Signal to noise

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A friend of mine forwarded me this FT article yesterday, as part of our discussion on the importance of Open Source. Not only is the logic flawed, but the FUD-based swipe at open source is especially cheap.

FT.com site : DROWNING IN NUMBERS: The rising cost of 'free'. 24 January 2007 The rising cost of 'free' The 21st Century appears increasingly benevolent, particularly regarding technology, products and services. Consumers and businesses are being offered an ever widening range of goods, for a ticket price of zero. Apparently.

Open Source has disrupted the software sector, to a large extent because of its perception as a free product. But once you factor in installation, maintenance and customisation, Open Source may no longer appear cheap. The impact of free services can, overall, be destructive. The minimal marginal cost of sending e-mails has enabled spam to flourish. Spam now represents more than 95 per cent of all e-mail sent, equivalent to more than 60bn messages each day. Free e-mail also allows viruses, worms, spyware and other malicious code to be carried gratis to millions of unwitting recipients. Free though the service may be, it is estimated to have cost consumers $7.8bn to repair or replace infected PCs during 2005 and 2006. By contrast, paid-for SMS services, on which consumers spent approaching $100bn in 2006 alone, were relatively spam-free; most likely because the economics of spam simply do not work within a commercial setting. Instant messaging (IM) has suffered a similar fate. The average IM user can expect to be interrupted with junk messages about five times a day, and those interruptions are forecast to rise to 27 times a day by 2008. The genuinely free lunch may still be some time away. *Statistics and opinion by Nick Pflaeger, technology partner, and Paul Lee, research director, at Deloitte.

Here's the argument in a nutshell:

1. Open Source is often regarded as zero-cost
2. Other zero-cost services exact an unwanted cost, which is often malicious
3. Paid-for SMS services have little of this malicious unwanted cost
4. Ergo, "The impact of free services can, overall, be destructive."

Analysis First, open source does not represent a zero-cost solution (and those who consult on the implementation of open source solutions are negligent if they imply that). The definition of open source is code that is open to everyone to view, amend and enhance. Not for everyone, to be sure, but it ensures that if the code is not fit for purpose, it is possible to modify it to do so. The 'free code' of open source that he refers to is confused with the zero acquisition cost. (The 'free' in 'free speech' is not the same as 'free' in 'free beer'). In industrialised countries labour costs are high. The investment of time in learning a new software package is significant (which is why well-designed human interfaces, can save time and by extension, money). The time it takes to adopt a new package is a very real cost, irrespective of whether that package is free. The free services he refers to provide a benefit to the users, for which they trade the currency of their attention (a subset of our available time). Second, the malware they refer to - which is egregiously ubiquitous on Windows machines, and completely absent on my Mac - has for example, nothing to do with the cost of that operating system, and everything to do with the size of the user base and the security weaknesses in the system. That contradicts his original premise: the impact of paid-for services can also be destructive. Third, paid-for SMS services are malware free, because they are such a simple technology (160 characters, piggybacking on a voice transmission infrastructure) and because they work within a walled garden of operator constraints, not "because the economics of spam simply do not work within a commercial setting". Finally, there is an egregious non-sequitur between second and third paragraphs. One moment, the authors are talking about Open Source, the next about spam, viruses, worms and spyware. And by implication, linking the two. Naughty. The point that the authors miss is that increased connectivity (or 'connexity', to use Geoff Mulgan's phrase) always means an increase in background noise. But where the noise level becomes too high, we change our behaviour to reduce it to a level which is comfortable (switch mail providers, use spam filters, pass laws to put a financial burden on spammers). We are accustomed to wall-to-wall advertising (something that would shock, nay offend, a person a hundred years ago) but we have adapted to filter it out. And now, we can do so using software (my NY Times and Economist.com sites are beautifully rendered sans ads). Still, we have always been willing to put up with noise in order to get want we want. 150 years ago, Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote: “We are too civil to books. For a few golden sentences we will turn over and actually read a volume of four or five hundred pages”. I wonder what he would have said about today's TV?