Voice of the DBA

Tag: software

  • Renting Features

    The licensing, use, and ownership of software has been quite a contested topic for years. Many people have assumed they “own” the copy of Quicken or Halo that they bought, but modifying or even reselling the bits has been a contested right by many vendors. It seems that courts seem to lean towards the perpetual rental of those bits rather than ownership.

    We’ve gotten used to that in software, but what happens when this extends into the real world? There is a piece at Ars Technica about BMW looking to “unlock” features on their cars if owners want to pay for them. These are things like heated seats or perhaps sports suspension that are installed, but not activated. You could subscribe to the feature on a trial basis, and then activate it for a year or two if you wanted to pay a fee. The interesting thing here is that you could even do this with a secondhand car.

    The comments from many people are disparaging, and rightly so, since so many vendors have looked to make money with these options, often in a way that isn’t quite fair for the consumer. There is certainly concern and outrage about the cost of these features if they can be installed in every car without payment, and there are weight/fuel considerations as well. While heated seats might not use more fuel, I’d assume something like adaptive suspension or extra speakers in a sound package do reduce mileage.

    In some sense, I do understand this approach. I’ve purchased computer hardware with extra CPU and RAM that could be “rented” for a short time, or purchased. In the case of a car, I’d like to be able to “purchase” heated seats forever with a similar charge to what I’d initially pay. Or maybe a rental makes sense if this includes a warranty while the item is rented. Certainly being able to turn this on later on a secondhand car would be great. There’s also the idea that you could turn off a feature you didn’t like and stop paying.

    I also understand the cost structure here. If every car is built the same, the costs of manufacturing go down, even if there is some loss on a percentage of customers not using the feature. If too few turn this on, I’m sure BMW (and others) abandon the idea. If enough do, I expect we’ll see other features, especially the electronic ones, being added to the list of options.

    Ultimately, the use of software to lock features, and unlock them, makes sense in some cases and not in others. The devil is in the details, and certainly I think companies need to tread carefully here, ensuring they are pricing the options in a fair way. I also think they need to account for perpetual ownership as one of the options.

    Cars are notoriously modifiable, and I do think this will succeed. I’m sure there will be jailbreaks and unlock codes available all over the Internet, but I’m not sure this will stop vendors from renting features. There are ways people can modify iPhones already, though I’m not sure most consumers care.

    Steve Jones

    Listen to the podcast at Libsyn, Stitcher or iTunes.

  • Grounded

    Technology has brought some challenges to travel. There is the bomb threat, of which I have no way to gauge how much of a potential problem this is on a daily basis. Certainly security at airports has changed over the years, and there is better scanning technology, but would anyone really be able to detect a bomb in a bag? Do we check all bags? I doubt anyone does, but perhaps I’m wrong. Either way, I hope this isn’t anything I need to worry about in my travels.

    I do carry electronics, usually a laptop, though sometimes two, along with the various supporting plugs and wires for charging it and my mobile. There was a time when I thought about getting a BRIX for demos, but with the requirements that security might make me turn it on, I decided not to get one. These days, with all the cloud options, I’m less worried about carrying a large amount of hardware, but I still need a laptop. When I saw a story about laptops being banned from flights, I wondered what I’d do.

    In this case, Macbooks are supposedly being banned if they have a certain battery issue. This came about quickly, and it’s likely that there were some business people in the middle of a trip when the ban was announced. That might have prevented them from flying, which would be quite a hassle. I remember when the Note was banned from some flights. I never met anyone that was inconvenienced, and likely plenty of people flew with their devices hidden in bags, so perhaps it wasn’t a big deal.

    I wonder about two things here. One, are we building new devices and technology that aren’t designed well from a safety standpoint? Most of us don’t have large servers in our offices anymore, so we might not care, but our other devices, which we use to get work done, perhaps might not be robust. In that case, I hope that businesses might have programs to help employees quickly replace devices if there are issues. Being on call and not having a device would be a nightmare.

    The other item is one I wonder about both for software and hardware. Do we make it easy enough to know what version of a device we have? I’ve owned Macbooks, and trying to determine what model you have is a chore. I can’t imagine that TSA or other security agencies could actually a) determine if you had a banned device, and b) know if you’ve had it repaired.

    I’d hate to think that companies will just build devices without making it easy to understand which generation of a device you own. This can already be a problem in not only computers, but other products like autos, where changes might be implemented in the middle of a model year. With the move to cloud and other rented software, are we going to have issues here? Azure SQL Database hasn’t changed the version in some time, despite there being changes to the code.

    Maybe it doesn’t matter, especially if old features don’t disappear. It does seem like something that we ought to do a better job of tracking, especially as it can be easy for us to have a model, but tag on a version number to easily allow a user to discern one from the other.

    Steve Jones

    Listen to the podcast at Libsyn, Stitcher or iTunes.

  • Republish: What’s a Toaster?

    A second republish today, but it’s one of my favorites: What’s a Toaster?

  • Software Patents

    This editorial was originally published on Jan 30, 2014. It is being re-published as Steve is out of town.

    I highly dislike the current patent system in the US. I think awarding patents for an idea like “1-click purchasing” is a poor practice that discourages innovation. There are numerous problems with our patent system, not the least of which is that it can stifle new ideas and prevent small companies from building on similar ideas that are, well, what I’d all common sense. I don’t quite share Richard Stallman’s view of software patents, but I do think we have fundamental flaws in the way we handle this intellectual property.

    I do, however, think that software has value, and the work we do as software engineers deserves compensation, as noted in this post. We should have some patents, and we should reward those that create truly innovative, and not common sense, ideas in the digital world. How we define those, and how we measure innovation isn’t clear to me, but I do think that non-trivial ideas deserve protection.

    Our legal systems around the world are slow to catch up to the digital world, and may never do so. As quickly as we can debate patents, copyright, trademarks, and more, the digital world grows, expands, and changes to stretch and challenge our thinking of how the world works. It almost seems as though digital ideas and software defy analogies and explanations that we can relate to the real world.

    I don’t know how I’d change patents, but I don’t want them to go away completely. I do, however, know what I’d do with copyright. I’d change it back to the original system we had, granting 14 years exclusivity to creators, with a single option to renew for 14 years and that’s it. The world certainly changes too fast to wait 95 years to use someone else’s work.