Freedom of the programmer

Freedom 0: everyone has the right to run the program as you wish and for any purpose.
Freedom 1: everyone has the right to study how the program works and adapt it to fit their needs.
Freedom 2: everyone has the right to distribute copies of the program without restriction.
Freedom 3: everyone has the right to improve the program and make these improvements publicly available.

2096 ... The world is on the verge of the 22nd century. Free software has become almost ubiquitous. Through the efforts of the GNU project activists, they managed to lobby for the law on software in most states. This law prohibits developing for the purpose of distributing and distributing software under the so-called "non-free" licenses. To determine whether this license is free or not free, an ad hoc committee (Free Software Committee) was established with offices in different countries and headquarters in the USA. It was in the United States back in 1983 that Richard Stallman openly declared the need to develop free software and the opening of the GNU project. The history of the GNU project is now held in all universities in all specialties, at least somehow related to programming.

The criteria put forward by the Free Software Committee for Programmers have been refined for a long time, and now the original official international document determining that there is free software, under the straightforward title “Free Software Bulletin” written in English, consists of 512 pages of refined legal text and lies in the main office of the Committee. This document takes into account all known nuances, all controversial issues that arise in determining whether this license is free or not. Through the efforts of the best lawyers in the world, the Bulletin was translated into other languages. True, so far only two: English (UK) and English (Australia). Nevertheless, this is significant progress! Work on each translation was about five years. We are currently working on the translation of the Bulletin into Chinese. The first page translation was recently completed. This day was a great joy for Chinese programmers. The Chinese government even appointed this day as an official national holiday.

My name is Max. I work as a developer in an American IT company called MacroSoft. Our company is engaged in the development, distribution and maintenance of free software. Sometimes we are engaged in the improvement of already written free programs to the needs of users. Yes, just think how the world has changed with the ubiquitous distribution of free software! Now, any programmer can take any program (since all programs are now distributed only under free licenses), see how it works, what tricks the programmer used to implement this or that chip, make any improvements regarding the speed or convenience of the interface, and again transmit this improved program to the world so that the same thing happens with it as with the program he took! Just a paradise for programmers! I can not imagine how people lived a hundred years ago ... Almost every program had to be paid. Plus, it was also impossible to take its source code, to see if there are any malicious instructions in it, which, for example, will send confidential information about the user to the developers, etc. And if a bug is detected in the program and you know how to fix it, then you cannot do it either. A nightmare of some kind ...
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True, the incomes of IT companies have noticeably diminished, since now they are not making a profit from the sale of each copy of the developed program. But personally, I think that working hard, writing some useful software, and then resting, so to speak, resting on our laurels, getting money from sales already lying in a hammock in Haiti are remnants of the bourgeois past. If you are a programmer, then earn a living, knocking on the keyboard! True, this bread does not have to be with butter, but in the end, what is more important for you: butter on bread or a favorite job?

Our company receives income for the development, distribution and maintenance of software. The least profitable item is, of course, distribution. After all, the distribution of free software for money, although not prohibited, but in essence should not bring much revenue. After all, if the software is free, then everyone can download it for free, while paying only for Internet traffic. True, from a heap of programs, it is sometimes difficult to find something that is appropriate for your needs. Therefore, the distributor is trying to talk about all the benefits of his product. Sometimes, of course, it makes a profit - the user pays for the labor of distributing a copy of a free program and acquires a copy for money. But usually the distributor gets the answer: “So, thank you for giving us your time, but we have the freedom to get a copy of your program for free, and we will take advantage of this freedom. Goodbye".

The second most profitable item is the development itself. Although on us, on programmers, everything also keeps, but from the point of view of income, we are not the most profitable workers, paradoxically. In general, there is nothing paradoxical. If the customer has declared a need to satisfy his software needs and is ready to pay for it, we, of course, fulfill this order. But our product, naturally, will be free, and then any user can receive it. That is, the customer actually pays for the satisfaction of not only their own needs, but also the needs of a number of other users, both individuals and companies. And in the conditions of tough market competition, if two companies work in the same service sector, both need about the same software, then who will not tolerate and donate a certain amount to develop, he loses, because his competitor gets this program for free , spending money on advertising, on updating hardware, etc. Therefore, companies (and these are our main breadwinners) are usually slow before giving us an order, forcing programmers to sit on a starvation diet. Sometimes, it happens, they unite with their competitors, dividing equally the amount needed for development. Therefore, we usually develop software not for any particular company, but for a whole service sector at once, receiving money not from selling a copy of the program for each computer of each organization, but for developing it. True, the saturation of the software market is much faster, but, as they say, if you want to live - know how to spin! Here we are turning ...

Well, of course, we get the main income from service specialists. Here they do not sit idle! Every day, each of them is called about 100 times (every 5 minutes during the 8-hour working day), they are asked which button to click to align the text to the width, to change the page size, to export the document to PDF and tons. .d Plus, some of them work at the exit, as they require their immediate assistance in installing and configuring software. Of course, almost all of this can be learned from the Internet - so detailed instructions are laid out there, that even the kettle will understand, - but, nevertheless, the demand for support services for some reason never drops.

Of the significant changes in the IT world, a significant decrease in the development of the gaming industry has recently been noted. After all, as it was before, in the bourgeois past: game developers will come up with the idea of ​​the game, develop a beautiful and fast engine, make the game without thinking about whether it will pay off all or not, because, as a rule, it paid off - everyone was interested in playing beautiful and high-quality games, and users spared no expense in buying CDs. Now everything is wrong. If someone dares to put up for sale a CD with a computer game, the user, knowing that the game is distributed freely, going to the developers' website, will receive, if not the executable file itself, then the source codes of this game and, if it cannot compile, then ask a friend programmer to help him with this. In general, the profession of a programmer has become so widespread that almost everyone has familiar programmers. True, programmers do not always have the time and desire to help their acquaintance for free, but there are always different forums, portals, which explain in detail how to compile this or that program. And for well-known games, there are even a lot of links to ready-made exe-games for different operating systems (unless, of course, the game developers themselves did not bother to put them on their websites). In general, the development of games, which in itself is very costly, has ceased to pay off and has ceased to be a profitable occupation. And a lot of gaming giants went bankrupt due to the widespread transition to free software. Among them are such well-known in the past, and now absolutely unknown manufacturers, like Electronic Arts, Bioware, Blizzard, Ubisoft and others.

Especially interesting is the story with Valve. From the history of computer games now you can find out that the company Valve in 1998 released the greatest computer game of all time, Half-Life. Then in 2004, her sequel Half-Life 2 was released, also receiving numerous awards. It is clear that users were looking forward to continue. In 2006 and 2007, they waited two more sequels: Half-Life 2: Episode One and Half-Life 2: Episode Two. But then the release of the games in this series stopped abruptly, to the terrible disappointment of the fans. Moreover, the matter was aggravated not only by the fact that the next part - Half-Life 3 - promised to be the last, promised to give answers to all the questions raised in the previous parts, not only that each part of this game was a significant breakthrough in the field of the gaming industry, but also and the fact that thirsting gamers constantly come across various hints that Half-Life 3 is being developed, that it is about to be released, we still have to wait a year or two: they will find a picture of the ship “Borealis” in the binary games of the next game, o which was only known about n should appear in the next part, then they will find somewhere a daddy with an unambiguous name "hl3". In general, already tired of waiting for users, these hints fell like salt on a wound. However, Valve, like any commercial company, did everything just to extract the maximum profit. And the maximum profit, it turned out, can be extracted not from the development of another part of the aging genre 3D first-person shooter, but from multiplayer online games: Dota, Team Fortress 2, etc. So at that time all fans of the series fully felt the cruelty of the market management model in software development However, we read further: by 2020, the SteamOS project, a special gaming operating system, by the way, was running on the Linux kernel, and by 2026, a large number of great online games were released that brought the company fabulous income. And so, when Valve's director, Gabe Newell, turned 64, he suddenly said: “And now Half-Life 3!” (“And now Half-Life 3!”) This news spread throughout the day the entire Internet.

And although those players who played at least 12 years old in the first part of the game were already at a very respectable age for computer games - at least 40 years old - they began to wait with new forces. By 2031, the development of the game Half-Life 3 was almost completed, and judging by some leaks from the central office of Valve, received as a result of hacker attacks, it promised to be something fantastic in scope, plot and technical solutions, when Washington State passed a law on software - the first of the United States of America. And Valve was just in this state. The following is historical information on the opposition of supporters of free and proprietary software, mainly Microsoft. This confrontation spread throughout the world and lasted for several decades. Well, today we have what we have: the Windows operating system by the Free Software Committee is prohibited, as a system, among other things, participating in the PRISM program for collecting confidential user information. So, the law on software obliged all companies in the state to lay out the source codes of all their programs and begin to distribute them under free licenses. To which Gabe said that either his company is not affected by this law, or he destroys all the sources, and the world will not see the long-awaited continuation of the legendary saga. The GNU activists, in turn, said he was bluffing. Then Gabe dismissed Valve, really destroyed all the sources, and he went to his dacha in the Bahamas. There is no sadder story in the world ... But nothing, it's all in the name of a great idea, the idea of ​​distributing free software! Software in which everyone can find out if a program contains malicious instructions or not!

Of course, the games are appearing now, but they are not developed on such a scale and are not as spectacular as before. Now on the Internet you can find videos with the passage of those old games, striking the clarity of graphics and colorful textures. You can even get their source codes from archives (if they were not destroyed), since the 50-year period for copyright objects has long expired. There is little confusion, however, from these source codes, since most of these games are written for the forbidden Windows operating system. And although there are free emulators of this operating system, heavy 10-gigabyte games work on them with jambs. Therefore, it is required to patch these emulators all the time, but this is not a simple matter: the source code of Windows NT 4.0 occupied about a million lines in C, and the latest versions of Windows 10 and Windows Skynet, which were released before Windows was banned - even several million , and to understand this code takes a long time. And if one game uses some features of the system, then the other - others, so for each fairly cool game you have to write your own emulator. Although basically everything is possible. And just recently, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Informatics Laboratory, it was possible to collect the game Heroes of Might and Magic V from source codes. Of course, with all this, only free software was used, and everyone has the right to use all this software completely free of charge and run the game on his computer. Well, everyone did. So, the work of the employees of the Laboratory of Informatics remained largely unpaid (voluntary donations did not clearly recoup the costs). This is logical, since they performed this work for their own pleasure, it can be said, their hobby, and for a hobby they don’t ask for money. But in the user community they received undoubted recognition! And not so much for the beautiful game that they managed to bring back to life, but for the successful software solutions. After all, no one has yet been able to spend so much time, so deep into the code, in order to run a truly complex program written under Windows. Lone hackers, of course, will not pull it, but for IT companies it’s already full of things.

Modern games, of course, are inferior in entertainment to games of the beginning of the century, but I think - and this opinion is shared by most of my friends - that the game should not be delayed by a beautiful picture, but by the plot and gameplay! I will even say that nowadays the same “Heroes of Might and Magic III” is considered more interesting than the mentioned heaped-up fifth. In general, modern games have become more like games from the beginning of the 90s of the last century - good old 2D and pixel art. So much for the cyclical history!

In general, the paid software market has gradually faded away. Since, of course, everything said about games concerns any expensive software. Professional, expensive software is developed, as I have already said, on the order of several large customers who work in the same sphere and, as a rule, are competitors. But this is not the case with games. Not a single commercial organization will order the development of a program, which, although it will be enjoyable, doesn’t cost a penny. And as we know from history, it was the games that stimulated the development of hardware. And the game developers even collaborated with the hardware developers. For example, a development company launches a game that has certain types of shaders specified in the system requirements. But hardware support for these shaders is only available from a certain company. Thus, the sale of this game stimulates the sale of these video cards. Sometimes it even turned out that the game has already been released, but the iron is not there yet. And the users were content with the cut-down graphics of the game for some time and were looking forward to the release of this hardware, bought it and enjoyed all the graphic possibilities. The development of iron, in turn, stimulated the development of the gaming industry: a new video card was released - games using the capabilities of this video card appeared, computers began to have a larger amount of RAM, games appeared that required all this volume, etc. Vicious circle. And so, the end of this circle came with the widespread distribution of free software. Games are now free.

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