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Software and Community in the Early 21st Century
Keynote at
Plone Conference 2006, |
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INTRODUCTION - [Paul
Everitt:] This
is day three of by far the best Plone/Zope/Python/whatever conference that
any of us have ever been to, I
know that we’ve said it a thousand times, but we love you, ONE/Northwest, thank you for making this
happen, this is just special. For
this year’s 2006 conference, our keynoter is professor Eben Moglen, the
long‐time counsel
for Free Software Foundation, the founder
of Software Freedom Law Center, and
faculty member at Columbia University. I believe you’ve given 125,000 speeches,
and so I’m sure that 124,000 of those
introductions were better than anything my feeble mind can come up with, so
instead of talking about you, I’m
going to talk about us. I
was going to talk about myself, but… Some
of us are the creators of software that we give
away for the public good. Some
of us, particularly at this conference, particularly in the non‐profit sector, use
this software for the public
good. For example, Oxfam Great
Britain, great friends of
ours, they have people who
actually are on the ground in Africa doing good things for humanity. Both
of us, both the creators and the consumers, are bound together in this
activity, in this community, based on a conversation and a
set of ideas where we want to
be, instead of rec… We don’t want you to be recipients of our
software, we want you to be participants in our software. And that’s a very big change of ideas, a
change of position, change of rights. What’s wonderful about this is that we’re only able to have this conversation and to do these kinds of things based on the people who came before us.
We are the beneficiaries of people that have created this set of ideas, this system to put it into action. We
have, fortunately, we have someone today who has spent decades doing
this, putting these thoughts into action, doing things, really getting real
things done. So it is with
great joy for us, that I
introduce Professor Eben Moglen. [Applause] PRESENTATION: [Eben Moglen:] I want to talk about the piece
of our common lives that Paul is pointing at, these
rules, these methods of living together around software, and I want to try
and explain what I think their larger moral and economic meaning is. It is both a moral and an
economic analysis – it has to be. It began as a moral question, it remains a
moral question, but it becomes along the way also a window into the economic
organization of human society in the 21st
century. If you think about the 20th
century economy out of which we are passing, its primary underlying
commodity was steel.
The making of steel was the 20th century root activity. And societies
measured themselves substantially by their success in producing steel. It was
the first sign of the reawakening of Europe as an
economic entity after the devastation of the
second world war. What we now think of as the European
Union and we thought of for a while as the European Economic Commission, and before
that as the Common Market, began as you may recall under
Jean
Monnet as the Coal and Iron Union. to bring
back the European industrial economy. The Asian Tigers began to claim for themselves
rising importance in the world economy when they began producing noticeable
amounts of steel. And when Máo Zédōng tried to imagine an alternative form
of economic development for The People’s Republic of China in the Great Leap Forward, his best thought was backyard steel furnaces. So that was how the
20th century thought about collaboration in the economy: It made steel, and
from steel it made the rest of what the 20th century possessed, for the
exploration of the environment and the control of nature for human benefit. The 21st century economy is not
undergirded by steel. The 21st century economy is undergirded by software,
which is as crucial as the underlying element in economic development in the
21st century as the the production of steel ingots was in the 20th. We have
moved to a societal structure in this country, are moving elsewhere in
the developed world, will continue to move, throughout the developing
economies, towards economies whose primary underlying commodity of production
is software. And the good news is that nobody owns it. The reason that this is good
news requires us to go back to a moment in the past in the development of the
economies of the west, before steel. What was, after all,
characteristic of the economy before steel, was the slow, persistent,
motivated expansion of European societies and European economies out into the
larger world – for both much evil and much good – built around the possession
of a certain number of basic technological improvements, mostly to naval,
transportation, and armament. All of which was undergirded by a control of
mathematics, superior to the control of mathematics available in other
cultures around the world. There are lots of ways we could conceive the great
European expansion, which redescribed human beings’ relationship to the
globe, but one way to put it is “They had the best math.”, and nobody owned
that, either. Imagine, if you will, for a
moment, a society in which mathematics has become property, and it’s owned
by people. Now, every time you want to do anything useful, build a house,
make a boat, start a bridge, devise a market, move objects weighing certain
numbers of kilos
from one place to another, your first stop is at the mathematics store, to
buy enough mathematics to complete the task which lies before you. You can
only use as much arithmetic at a time as you can afford, and it is difficult
to build a sufficient inventory of mathematics, given its price, to have any
extra on hand. You can predict, of course, that the mathematics sellers will
get rich. And you can predict that every other activity in society, whether
undertaken for economic benefit or for the common good, will pay taxes in the
form of mathematics payments. The productization of knowledge
about computers, the turning of software into a product, was for a short, crucial
period of time at the end of the 20th century the dominant element in
technological progress. Software was owned. You could do what
you could afford, and you could accomplish what somebody else’s
software made possible. To contain within your own organization a sufficient
inventory of adaptable software to be able to meet new circumstances flexibly
was more expensive than any but the largest organizations, seeking private
benefit in the private economy, could afford to pay. We are moving to a world in
which, in the 21st century, the most important activities that produce occur
not in factories, and not by individual initiative, but in communities held
together by software. It is the infrastructural importance of software
which is first important in the move to the post‐industrial
economy. It isn’t that software is itself a thing of value, that’s
true. It isn’t that applications produce useful end point activities or
benefit real people in their real lives, though that’s true. It is that
software provides alternate modes of infrastructure and transportation.
That’s crucial, in economic history terms. Because the driving force in
economic development is always improvement in transportation. When things
move more easily and more flexibly and with less friction from place to
place, economic growth results, welfare improvements occur. They occur most
rapidly among those who have previously been unable to transport value into
the market. In other words, infrastructure improvement has a tendency to
improve matters for the poor more rapidly than most other forms of investment
in economic development. Software is creating roadways that bring people who
have been far from the center of human social life to the
center of human social life. Software is making people adjacent to one
another who have not been adjacent to one another. And with a little bit of
work, software can be used to keep software from being owned. In other words,
software itself can lift the software tax. That’s where we now are. At
that moment, on that cusp. In this neighborhood, at this
moment, the richest and most deeply funded monopoly in the history of the
world is beginning to fail. Within another few months the causes of its
failure will be apparent to everybody, as they are now largely apparent to
the knowledgeable observers of the industry who expect trouble for Microsoft.
The very engineering limits of trying to make software that you own
work as well as software that the community produces, are becoming apparent. It used to be suggested that eventually
software produced without ownership relations might achieve
superiority beyond that of software produced by proprietary producers. It
used to be argued that that might eventually happen. When those of us
who had some theoretical experience in this area said: “Why do you think it’s
only going to happen eventually? It’s happened already.”, people had a
tendency to point at the monopoly products and show the ways in which they
are still, one way or another, better: “You see, you can’t do it.”. The browser,
as we are all aware, is a pretty crummy piece of software, right? It’s
commodity activity, nowadays, browsers. And Microsoft has written some browsers.
And they have been working on the browser they just released for years. And
now they have announced what their best browser at present levels of
engineering investment can be. And on the day of its release, it is less good
than the unowned competitor, produced by, who? What? Where? When? On the day
of its release. What is being seen this week,
next week, the week after, about Internet Explorer version 7 will soon be seen
about operating system kernels, file
systems, desktop and window
management, and all the other commoditized parts of a client side operating
system at which we are now operating to produce superior software at
infinitely lower price. We are still – only partially, of course, but we are still
a capitalist society. And when someone entrenched, no matter how deeply, is
producing overtly inferior goods at three orders of magnitude higher price,
or infinitely higher price, the event, or the outcome of the event is
obvious. Ownership of software as a way of producing software for general
consumption is going out, for economic reasons. But as I said,
the economic insight that we can get from watching the transition from steel
to software is far less important than the moral analysis of
the situation. The moral analysis of the
situation presents where we are now as, if I may borrow a phrase, a
singularity in human affairs. One of the grave problems of human inequality
for everyone who has attempted to ameliorate the problem of human inequality
– which is most thinkers about the morality of social life – the gravest
problem of human inequality is the extraordinary difficulty in prizing wealth
away from the rich to give it to the poor, without employing levels of
coercion or violence which are themselves utterly corrosive of social
progress. And repeatedly in the course of the history of our human societies,
well‐intentioned, enormously determined and
courageous people, willing to sacrifice their lives for an improvement in the
equality of human life, have had to face that problem. We cannot make
meaningful redistribution fast enough to retain momentum politically without
applying levels of coercion or violence which will destroy what we are
attempting. And again and again, as Isaiah
Berlin and other late 20th century political theorists pointed out,
through hubris, through arrogance, through romanticism, through self‐deception, parties seeking permanent human benefit and an increase in the
equality of human beings have failed that test, and watched as their
movements of liberation spiraled downward from the poison of excess coercion. We do not have to do that
anymore. The gate that has held the
movements for equalization of human beings strictly in a dilemma between
ineffectiveness and violence has now been opened. The reason is that we have
shifted to a zero marginal cost world. As steel is replaced by
software, more and more of the value in society becomes non‐rivalrous – it can be held by many without costing anybody more than if
it is held by a few. In the English‐speaking world – and it was primarily in the English‐speaking world, in Scotland, in North
America, at the outer edges of the British
Empire – we moved towards a system of universal public education in the course of the 18th
and 19th
centuries. Protestant north Now we live in a different world,
for the first time. All the basic knowledge, all the refined
physics, all the deep mathematics, everything of beauty, in
music, in the visual arts, all of literature, all of the video
arts of the 20th century can be given to everybody, everywhere, at essentially
no additional cost beyond the cost it required to make the first copy. And so
we face in the 21st century a very basic moral question: If you could make as many
loaves of bread as it took to feed the world by baking one loaf and pressing
a button, how could you justify charging more for bread than the poorest
people could afford to pay? If the marginal cost of bread is zero, then the
competitive market price should be zero too. But leaving aside any question
of microeconomic theory, the moral question “What
should be the price of what keeps someone else alive if it costs you nothing
to provide it to him?” has only one unique answer: There is no moral justification
for charging more for bread that costs nothing, than the starving can
pay. Every death from too little bread, under those circumstances, is murder.
We just don’t know who to charge for the crime. We live there now. This is both an extraordinary
achievement and a very pressing challenge. There were good reasons after 1789 to be a little doubtful about the wisdom
of revolution. Because revolution meant the coercive redistribution, likely
to spiral downward in the well‐known way. In the economy of steel,
people who make steel become workers. They have little individuality. They
are reckoned as workers in an industrial army. And as Marx
and others like him pointed out in the middle of the 19th century, that is
largely likely to lead to the model, internally, of political progress
through a clash of armies. We don’t live there anymore. We find ourselves now in a very
different place. You live there, I live there, my other clients live there.
It’s a place in which the primary infrastructure is produced by sharing.
The primary technology of production is unowned. The effectiveness of
that mode of production in the broader society is now established. Plus or
minus the couple more years left before Microsoft fails entirely, we have now
proven either the adequacy or the final superiority, in
crass economic terms, of the way we make things. We have brought forward,
now, the possibility of distributing everything that every
public education system uses, freely, everywhere, to everyone;
true universal public education for the first time. We have shown how our software,
plus commodity hardware, plus the electromagnetic spectrum that nobody
owns, can build a robust, deep mesh
structured communications network which can be built out in poor parts of
the world far more rapidly than the 20th century infrastructures of broadcast
technology and telephone. We have begun proving the
fabric of a 21st century society which is egalitarian in its nature, and
which is structured to produce, for the common benefit, more effectively than
it can produce for private, exclusive, proprietary benefit. We are solving
epical problems. We are introducing new
possibilities based upon new technological arrangements to deal with the fundamental
political difficulties that we have coped with and our predecessors, in
seeking equality and justice, have coped with for generations. We are very lucky. We live at a
time when technological progress and the pressure for human justice are
coming together in a way which can produce fundamental satisfactions that
have eluded us for centuries, but in that luck there comes responsibility: We
need to get it done. There are other people with
other views. We are not everybody. The other views assume that this
technology, too, can be shaped to support hierarchy. That it can be shaped to
support ownership. That it can be shaped not only to ignore the moral
question I have put forward, but to make that moral question invisible
to almost everybody, forever. The folks on the other side are
also very powerful. They look way more powerful than we. They are also quite
clearsighted. They, also, understand that there is an epical openness here,
and they have no more intention of giving up what they claim as theirs now,
than they ever have had. The dystopic possibilities of where we live are
nontrivial. If you imagine, right now, a flood of billions of dollars of
consumer products moving towards you in containers from the east, containing
devices that use all this software we have made, but lock it down so no one may tinker with it. So
that if you try and exercise the freedoms that it gives you, your
movies don’t play anymore, your music won’t sing, you books will erase
themselves, your textbooks will go back to the warehouse unless you pay next
semester’s tuition to the textbook publishers, and so on. The magic of this technology is
that it can be used for the great ideal of capitalist distribution: never
actually give anybody anything, just as it can be used for our
fundamental purpose, which is: Always give everybody everything. And so, in fact, we now find
ourselves in a more polarized place than usual. Not because Paris is
starving. Not even because the lettres de cachet have grown so horrifying to
the population. On the contrary, this population has never been less
horrified by putting people in jail without charges and keeping them there forever
than it ever has been in the past. The reason that we now face a more than
usually polarized circumstance is that the sides that have confronted one
another over equality and social justice for generations are now more evenly
matched than they have ever been before. You and I, and the people who
came before us, have been rolling a very large rock uphill a very long time.
We wanted freedom of knowledge in a world which didn’t give it, which burned people for their religious or
scientific beliefs. We wanted democracy, by which we meant, originally, the
rule of the many by the many, and the subjection of today’s rulers to the force
of law. And we wanted a world in which distinctions among persons were based
not on the color of skin, or even the content of character, but just the
choices that people make in their own lives. We wanted the poor to have
enough, and the rich to cease to suffer from the diseases of too much. We
wanted a world in which everybody had a roof, and everybody had enough to
eat, and all the children went to school. And we were told, always, that it
was impossible. And our efforts to make it happen turned violent on their
side or on ours many more times than we can care to think for. Now we’re in a different spot.
Not because our aims have changed. Not because the objectives of what we do
have changed, but because the nature of the world in which we inhabit technologically
has altered so as to make our ideas functional in new and noncoercive ways.
We have never in the history of free
software, despite everything that has been said by lawyers and flacks and
propagandists on the other side, we have never forced anybody to free any
code. I have enforced the GPL since 1993. Over most
of that time I was the only lawyer in the world enforcing the GPL. I did not
sue, because the courts were not the place for the ragtag revolution, in its
early stage, to win pitched battles against the other side. On the contrary,
in the world we lived in only ten or fifteen years ago, to have been forceful
in the presentation of our legal claims would have meant failure even if we
won, because we would have been torn to pieces by the contending powers of
the rich. On the contrary, we played very shrewdly, in my judgement now, as I
look back on the decisions that my clients made – I never made them – we
played very shrewdly. When I went to work for Richard Stallman in 1993, he said to me at the
first instruction over enforcing the GPL: “I have a rule: You must never let
a request for damages interfere with a settlement for compliance.” I thought about that for a moment,
and I decided that that instruction meant that I could begin every telephone
conversation, with a violator of the GPL, with magic words: “We don’t want
money.” When I spoke those words, life got simpler. The next thing I said was: “We
don’t want publicity.” The third thing I said was: “We
want compliance. We won’t settle for anything less than compliance,
and that’s all we want. Now I will show you how to make that ice in
the wintertime.” And so they gave me compliance, which had been defined
mutually as ice in the wintertime. But as all of those of us who are about to
live with less ice in the wintertime than we used to have will soon know, ice
in the wintertime can be good if you collect enough of it. And we did. We collected enough
of it that people out there who had money to burn said: “Wait a minute, this
software is good, we won’t have to burn money over it. And not only is this
software good as software, these rules are good, because they’re not
about ambulance chasing. They’re not about a quick score, they’re not about
holding up deep pockets, they’re about real cooperation between people
who have a lot and people who have an idea. Why don’t we go in for that?” And within a very short period
of time, they had gone in for that, and that’s where we live now. In a
world in which the resources of the wealthy came to us not because we coerced
them, not because we demanded, not because we taxed, but because we shared.
Even with them, sharing worked better than suing or coercing. We were not
afraid, we didn’t put up barbed wire, and so when they came to scoff, they
remained to pray. And now the force of what we are is too strong for a really
committed, really adversary, really cornered, really big
monopoly to do anything about, at all. That’s pretty good work, in a short
period of time that you all did. You changed the balance of power in a tiny
way. But when you look at it against the long background of the history of
who we are and what we want, it was an immense strategic victory, and not a
small tactical engagement. Now, as usual, when you win a
small tactical engagement that turns out to be a large strategic victory, you
have to consolidate the gains, or the other side will take them back. So we are
now moving into a period in which what we have to do is to consolidate the
gains. We have to strengthen our own understanding about what our community
can do. I want to go back to the thing I said at the beginning – In the 21st
economy, production occurs not in factories or by people, but in communities.
eBay is a
pretty decent way of organizing a community to sell and buy stuff and empty
garages. And it is doing a pretty fair job of that. MySpace, Friendster
– nevermind who owns, nevermind what’s indended, nevermind the pedophiles –
it’s a pretty good way of dealing with an extraordinary deep and important
problem that most societies have to cope with, which is how to give old
children becoming young adults some way of experiencing their independent
identity in the world. How to give them a way to say: “Here I am, this is
what I am, this is what I feel, this is what is going on in my life.” It has
produced a lot of bad adolescent poetry, it has produced a lot of risqué
photography and self‐portraits in states of deshabille
. But it is also dealing with a thing which has sometimes been known to cause
suicide, and which shouldn’t be taken quite so lightly. It is not a small
thing if you feel yourself to be a really isolated teenager living and
working in a part of the world that doesn’t understand you at all, to know
that you can have tens of thousands of people around the world immediately
available to you who know what you’re feeling and who can provide the kind of
support that you need. That’s actually social service work of a very
deep and important kind. We are making communities that produce good outputs,
and other people are looking at them as business models where eyeballs are
located. Up to a point, that’s acceptable, and when the tipping point is
reached it isn’t anymore, and that’s the kind of activity which is now
our political challenge. To understand how to manipulate those processes – as
we all can, because we make the technology – how to manipulate those processes
so as to gain the social benefit and reduce the possibility of power
discrepancies developing that neutralize the very kinds of social justice
outcomes we are looking for. This is possible to do. It not only work for lawyers. Mary
Lou Jepsen’s inventions in connection with the display of the One Laptop Per Child box will turn out to be
of enormous importance to the world. The One Laptop Per Child box – which
I’ve spent a lot of time helping with this past year, and which everybody in
this room ought to be thinking about hard, because it’s a great moment in
human technological history – the One Laptop Per Child box has a few
requirements that are really important for computers in the 21st century:
One, a child has to be able to take it apart safely. Two, you have to be able
to generate electricity for it by pulling a string. Three, it has to be
culturally accessible to people who live in a whole lot of different places
around the world, speak different languages, have different world views, have
different understandings of what a computer is, or might be, or could be, or
what this thing is that their children are holding. It has to be
discoverable. It has to be a place for a child to explore indefinitely and
learn new things in all the time. I just want to concentrate on
the first parts: It has to be something you can pull a string to power, and
it has to be something a child can take apart safely. No existing LCD panel meets those needs, because
every existing LCD panel in the world uses a mercury backlight, which runs on high
voltage, which is dangerous, and which contains toxic chemicals – the mercury
itself, of course. So how about a display which gives you transmissive color,
beautiful color, indoors, and high contrast black and white in full sunlight,
so that it can be used in every natural environment, and which consumes per
unit area one tenth of the electricity used by standard current LCD panel
displays. How about that it doesn’t have any harmful substances in it, can be
safely disassembled and reassembled by a child, down to its components, so
that field replacement of almost anything can occur, and is, in addition,
cheap to manufacture. So, we’re going to give an
enormous gift to all the cell phone and gadget manufacturers of the world out
of OLPC, which is why Quanta, the largest manufacturer of laptops in
the world, and the display manufacturers throughout the pacific rim are
screaming to be first or second sources of the OLPC display. Because the
patents in there are worth sharing. In other words, the free world
now produces technology whose ability to reorient power in the larger
traditional economy is very great. We have magnets, we can move the iron
filings around. We can also change the infrastructure of social life – that
OLPC is every textbook on earth, that OLPC is a free MIT education, that OLPC
is a hand powered thick mesh router. When you close the lid, as a kid, and put it on
the shelf at night, the main CPU shuts down, but the 802.11
gear stays running all night long on that last few pulls of the string, and
it routes packets,
all night long – it keeps the mesh. The village is a mesh when the kids have
green, or purple or orange boxes. And all you need is a downspout somewhere,
and the village is on the net. And when the village is on the net, everybody
in the village is a producer, of something: Services, knowledge, culture,
art, YouTube
TV? The week that Rodney
King was beaten in Los Angeles, I was on the telephone
with a friend of mine who does police brutality cases in Dallas,
and he said to me: “You know what the difference is between That was a long time ago. There’s no place on earth with
too few video cameras anymore. Right? The gadget makers took care of that. Now, what is journalism like
when every village has a video camera and is on the net? What is diplomacy
like? What’s it mean if the next time somebody starts some nasty little genocide
in some little corner of the earth the United States Government
would prefer to ignore, that there’s video all over the place, all the time,
in every living room? What’s is mean when children around the world are
networking with one another over the issues that concern them directly,
without intermediation – everybody to everybody – saying: “Do you have what
we need? How come you have what we need? How come we can’t do what you can
do? Because your father’s rich? Because we’re dark? Because we live down
here?” Globalization has been treated
up ’til now as a force which primarily puts ownership in the saddle. Maybe.
Maybe. But the One Laptop Per Child seems to me to consolidate some of our
strategic gains, which is why I’m in favor of pressing hard for it, and
things like it. Now let me come back to the stuff we have in common in this
room. Community, I have said – not an original thought – is powerful. The
network makes community out of software, but some software is better at
producing community than other software. GCC is a really useful thing, but it
doesn’t produce community. In fact, if anything, GCC has been known to produce
the opposite of community. And this is not a joke about compiler
guys either, right? The Perl interpreter, which is a fine thing,
produces rather little community too, and the community it produces is, what
shall we say, a little inward looking. [Laughter] There are other kinds of
software which produce community in a very different way and you know what
that’s like, ’cause you work on one of those corners. Right? The problem that
I have with things called Content management systems is that they’re
systems for managing content, which is not very important. Community building
software, however, is very important. I’m trying to do a little thing this
year called making GPL3, which is actually more about having a lot of
discussions with a lot of very different people around the world,
about what they think free software licensing ought to be like and why they
don’t like Stallman. The latter is not the subject I go out to talk about,
it’s just what they talk about no matter what I do about it. It’s an attempt
to create a kind of broad global community of people who care about a thing
that they all take very seriously, and they do take it very seriously,
you understand, right? When guys fly from Germany to India to
participate in their second international conference on GPL3, you know
they really care. So, I’ve been talking to a lot
of different people in a lot of different forms, some of them like IRC, some of them produce formal documents,
some of them are telephone types. That’s all held together by Plone. That’s many different
overlapping communities held together by software for making communities.
It’s related to Voice over IP through Asterisk, which changes my life as a lawyer
completely. Those of you who haven’t discovered what free software can do to
IP telephony, you have a great discovery headed your way. And we made
a little bit of software of our own for for dealing with a
thing that, it turned out, there was no existing tool for that we really
liked, namely some austere simple interface for marking up one document in a very,
very, very multiplicitous way, with tens of thousands of possible
commentators. So that everybody participating can see what everybody else has
done in some manageable way, and can intervene in the process in a thoughtful
fashion, tied to some particular phrase, or word, or piece of a document that
concerns them. Before we started this
activity, I read lots and lots of commentary that said: “As soon as FSF tries to do this it’s going to
dissolve into a flamewar. As soon as anybody attempts to do
this, it’s just going to become Slashdot
all the time.” It wasn’t like that. it hasn’t been like that. Even Slashdot
hasn’t been like that. That’s not the way it went. Of course there was
lots of stuff said that I regret, some of it was said by very big people,
much of it was said by Forbes. But that wasn’t the problem, right? The
coherence of the community, a community which includes Ubuntu users in Soweto as
well as IBM,
includes developers in Kazakhstan as well as Hewlett‐Packard,
includes people who have thousands of patents
as well as people who don’t know what a patent is, that conversation
has gone, I think, remarkably peaceably and quite constructively, for a
period now of about ten months. Twenty years from now, the
scale of our consultation over GPL is going to seem tiny, the tools we used
are going to seem primitive. The community we built to discuss the license is
going to look like a thing a six year old could put together without taking
more than a couple of breathers around it. And yet, that’s only going to be
because our sophistication in global coordination of massive social movements
is going to be so good. You do not see Microsoft out conducting a global
negotiation over what the EULA for Vista
should say. And even if they were minded to do it, they couldn’t. Because
they’re not organized for community, they’re organized for hierarchical
production an selling. I have heard a lot of stuff from people who thought
that Richard Stallman was a problem, but ask yourself this: “If the GPL
process had been run by Steve Ballmer…” Right? So, we are learning, in
very primitive ways, within our community, how to build large globegirdling
organizations for a special purpose for a short period of time to engage
people constructively in deliberation, and we are learning how to do that
despite vast cultural and economic discrepancies in the assets of the
participants. That’s 21st century politics – Plone makes it. But it isn’t what you have,
it’s what you do with it. So we have some remarkable
opportunities, all of us. We have a very special place in the history of the
campaign for social justice. We have some very special infrastructure. We
have new means of economic development available to us. We have got proof of
concept, we have got running code. That’s all we ever need. But we need
prudence. We need good judgment. We need a willingness to take risks at the
right places in the right time. We need to be uncompromising about principle,
even as we are very flexible about modes of communication. We need to be very
good at making deals, and we need to be very clear, absolutely
clear, without any ability of variance at the bottom line about what
the deals are for, where we are going, what the objective
is. If we know that what we are trying to accomplish is the spread of
justice and social equality through the universalization of access to
knowledge, if we know that what we are trying to do is to build an economy of
sharing which will rival the economies of ownership at every point where they
directly compete, if we know that we are doing this as an alternative to
coercive redistribution, that we have a third way in our hands for dealing
with long and deep and painful problems of human injustice, if we are conscious
of what we have, and know what we are trying to accomplish, this
is the moment when, for the first time in lifetimes, we can get it
done. We do not need revolutions in
which the have‐nots dispossess the haves right now. But
we are under pressure. There are a lot of people in the world, there is not a
lot extra to eat, there is not a lot of excess clean water to drink. Minds
are being thrown away by hundreds of millions in a world where people are
trapped in subsistence crisis that is now avoidable, and their ability to
think, and create, and be is stunted forever. The climate is changing beneath
our feet, the air is changing above our heads, and as the fossil fuel system
decays, the inequalities and power discrepancies and authoritarianisms that
grew up around the oil business in the 20th century are going to do us real
harm. So we have great opportunities, we have great challenges, the upside is
the highest it has been in generations and the downside is not too pleasant.
That means there’s a great deal of work to be done. Oddly enough, it’s not painful.
It consists of doing neat stuff and sharing it. You’ve been successful at it
already, beyond anybody’s expectations and beyond most people’s dreams. “More
of the same” is a good prescription here. But a little more political
consciousness about it, and a little more attempt to get other people to
understand not just what, but why, would help a lot. Because
people are getting used to the what: “Oh yeah, Firefox,
I use it all the time.” “Why?” “Why, ’cause the Internet…” “No, no, no, no,
no, no, no, not why do you use it, why does it exist?” “Oh, I
don’t know, some… people did it.” [Laughter] OK. That’s the moment,
all right, that’s the moment, that’s the one where that annoying Stallman
voice should enter the mind, OK: “Free as in freedom”, “Free as in freedom”. Tell
people it’s free as in freedom. Tell them that if you don’t tell
them anything else, because they need to know. We’ve spent a long time
hunting for freedom. Many of us lost our lives trying to get it, more than
once. We have sacrificed a great deal for generations, and the people who
have sacrificed most, we honor most, when we can remember them. And some of them
have been entirely forgotten. Some of us are likely to be forgotten too. And
the sacrifices that we make aren’t all going to go with monuments and honors,
but they’re all going to contribute to the end; the end is a good end if we
do it right. We have been looking for freedom for a very long time, the
difference is: this time, we win. Thank you very much.
I need to go back to New
York City, but I would like to take some questions. I’ve talked too long
and heard too little. So I want to spend a little time. Questions? Yes. I’ll
repeat them so that they can be heard. QUESTION: [Eben Moglen:] Well, the usual way of dealing
with that question is through what we call licenses, which are statements of
rights and obligations concerning creative works. And whatever you may think
about ownership structures, copyright exclusivities, it’s a good idea to
attach permissions and restrictions or requirements to works of creation so
that people know how to deal with them respectfully. This is why my dear
friend Larry Lessig has spent so much time attempting
to evolve a social structure which could form an umbrella for a series of
instructions that people can usefully give about works of their creation. The
Creative Commons idea is an attempt to face
the question you are asking. If we are going to move to a world in which
content is created by community, rather than hierarchicly, through ownership
and work for hire structures, we’re going to have to have a system for giving
and explaining creators’ understandings about their works, in a defined clear
operable, administrable fashion. And it was that insight which led Lessig to
go where he went. Now there are lots of
controversies surrounding the particulars of the Creative Commons’
implementation of that idea – Larry would say: “And there should be, because
it’s a new thing, politically, and it should be heavily discussed.”. In the
long run, though, that’s where we are going, towards an evolution of a series
of free licenses that allow people to share all the things that they
create with the same degree of effectiveness that some licenses have
allowed software to be shared. I think that work is but years from
completion now, maybe even less than that, because so much force is behind
the question. So I think that’s how we solve it. QUESTION: [Eben Moglen:] It could conceivably be the
case that those who enhance shared software and never distribute their
enhanced versions but merely provide services over it, maybe, those people
are playing fair. Maybe that’s OK, maybe it isn’t, right? So the first
question is, have we reached consensus on the underlying policy goal? I think
the answer is “No”. I have believed for about five
years, since this this particular point began to become obviously important,
I have believed that there might be an evolution towards a consensus;
I still see none. There is a, I would say, predominant view, even in
the developer community, let alone in the user community, that that’s a
perfectly OK thing to have happen. The reason is that developers take the
right of private modification very seriously. And the Free Software
Foundation does, too; the right of private modification’s an important right.
Compelling people to disclose work that they do on software is not a good
outcome, even if the software they start from is shared. So the question becomes less, I
think, “Are the people who provide services over privately modified software
doing something wrong?”; the question becomes: “What is the right of a
user of a service enabled by software, and is that different from the right
of someone who has received a copy of her own of a computer program?” I think
it is reasonable to draw an ethical distinction between somebody who walks up
to an ATM, and somebody who receives a copy
of a program which could be used to run an ATM. How far that ethical
difference extends and what the ruleset ought to be, I think is still
unclear. GPL3 offers a compromise: It
offers to be compatible with a license which is like the GPL
but which contains the opposite rule, that is to say, services provided over
modified versions lead to a requirement to release the modifications. I
suspect that if that proposal becomes part of the final GPL3, as it is
currently slated to do, that there will be a fairly small number of
developers who will write programs which are marked in the relevant
way: “If you modify this and provide services you have to release the mod’s.”
I think those programs will get very small commercial use, because commercial
users will by and large not like that rule and avoid software published under
it, and so we will in effect wind up with a certain amount of remote service
provision software under that rule with very little technical uptake in
commercial life. That would not result in much additional rights for users,
because most of the software users will be interacting with from day to day
won’t be covered by those rules. That doesn’t seem to me an outcome that is
bad in itself, but it also doesn’t seem to me an outcome that it’s very
important to shed blood for. So I have entered into the GPL3
process thinking that either outcome might eventuate. Linus
Torvalds, if I might just say so for a moment, says this is a very bad
idea and it shouldn’t be done, and it’s part of the reason he doesn’t like
the license. We are listening, carefully, to everybody, including Linus
Torvalds.
[Eben Moglen:] Yes, that’s right. Let me take
one intermediate step, Jon, before I get to the end
that you reached. As you may have noticed, Internet Explorer 7 “solves” the phishing
problem. No more phishing! Every time you type a URL into the location bar of the
browser, it sends it to a Microsoft server, and says: “Is this phishing?”. [Laughter] And you’ve got to admit that
this is a new solution to that problem, right? I hadn’t thought of it before.
Maybe Google
had thought of it and Microsoft wanted to get there first. Right, it’s
correct, software is really good at one thing, software is really good
at saying “This data is mine.”. Software does that by branding data all the
time with whose it is and where it came from and what we did with it, and
lots of the data that other peoples’ software brands is about us and
concerns us and even identifies us in the deepest and most intimate
ways. Dealing with that without disturbing the freedom of software to
operate is a tricky problem. Almost everybody’s solutions, not
coincidentally, hurt the freedom of software because they are largely
solutions which offer either security or privacy through a proprietary
solution which hurts the freedom of software. And that is the dialog that we
have at the moment. So there are corporate parties
participating in the GPL3 dialog who deeply disagree with FSF about the
importance of Disney, and Sony, and other
entertainment manufacturers in the anti‐DRM part of the GPL3. They say “We
think you with the Free Software Foundation are wrong, Disney and Sony are
never going to lock down the entire net to protect entertainment; They want
to but they can’t. And if that were the only reason for having anti‐DRM components in GPLv3, we’d be as hostile to it as they are. But we –
gadget manufacturers, mostly – we think that you’re right, that pervasive
lockdown is a worry, it’s just that we think you’ve identified the source of
it wrong. It’s not the entertainment industries, it’s the security
establishment. We think that the reason everything is going to be locked down
is because people are going to rush to implement security, and the only way
they can think of is to lock down the whole stack, and we worry about that too,
because locked down stacks are bad for us as gadget manufacturers, they
interfere with porting our stuff around, and they reduce flexibility, and so
we don’t like that, and we would therefore be prepared” – they say,
quietly – “to work with you on anti‐DRM if you’d only stop kicking Disney’s
shins quite so much.” Alright, that’s… [Paul Everitt:] Do you’ve time for one more? [Eben Moglen:] Yeah, sure. Yes. QUESTION: [Eben Moglen:] That’s beautiful. There was an
introduction that wasn’t about me when I came in, there’s a question that is
not about me so I can go out, and I think that’s the right question to ask. [Laughter] Thanks very much.
[Paul Everitt:] One thing… One more thing I need to add on this
I neglected in the introduction. During your talk you mentioned that these
rules are good. And “good” as in “just”, as well as “good” as in
“effective”. And you’ve been working on these rules in the larger
historical sense, but you also worked on these rule in a very local sense for
us: Eben helped us bootstrap the Plone Foundation, conceive the
software conservancy idea, that became our grande idée that
Chris was just mentioning. Not only that, but his
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