on 10 October 2008This month I decided to install WordPress. I wanted to update my blog from Blogger 1.0 to something that acknowledged the existence of any form of web standard other than ‘sod it, seems to be working’, and since Blogger 2.0 appeared to bear as much resemblance to Blogger 1.0 as Jordan does to her school photos, I thought I might as well switch to something more credible. But I failed to take into account that WordPress is open source, and it is a truth universally acknowledged that software produced by a ‘community’ must be in want of any form of documentation that explains what you have to do in order to make it work, in the order you actually have to do it.
There is, of course, a fundamental flaw in the concept of creating software for free. I used to write a few bits of freeware myself, but I was a teenager with nothing better to do. And I was a child of the 1970s. When I was growing up, Sunday newspapers (available solely from newsagents, supermarkets being prohibited from opening on the Sabbath) predicted that, due to the ever-increasing efficiency and ingenuity of industrial processes (not counting British Leyland), people in the 21st Century would enjoy unlimited leisure (even when not on strike) while computerised systems did the work. Of course, this was at a time when it was socially desirable to flaunt a complete ignorance of evolutionary biology, basic economics, and what was wrong with crochet.
Why aren’t we lying around all day and retiring at 30? Because we’re people, not baa-lambs. If we could all agree to let the machines get on with supplying our basic needs, we could have a pleasantly lazy existence. In practice, though, while Alice might be content to make do with her allowance, Bob will be wondering if he couldn’t give the machines a hand in return for an extra ration of Soylent Green, while Carol, who maintains the pornbots, begins to think such an important job ought to be recognised with at least an extra shot of soma on the weekend. Before you know it, Dick and Jane are setting up a law practice to assist with her claim against the Ministry of Truth, and it’s all gone a bit Mao Zedong.
The thing about being evolved, rather than designed, is that not only do we have no perfect state of grace to look back on, we also have none to look forward to. Human beings aren’t built to wander hand-in-hand towards the light, like the tendrils of a clematis. We’re more the kind of organism that wakes up with a hangover, fries a few other organisms for breakfast, wastes the rest of the morning moaning about all the stuff that’s preventing it surviving and multiplying, spends the afternoon fixing it (with the wrong tools and a lot of swearing), drinks its way through the evening, then lies awake worrying about all the stuff that still needs fixing tomorrow.
Because a human’s work is never done. There’s not going to come a time when you can say, ‘Right, comrades, we’re top of the food chain, we’ve cracked supersonic flight and antibiotics, and we’ve devised a means of recording images of naked foreign chicks that we can play back later. Down tools, we’re ’avin’ it large for the next three billion years.’
Programming is like that, too. Microsoft and Adobe launch new versions of their software every year; nobody asks them when it’ll be finished. It’s surely our inherited fondness for an open-ended challenge that makes us work on programs even without being paid. Nature didn’t intend us to enjoy tinkering about with code, and it’s certainly not going to get us laid, but it’s a by-product of the way we’ve evolved to figure stuff out and make it work. Sadly, we appear to lack an instinct for usability testing or the drafting of properly structured documentation.
Still, open source has one undeniable advantage: when it’s broken, it’s because the developers have cocked up, not because they’ve deliberately broken it. One way that commercial vendors habitually break software is by applying copy protection. Electronic Arts decided to do this on its new evolve-it-yourself game, Spore. If users can’t copy it, reasoned the EA bean counters, we’ll sell more. So they limited each copy to three activations and one user account. For somebody like me, with six computers and three kids, this is about as useful as a one-doored car.
Inevitably, somebody cracked the software to remove the install restrictions, and the cracked version proved a highly attractive download for people who might have shelled out £30 for the legal version if it hadn’t been crippled. Though EA still didn’t ditch the copy protection, it quickly increased the limit to five installations, each with five users.
As EA Games boss Frank Gibeau explained: ‘I believe we need to adapt our policy to accommodate our legitimate consumers.’ Which is one of those corporate statements that, each time you read it, leaves you a little more astonished that Homo sapiens ever managed to drag itself out of the primeval soup.
Adam Banks is currently under construction.
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