The year is 1981. IBM has just released the Personal Computer; a brand to reassure amid the abundant microcomputer’ offerings. Several models are produced in quick succession accompanied by an ad campaign featuring a Charlie Chaplin figure. The message is clear: It’s cheap and it’s cheerful.
The growth vector for the machine turns out to be a software application called a spreadsheet. In its many early forms – VisiCalc, Lotus 1-2-3, Multiplan – it vies with Word Star word-processing and Space-Invaders as the most popular software. Hardware sales skyrocket. Nobody questions the rapid and promiscuous spread of these software programs. Everyone has 5.25″ floppy disks packed with applications which are passed around with careless abandon. That was then. This is now. Harsh fines and jail sentences are threatened to anyone involved in doing what came naturally back in the early 80s. It’s a Very Bad Thing to copy software without having a license to do so. Software manufacturers have suddenly wrong-footed PC owners. They say this stuff is ours, we want to be paid for it’, and of course they’re right. But here is a problem. Software’s binary information is a kind of digital DNA, always wanting to replicate. It’s what has made and sustained the digital revolution. When transmitting information, whether from one disk to another or over the Internet, errors can be corrected, weak signals regenerated as new, even lost portions of messages recreated, instantly. This is the essence of the digital world, and replication is its big trick. One of the things most of us did with our first computer was to copy something. In our early PC vocabulary COPY was the most popular word. Doing it was easy and gave instant satisfaction. It did nobody any harm – right? The user got the software and the manufacturer got their product spread far and wide. But a company has to make money, not just gain market share, and at some point in time a shift occurred. It’s as if the manufacturers decided to play the soccer off-side rule and leave pc owners stuck way out of line. The largest ever amount of people all committing the same crime at the same time happened. How do they (we!) get back in line? How can software manufacturers get 100% license compliance in their customer base? A London analyst who specializes in intellectual rights issues says “the paradigm we have at present where the license chases, as it were, the product is certainly not an effective mechanism for compliance.” In other words trying to push licenses into places the software has gone without the slippery ease with which it got there in the first place is difficult. But that’s not all. An account manager for a hardware firm in the US says “It can be impossible to keep the licensing nailed down. The hardware changes, the software moves on, departments, even companies, merge. The picture is always changing. Everyone knows that – it’s a kind of game”. Demand has always fuelled innovation in Information Technology. Fluid, dynamic, competitive, the elements of IT constantly move. Suppliers can apply different strategies at different times for different reasons; market share, volume shipments, and of course profit. Licensing is a big weapon in their armoury. New technologies then emerge, legislation changes, big players go bust and others are created. How can a static and legalistic document like a software license stay perfectly matched to a company’s IT assets – all the time? There are also the different licensing arrangements that software manufacturers employ. Licenses may be priced according to whether they are academic, charity, large volume, product upgrade, competitive upgrade, client server, thin-client, or one of several other types. Complimenting these are the high-value service add-ons like maintenance and technical support. Why did it have to get so complicated? And if this is the way it has to be then can’t the power of IT itself resolve the complexity? Or will the fact that software and hardware come from different, often competing, sources fan the fires of confusion for many years to come? Finally what if The largest criminal gang ever’ decides to behave in the way it has been painted and with one voice says No – we’ve had enough!’ Now wouldn’t that be interesting?
Jamie Plenderleith – sales@counter-intelligence.ie
