Who Owns Your Computer?
When you purchased your computer, you paid for the monitor, the keyboard and the optical mouse. You bought a case that contains your CPU, floppy, hard and CD-RW drives, with just enough RAM to make it all work.
Included in that purchase price, if you bought your computer from a big company like Dell or IBM, is your copy of Microsoft’s Windows XP; you might even have ponied up a bit more cash for your copy of Microsoft’s Office suite.
Key word there being “your”.
No one disagrees; you own your computer’s hardware, which is under some sort of warranty, anything from 30 days to a year or more, generally speaking. Ownership in this case also means you’re responsible for maintaining it, to keep it in good working order after that warranty expires.
“Your” operating system (OS) and software operate under different rules, as we shall see, primarily because of a hard choice faced by IBM in 1980.
A (Very) Brief History of the Personal Computer
Microsoft is noted less for innovative software than for buying or appropriating other people’s ideas (hey, Jobs and Wozniak basically swiped the idea for the Mac's graphical user interface (GUI) from Xerox PARC) and folding them into their signature products—Internet Explorer or the Media Player into Windows, for example. But there is one area where they have always excelled, an industry leader through good times and bad.
In 1980, IBM was readying their Personal Computer for wide release, but they had a problem—it had no operating system (OS). A young, San Francisco-based company, called Micro-Soft, had a solution they called the Disk Operating System, or MS-DOS which they’d purchased from a guy down the hall for $50,000—neglecting to tell him IBM might be interested in it.
But, IBM had another problem: Micro-Soft refused to sell MS-DOS.
They’d license it, but they wouldn't sell it.
With their backs to the wall, IBM agreed to this plan and gave Micro-Soft the first big push onto our desktops, if not our hearts and minds, and on August 12, 1981, MS-DOS was released to a largely unsuspecting world. More importantly, this release included Micro-Soft’s new End User License Agreement (EULA), which allowed you to use the OS without actually owning it.
Who Owns Your Software?
As an industry leader, this company, now called Microsoft, established the rules by which consumers and businesses may use any program or OS (you Open Source/Linux people can ignore most, if not all, of this).
Now, all software producers retain their ownership rights, allowing you use of the program under a well defined—not to mention legally binding—set of parameters.
What the EULA means, in the plainest possible terms, is that you do not “own” that copy of Windows XP currently installed on your computer—technically, you don’t even own the CD-ROM.
For that matter, unless you’ve written it yourself, you don’t own any of the software on your computer.
What you do have is the company’s permission to use that program based on your purchase of the license, as described both during installation and often in printed form somewhere in or on the box.
So, What Exactly Did You Agree To?
One of the first questions you’re asked during any software installation is if you agree with that product’s EULA. You do read them, don’t you?
Yeah, neither does anyone else, mostly. Usually, you’re agreeing to not pirate the program; lend it out to your friends; resell it for profit; install it on every computer you own, that sort of thing. If you do read it and disagree with these rules, you are free to not install the software on your machine.
The producing company holds all the intellectual property rights (and rightly so) and all of the legal rights, which means they may revoke your license at any time for pretty much any one of a dozen or more reasons.
For better or worse, the EULA is Microsoft’s enduring legacy to the computing industry and its most significant contribution to the distribution of software around the world.
The Rise of the Open Source Movement
In the years since 1980, Microsoft has become one of the largest and wealthiest companies in history, with most estimates placing Windows on 95% of the world's desktops and Office on at least 90% of those computers, in essence creating a software hegemony.
A watchword among the earliest of computer pioneers was, "Information wants to be free". Arpnet, which was created by a consortium of educational and governmental institutions and led to the Internet, was developed with this in mind—a way to share information. The Open Source movement came out of this kind of sharing mentality.
Believing that software companies exerted too much influence and held too much power over their users, these geeks—there is truly no better word to describe them—developed their own operating systems, such as Linux, and all kinds of software to run on it.
Why Open Source Matters
In this ad-hoc, grass-roots world, updates and patches are created by, well, anyone, and released for anyone else to use as they see fit. Linux, for example, is freely distributed and constantly evolving, used both on desktops and for servers—widely regarded as more secure than any Windows server and used both in business settings and at web hosting companies and Internet Service Providers (ISP's).
It is this movement that terrifies Microsoft like no other challenge in their history—that Windows and Office are such hugely popular products makes them the target of hackers everywhere. That people might somehow be able to get their hands on a secure and stable OS and software without paying for it keeps Bill Gates awake at night.
Because the idea of Open Source remains: you should be able to own your own operating system and software. The End User License Agreement, justified though it may be legally, embodies the antithesis of this philosophy. Growing interest in the Open Source movement can only be seen as a warning shot across Microsoft's bow.
Updated: November 18, 2005