For instant messaging, some people use MSN, some Yahoo Messenger, some AOL, some Skype – and while there are clients that can handle many of these and more, frequently they do so at the cost of not supporting features like video or audio chat, or by having only hazy support for filesharing. In the world of social networking, there are people’s Twitter feeds, their Facebook statuses…and so on and so forth.

To all of which I say, if you will forgive the American imperative, ‘pick a lane!’ I might even add, ‘Dammit! [sic]‘.

Let us compare with email. No one has to run more than one email client: but that is because email is an open standard, that requires no central service to operate, created before anyone had thought to lock users into a proprietary system to sell them advertising.

Back when I was using computers for the first time, there were three basic models for software:

* Shrink-wrapped and very expensive, with onerous sounding End-User Licence Agreements

* Shareware on Magazine Disks – you could use a demo, but had to pay ($20 is the figure that seems to have stuck in my memory) to get a licence code and keep on using the program.

* Free programs, that came with a simple disclaimer and let you copy and share them with your friends. Probably also found on a floppy disk on a magazine.

What I didn’t know about at the time was that a ‘Copyleft’ movement was growing.

The Free Software Foundation are the foremost promoters of a model that says, as far as I understand it, “we want to let you do all the things that copyright law would usually prevent you from doing, we want to to copy, to modify, to distribute our software. But we want to control the way you do it.” Software created in the light of this philosophy runs much of the internet, and parts of the Mac OS operating system.

The FSF are the writers and promoters of a licence called the GPL. For very good reasons, the FSF want the GPL to be a contract. As a contract, it could be hard to enforce and open to challenge: under US law, to enforce it effectively, you would have to show that you have suffered economic damage as a result of a breach.

So the FSF would like Courts to interpret their software licences not as contracts, but as grants of licence. These can be more easily enforced, using the civil and criminal statutes on copyright law which, thanks to international treaties, are ever more standardised.

The problem is that Courts in the US seem not to wish to do this. The GPL – and similar licences – look to them more like a contract than a grant of licence.

And that could be a very big problem for the GPL, because it could render its most important features effectively unenforceable. Since the GPL makes it clear that software can be copied, modified and redistributed freely, courts may decide that there is little economic harm done by those who ignore the other conditions the licence tries to enforce.

Many people have an opinion on this, and the truth is that until there is more case law, especially in the US, who is right and who is wrong will simply not be known. Until then, however, there is a very serious risk that the whole concept of the GPL is holed below the waterline.

The FSF could, of course, re-write the GPL with its status as a contract in mind, but this would make enforceability hard, would mean that the contract law of different jurisdictions would have to be taken into account and – perhaps the biggest hurdle of all – would mean they would have to give up some of their most cherished legal-philosophical positions.

The moral is: be careful about saying that information wants to be free—you may get more than you bargained for.

1. Whether by design or incompetence, Facebook reveals more information to strangers than you think.

2. Your remotely stored documents may be liable to subpoena without your knowledge.

The moral of the story, folks, is Nicholas’ second law of computing:

The fact that you need to enter a password to access your data tells you nothing about who else can access it.

Corollary: passwords provide only peace of mind.

If you didn’t understand a word of that, don’t worry, it just means that you are not a computer-geek (*nix variety, anyway).

But in truth, only a very few of the arguments hold water. Arguments about bandwidth use, or storage costs, could equally well be applied to any number of technologies, not least the web itself. They are the relics of a different era.

Likewise, modern email tools are perfectly able to search HTML or text emails in a way that is transparent to the user. Arguing that email users should not have access to different fonts or colours is much like arguing that they should still be using the word processors of 1987 as well. Aside that from those who work in IT or have a long history with computers, the bulk of email I receive nowadays is HTML, and I am hesitant to continue sending text-only email because outlook express (the default client of much of the world) renders the text in an almost deliberately ugly fashion. While computer purists may protest, there is little point in deliberately making one’s email seem unprofessional.

Most people like to read proportional fonts on the screen, and the only way to ensure your email is displayed in a proportional font by many (very popular) clients is to embrace HTML email. Of course some people send badly designed messages, but arguing that people shouldn’t have access to a tool in case they misuse it is much like saying that CSS or font controls shouldn’t be allowed on the web in case people were to come up with bad designs.

A 19th Century manners book that I happened to see recently advised against using any paper or ink for correspondence that was likely to draw undue attention to itself. That’s still good advice today.

There were probably two reasons for this. The first was that the internet was that much smaller. Content hadn’t been replicated in the numerous places it has now, and searching was probably a more difficult task. Secondly, Google had not yet revolutionised the way search engines organised results.

Today, there must be few who are unfamiliar with Google, and few who do not use it on a regular basis. As the internet historians come to weave their stories, however, they tend to focus on the ways in which Yahoo might have come close to achieving Google’s dominant position.