One's Born Every Minute: When Freeware Isn't Free

CyberCynic Corner

One's Born Every Minute: When Freeware Isn't Free

By Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols
Sm@rt Reseller

April 30, 1998

Freedom's just another word for Netscape's last stand.

The best things in life are free. What an absolute crock! Even your first breath was purchased with blood, sweat and tears. But don't take my word for it. Ask your mother, she'll tell you.

Some software, however, really is free and good. If you are really a smart reseller, you already know the names. Larry Wall's Perl is the best damn scripting language ever, bar none. And then there's Apache, still the most popular Web server by a ratio of two to one over the nearest competitor, according to NetCraft. Of course, let's not forget the venerable Linux, increasingly an operating system of choice for businesses as well as power-users.

Now, Netscape, by way of its Mozilla group, has tossed its hat into the ring with the release of free source code for a pre-alpha version of Netscape Communicator 5.0. That's right, it's free. But guess what? It's not worth the price.

Wait! Put down the tar and feathers and don't flame me yet. Have you ever really looked at Mozilla? The code is grossly obese. Even though Communicator 5.0 hasn't even made it out of diapers, the portly product consumes hundreds of megabytes of hard disk space when unzipped.

Now, I know C++ well enough to not make a fool of myself, and I've programmed my way out of trouble with C many a time, but Netscape 5.0 is well beyond my scope. Unless you have already worked with large C++ projects, don't waste your disk space on it.

Even when you do know what you're doing, which some of my buddies do, getting the thing to compile properly on either Windows NT or Unix—don't even think about trying this under the less reliable Windows 95—has proven impossible to date. Even when they do get it into an executable, my programming pals already know that it will be as functional as the Titanic an hour after the iceberg.

Say, though, that you are a reseller or an ISP with the experience and the equipment. Should you bother? Absolutely not. The code is too rough to do anything with. You could sink hundreds of your best and brightest programmers' hours into this code and never see dollar one of profit.

I know, I know, those of you who believe in freeware also believe that doing work for the common good of all programmers and users is worthwhile in its own right. And you're right. We wouldn't have Linux today without your efforts, which I genuinely applaud.

The Mozilla project, while it may drape itself in the flag of freeware, just isn't the same. I may have been born at night, but I wasn't born last night. The real beneficiary of your efforts will be Netscape. After all, why pay costly programmers when you can have legions of good-hearted developers do your coding and testing for you?

Now I'm not saying that the people at Mozilla have such a cynical attitude. They probably believe that what they're doing is really the same as creating a Linux or other freeware favorites like sendmail and bind. But the company that will get the lion's share of the intellectual capital from the Mozilla's free labor won't be yours.