Good Engineers, Piracy, And Open Source Software

I don’t think any good software designer wants to charge money for their software. I bet that raises a bunch of questions, now doesn’t it?

What does it mean to be a good engineer?

The way I see it, good engineers are like children. They want to do what they want to do all day, and every day. The best engineers in the world are the ones who were creating stuff long before they got paid to do it — that is to say, their hobby is to create things. So they’re very productive children.

It’s very sad to realize that most people in the world aren’t like this — most adults have lost their child-like sense of wonder and fascination with what they do, and most don’t go to work excited, enthralled, and absolutely captivated by what they’re about to do.

When I met Steve Wozniak at Macworld, having read his books and talked with him in person, the association between “good engineer” and “child-like sense of wonder” really cemented in my mind. You’ve heard the phrase “like a kid in a candy store,” right? Hearing Woz talk about the iPhone was like watching a kid in a candy store.

So being a good engineer has nothing to do with money. At all. It’s about wanting to create things.

Software’s Value

Even if a good engineer doesn’t want to charge money for their work, it has value. It takes a distinct type of person¹ to steal a Porsche — why isn’t the characterization similar when referring to someone who steals software? Both products take considerable amounts of engineering and ingenuity, and I’m pretty sure that engineers at both Porsche and Apple want everyone who possibly can to use their products — not because they’d profit from it, but because they genuinely believe that the product is that awesome².

But Good Engineers Must Eat, Too

As unfair as it is, even good engineers must pay rent each month and eat on a (semi³) daily basis. That means that they’ve got to be paid, and it’s very hard to be paid without charging money for your work, as it’s asymptotically approaching impossible to be a great engineer on the side of working a day-job⁴.

Piracy

Some very intelligent people say that piracy is, for the most part, done by 15 year old boys with no money. I’m inclined to agree. I’m not writing this article because a few people are pirating Flow. I’m writing it because I’ve heard a ton of ill-formed opinions in the past few years “justifying” piracy by people who aren’t 15 year old boys without money, and I’d like to call bull on all of them.

I’ve never really understood the argument that “software shouldn’t cost money.” I totally agree that most good software is written by people who don’t want it to cost money, but I simply cannot fathom how software isn’t worth money. In the same fashion, I don’t understand people who argue that music and art should be free, either.

My natural assumption in cases where any of these notions has been asserted was simply that the person would rather make up some ridiculous ideology than admit that they are, morally speaking, an ethically deformed jackass.

I’m glad that’s out there.

Open Source Software

While I stand by the notion that good software designers would prefer their work to be free for all to use, even in a perfect world, I personally am diametrically opposed to open-sourcing any real products. Read that carefully before you pounce.

It’s not that I don’t like open source software. I do, and in fact, I’m an active contributor to a certain open source project, and even have open-sourced some of my work, too.

Open-sourcing a framework is not the same as open-sourcing a product. My issue with open-source products is that it has the capacity to allow even the leanest of software companies to produce bloated software. Open source means that anyone can work on it, and not to be arrogant⁵, but I don’t want just anyone touching the internals of the fruit of my labor.

There are most certainly counter-examples to this (Transmission, for example, which is a stunningly great piece of software on OS X), but in general if you look at the quality of closed-source products, and the quality of open-source products, you’ll see the trend is immensely obvious.

Conclusions

• In a world without living expenses, good engineers would work for free.
• It’s incredibly difficult to be a great engineer “on the side,” so good engineers need to charge money for their work.
  • Thus, piracy hurts the ability of good engineers to continue being good engineers.
• There is no argument for software, music, art, etc., “rightfully” being free. People who assert such things are ethically deformed.
• Open Source has its place in things like frameworks, which help people build cool ideas, but aren’t ideas on their own.
• Open sourcing a product is like hiring several thousand uncertified “volunteer surgeons” to perform a heart-transplant on your daughter.