Date: Sat, 20 Jun 92 12:39:51 0
From:
[email protected] (Brad Cox, Ph.D.)
Subject: File 1--Proposal: A Market Mechanism for Information Age Goods
The enclosed article, which was written as a column for an
object-oriented programming magazine, proposes an initiative that has
great potential for both good and for harm. I believe that
superdistribution, as discussed in this paper, should be relevant to
EFF's interests, even though it looks at privacy from a viewpoint
contrary to the one that EFF generally endorses.
++++++++++++++
"WHAT IF THERE *IS* A SILVER BULLET...AND THE COMPETITION GETS IT FIRST?"
(Invited Column; Journal of Object-oriented Programming; June 1992)
Few programmers could develop a compiler, word processor or spreadsheet
to compete in today's crowded software market The cost and complexity
of modern-day applications far exceed the financial and intellectual
capacity of even the rarest of individuals. Even large-granularity
sub-components like window systems, persistent object databases and
communication facilities can be larger than most individuals could
handle. But nearly any of us could provide smaller (so-called
'reusable') software components that others could assemble into larger
objects; components as small as Stacks and Queues.
So why don't we? Why do we drudge away our lives in companies with the
financial, technical, and marketing muscle to build the huge objects we
call applications? Why don't we start software companies, like Intel,
to invent, build, test, document, and market small-granularity objects
for other companies to buy? Think of the reduction in auto emission
pollution if more of us stayed home to build small-granularity
components for sale! Think of not having to get along with the boss!
Object-oriented programming technologies have brought us tantalizingly
close to making this dream technically, if not economically, feasible.
Subroutines have long been able to encapsulate functionality into
modules that others can use without needing to look inside, just as
with Intel's silicon components. Object-oriented programming languages
have extended our ability to encapsulate functionality within
Software-ICs<1> that can support higher-level objects than subroutines
ever could<2>. Such languages have already made the use of
pre-fabricated data structure and graphical user interface classes a
viable alternative to fabricating cut-to-fit components for each
application. All this is technically feasible already, even though the
software industrial revolution has hardly begun<3>.
Yet these technical advances have not really changed the way we
organize to build software. They've just providing better tools for
building software just as we've done in the past. The pre-fabricated
small components of today are not bought and sold as assets in their
own right, but are bundled (given away) inside something much larger
than any individual could build. Sometimes they are bundled to inflate
the value (and price!) of some cheap commodity item, as in Apple's ROM
software that turns a $50 CPU chip into a $5000 Macintosh computer.
Sometimes they play the same role with respect to software objects, as
in the libraries that come with object-oriented compilers.
There is no way of marketing the small active objects that we call
reusable software components, at least not today. The same is true of
the passive objects we call data. For example, nearly 50% of the bulk
waste in our landfills is newspapers and magazines. Nearly half of our
bulk waste problem could be eliminated if we could break the habit of
fondling the macerated remains of some forest critter's home as we
drink our morning coffee. But this is far more than a bad habit from
the viewpoint of newspaper publishers. If they distributed news
electronically, how would they charge for their labor?
Paper-based information distribution makes certain kinds of information
unavailable even when the information is easily obtainable. For
example, I hate price-comparison shopping and would gladly pay for
high-quality information as to where to buy groceries and gasoline
cheaply within driving distance of my home. This information is avidly
collected by various silver-haired ladies in my community, but solely
for their own use. There is no incentive for them to electronically
distribute their expertise to customers like myself.
What if entrepreneurs could market electronic information objects for
other people to buy? Couldn't geographically specialized but broadly
relevant objects like my gasoline price example be the 'killer apps'
that the hardware vendors are so desperately seeking? Think of what it
could it mean to today's saturated market if everyone who buys gasoline
and groceries bought a computer simply to benefit from Aunt Nellie's
coupon-clipping acumen?
Information Age Economics
These questions outline the fundamental obstacle of the manufacturing
age to information age transition. The human race is adept at selling
tangible goods such as Twinkies, automobiles, and newspapers. But we've
never developed a commercially robust way of buying and selling easily
copied intangible goods like electronic data and software.
Of course, there are more obstacles to building a robust market in
electronic objects than I could ever mention here. Many of them are
technological deficiencies that could easily be corrected, such as the
lack of suitably diverse encapsulation and binding mechanisms in
today's object-oriented programming languages, insufficient
telecommunications bandwidth and reliability, and the dearth of capable
browsers, repositories and software classification schemes. My second
book, Object Technologies; A Revolutionary Approach, <Cox2> considers
these technical obstacles in detail to show how each one could be
overcome if suitable economic incentives were in place.
The biggest obstacle is that electronic objects can be copied so easily
that there is no way to collect revenue the way Intel does, by
collecting a fee each time another copy of a silicon object is needed.
More than any other reason, this is why nobody would ever quit their
day job to build small-granularity software components for a living.
A striking vestige of manufacturing age thinking is the still-dominant
practice of charging for information age goods like software by the
copy. Since electronic goods can be copied easily by every consumer,
the producers must inhibit copying with such abominations as shrinkwrap
license agreements and copy protection dongles. Since these are not
reliable and are increasingly rejected by software consumers, SPA
(Software Publishers Association) and BSA (Business Software Alliance)
have even started using handcuffs and jail sentences as copy protection
technologies that actually do work even for information age products
like software.
The lack of robust information age incentives explains why so many
corporate reuse library initiatives have collapsed under a hail of user
complaints. "Poorly documented. Poorly tested. Too hard to find what I
need. Does not address my specific requirements." Except for the often
rumored "Not invented here" syndrome, the problem is only occasionally
a demand side problem. The big problems are on the supply side. There
are no robust incentives to encourage producers to provide minutely
specialized, tested, documented and (dare I hope?) guaranteed
components that quality-conscious engineers might pay good money to
buy. As long as these "repositories" are waste disposal dumps where we
throw poorly tested and undocumented trash for garbage pickers to
"reuse", quality-conscious engineers will rightly insist, "Not in my
backyard!"
Paying for software by the copy (or "reusing" it for free) is so
widespread today that it may seem like the only option. But think of it
in object-oriented terms. Where is it written that we should pay for an
object's instance variables (data) according to usage (in the form of
network access charges) yet pay for methods (software) by the copy?
Shouldn't we also consider incentive structures that could motivate
people to buy and sell electronic objects in which the historical
distinction between program and data are altogether hidden from view?
Superdistribution
Lets consider a different approach that might work for any form of
computer-based information. It is based on the following observation.
Software objects differ from tangible objects in being fundamentally
unable to monitor their copying but trivially able to monitor their
use. For example, it is easy to make software count how many times it
has been invoked, but hard to make it count how many times it has been
copied.
So why not build an information age market economy around this
difference between manufacturing age and information age goods? If
revenue collection were based on monitoring the use of software inside
a computer, vendors could dispense with copy protection altogether.
They could distribute electronic objects for free in expectation of a
usage-based revenue stream.
Legal precedents for this approach already exist. The distinction
between copyright (the right to copy or distribute) and useright (the
right to 'perform', or to use a copy once obtained) are both provided
by existing copyright laws. They were stringently tested in court a
century ago as the music publishers were sorting out the implications
of the emerging music broadcasting industry.
When we buy a record, we acquire ownership of a physical copy
(copyright), but only a limited useright; just the right to use the
music for personal enjoyment. Conversely, large television and radio
companies get the very same records for free, but pay substantial fees
for the useright to play the music on the air. The fees are
administered by ASCAP (American Society of Composers, Authors and
Publishers) and BMI (Broadcasting Musicians Institute) by monitoring
how often each record is broadcast to how large a listening audience.
A Japanese industry-wide consortium, JEIDA (Japanese Electronics
Industrial Development Association) is developing an analogous approach
that analogizes each computer to a station that broadcasts to an
audience of one<4>. Called super%distribution, its premise is that copy
protection is exactly the wrong idea for software. Instead,
superdistribution allows software to be freely distributed and freely
acquired via whatever distribution mechanism you please. You are
specifically encouraged to download superdistribution software from
networks, give copies to your friends, or send it as junk mail to
people you've never met. Spray my software from airplanes if you want.
Please!
This generosity is possible because this software is 'meterware'. It
has strings attached that effectively make revenue collection
completely independent of software distribution. The software contains
embedded instructions that make it useless except on machines that are
equipped for this new kind of revenue collection.
The computers that can run superdistribution software are otherwise
quite ordinary. In particular, they will run ordinary pay-by-copy
software just fine. They just have additional capabilities that only
superdistribution software uses. In JEIDA's current prototype, these
services are provided by a silicon chip that plugs into a Macintosh
coprocessor slot.
Electronic objects (not just applications, but active and/or passive
objects of every granularity) that are intended for superdistribution
invoke this hardware to ensure that the revenue collection hardware is
present, that prior usage reports have been uploaded, and that prior
usage fees have been paid.
The hardware is not complicated (the main complexities are
tamper-proofing, not base functionality). It merely provides several
instructions that must be present before superdistribution software can
run. The instructions count how many times they have been invoked by
the software, storing these usage counts temporarily in a tamper-proof
persistent RAM. Periodically (say monthly) this usage information is
uploaded to an administrative organization for billing, using public
key encryption technology to discourage tampering and to protect the
secrecy of this information.
The end-user gets a monthly bill for their usage of each top-level
component. Their payments are credited to each component's owner in
proportion to the component's usage. These accounts are then debited
according to each application's usage of any sub-components. These are
credited to the sub-component owners, again in proportion to usage. In
other words, the end-user's payments are recursively distributed
through the producer-consumer hierarchy. The distribution is governed
by usage metering information collected from each end-user's machine,
plus usage pricing data that is provided to the administrative
organization by each component vendor.
Since communication is infrequent and involves only a small amount of
metering information, the communication channel could be as simple as a
modem that autodials a hardwired 800 number each month. Many other
solutions are viable, such as flash cards or even floppy disks to be
mailed back and forth each month in the mails.
A Revolutionary Approach
Whereas software's ease of replication is a liability today,
superdistribution makes it an asset. Whereas software vendors must
spend heavily to overcome software's invisibility, superdistribution
thrusts software out into the world to serve as its own advertisement.
Whereas the personal computer revolution isolates individuals inside a
standalone personal computer, superdistribution establishes a
cooperative/competitive community around an information age market
economy.
Of course, there are many obstacles to this ever happening for real. A
big one is the information privacy issues raised by usage monitors in
every computer from video games to workstations to mainframes. Although
we are accustomed to usage monitoring for electricity, telephone, gas,
water and electronic data services, information privacy is an explosive
political issue. Superdistribution could easily be legislated into
oblivion out of the fear that the usage information would be used for
other than billing purposes.
A second obstacle is the problem of adding usage monitoring hardware to
a critical number of computers. This is where today's computing
establishment could be gravely exposed to those less inclined to
maintain the status quo.
It is significant that superdistribution was not developed by the
American computer establishment, who presently controls 70% of the
world software market. It was developed by JEIDA, an industry-wide
consortium of Japanese computer manufacturers. The Japanese are clearly
capable of building world-class computers. Suppose that they were to
simply build superdistribution capabilities into every one of them, not
as an extra-price option but as a ubiquitous capability of every
computer they build?
Review the benefits I've discussed in this column and then ask: Whose
computers would you buy? Whose computers would Aunt Nellie and her
friends buy? What if superdistribution really is a Silver Bullet for
the information age issues I've raised in this column? And what if the
competition builds it first?
[Footnotes]
<1> ) Software-IC is a registered trademark of The Stepstone
Corporation.
<2> Brad J. Cox; Object-oriented Programming; An Evolutionary Approach;
Addison Wesley; 1986.
<3> Brad J. Cox; Object Technologies; A Revolutionary Approach; Addison
Wesley; late 1992. Also see Planning the Software Industrial
Revolution; IEEE Software; November 1990, and There is a Silver Bullet;
Byte magazine; October 1990.
<4> Ryoichi Mori and Masaji Kawahara; Superdistribution: An Overview
and the Current Status; ISEC 89-44; and Superdistribution: The Concept
and the Architecture; The Transactions of the IEICE Vol. E 73 No 7 July
1990. Also seeWhat lies ahead; Byte 1989 January; pp 346-348 and On
Superdistribution; Byte 1990; September; p 346.
* * * * *
Brad Cox, Ph.D. (203) 868-9182 voice / -0780 fax
Information Age Consulting Best:
[email protected]
Downloaded From P-80 International Information Systems 304-744-2253
