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Day IV – (Piracy? DRM? Where did that come from?)

Oh well, Moon Nanosystems execs took another wild step completely against the likes of its staff. Nanosoft officials started installing their new software while assuring the staff that it would better… A selected (read bribed) staff sat down to try and test the new software installed on one of the workstations. It included the genuine versions of all software directly or indirectly by Nanosoft. As soon as the system booted up, Moon nanosystem’s real face was exposed to Nanosoft. All the pirated copies of the Nanosoft Office Suite were found on the network, and so, the eyes of the Nanosoft execs turned red. And from that very instant, the Nanosoft Genuine Advantage ads started popping up on every workstation.

Moon Nanosystems realized that for every system, they had to get a unique copy of their software, or buy a multi-license enterprise edition which too has limited installing capacity. It also realized that nanosoft is now going to keep a close watch on how many systems they really install their multi-license package and it now knew it had been outsmarted now. “No room to make petty profits or savings anymore! No more using Office stuff for home use again!” cried a Moon Nanosystems Exec.
DRM, or Digital Media Rights is a piracy prevention mechanism which is hardwired into every proprietary piece of software. It really elevates the expenses involved in the software usage process. It is all for preventing piracy of the software. Hence, any closed source software will contain mechanisms to prevent itself from being copied. All this in no way benefit the user who has to not only compromise with the customizability but also the anti-piracy measures.
Open Source on the other hand, encourages users to copy and redistribute the product. This is something highly beneficial to enterprises with a large network. Unifying standards is much more cost effective in the open source case. And, there is no such thing added to any open source software which will not help the user in anyway. Take RHEL5 (Red Hat Enterprise Linux v5) for example, it is a commercial distribution offering support, but being Open Source, another distro was made using its code named CentOS. CentOS has everything that RHEL5 might have, but it lacks commercial support.
If any enterprise may not want to have commercial support, but needs a rock-stable reliable platform to work on, they can go for CentOS, which has the reliability of RHEL5 and the best of all, it’s free. Hence, it is redistributable and inexpensive.

Day V – (Why can’t I use my handmade server?)

If all those compromises weren’t enough, Moon Nanosystems was just about to make another big one. A large pile of resignation letters were on the CEOs desk already and still those execs wanted more…
They started discussing hardware platforms on the fifth day just to see if all the hardware at Moon Nanosystems is compatible with Nanosoft’s Software. Nanosoft discovered that many servers on Moon Nanosystems use a custom made hardware platform called Ultra-CRAPS (reverse the last word to get the joke). This was an unsupported platform from Nanosoft’s side. They once again suggested (read ordered) the execs to change their hardware platform to some thing that gets Nanosoft some revenue. Pleading to compile their software on Ultra-CRAPS was of no use.
Platform support is one the biggest problems in the closed source world. For example – Nanosoft’s software was only designed for some specific commonly used hardware platforms. But the needs of Moon Nanosystems were very different and they wanted to use a custom made hardware platform. Compiling the software code on that hardware would optimize it enough to run on it. It isn’t a very difficult process to give support to multiple hardware platforms.
Open Source on the other hand, has no problem in giving out the source code in order to satisfy the needs of its clients. The client is free to compile and run the program on the platform of his choice. Open Source already supports a dozen hardware platforms already and hence, can be used in the more diverse applications the client has specific to that type of hardware.

Conclusion…

Moon Nanosystems execs finally got fed up signing all those resignation letters and the rants thrown by Nanosoft and Whoracle officials. They ultimately concluded that they were better off without any outsourced management rather than going for such a closed and non-independent system.
Ultimately, it shifted itself to Open Standards and started getting somewhere high and fully credited SourceGorge and other OSS companies for it.

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