[ih] Internet analyses (Was Re: IPv8...)

[John Gilmore]

John Day <jeanjour at comcast.net> wrote:
> Taxpayer money is free.
> So much for good old American capitalism.
> State Socialism is much more effective  ;-)

John, you may think you're being funny, but you don't understand.

What mattered were the terms on which the software was released.  Not
the source of the funding.  Freely available software moves markets.
People readily adopt good products that they can download for free, with
no "trial versions" and no hidden gotchas.  They think much harder about
spending money on products.  Most corporate or academic programmers
don't even have a budget for buying software, they need management
permission.  Free downloads need no permission.

DARPA got exactly what they wanted from their contract with Berkeley --
broad, rapid adoption of TCP/IP in their research community.  That would
not have happened if they had paid the same amount but had asked
Berkeley to license the results through a proprietary company.

At Cygnus, governments were less than 10% of our business.  Capitalist
companies were paying us to make GCC work better and to release the
improvements for free.  Having a GCC port for their chip meant more
sales of their chip.  It meant more satisfied early customers who might
build it into high volume products.  A dozen chip companies paid us from
their marketing budgets!

Other companies paid us for great support for the build tools that their
internal developers used.  This meant that their next proprietary
product was more likely to ship on time.  (A 1-week delay in a new
product from Cisco or Sun could easily cost them $100 million in sales.
It's easy math when they were selling >$5B of their flagship product a
year.  It was worth even more if they avoided their competitor shipping
a next-generation product before they did.  Both companies used our
tools, and bought our support.)

Later, Sony paid Cygnus more than a million dollars to build free
compilers and simulators for the PlayStation.  They made it all back
dozens of times over when the PlayStation hit the consumer market.  It
had a bunch of great games, all of which had been developed and debugged
in our simulator before the hardware was even available.  The competing
game consoles were released with wimpy games, because the other game
developers couldn't start a year before the hardware was ready.

I don't blame folks for not understanding.  As one of the first
free-software companies, we had to learn all this ourselves.  The freely
available software stream that we created, was creating value for our
customers that we hadn't dreamed of when we started out.  Not to mention
all the value that ordinary users got, from getting our reliable
compilers for no money and with easy sharing around their organization.

Free availability of Internet software (and the protocol specs, but
that's another story) was a significant component of Internet history.
It reduced the transaction costs of cooperation -- and at its heart, the
Internet is really a big exercise in voluntary cooperation.

	John Gilmore