Hot Off the Press

Monday, 26 June 2006

Just arrived from the print shop:

Not pictured: the new batches of “I✪DF” and “Your PC Is a POS” shirts which came in at the same time.

Interoperability and DRM Are Mutually Exclusive

Tuesday, 20 June 2006

Earlier this month, the British Phonographic Industry — the organization that collectively represents record labels in the United Kingdom (i.e. the British equivalent of the RIAA) — granted explicit permission to Britons to rip music from CDs to digital formats suitable for use on portable music players.

Yes, that’s right: until earlier this month, anyone in Britain who copied music from their own CDs to an iPod (or any other digital player) did so under the threat of prosecution. British copyright laws do not contain the same fair use provisions that we enjoy here in the United States. In a statement issued before the House of Commons Select Committee for Culture, Media, and Sport, BPI Chairman Peter Jamieson said:

“Traditionally the recording industry has turned a blind eye to private copying and has used the strength of the law to pursue commercial pirates.

“We believe that we now need to make a clear and public distinction between copying for your own use and copying for dissemination to third parties and make it unequivocally clear to the consumer that if they copy their CDs for their own private use in order to move the music from format to format we will not pursue them.”  

That’s good news. Common sense has not fared well in our current copyright wars.

Common sense evaporates, however, with Jamieson’s statements regarding Apple and the iTunes Music Store.

Jamieson acknowledges the huge contribution Apple has made to the development of the download business and the enormous appeal of its integrated hardware and software. However, when asked about iTunes dominant market share in downloads, Jamieson said, “It’s not particularly healthy for any one company to have such a dominant share.”

iPods currently only play unprotected MP3 files, such as those ripped from CDs, or songs downloaded from the iTunes Music Store. It applies its own Digital Rights Management (DRM) to the downloads it sells, that prevents them from being compatible with non-iPod music players. The DRM also prevents downloads purchased from most other legal download services, such as Napster and HMV Digital, from playing on iPods.

Jamieson called on Apple to open up its software in order that it is compatible with other players. “We would advocate that Apple opts for interoperability,” he said.

What they’re advocating makes no sense. What, exactly, would “interoperability” entail?

Apple could license FairPlay to other device manufacturers. This is certainly possible, but one would presume, however, that Apple would only provide such licenses for a fee. And thus this would not effectively reduce the dominant position Apple currently holds in the legal download market. They’d just be in a position similar to Microsoft’s in the PC operating system market.

Or, Apple could modify iTunes and iPods to play DRM-protected Windows Media files, like the ones from Napster and HMV Digital and dozens of other also-ran legal download sites. Maybe even to reduce confusion, they could just shutter the ITMS and abandon FairPlay. Then instead of Apple’s technology dominating the legal download market, it’d be Microsoft’s, and I’m sure that’d be great for everyone.

Apple can’t “just play music from other stores”; the whole point of DRM is that there’s secret juju encrypting the data in the files. To play them, Apple would have to obtain a license from Microsoft, and you’re just fucking nuts if you think Apple is going to do that. Microsoft charges money for these licenses, and Apple would be forever after beholden to Microsoft for continuing DRM licensing.

I’m not disagreeing that Apple’s dominance is unhealthy for the industry. But the executives in the record industry — on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean, apparently — are too ignorant to realize that what they want is technically impossible. The industry’s idea of a “perfect” DRM scheme is one that is not controlled by either Apple or Microsoft, and which gives only them (the record industry) complete control over what users can do with their downloads. Such a scheme does not exist, and it does not exist because it isn’t possible.

But interoperability already exists: you get it with MP3 files, and any other non-DRM-laden file formats.

So what Apple could do to achieve ITMS interoperability is simply remove the DRM from the music it sells via ITMS and deliver the files in non-encrypted AAC format. Users would be happy, as they’d get files unencumbered by FairPlay restrictions. The manufacturers of other digital music players would be happy, because AAC is an ISO standard.

[Update: I made a significant mistake in the above paragraph, having originally described AAC as an “open format” which doesn’t require licensing fees. It is not. It is an ISO standard, but it’s encumbered by patents and anyone who writes encoding or decoding software is required to pay licensing fees. The error is doubly embarrassing considering all the recent attention on issues relating to openness. My apologies.]

But that’s not what the music industry wants. Yes, there exist legal download stores that sell music in MP3 format (e.g. eMusic.com) — but they don’t have content from the major record labels, because the major record labels refuse to allow their music to be sold for download without DRM. The music industry’s insistence upon DRM is what put the ITMS in the position that Apple now enjoys; the record industry is decrying a lock-in advantage that they themselves handed to Apple so they could deny their customers (i.e. us, the people who listen to music) the interoperability they now say they want.

It is possible that even if the major record labels were to allow legal downloads of non-DRM-laden music that Apple would resist, out of the selfish desire to maintain the lock-in advantage that FairPlay’s DRM provides. But at least it would give the record industry a principle to stand upon: We call upon Apple to open the iTunes Music Store by removing the DRM, and Apple is refusing. And they could more or less force Apple’s hand by permitting other download stores to distribute music in iPod-compatible non-DRM formats.

Record industry executives refuse to believe what is patently obvious to anyone with a clue — they are never ever going to regain complete control over the distribution of recorded music. They so desperately want this that they believe it must be possible, but the very nature of DRM is that it is diametrically opposed to interoperability.

What’s most infuriating is how the mainstream media plays along with the entertainment industry, parroting their calls for nonsensical “DRM interoperability” as though it’s all perfectly reasonable.

Calling for “interoperability” without any practical suggestion as to how it could be achieved is just an empty platitude. It’s like demanding “a cheap source of energy” or “a cure for cancer”. But unlike the energy problem or cancer, digital media interoperability is not an intractable problem. There’s an obvious solution staring everyone in the face.

Why Apple Won’t Open Source Its Apps

Monday, 19 June 2006

Tim Bray’s “Time to Switch?” is a nice tangent to my “And Oranges” piece from Thursday; he’s considering the same Mac OS X-to-Ubuntu route as Mark Pilgrim, and he lists both reasons why he wants to switch, as well as some of the issues that would make it unpleasant.

(His three cited “hard issues” that’d make it difficult to switch more or less boil down to seamless hardware-OS integration; the “it just works” factor that has always been one of the biggest differentiating factors of the Mac: sleep/wake-up for laptops that just works; WiFi that just works; and external display and video projector support that just works.)

Bray also suggests — and this is something he’s pitched a few times before — that Apple ought to release the source code to several of the applications that come bundled with the OS:

In particular, it’s bothered me for years that the Apple apps aren’t Open Source; there are all these irritating little misfeatures and shortcomings that I’d be willing and maybe able to fix, and there are lots more like me. Since the apps are joined at the hip to OS X, there’d be no real downside to Apple.

The real problem, it seems to me (and I think this bothers Mark more than he says), is Apple’s paranoid communication culture: it is forbidden to say anything except what it’s compulsory to say. Apple’s exterior is polished, shiny; and entirely opaque. Personally, I think their success has been about shipping good products, but I think they believe it’s a consequence of the tightness of the lip. I’d rather do business with a company I can talk to.

He does have a good technical case for why Apple might want to do this. His argument, more or less, is that Apple doesn’t need to be protective of the source to these apps (e.g. Mail, Safari, iCal, iChat) for competitive reasons, because they’re inextricably tied to Mac OS X technologies like Cocoa. If they released the source to iCal, it’s not like it would be that much of a help in allowing someone to port it or knock it off on Windows or Linux. It’d probably be easier to do a rip-off of these apps on another platform by completely re-implementing them rather than using their actual Cocoa source code.

I.e. Bray is addressing the very common managerial reaction to the idea of open sourcing proprietary software — that you can’t do it because your software is a competitive advantage, and that giving your competitors the source code to your apps would give away your advantage. I think Bray is right that this doesn’t really apply to the apps Apple bundles with the system — these apps are a valuable asset and a major component of the appeal of Mac OS X, but their strength is in their UI design, not in the code that implements the designs. Anyone can rip off the best aspects of iCal or Mail just by looking at them.

Bray further argues, correctly, that the source code to these apps would be tremendously valuable as a learning tool for Mac developers. Many good programmers, if not most, prefer to learn by examining working example code.

Bray even makes it clear that he’d be happy with lowercase open source, meaning that Apple could release the source code under a somewhat restrictive license (i.e. not an Open Source license) that would forbid using the source code for software on platforms other than Mac OS X.

These are all good points. But, unfortunately, Apple still can’t do this. Well, technically, won’t do this, but the reasons why they won’t are so strong that it might as well be can’t. (Or, rather, the reasons are so strong from the perspective of Apple’s executive management, which is really all that matters since that’s who would need to make the decision.)

Bray is right that releasing the source code to these apps would be unlikely to hurt Apple competitively against Windows or Linux, but he overlooks another form of competition: existing versions of Mac OS X. The role these apps play isn’t just to make Mac OS X look good compared to Windows or Linux, but also to help make each new version of Mac OS X look better than the previous one; i.e. to convince Mac users that it’s worth paying for the latest upgrade.

If the source code to these apps were made available, the best features from new versions of these apps could be ported back to previous versions, lessening the incentive for users to upgrade.

Consider iChat. It seems quite possible that one of the features planned for the 10.5 version of iChat might be tabbed chat windows,¹ and that this feature would be considered a selling point for the OS. But if iChat were already open sourced today, it’s almost a certainty that someone would have already added tabbed windows to it. Kent Sutherland’s Chax is an input manager hack that adds tabs (and a slew of other features) to iChat. It’s a clever hack, and works as advertised, but to me, it very much feels like a hack. I.e. it doesn’t come close to looking or working the way “tabbed iChat” would look/work if tabbed chat windows were added to iChat by Apple. If Sutherland had access to iChat’s source code, he probably could have added tabs to iChat in a vastly less hacky (if not altogether unhacky) way.

That might be great for iChat users, but it wouldn’t be great for Apple if they were hoping to use tabbed chat windows as a selling point for Mac OS X 10.5. Just take a look at the “new features” marketing for Tiger; about half of it revolves around new features in the apps Bray wants to see open sourced.

The problem is that even though Apple doesn’t charge for these apps separately (like they do with the iLife and iWork suites), these apps aren’t really gratis. They’re parts of the OS — not in the technical sense, but in the product packaging sense. When you buy a new version of Mac OS X, you don’t just get the operating system, you get the OS plus a bunch of apps.

It’s not in Apple’s interests to add high-profile cool new features to its applications in between major OS releases, and it wouldn’t be in Apple’s interests to allow enterprising outside developers to do so, either. This is one reason why Web Kit, the rendering framework, is open source, but Safari, the application, is not.

The development strategy of unveiling all these new features at once — in both the OS itself and in the bundled apps — has been extraordinarily successful for Apple. How many software products can you think of that have users lining up around the block for a midnight release party?

It’s reasonable to assume that major new releases of Mac OS X would still be successful even if Apple released several of its bundled apps as open source, but would they be as successful? Even if you think they would be — that not one sale’s worth of enthusiasm would be spoiled — you certainly can’t prove it. And it seems to me extremely hard to make the case that such a strategy would result in a net increase of sales of new versions of Mac OS X.

Worse, I think it’s easy to make the argument that it would hurt sales. These bundled apps like Safari, iChat, and iCal are one of the biggest differences between Mac OS X and the classic Mac OS; back then there was never as much application software that shipped “for free” with the OS. And even the “free” browser and email client came from Microsoft, not Apple. I think these apps are a big reason why new releases of Mac OS X are a much bigger deal, publicity- and enthusiasm-wise, than new releases of the classic Mac OS were. (There were no midnight release parties for Mac OS 8.6.)

In short, releasing the source to these apps would be a risk. Not a risk with a catastrophic downside, but a risk nonetheless. And the potential upside — the best case scenario from Apple’s perspective — wouldn’t result in any additional sales. So why take a chance? Why mess with a strategy that has proven to be lucrative?

You can argue that this sucks, that it ought to be us, the users, whose interests matter most. And that you shouldn’t have to pay $130 to upgrade your entire OS if the only new features you’re interested in are in just one of the bundled applications. But that’s not how it works. Apple is a for-profit corporation, and Mac OS X is one of their most profitable and most successful products.

Perhaps you find it particularly galling that I’m more or less saying that the reason they’re not going to do what Bray suggests — despite the fact that following Bray’s suggestion really would be cool for users and developers in all sorts of ways — is that it might cost them upgrade sales from users who have already paid for previous versions of Mac OS X. Such gall is one factor that drives people to open source platforms.

But there’s a flip side to this equation, which is that developing good software takes time and talent, and time and talent cost money. Some portion of the revenue from sales of Mac OS X goes back into funding development of future versions of Mac OS X.

This is the dichotomy between closed and open source software development. I’m right there with Bray regarding the frustration of using an app that’s very cool and really good but that there’s just a couple of small things that I’d rather see done differently or better, but which I can’t fix or change other than by petitioning the developer to implement my suggestions. (Good luck writing “Dear Apple” letters asking for tweaks to their software.) But while open source software is, by definition, eminently tweakable, it also, in general, is less likely to get to the point of being very cool and really good in the first place. (E.g. where’s the open source calendar app that’s as simple and uncluttered as iCal?)

Of course there are exceptions, like, say, Adium, the open source Mac OS X chat client that a lot of people flat-out prefer to iChat. It has a most excellent tab implementation and supports a bunch of IM platforms that iChat doesn’t, like Yahoo and MSN. Or Camino, the excellent Mac-native offshoot of the Mozilla project, and which compares pretty well against Safari.

But no one is trying to make a buck by selling licenses or upgrades to Adium or Camino. Open source software tends to improve in small, steady, frequent increments. Established commercial software tends to improve less frequently but in large gulps so as to entice users to pay for upgrades.

The fact that Apple’s Macintosh business still fundamentally revolves around profits from hardware sales does mean that it’s possible that they could heed Bray’s suggestion (I’d say Safari would be the mostly likely candidate, considering the success of the Web Kit project), and if they do, I’ll be happy to have been wrong.

But don’t hold your breath.

Recently on Daring Fireball:

And Oranges

Thursday, 15 June 2006

Regarding Mark Pilgrim’s switch to Ubuntu Linux, and the general issue of making complex decisions.

Confidence Game

Friday, 26 May 2006

In the very worst tradition of punditry, allow me to make a sweeping generalization based on a few almost completely unrelated observations: Microsoft is suffering from a lack of confidence, and Apple is brimming with it.

‘Web Kit’ vs. ‘WebKit’

Monday, 15 May 2006

Question for Apple: Is it “Web Kit” or “WebKit”?

The Last Pixel

Friday, 12 May 2006

A last minute push for the membership drive, and a few details regarding the t-shirts.

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