All posts by shannah

Steve Hannah is a 28-year-old software developer currently studying and working at Simon Fraser University in beautiful Vancouver British Columbia. He specializes in web information systems and prefers Java, PHP, and Python as programming languages. He is a Christian and worships at Christ Church of China in Vancouver.
Software Development

Open Source Business Models

Looking at open source business models, it can be difficult to find something that looks viable. Here are a few models along with my assessment of their pros and cons.

1. Pay for support and Consulting

In this model you provide the software for free and open source, but charge for consulting and support.

Pros:

  • Easy model to understand – you just charge an hourly rate for consulting and support.

Cons:

  • Since you don’t get paid for the 90% of your time that you spend developing the software itself, you are forced to charge 1000% of your required hourly rate just to make ends meet.
  • You would be better off finding another open source project that someone else is sweating over and just charge for support on that one. Don’t waste your time developing anything new.
  • If you insist on this business model, you’ll be in direct competition with anyone else that wants to set up shop to do consulting on your software – and they can charge 10% of your price since they don’t have to spend time developing the software.
  • This only works when your software is something that people generally require support for. If your software is too well made, then people won’t need support or consulting.
  • Gives incentive to make software that is complicated and hard to work with .

Conclusion: This one’s a big loser.

2. Charge for add-ons

With this model your primary product is free and open source, but you charge for add-on modules.

Pros:

  • If you have a large user base this is a good way to give you a relative monopoly on the market for your add-on.

Cons:

  • The open source culture may resist attempts at monetization of this sort. Users of free software often resist or resent attempts to add pay software into the mix.
  • You must have a very large user base for the market to be big enough to support add-ons.

Conclusion:
This model has potential if done the right way.

3. Charge for Documentation/User Manuals

With this model you provide the software free and open source but you charge for access to the documentation. This model could work well for software that requires documentation to take advantage of (e.g. software frameworks, libraries, or complex systems that are managed by an administrator). In fact, in certain cases this has the same effect as charging for the software while keeping the software itself open and freely distributable per the spirit of FOSS.

This is because those people who are explicitly using your software and its features will need to purchase the documentation (so it’s kind of like purchasing a license for the software itself), but they can still freely distribute the software itself as part of their own projects (so it retains the basic freedoms that sit at the core of the FOSS movement).

Pros:

  • Could work well for technical projects or software components that rely heavily on documentation.
  • Acts like commercial software for revenue (1 documentation license per user).
  • Software remains freely distributable.

Cons:

  • Only works if the software is heavily dependent on documentation to use.
  • Gives incentive to create software that is difficult to figure out (non-intuitive).

Conclusion:
This is a good model for technical software.

4. Donation-ware

This is the model where you offer your software up for free and ask (beg) for donations. This is a ridiculous model. It is not even a model so it isn’t worth a pro-con matrix. There are no Pro’s. I am philosophically opposed to the concept of donation-ware. I am a software developer, not a charity. If someone feels compelled to donate money to a cause, there are thousands of good causes: Cancer, Haiti, etc.. But don’t donate it to a software developer (unless he’s creating software to cure cancer).

You will NOT make any money by asking for donations. At most you will make a few people feel good about themselves for donating a dollar or two.

5. Advertising

With this model you treat your software as a means to generate traffic to your website and you try to turn that traffic into money either through selling another product, or through sponsorships.

Unless you get a ton of traffic, this model likely won’t make you enough money to pay for your webhosting plan.

News, Software Development

Why the iPad will succeed / Why I’m excited about it as a Software Developer

To me (as a software developer), the most exciting thing about the iPad is the fact that it is integrated with the App Store. On the iPod and iPhone, the App store has proven to be a fantastic commercial success, opening a new distribution channel for software developers. There have been a few attempts to create similar type app stores for the desktop (or laptop), but none have been wildly successful. I think this is due to the culture. We are too used to downloading our software through the web browser – we don’t really see the need for an app store. If there was single app store for the desktop that allowed users to purchase /install software as easily as the iPhone app store does, I’m sure that the software industry would double or even triple in revenue in a short amount of time.

The iPad, being closely related to the iPod/iPhone in user interface makes it far more likely the at users will embrace its apps in the App store. This means that software developers who develop for the iPad will have an easy and automatic distribution channel for all of their works, where they can get paid in a simple and secure fashion. And the possibilities for application development on the iPad would appear to far exceed the possibilities of iPhone apps – nearing the level of desktop applications (or even beyond).

This simple fact is why developers will embrace the iPad. And when developers embrace a platform, historically, so too do users.

Uncategorized

BC Election – my local candidates

I decided to take a look at the local candidates for my riding in the provincial election. Their websites are:
(Harry Bloy – Liberal)
(Jaynie Clark – NDP)
(Helen Chang – Green)

First impressions:
Harry Bloy needs a better website (notice that I pasted his webpage from the BC legislature site – because HarryBloy.com has no information about who Harry Bloy is). Jaynie Clark looks pretty qualified with her committee and legal experience. Helen Chang apparently only stands for one issue: ESL/immigration.

Right off the bat I won’t be voting for Ms. Chang as it doesn’t look like she would be interested in representing me. She appears to only want to represent ESL people. I think ESL is important, but it is not in my top 3 issues, so it wouldn’t make too much sense to vote for someone where ESL is their one and only issue.

Between Harry Bloy and Jaynie Clark, it really comes down to whether I want the government run like a business or a bureaucracy. These two candidates seem to be quite accurate personifications of the parties that they represent. Bloy has lots of business experience (and 2 terms MLA experience); Clark has experience with the labour movement (BCGEU, Labour Relationships Board, Industrial Relations Association).

So really it comes down to the party. Liberal or NDP. Numbers get thrown around everywhere arguing under which government we had a stronger economy. I’m not sure even if the provincial government can have that much effect over an economy that is so dependent upon the ups and downs of the world’s economy. I will say that under the liberals there have been lots of visible signs of positive progress (Canada Line, Golden Ears Bridge, Port Mann Bridge, the Olympics), and it seems like the NDP has been opposing this progress at every turn. The NDP portrays the attitude that we shouldn’t be embarking on any major projects while there are still homeless people in the down-town east side. They have been critical of nearly every major project, with part of the reason being that “we shouldn’t be spending XXX dollars on YYY when we should be spending that money on the homeless”.

I am personally of the mind that we should treat homelessness seriously, however, the simplistic solutions offered by advocates of the homeless (throw money at the homeless) is naive and would likely result in more homelessness. I don’t want to get the homelessness issue here because it is too complex say anything meaningful in this short space. I just have the feeling that had the NDP been in power for the past eight years we wouldn’t have the olympics, or the port mann, or the canada line – and we would still have homeless littering the streets, but the NDP would be boasting about the amount of money they have added to fight homelessness and would be happy that despite a dramatic increase in the number of homeless, there are two or three times as many homeless now housed and off the streets on the government’s dime.

I watched the news reports yesterday covering Carole James’ visit to some of the struggling logging towns in the interior. She was ranting and raving about how the logging industry has been ravaged while Gordon Campbell has been in power. She grand-stands there to draw attention to the grief that “Gordon Campbell’s arrogance” has caused.

… BUT I didn’t see her offer any solutions to the problem. She pretends like there is something that the provincial government could magically do to increase global demand for wood. I think that the Green party leader Jane Sturk had it right when, in the leaders’ radio debate, she dismissed James’ use of the lumber woes as disingenuous as it’s unrealistic to think that Gordon Campbell (or any provincial government) could have any control over the soft-wood industry because it is subject to global market forces that are beyond the control of our tiny province.

Since James has not proposed any solutions to the Lumber industry, I assume she is promising these communities moral support. Either that or she will be surprising the rest of us by putting up big money to subsidize these industries.

All that said, I think that Gordon Campbell should join toastmasters to help him overcome is anxiety about public speaking. He looked terribly nervous during the TV debate and I would wager that George W. Bush would have bested him on that night. At least W has a little swagger and charisma to help connect to the audience. Campbell just looked nervous and dim-witted.

So I guess I’ll vote liberal because I’d rather have the olympics and the port mann than not. If I believed that NOT spending money on those projects could solve homelessness and help us socially, I would obviously prefer to spend money on those social goods, but I just have little faith in the well-intentioned left’s ability to convert money into results. No, if we DIDN’t spend the money on these infrastructure projects (and the olympics) I’m sure that it would have just been poured into the black hole of good intentions and dubious results.

Hopefully at the end of the next term, there will be a bonified scandal with the liberal’s finger prints on it that will leave us no choice but to change. Hopefully during the next term, the NDP will provide a more constructive opposition voice – one that doesn’t take their position as the “opposition” to mean that they should oppose every idea and every project to get the province moving. Hopefully next time we will be using the proposed Single Transferable Vote and we have a few more good options to vote for on the ballot.

Until then….

Software Development

@fido.ca vs @pcs.rogers.com

I was trying to set up server monitoring to send a text message to my cell phone when my server goes down. Since I’m on fido I first tried 0123456789@fido.ca (replace 0123456789 with my phone number), but found this to be terribly inconsistent. Sometimes I received the messages, but usually I didn’t. It didn’t seem to matter how long the messages were. This would not work.

So, since Fido is actually rogers now, I tried 0123456789@pcs.rogers.com, and found that this is very consistent. At first it prompted me to subscribe to the rogers email to sms service. Once I did that I was able to receive email. When an email comes in it tells me who it’s from. If I want to read it I reply back with the text “read”. Then it sends me the message.

This will work fine for now.

(Update an hour later some of the messages I sent to …@fido.ca are starting to trickle into my phone in no particular order….. obviously xxx@fido.ca is not a reliable way to send text messages to fido phones).

News, Software Development

Why piracy must be stopped

I wrote this in response to a number of “pro piracy” or “piracy rationalization” comments to a CNN article:
http://scitech.blogs.cnn.com/2009/04/20/a-turning-point-for-online-piracy

This appears to be a culture war, and one that is being lost – and will eventually cost us dearly. Many of these comments are consistent with my anecdotal experience with friends and acquaintances. People who are involved in theft, be it digital or material, always try to rationalize their behavior. Nobody actually believes that they are a bad person. I have known people who earn a living by stealing car stereos. Their justification will generally include such points as “insurance will pay for it – and big insurance companies deserve to be robbed..”, or “the guy who owns the car is obviously rich and can afford to get a new stereo”. Either way there is some justification or rationalization that allows the thief to sleep at night.

Digital piracy is no different. There seem to be many well-articulated arguments to justify digital piracy, but all seem to predicated on the assumption that since “stealing” digital content does not deprive the original owner the content, it isn’t really like stealing at all. You wouldn’t steal your friend’s car because then your friend would be without a car (and you would be without a friend). However if such a thing as a car replicator existed that allowed you to duplicate your friend’s car for free, then you probably wouldn’t think twice about “replicating” your friend’s car.

So for pirates who otherwise are not thieves, it seems to boil down to an internal rejection of the notion that digital piracy is, in fact, theft. Fair enough. It is different enough from material theft that we might as well distinguish it from material theft and give it a different name. So piracy is not “stealing” it is simply “piracy”.

Now that we have distinguished it, let’s look at some of the implications of piracy.

1. If a product is freely available via piracy, and in our culture, piracy is considered OK, then anyone who decides to “purchase” that product is really engaging in a form of charity because they believe in the cause of the product or the person who created it. This is why 10 years ago you thought it was OK to pay $20 for a DVD movie (because you were purchasing a product), but now you think that $20 is a rip-off, because you are now engaging in $20 or charity – more difficult to justify (people spend up to 10% of their income on charitable donations, and the other 90% on themselves – by the same formula you’d think that a pirate who likes a movie would be willing to donate $2 to the movie-maker, even though he would have been willing to purchase it from the movie maker for 10 times that).

2. Based on the economic assumption that people are inherently greedy, most people won’t choose to “purchase” a product when they can get it for free.

3. The marginal value of any product that can readily be pirated will approach zero.

4. At a value of zero the product is not worth making, so the supply of good digital products (e.g. music, movies, software, e-books) will also approach zero – you won’t be able to get them anymore.

If, as a culture, we want to preserve our rich climate of art and ideas, it is imperative that we address this issue. Simply lowering prices to reflect what “pirates” perceive as reasonable prices would result in artificially low prices (because a pirate’s perceived value of content is based on how much he would donate out of altruism, not how much the product should actually be worth to him). If we completely eliminated piracy, only then could we find out what a digital product is really worth. If prices are too high, people won’t pay them, and they will come down. If prices are too low so as to deter artists from producing product, then prices will go up until they reach equilibrium.

They cannot reach equilibrium as long as there is a free alternative to every digital product.

Attempts such as Apple’s DRM are certainly a step in the right direction, but have been met with much resistance from the “pirate” community, as they want the ability to copy anything that they buy freely. Unfortunately we’ve seen that people are not responsible enough to handle this privilege, so it is unrealistic to think that any solution without some form of DRM will solve our problem and produce a proper equilibrium.

Given the facts and the implications of those facts, it is imperative that we proceed with whatever reasonable acts are necessary to curtail piracy. It may not be stealing, but it is still bad for society.

Uncategorized

New Video for Web Lite Translation Service

We just had a video created for Web Lite Translation service and the results are stunning. The video was produced by Go2Video Productions. I was absolutely amazed at both the speed and quality of their work. We gave them a whole slough of information about our service and in only a couple of days they came up with a nice, succinct message that was appropriate for a one minute video. If I ever need a video created again I won’t hesitate to call Go2Video Productions.

You can see the video on the Web Lite Translation Corp. website.