer. There are lots of shareware companies out there. People won’t use your software if they can’t see the value in it. I want to make software; I don’t want to be a salesman.

However, I also don’t particularly want to work commission for some bank writing crappy database entry forms all day (not that there’s anything wrong with that…).

I’m not a free software zealot by any stretch, but I do very much see the value of a rich ecosystem of free software out there. And personally, I’d rather use free software than stuff I’d have to pay for, even if I was able to get it for free (not that I would, of course).

I know there’s a way to make this it all work, just like I know the whole thing with music and movies will work itself out in the end. We’ll all be richer for it when it does.

***Warning***: There’s a spoiler in here for those who haven’t been downloading Doctor Who lately, or who haven’t been following third season casting announcements. I expect most of my readership either knows what’s going on or doesn’t care.

* * *

A couple times in the new series, the Doctor’s dropped hints about his family. No detail, just off-hand comments. Like in Smith and Jones, he mentioned something about having a brother.

Odd that the Master shows up at the end of this season then.

It’s always been a bit vague as to the Master’s precise relationship to the Doctor. Like most aspects of the Doctor’s past, it’s largely left undefined. That’s kinda what Doctor Who is about. Hence the title.

All we really from the original series is that the Doctor and the Master went to the Time Lord Academy together. It’s hinted that they have *some* amount of shared history, but it’s left intentionally vague. Mostly, though, the writers of the original series were content with leaving the Master as simply a really mean Time Lord bent on (a) survival at all costs and (b) universal domination. Oh, and vengeance against the Doctor, probably for his interference with (a) and (b). He was basically just a pulp-style arch-nemesis for the Doctor. Ming the Merciless to his Flash Gordon. Something like that.

I don’t get the impression that Russel T Davies will let it go at that, though. He’s all about character. He’s going to try to define the relationship between the two Time Lords, at least for himself, because he has to know what having the Master back means to the Doctor on an emotional level.

I have a theory about what he might define that relationship to be. I’m not sure he *will* do it, or even that he *should*, but I want to put it out there just so if it turns out to be right, I can gloat and say I called it.

It may very well turn out that the Doctor and the Master are brothers.

It’s not a particularly new idea. Back in the 90s, there was a series revival attempt that’s referred to as *Fathers and Brothers*. It was utterly apocryphal and talked about how the Doctor and the Master had to go out and find their lost dad Rassilon (otherwise known as the founder of the Time Lord race) or some nonsense and it sounded pretty horrible. (There’s [a book](http://www.amazon.com/Nth-Doctor-Jean-Marc-Lofficier/dp/0595276199/) about Doctor Who revival attempts that I should really get some time…).

What’s fueled most of the fan speculation, I think, is a hard-to-make-out line in the 5th Doctor episode [Planet of Fire](http://www.bbc.co.uk/doctorwho/classic/episodeguide/planetoffire/). The Master says to the Doctor, “Would you show no mercy to your own–? Argh!” and then dies in a fire. The Discontinuity Guide writes this off as referring to their shared heritage or biology as Time Lords. The novelization of the episode omits the line entirely. But the question was always out there: your own what?

So RTD has been easing us up to the idea of the Doctor having family and needs an emotional kick for the Doctor and a convincing reason for the Master’s crazy vendetta. Wouldn’t it make sense for him to reveal, at the climax of the season, that they’re more than just old school chums? Maybe even brothers? Hm…

It’s rare that I get home before sundown these days, and I decided to take up the opportunity to mow the front lawn while I had daylight and it wouldn’t piss off the neighbours.

When I was driving in, I narrowly avoided running down a neighbour kid who was tooling around the roads on his bike. This happens infrequently. There are a lot of kids in my neighbourhood and they spend a lot of time just hanging out in my cul de sac avoiding cars and being bored. It’s what kids do.

Having gotten in and changed out of work clothes, I got something quick to eat and went out to start mowing. I didn’t make it halfway down the lawn before I noticed the self-same neighbour kid tentatively pedalling up towards my house.

He parked his bike in the road, dropped his helmet down beside it and started trudging up the lawn towards me. I stopped the mower.

“Can I help?”

“Huh?” I replied. I’ve never really considered myself good with kids. I wouldn’t have expected that that would be the sort of question that they’d ask.

“Can I help? I can use the ‘lectric lawnmowers, but I’m not allowed to use the gas ones.” He paused. “I’m bored.”

“Ah,” I said. I thought about it. I figured at worst he was probably going to try to extort $10 out of me, which I could deal with. It wasn’t going to take me long, but occupying bored kids with productive if mundane tasks is practically a community service these days, and if I kept and eye on him and kept him in the front yard I doubted anyone would start accusing me of luring kids for unsavoury purposes, as seems to be so much the fashion.

So I let him go at it. He didn’t do a half-bad job, either. A bit slow, maybe, and didn’t seem to grasp the finer points of cord management, which is always the trick with electric mowers. But he got the job done. I took the opportunity to pull up some weeds I’d been neglecting.

The only trouble was getting him to stop. “I’ll do anything you need,” he would say, “I’m a good worker.”

Indeed.

I had to let him start into the back yard, because I couldn’t tell him to go away and I’d run out of front yard for him to do. Eventually he just got bored and decided to go home. Which I was fine with. He’d done far more than I’d wanted to do tonight.

I thanked him for his help and off he went. As inexplicably as he came.

He didn’t even ask for money.

There’s something deeply weird about Corel’s online store.

I’ve used Paint Shop Pro for ages. I’ve bought every version that comes out since version 7. Upgrades are usually pretty cheap, and the new versions have added useful stuff.

Corel bought Jasc, the company that makes PSP (they had the acronym first), a couple years ago. PSP 10 was the first version released from Corel. I dutifully bought the upgrade when it was announced.

For some reason I never did figure out, Corel sent me two copies. I’m not complaining or anything. I just gave one of the copies to a friend.

The new version, PSP Photo XI, came out recently. I’m not sure why they decided to add “Photo” to the name, except maybe to avoid confusion with Corel Painter. I was a bit undecided on whether I should upgrade. I haven’t been using it much lately, and I’d just switched to Linux. I use it at work, though, and the upgrade was only $40, so I decided to just go ahead and put in the order for the upgrade. I ordered the physical box because it was the same price and hey, they sent me two last time.

This time, however, they sent me a copy of Corel Painter X instead of Corel Paint Shop Pro Photo XI. I guess the “Photo” didn’t help them much after all.

I’m trying to decide how I feel about this. On the one hand, I didn’t get what I ordered. On the other, they sent me a $500 piece of software for $40.

Maybe I should put it on eBay…