Why We Shouldn't Begrudge Commercial Open Source Companies

Thinkcloud writes with a followup to recent news that Mozilla is once again looking into a do-not-track mechanism after having previously killed a similar tool, allegedly under pressure from advertisers. Canonical COO Matt Asay wrote in The Register that this is not necessarily the case, nor is Mozilla's decision necessarily the wrong one. "It's quite possible — indeed, probable — that the best way for Mozilla to fulfill its mission is precisely to limit the openness of the web. At least a bit. Why? Because end-users aren't the only ones with rights and needs online, a point Luis Villa elegantly made years ago. It's not a one-way, free-for-all for end-users. Advertisers, developers and enterprises who employ end-users among others all factor into Mozilla's freedom calculus. Or should." OStatic adds commentary that "Like it or not, commercial open source companies are still companies, and the economics of the online world have everything to do with their present and their future.

RMS got this in the 80s

[ciaran_o_riordan]

Richard Stallman was selling tapes of Emacs and GCC back in the 80s and made sure the GPL allowed selling.

Here's his essay about how to do it but at the same time ensure it doesn't end up funding proprietary software:

http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.html [gnu.org]

Freedom? Sure.

[taustin]

Companies have the right to offer their goods and services on the internet. They do not, however, have the right to force me to help them sell it to their customers (the customers here are the advertisers, not the users of Firefox or any other software). It is not my responsibility to help them prop up a broken, evil business model that can only succeed by taking away my choice to be tracked or not.

When advertisers pay me to watch their crap, I might consider it, if the pay is high enough. Until then, it is up to me what I watch and who tracks me watching it.

Re:Nothing Is Free

[Jimmy King]

There's always money to be had, but everything doesn't always have to be about money. As I say in my post just above to the GP here, I was around in those BBS days he remembers. You can actually do something that provides other people with a service and costs you time and money without trying to make money off of it and just do it because it's fun. Back in the day even actual businesses did that sometimes. There was a great BBS that was completely free run by the newspaper back in my home town. It had a bunch of registered doors, IRC style chat, etc. and no advertising at all, not even for themselves that I can remember. It wasn't about money, tracking users, spreading their name, etc. Just providing something cool and fun for the community.

Re:Tracking is evil

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

I'm not sure explicit consent is required as much as a singular, easy-to-find method of opting out.

A very important addendum to opting out is that it needs to actually be opting out from being tracked.
To the best of my knowledge, all of the various tracker-specific "opt out" methods do not stop them from tracking you.
All they do is stop them from showing you advertisements based on the tracking information that they still collect.
You aren't really opting out from being tracked, you are opting out from being reminded that you are being tracked.

That needs to change.

Re:Pretentious twat

[BZ]

> To be fair, you are not a statistician.

No, but I am a mathematician and physicist by training with some so-so knowledge of statistics (not enough to do original research, but enough to do error analysis on my experiments, say).

> All those buzzwords you used in your failed attempt to look smart refer to measurable
> numeric characteristics

Yes, and "computed experience" is not all that hard to define (in various ways, agreed) and then measure. And given pretty much any reasonable definition and measurement technique my statement would be true. Now you can accuse me of being insufficiently pedantic in that I didn't define such a measurement technique, but that's where the fact that in this case it really doesn't matter much comes in.

> But saying Mr X is the mode of Lalaland is just retarded.

When measuring somewhat imprecise quantities (like "computer experience"; this is less applicable to salaries) it's common to deal with the imprecision by binning (e.g. instead of asking people for the exact to-the-second amount of time they've programmed in C, whicih they couldn't tell you if they tried, you ask them for the number of years, possibly with some predefined non-single-year ranges). At which point it does in fact make sense to speak of the mode of the resulting distribution.

But as an aside, you could in fact talk about the modal salary. It's just not a very useful measure when binned at the 1 cent level, so no one does.

Again, I could have been more pedantic and said "The amount of computer experience you have is likely several standard deviations away from any of the mean, median, or mode amounts of computer experience in the population of grandmothers in the United States in the year 2010." But _that_ would have sounded pretentious. ;)