Backup is important, and you can’t always count on the IT department to do it for you, often through no fault of their own. If you’ve ever tried to keep a backup system running for a hundred machines of different types and configurations, you know that even the best solutions work “mostly,” and if a crisis comes when machine 73 of 271 failed its backup, problems occur. I put client data on DVDs several times a week, and before I hand it to them, make sure they have a place for it that isn’t on a desk corner under sales reports and Doritos bags.
Recently I found InfraRecorder which is in pure fairness a clone of Nero, the first CD-burning program to be intuitive enough and to have the right default settings for the average user to quickly be burning CDs. I like InfraRecorder. It’s snappy, stable, and the interface is mostly a clone of Nero’s. I’ve been using InfraRecorder to burn CDs all morning and will use it to replace Nero at home, since I don’t want to pay their software fee.
However, this shows us a dark side of open source software, which is that most of it clones existing software. OpenOffice is a Microsoft Office clone, InfraRecorder clones Nero, Linux clones UNIX, certain text editors that won’t be named clone their commercial variants. The problem I have with this is that what Nero did to CD-burning should reward those who do it, or we’re going to see fewer people wanting to do it. There were CD burners before Nero, but they were disorganized. Their interfaces were awkward, arbitrary or primitive. They didn’t offer sensible features like asking the user certain questions, assuming some things by default and making others that were rarer into menu options. Nero put it all together into one package. Seven years later, InfraRecorder clones that package, adding a few touches of its own, some of which are improvements, some of which are dumb, and some of which are the software interface equivalent of using synonyms to avoid plagiarism.
You and I, dear Reader, probably share some apprehensions about the ownership of property. The fact remains that most of the world is impoverished, and what motivates us to keep striving is the thought that we can carve out a niche of our own and avoid that grim fate. I believe in Open Source, but I also see its dark side, which is that when cloning becomes legal, fewer people are going to be motivated to do the kind of things that got us Nero, Photoshop, and other groundbreaking apps in the first place.