Though I've got my doubts about raw fish, there is one thing sushi and raw image post-processing have in common: both imply a certain level of craftsmanship and thus, the hand of a particular creator, as opposed to off the shelf ‘machine made’. So what about this high and mighty moral tone I've been spouting throughout the site? The assurances that, even though I don't like the current setup for, say music cds and the like, I still abide by the business model? In using the dcraw plugin for gimp, what am I “stealing” from Nikon?
In a word, nothing.
My first digital camera was a Kodak, and though it worked well enough for the technology of the time, the wizard and I found it ever more frustrating, because it stored the images in a proprietary format; this meant we were forced to use Kodak's software to initially download and store the pictures I'd taken; only then could we convert them to something useful, like .jpgs or .gifs (this before the submarine patent on .gifs emerged...)
This was bad, for two reasons: one was that the software was only available on windoze, and we preferred to use linux, though at this point we were still maintaining a legacy windoze box for this camera software, Quickbooks and one game I've since given up on (Myst/Riven). Downloading, moving, and changing permissions (since this all had to be done as root) was a royal pain in the ass. Not only that, as I took more pictures, I outran the design of the software, which stumbled ever more badly as time went on. Never, I vowed, would I purchase another camera that locked up my images in their format.
This problem is hardly peculiar to photographers: auto manufacturers and their dealerships are trying to lock out independents like my repairshop by forcing them to purchase extremely expensive diagnostic software (dealerships do not make much money selling cars. They make money fixing cars. Auto manufacturers, for the most part, do not make money from designing cars that are easy to repair—do you begin to see the consequences, here?) Just now a bill is finally going up that would open the standards for the diagnostics for cars. This means not only is my mechanic no longer unfairly penalized, but that you, the tinkerer in the garage who increasingly has been locked out of working on your own vehicle, might in the future as electronics continue to come down in price, have access to the tools and knowledge to fix your own car—just like your grandfather did.
Heady stuff, that.
It is a sad commentary on corporate nature that companies find the temptation to lock their customers in and competition out by whatever means necessary, rather than competing fairly on quality, service and price. My financial records, my writing, my images (my hello! medical records)—my data of any kind—belongs to me. It doesn't belong to Nikon. Nikon is free to offer software to help me process the images I take with their equipment; but I feel, very strongly, that they do not have the right to force me to use their software (let alone windoze!) to access those images in their ‘primitive’, untouched form (that's what a raw image is.)
In fact, so far as I can tell, the boom in RAW image processing by photographers more likely than not owes its surging popularity to the creator of dcraw, who started by hacking his Canon's format, then that of other Canons, then other brands, as people sent him samples and asked him to figure theirs out too—because until then, there simply weren't widely available tools to process this stuff—the manufacturers made the not unnatural assumption that people wouldn't want to bother experimenting with varying algorithms, tuning their systems for the very best performance, preferring instead to use the camera's onboard processing. And in fact most folks don't.
But a few prefer to get under the hood; and now the manufacturers want us to buy only their software for accessing images in this format. (The popular auto analogy is having to buy only Ford brand gasoline for your mustang. That cheap brand across the street isn't allowed.) It's never a good idea to try and corner the entire market, because it's impossible to predict what weird crap people will build on your creations. You can't satisfy all your customers, ’cuz inevitably someone will want some weird feature you never even considered.
It's the old ‘do you want an overall bigger piece of a gigantic pie versus the entire (but much smaller) pie?’ Good business sense, as well as ethics, dictate the former: open formats means a broad range of 3rd party add-ons for niche markets. Customers in those niches add up.
And that is why I would not have even considered purchasing this camera if it hadn't had the hack available. You have the right to keep someone else from copying and selling your product. You do not have the right to tell her what to do with it once she's bought it. This is the difference between stealing a song, and keeping secret the format in which that song is written. (And if you're wondering whether you should worry about your stories, email, financial documents, —all those songs you bought—being locked up...well, that's a very good reason, when Longhorn comes out, to switch to a different OS. Even if you don't go for Open Source, pick one with Open Standards.)
file originally written 12may05
Unless otherwise noted, text, image and objects depicted therein copyright 1996--present sylvus tarn.
