Software when you need it most

I spent some time last week with a leader from one of the many schools devastated by the earthquake in Christchurch New Zealand, and he raised a really good point about access to learning tools. He pointed out that not only are many Christchurch (or Japan's) schools' servers, laptops and desktops locked away in buildings that are too dangerous to enter, so too are all their software licences. One of the many tragedies of the earthquake is that if a school has 5 licences for a piece of software, and that software is for lost or permananetly inaccessible to staff and students, the school has very few choices but to pay for more licences or not use the software. I'm sure some insurance companies or software vendors would be able to provide replacement licences in cases of demonstrable hardship, but timeliness is the key. Staff and students have been without digital learning tools since the quake on 22nd February, and can't afford to wait for paperwork to be completed. Using software that is free to install on any computer a student has access to gets around this problem and helps us take one further step towards any-where, any-time, any-device learning. Not only can students use digital tools outside of school hours in places physically distant from the school, they can also continue learning in times of crisis.

LCA2010: Antifeatures

One of the keynotes at LCA2010 was Ben Mako Hill. His presentation on 'Antifeatures' in software was very nicely put together and for me illustrates some of the madness that exists in proprietary software. An antifeature is something that the developer works hard to develop and include in a product that limits that product's abilities. Sometime considerable effort and expense goes into developing these antifeatures because the developers know that there will be a profit in it further down the track. The best illustration of a simple antifeature is unlisted numbers in the phonebook. Although it's much easier for a telephone company to exclude a number from a directory than include it, somehow it has transpired that in order to have your number left off the directory, it costs you money.
Mako has a long list of these antifeatures in products, and all of them were designed to exploit consumers through:

• extract money from the user.
• segmenting the market.
• creating or extending monopolies.
• protecting copyright.

Perhaps the most well-known example of the second kind of antifeature is the scam perpetrated by Microsoft around the Windows NT Workstation & Server editions. It was the same product, but by changing one digit in the registry, M$ could cripple the software so it couldn't act as a webserver.
Another good example is the Canon G7. All cameras (including the Cann G6) shoot RAW. It's simply the uncompressed 'raw' data from the camera's CCD. Canon decided that in order to push people who wanted RAW into the next price bracket, they would cripple the G7 so it would only produced compressed JPG images.
I love the word 'antifeatures'. It's a perfect label for some of the anti-consumer practices most companies engage in. Let's always remember that companies are designed to make money. Keeping customers happy is only a mean to that end. And let's take back a bit of consumer power- it's our money after all.