Mike Lee is a product engineer in the Netherlands.
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For more information about Appsterdam, check out http://appsterdam.rs and follow @appsterdamrs.
As you’ve probably heard, a company called Lodsys claims that use of Apple’s in-app purchasing framework violates their patent. Normally a company like this, commonly known as a patent troll, would go after Apple and everyone who has copied Apple and the world would barely take notice. This time, they’ve decided to go after third-party developers.
To people outside our industry, this might seem like a minor strategy shift, but from an industry perspective, this changes everything. This software patent nonsense has largely been a game played between the giants in our industry. The mom and pop software shop has, for the most part, been left alone.
Now Lodsys claims that, while Apple and the other giants have licensed their technology, those licenses do not apply to third-party developers. Therefore, they claim people who use the in-app purchasing framework owe them additional licensing fees.
The same patent system that has completely failed to protect the iPhone from being copied wholesale is being used to extort its developers. This precedent not only affects patent law, but all of software development.
If using a platform-provided API is not free from the odious weight of software patents, then software development as a cottage industry is no longer practicable. Make no mistake, Lodsys demonstrates that software patents threaten our very way of life.
In an economy where jobs are all people can talk about, software patents have created jobs for no one but lawyers and parasites. On the other hand, unless Apple acts quickly, software patents are about to put some honest craftsmen out of work.
You might think that sounds dramatic. A small cut is not going to kill a thriving business, true, but this is the opening salvo to all-out war. The parasites have taken notice of the goldrush, and would like nothing more than the precedent that allows every modern-day mobster with a patent lawyer on retainer to start cracking nuts.
It is time to abandon the failed experiment of patenting software as fundamentally wrongheaded. Ultimately software is math. Patenting math makes as much sense as patenting rhetorical devices in English. It is as if someone has patented the idea of using a screwdriver. It doesn’t just affect what we create, but our very ability to work.
Beware, my friends, and take serious heed. Unless and until Lodsys and everything they represent are brought to an immediate and permanent end, stormy clouds of a very dark future lie just over the horizon for our entire industry.
I’m a big fan of Freakonomics, but the latest entry on their blog is just silly. It’s like someone noticed a deadline looming and spat an idea onto the page without giving it a second thought.
The essay is about the U.S. government’s recent crackdown on online poker rooms, which rubs the author the wrong way. This leads him to muse on the nature of his reaction, coming up with a “daughter law” which goes like this: if you wouldn’t want your daughter doing something, the government should probably make it illegal. Conversely, if the government unduly limits your daughter’s choices, that’s bad law.
The essay gives several examples, which boil down to this: you wouldn’t want your daughter to be a prostitute, so that’s out, but you’d want her to have access to a safe, legal abortion, so that’s in. You don’t want your daughter to be a drug addict, so that’s out, but you don’t mind her being a poker champion, so that’s in.
Those decisions really seem bound to the way you phrase the question. I would want my daughter to have a safe way to deal with menstrual pain, so I want pot to be legal. That’s easy. What about hard drugs? I don’t want my daughter to be a drug addict, but if, heaven forbid, she became a drug addict, I would want to know her supply was safe, and that her downward spiral would lead to treatment and not prison. So in that sense, I want all drugs to be legal.
On the other hand, I don’t want to have my daughter spend her study time and tuition money playing online poker. I definitely don’t want her flunking out of school while racking up a huge debt to some overseas crime syndicate, who might force her to pay it off with her body. So, clearly online gambling should be illegal.
If that did happen, though, and your daughter did become a prostitute, wouldn’t you want that to also be safe and legal? On the other hand, you definitely don’t want her to become a traffic fatality, so we should probably talk about banning cars. You also want her to have clean air to breathe, which brings us back to banning cars.
Of course, that’s crazy, because it would impact a lot of people who are not your daughter. That’s why law is not based on what’s right for your daughter so much as what’s right for everyone. We call that idea the categorical imperative, which is what the daughter test is a wrongheaded version of.
I expect a lot of back-pedalling in the promised follow-up.
With this latest installment in my series of posts about Appsterdam, I’d like to talk a bit about the weather, and let that lead us into a bit of conversation about Dutch culture and life in the world’s most livable city. I know a lot of you are eager to hear concrete details around things like immigration. We’ll talk more about that next time. Remember: you get three months without a visa. Come for the summer and we’ll have plenty of time to talk when you want to stay.
You may have heard that the weather in Amsterdam is terrible, especially if you’ve been speaking to the Dutch. Having spent quite a bit of time here, I can assure you the climate here is quite nice—this from a guy who grew up in Honolulu. The winter, like the cost of living, is inline with Seattle, but the rest of the year is actually nicer. Plus you have the Europe bonus: if the clouds get you down, you can take a train to nicer weather.
The source of this contradiction lies in Dutch culture. Bitching about the weather is just how one starts a conversation here. It’s always too hot, too cold, too wet, or too windy. The weather is always nicer somewhere else. The prices here aren’t as good as they used to be, and the food here is nothing compared to Paris, and the people, don’t even get me started.
This is what I term the Dutch modesty. The Netherlands has a cultural modesty that rivals Japan. This is important to recognize, because it’s easy for Americans especially to run into this. For example, when you’re speaking at a conference here, you don’t talk about accomplishments. In the States, it’s typical to spend the first five minutes of your talk explaining who you are and what qualifies you to be on stage. In American culture, this is humble, as it doesn’t assume people know who you are, and polite, as you’ve divulged something about yourself.
In the Netherlands, the opposite is true. An American who gets up on stage and starts with a five-minute summary of their résumé comes across as a braggart. Who is this arrogant SOB who feels the need to stand up here and tell us who he is and why we should listen to him? The nerve! I’ve been at conferences where very humble speakers have come off as complete assholes because of this cultural difference.
So when you speak to the Dutch about their homeland, about their culture, their language, and especially their weather, they will spin you great yarns of their inferiority. Still, there are hints of pride at the past glories of the Golden Age. You pick it up around the edges of a conversation. If you really want to force it out, start expounding on the virtues of Germany.
The real tension between the Netherlands and Germany is akin to the tension between the United States and Canada. They have stereotypes of the other as tourists, and sporting matches bring it out more than anything. The one difference is, again, on the edges. When you talk to the Dutch about the subject of Germany, no specific person mind you, but as a concept, you will sometimes hear a hint of bitterness trailing off in something like, “which doesn’t change the fact that they starved us.”
The last battles of World War 2 were fought in the Netherlands. The failure of the Allied offensive “Market Garden” left the Nazi-occupied country in a half liberated state. The efforts of the Dutch resistance, and obvious joy in the hearts of the liberated, agitated the Germans, and they punished harshly those still within their grasp. German-inflicted privation killed 18,000 Dutch citizens over the last winter of the waning war.
To Americans, the last great war is an abstract idea, the subject of documentaries and video games. To Europeans, it’s recent history. May 5th is celebrated in the Netherlands as Liberation Day, preceded the night before by a national ceremony remembering the dead. The entire country observes a two-minute silence at 8 p.m., with bars and restaurants everywhere sometimes bringing in projection equipment to show the broadcast of the ceremony from the national monument in the middle of downtown Amsterdam.
This all happens less than a week after Queen’s Day, which is the Dutch equivalent of Presidents’ Day, except that the party is more like New Year’s Eve, with everyone in the country taking to the streets the night before for 24-hours of revelry. Sales tax is suspended for the day, leading to free markets springing up on every inch of available pavement.
In the days leading up to Queen’s Day, people call dibs on their piece of the pie by drawing a border in tape, usually accompanied by the word BEZET, meaning “reserved,” or more accurately, “occupied.” This is such a cultural phenomenon that Heineken, the Budweiser of Holland, riffs on it in its advertisements.
What I love about Queen’s Day is not that it’s the world’s largest birthday party, but the birthday wish that it fulfills. The point of Queen’s Day is togetherness. It is the one day of the year when we set aside our differences and literally take to the streets to meet our neighbors, embrace our differences, and party our asses off with strangers—all while dressed in bright orange.
One thing: the mascot. How can you not love Andy the Android? It’s the one thing they really got right; the one well executed detail they didn’t just copy over from iOS.
Seeing Droid Charge as the promoted topic on Twitter made me realize what an opportunity they missed with their whole branding.
What if, instead of a Droid Charge, it’s a Charge Droid, another in a long line of cute little robots that do useful things for you.
Smart Phones are for nerds, and iPhones are for nerds in turtlenecks. People love robots, not big scary robots, but cute, slightly buggy robots, like the Star Wars droids from which Droid licensed its name.
George Lucas and his crew get how to make a robot friendly, even lovable. Google and their crew do not.
The robots in the Droid commercials are scary. Disembodied alien arms researching humans using the Minority Report fork of Android. Horrifying.
Ask a nerd to design a robot and he’ll design the perfect killing machine, programmed to punish purveyors of wedgies worldwide.
That’s not the kind of robot people fall in love with. That’s the kind of robot people fear. Getting people to fear technology is not the challenge.
Imagine if a Droid actually looked like Andy, and behaved like him too. Imagine if the Android SDK was for programming an android instead of a cheap iPhone knock-off.
Imagine if Google bought Tapbots, and our children programming robots.
It’s time we had an adult conversation about Appsterdam.
There are a few topics, certain liberties if you will, that people enjoy in the Netherlands, the mention of which tends to attract criticism. Having taken to heart some feedback, and having thought about it quite a bit, I think further explanation is in order.
Let’s talk about three things that are tolerated in the Netherlands that are often anathema in other places: marijuana, prostitution, and homosexuality.
Let’s take it from the top. Amsterdam and San Francisco are the two world capitals of pot. Each plays host to weed and its culture, surrounded by a tolerant state. I think this is an important success factor for both cities, and for two reasons.
First, a lot of people smoke weed. In general, and as opposed to alcohol, it helps people put aside their differences and get along—or at least chill the heck out. This is especially true in our industry. In northern California, weed is like aspirin, good for any number of ailments, from anxiety to angina. I’ve heard engineers refer to it as brain coolant, a social lubricant preferable to alcohol, and a vital part of the development cycle.
Second, marijuana is relatively harmless. The science is in, and it shows us that THC is a naturally occurring chemical that is self-regulating and nearly impossible to overdose on. This is something we co-evolved with, which grows everywhere, and which wasn’t any kind of big deal until the last century. It’s stupid to waste time on weed when alcohol is both legal and worse—especially in places with real scourges, like meth.
If you’re not down with the chronic, you’ll be pleased to know that weed is a lot less ubiquitous in Amsterdam than in San Francisco. Because it’s freely available, most natives grow out of it, and consider smoking pot something for teenagers to do before graduating to drinking alcohol. Even during the Cannabis Cup, you’d have to be in a coffee shop to notice. You smell weed on the street here once in a while, but far less often than you do in San Francisco.
Then there’s legal prostitution, which is awesome. That last sentence gets me in trouble, because people think I’m saying prostitution is awesome, which is not at all what I am saying. Prostitution is an unfortunate reality in an imperfect world, but having seen it on both sides of the law, I have to tell you that legal prostitution is way, way better.
In the Netherlands, prostitutes pay the same taxes for the same rights and protections as any worker. They have health care, sick pay, and a pension plan. You can move out of prostitution into another industry and have a career, the same as anybody else. Resources saved by not fighting victimless crime are diverted into fighting real crime, like human trafficking.
I feel the same way about soliciting prostitutes as you probably do: you don’t want to pay for sex, because once you’ve paid for sex, you’re a person who has paid for sex. That being said, who am I to feel high and mighty? I’ve had to do work I wasn’t particularly thrilled about, and busting hump throwing bags for a living is no less selling your body. It makes me happy to see a system that works according to logical principles with the expected decrease in human misery, and the red light district here exemplifies that.
What all this means to you is that there is no bad part of town in Amsterdam, no sketchy few blocks where people go to score dope and find hookers. The red light district is, if anything, safer than the rest of Amsterdam, without any of the grossness typically seen in other cities. For adult couples, it can actually be a nice time, and it keeps all that sort of thing in one small place. Your children aren’t going to run into prostitutes anywhere else in the city.
The Netherlands is a testament to what happens when you stop trying to legislate morality. Rather than everything going to hell, the quality of life in general improves, and crime goes down. While the Netherlands is closing prisons for lack of crime, the United States imprisons more people than any other nation. Now tell me who’s wrong about legal prostitution.
On no point does this ring truer than homosexuality. While Americans have their legal right to be together dangled in front of them and batted around like a congressional cat toy, the Netherlands legalized same-sex civil unions a decade ago. Unlike in the United States and much of the world, nobody around here really cares who you love. Your business is your business. As long as you’re not hurting anybody else, you’re free to live your life.
This is the Dutch tolerance that has been the key to Amsterdam’s growing prosperity over the past several centuries. It is what makes this such a nice place, where people from different backgrounds can come together and learn from each other, share food, and laugh at each other’s differences with a spirit of good humor and togetherness.
Tolerance is a two-way street. Being tolerated is easy. Being tolerant can be a challenge. None of us are as color-blind or as free from prejudice and we’d like to believe. Being part of a tolerant society means not only giving up your biases, but also giving up on being offended.
You have to learn to let things go. If somebody does something that rubs you the wrong way, that seems odd, or that annoys you, swallow your feelings, work that grimace into a smile, and laugh.
