How I Learned the difference between Open and Free

Around the first decade of the 21st century, people were file-sharing like they were preparing for the BitTorrent Olympics. The combination of “new movies” and “free” was just too good to ignore.

The first time I saw eMule installed on the work computer of a very serious network engineer, at a very serious cable and internet service provider lab, I was confused.

eMule is an open source project from 2002, a peer-to-peer file-sharing client for Windows. It was one of a few clients that made it possible to download and upload very large files much faster than before. Large files like movies, and TV series and games. Within a few years, many technically-oriented individuals around the world were playing pirates. Some in the name of cord-cutting.

Back to the service provider lab.

“Are you guys illegally downloading movies at work?!!” there was emphasis on the word work, because there was no doubt anyone as technical as him would be the movie piracy guru at home.

“Ha ha, no” he said “but everyone else does. We need to test to make sure our network supports torrenting perfectly”.

An internet provider. Testing file-sharing clients. Because the public, engaged with illegal movie-downloading, needs speed.

Interesting.

This was just the start though. Anyone as technical as this guy would spend hours crafting their media center at home. Laptops were connected to TVs. Expensive NAS devices were purchased to store the movies. Automation and scheduling were harnessed to make sure the dead hours of day, and night, were used to download all the free stuff on the watch list. It was a sport and a pastime.

At the beginning, anyone technical would thoroughly enjoy this. Saturdays of connecting HDMI cables around the house and watching fragments of multiple movies download. It’s better than a fish tank. But what about their second cousin, who — shamefully- doesn’t understand this stuff? And what about their grandparents? Don’t they get to cable-cut too?

Apparently, they got it too. The folks who could navigate the open source projects and home-made installations quickly became community support centers for non-technical family members and neighbors. Which made their weekends busier. Some creative minds developed business models for supporting the thriving community.

You can imagine how relieved everyone was when Netflix finally arrived.

At some point the experimenting phase is over, and everyone is just re-inventing the wheel. The people that actually pushed the technology are already experimenting with the next thing. At the end of the day, I believe most of us just want a service that works and makes life easy. And most of us are perfectly willing to pay for it.

I think it’s SaaS time. What do you think?

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Originally published in Medium