O'Reilly Voluntarily Limits its Copyrights

There's an announcement on the O'Reilly website that they will be releasing most of their books to the public domain after 14 years. O'Reilly is a book publisher that focuses on technical books, and they're widely recognized in the software industry for their concrete, exhaustive, and high-quality documentation. They make "the books with the animals on the covers".

I think this is great news. I despise what has happened to intellectual "property" over the last few decades, both in terms of copyright as well business method patents.

I expect that eventually economists will realize that the public domain is not just a nice thing to have, but is actually essential for a vibrant economy. Kind of like how marshes are essential for water purification, even though on first glance they look like a waste of prime waterfront real estate.

I could go on about this at length, but for now I'll limit myself to making this one point: Microsoft has over $40 billion in the bank, all of which came out of its customers' pockets. On the other hand, the free software movement has created operating systems and office productivity software that rivals Microsoft's, without charging anybody anything.

Consider how much farther along we would be if all the money that people paid for Windows and Office went directly to developers, who then released the code to the public. The world as a whole would have saved at least $40 billion. Actually they would have saved even more, since nobody would have paid billions of dollars in marketing for those products.

The most common objection to this idea is that if Microsoft didn't exist, none of the developers that wrote the software would have gotten paid, and so it wouldn't have gotten written. Well obviously nobody paid the Linux developers, but even putting that aside, the fact is that most programmers are paid for writing in-house software -- software that is used by the company they work for, and nobody else. If those developers could build on a shared code base, they would still get paid -- the features still need to get written, and so someone would pay for them.

The reason why this doesn't happen is because the companies that pay for in-house software view it as a competitive asset, so they hoard it. In the long run this ends up costing everybody a lot more money. It's like when a company refuses to pay its employees a decent salary, so that it can cut costs -- without realizing that now the employees can't afford to buy the product, and so the company (and all the other companies like it) have ended up killing their own market. It helps in the short-term, but in the long-term it is exceedingly stupid.

I could say a lot more, and raise and respond to a lot more objections, but I'll leave it at this for now.

Posted on May 2, 2003 01:08 PM
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