Slashdot Mirror
Eric Raymond vs. Larry Lessig On Open Source
Lindsay Sobel writes: "Eric Raymond and former Microsoft case advisor Larry Lessig have been cutting each other down in The American Prospect Online's roundtable on open-source software. Lessig calls Raymond's philosophy nothing more than Ayn Rand warmed-over, while Raymond calls the regulation Lessig endorses 'one-size-fits-all pseudo-cooperation enforced at the point of government guns.' "
The discussion is pretty interesting with great points on both sides.
Not to be too anarchist here, but the govenment forces all sorts of crap on us that we would have liked, but they force things far too much, and people end up hating both the product and the government.
It's the same philosophy behind people hating products that are advertised too much. Linux has got along fine so far with only word-of-mouth advertising (for both customers and programmers) so why should things change?
"Assume the worst about people, and you'll generally be correct"
On second thought, then you'd get the corporate hounds bothering you to become a "registered" user so that they could claim you as a tax credit. Oh well.
As far as the regulation goes, screw that. I'd like government regulation to stay as far from open source as possible.
Network Security: It always comes down to a big guy with a gun.
Ok, I work for Microsoft. It's a good gig and I don't generally feel that I'm a servant of evil. After clicking the link and loading the ESR paper, my win2k box promptly rebooted. It took a few minutes of deep breathing before I was able to convince myself that this was a coincidence. Or was it?
--Shoeboy
ESR is an incredible thinker and gifted author, but what I see is a direct contradiction in his beliefs when it comes to regulation. He abhors regulation (governmental or otherwise) in one breath, but in the next, he seems to promote government intervention - in one form or another - as a solution to the MS problem. Can he - or someone more familiar with the inner workings of the ESR mind - clarify this apparent contradiction for me?
Maybe there isn't one, and maybe I haven't digged through enough of ESR's writings to find the answer...if there is, do let me know. Thanks.
First of all, I have yet to see the American government "trying to force international free software projects down everyone's throats." Can you please clarify this statement?
Second of all, as a Libertarian, I feel a need to step and and clarify what the federal government is doing in regards to MS. The federal government represents the people, and the people's interests (in an ideal world, but we will not get into that). The federal government is acting on behalf of the American public to stop what it perceives as a corporation that is hurting that same American public.
The federal government has a ridiculously short list of tasks it is given (most are spelled out in the Constitution). While one of them is to stay back from the economy whenever possible (Laissez-Faire), it also has an obligation to see that the rules of capitalism are not broken. These two "rules" are sometimes at odds.
According to the federal government's findings, Microsoft has practiced behaviours that are monopolistic in nature. The federal government has a right, and an obligation, to step in and prevent such actions in order to further the capitalistic system we have, despite its general Laissez-Faire approach.
Third, Linux has gotten to the point where "word of mouth" is no longer going to be the only form of "evangilism" and advertising. This is not due to anyone's set wishes, but simply rather due to the acceptance and size that Linux currently has. "Word of mouth" would not have Redhat boxes on store shelves. "Word of mouth" would not have the now infamous Linux-related IPOs. Your post screams of radical conservatism, and cries for returning to "the good old days". This simply is not possible.
As with anything, time goes on and things change. Sometimes we may not like these things, but they happen regardless. The best thing the Linux community can do is adapt to the changing conditions, just as the operating system itself has done over the years. This does not require GNU/Linux people to "sell out", but rather adapt. They have come this far, getting bigger is not going to change those base ideals now. It might just change the approach taken.
- (c) 2018 Hank Zimmerman
You know, I wish RedHat, VA, and the other LinBizzes would concentrate their open source focus on providing lawyers for the community. What we really need is to get some law hackers finding hacks in the Federal Code (I think the outside world calls them loopholes) and start turning the tables. (you know, perhaps we need to make a call for some of the CS majors to go into law instead of industry...)
Now on the same lines: would it be a stretch to register more open source projects as not-for-profit? It seems a bit of a tax hack. Basically, have the project as a profitless entity, receiving donations from businesses who are looking for extra features (all added to the general source so the public can benefit, of course,) and paying programmers for their work from those donations, keeping only a 'little bit' of the money for administrative purposes.
This could subsidize our patents (better that we get them for the world to use before someone tries to copyright the while loop)
And, for successful projects, the maintainers can still make a healthy salary. (Didn't Elizabeth Dole make 600k/year for heading up the American Red Cross? -- and don't even start on the United Way or the RIAA, for that matter.)
Isn't the hack all about taking what you're given and using it in such a creative way you impress your friends? Let's impress our 'friends' in Congress by taking their tricks and showing what we can do with them.
How about "The Apache Scholarship" for a top student in CS that has performed valuable community service for the Apache community? More directly, churches pay pastors and others for services rendered, certainly our non-profits could do the same thing.
(Note: there are some noticable problems with this, the least of which would be international concerns. However, government involvment certainly wouldn't be any better.)
--Eric
I've always been amused and slightly baffled by the tendency of some geek types to endorse wacky libertarian viewpoints (a la ESR). Living as I do the ridiculously overprivileged lifestyle of a mostly-white North American middle-class male, it's long been pretty damn clear to me that the only reason I can play with all this high-tech stuff and these high-falutin' ideas is that someone else laid down the groundwork of the society to support me. I do Unix and network consulting; I don't grow food, provide childcare, clean up the environment (well, not directly), or do much else besides shuffle bits, and yet I have one of the most highly-valued skillsets around. There's no way I could exist at all without that enforced social structure, let alone with such highly specialised (and frankly useless in the real physical world) knowledge and skills.
/. a while back, you can be governed by elected officials, by corporations, or by roving street gangs (Chaos Overlords anyone?), but you're still gonna be governed.
/. crowd is aching to moderate me down now. ;)
In psychology there's a concept called Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs; basically you have to have the basics in life accounted for before you can get into the more refined and esoteric stuff. We're able to do open-source software not just because of government-mandated intellectual-property regulation (though that's a very real effect that Lessig argues for well), but also because someone else made physical life easy for us, and in a lot of cases (not all, but a lot) that someone was everyone, in the form of government trying to establish an equal basis. Technocorporate America isn't going to create the kind of society where you can work on cool code for free and still have food, clothing and shelter; they don't have the agenda, and they frankly don't have the social clue it would take.
It may seem non-germane to the IP-law argument to talk about broader social structures, but they're all part of the same viewpoint (basically, that far libertarianism is for blind kooks).
As someone else pointed out on
Oh well, that's my rant. I'm sure most of the
(note that I'm not slagging ESR personally, just his viewpoint - Even though I don't think as much of his OSS papers as some people, I've actually long had respect for him, pretty much ever since he took over editing the Jargon file / NHD)
-- Life is short. Forgive quickly. Kiss slowly. ~ Robert Doisneau
The title of this article is misleading, because most everyone involved in this discussion seems to be a proponent of Open Source. From what I can tell, Raymond is basically going on with his usual Libertarian claptrap and this time is actually getting owned by someone who seems to actually know what's going on in the world (Lessig and Newman).
It's not that Raymond or Libertarians (e.g., virulently anti-socialist objectivist gun-owners) in general don't have some interesting points, but as usual he's taking their arguments way too far and coming up with the usual Libertarian nonsense...all government and government regulation is bad, the Internet will give birth to a free society, blah blah blah.
I honestly wish Raymond would stick to championing Open Source rather than trying to inject his Libertarian ideals where they are really irrelevant and don't belong. At least he's pretty good at the former. Kudos to Lessig for a well-thought out argument.
-W.W.
"Well it should be obvious to even the most dim-witted individual who holds an advanced degree in hyperbolic topology...
This is childish at best. Especially ESR. He really is as embarassing to OSS/Linux as RMS.
Just to respond to some posts:
ESR is NOT a definitive part of what we do. WE ARE.
ESR is not a great thinker. He is a clever manipulator. Lessig is not any better.
We are better than this. RMS's viral license, ESR's mouth and BP's ego do a dis-service to the work WE put in. You do not really see LT shooting his mouth off, do ya.
These three (and Lessig) are a joke. There may have been a time when RMS/ESR/BP made some contributions. Their time is past. The revolution is over. Linux won. Linux has legitimacy. It has coders. It has capital. It has standing. It has market share.
We need to retire the revolutionaries. In the US, we transitioned from a revolutionary tribunal to a Federal Republic. In France, they did not make the transition, and the revolutionaries committed atrocities and sold it out to Bonaparte.
Where do we want to be 5 years from now?
Retire them. They did their bit. But they are mucking up the jobs we need to do now. We need leaders, not ESR's bad logic and big mouth and warmed over Rand. We need people who can build something of this momentum.
If Linux loses momentum, you can place the blame not with the coders or the code, but the fanatics who represent us poorly.
Tom Dutton
Reality does not happen until you analyze the dots. -Don DeLillo (Underworld)
...and maybe the only worthwhile thing to take from this debate:
e wman-n-1.html )
'One reason an acknowledgement of both past and present regulation is needed is so we can move public debate away from the false "should there be public policy" question to the real question of "which public policy" should be promoted?' (Newman at http://www.prospect.org/controversy/open_source/n
Intellectual experiments in anarchy work about as well as they always have: they don't. The 'Net is now a matter of public interest and public policy, and people need to stop pretending no one in government or law enforcement knows it exists. Telecommunications have been regulated in every country since the turn of the century, an it is hard to see how universal access, limited tolls and extensive innovation and research would ever have happened without it.
There will be laws that specifically regulate internet access and standards and computer design and construction, just as there are for telephones, TV's, radios, cars and the postal system. This is inevitable and in the past turned out to mostly be a good thing. We can have stupid internet policies, but we can't pretend there will be no policies.
She had a great philosophy that doesn't deserve to be reduced to a stereotype
Hah! Her own writings reduced whatever complex ideas she may have had to a stereotype.
Here's a summation of every Ayn Rand book:
"If only those damn looters would leave us alone!"
"You must do what we tell you, creators, or we will kill you!"
"You do everything at the end of a gun!"
"We do everything at the end of a gun...and LIKE IT!"
"Good thing the looters destroyed themselves, as was inevitable! They only knew how to do things -- AT THE END OF A GUN!!!!!!!"
"If only we had more guns we would have crushed you, aaargh!"
It was very deep stuff...
Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
Lingua Franca ran an article on academic reactions to Rand that was pretty interesting.
Government doesn't always get the rules and regulations right. Government is influenced by special interest lobbying, by bogus economic theories, and often, they just get it wrong. But a laissez-faire approach is throwing out the baby with the bathwater. In order to live in a prosperous, free market society, we need to get government to work properly.
Raymond could be correct in arguing that in the Microsoft case in particular, government action is not needed anymore, that other forces have already worked to reduce Microsoft's importance and influence. But it's false to base that argument on "the invisible hand"--for a market like the one Microsoft operates in, a monopoly is a very plausible outcome. If open source can, by itself, compete with Microsoft, it's because Microsoft has missed opportunity after opportunity, and it's because the goverment investigation has already restrained their behavior greatly (without it, PC companies would likely continue to be contractually prohibited from preloading anything other than Windows). But, in addition about ensuring a free market in PC software in the future, the law suit is as much about punishing past misbehavior (and discouraging others from engaging in it) as it is about addressing current failures of the market.
I should say, incidentally, that I don't view Microsoft as all evil. But they have done some things that no large company should be allowed to do in a free market, and it appears to me that they have, at least for the time being, a natural monopoly, something that requires some government supervision to ensure that the consumer isn't harmed, just like electricity and telephone.
Americans seem to love to hate law and government. A healthy distrust of government is probably always a good idea, but ultimately, there is no democracy or free market without the rule of law and a government to enforce it. A free market and "the invisible hand" work only under a specific set of social and economic parameters and government needs to create and maintain those parameters.
It's valuable to debate individual policies on their specific merits and effects, but general arguments that with less government regulation, the "invisible hand" will take care of things are not based in economic reality.
Sorry, Mr. Lessig, but it very much does matter where AT&T came from. If we look at only the last 50 years, say, we see what most people do: AT&T as a monopoly (why?), with no solution apparent other than force -- more regulation, that is. After all, don't monopolies justify regulation?
And does it or does it not matter where the cable monopolies came from?
As for the identification of contract law, property rights, etc, with "regulation" -- well, WHATever. I would call these things "law", say, perhaps "commercial law", and then call "regulation" something else.
I agree, this aspect of Lessig's argument is confused by fuzzy language. However it does not follow that regulation in the dictionary sense is inherently evil. Accepting the Merriam Webster definition, the morality of regulation depends a great deal upon the basis upon which the "executive authority or regulatory agency" derives its power to issue a particular regulation.
Obviously, things can go wrong in many places -- the law may be bad, inconsistent or unclear; the regulatory implementation of the law may be incorrect, impractical, or ineffectual. Enforcement of the regulation may be too lax or too aggressive. All of which is to say it is a good thing to be skeptical of regulation.
However this does not support the very strong blanket assertion that regulation in the dictionary sense is inherently evil or misbegotten. You need much stronger evidence to support that conclusion.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Who is more valuable to society? The person who works on a farm, or the person who makes farming more productive.
If I worked on a farm, I could grow enough food to feed (say) 2 people. Say I create a new strain of corn so that each farmer can now grow food to feed 3 people. If there are a hundred farmers, I've increased the food produced by 50%, instead of the 2% from my own labor.
I am also in computer science. I am valuable to society not because I do manual labor, but by creating software and ideas that make other people more productive in their jobs.
RMS is an embarrassment only because he is up front and clear about what he believes in.
Put simply, he believes that denying people access to information they need is wrong. Ever.
Now most people don't agree with this, or at least they don't act as if they agree with this 100%, 100% of the time. Now, he may think, and probably does think, that this produces better software, but IIRC it is basically irrelevant to him.
I don't agree completely with RMS, or at least I haven't thought things through enough to know whether I do. But I do respect him because he fights fair. He never, ever uses his project credential to pull rank in a fight, although if anybody could, he could. He never claims to be a spokesman for anybody else's views but his own. He doesn't obfuscate his ideas in pleasing academic metaphors or subtle code words -- it's there and you can agree with him or part ways, your choice.
America is a country that likes to pretend we're a bunch of straight shooters, when in fact we love to follow phonies. You can't get any media respect unless you're a bald faced self promoter and liar (I mean, unless you are media savvy). When we meet the real thing, our reaction is scorn.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Eric Raymond has some interesting theories about the motivation behind open source, but his emphasis is misplaced. I believe that the best arguments for open source projects have nothing to do with establishing communities, or earning prestige among peers. Instead, it comes from a basic understanding of the value of software, and the desire to maximize the value of one's own work.
What's the value of a piece of software, as a physical commodity, in the sense that a piece of software is something that sits on your hard drive, takes up space, and hopefully does something that you find useful.
Here's one possible heirarchy for software value, in order from most worthless to most valuable:
1) A binary that no longer works is worthless. It has negative value in that it is a waste of disk space. Maybe the operating system API changed, or the hardware vendor changed the architecture slightly and broke the binary, or perhaps an intractable bug has come to light. Doesn't matter. The value of this software is zero. You can't use it, or you wouldn't want to. This is the fate of most commercial software in the long run, especially commercial software that runs on propriatary operating systems.
2) An unsupported binary is slightly more valuable, but not in the long run. Someday it will most likely enter category one, especially if it runs on a proprietary operating system. There's a lot of software, especially freeware, created and released with the best intentions, that exists in a publically available form only as MSDOS or obsolete Windows binaries. Relying on this sort of software is like being a passenger on an airplane with a dead pilot soaring through the sky on autopilot. So far, so good, you're getting from point A to point B, but you'd better have a parachute.
3) Supported binaries are more valuable. Commercial, shrink-wrapped software makes up most of this category. Of course, when you depend on binary level support, you know that any time you may be forced to upgrade, or your software supplier may discontinue the product, and your existing binary will enter category two, which you don't want.
Hardware with closed source drivers is also in category three.
One danger of category three software is that sometimes it slips into category two without notice. When we upgraded one of our Sun workstations to Solaris 7, for Y2K purposes, for instance, we had to eliminate a $1500.00 third-party ATM interface, not because of any problem with the interface, but because the vendor had, without our knowledge, discontinued driver support. The interface makes a nice, if expensive, paperweight.
The conventional wisdom in the software publishing world is that commercial software belongs in category three. Category three provides the most leverage by the software provider over the users of the software, and hence, the most opportunity for revenue. As part of one operating system upgrade, we had to re-purchase thousands of dollars worth of binary application software, because of changes to the operating system that broke the applications. This vendor made a lot of money off of us, and the new versions of the software had no new features -- they had just been recompiled to work with the new kernel.
4) Software with restrictive source code availability is more valuable. In this case, you have the source code, but few, if any other people have the source code, and in any event, you are unable to effectively collaborate with them, This includes both source code obtained under an NDA, and, more importantly, software you've written yourself but never published.
You have, at least in theory, the ability to keep this type of software working yourself, but you run the risk of having to actually put the theory into practice, and in a worst case scenario, you may find yourself having to dedicate tremendous resources to keeping the software working, and who wants that?
Firstly the crucial case was heard in 1911. (Although the order to dissolve the trust - actually a deal with the railroad owners - was made in 1892)
In fact, consumers didn't benefit from the Standard breakup.
Considering that the charge they were found guilty of was price fixing, this statement is a little odd. The whole set up of Standard Oil was to use its monopoly in oil (90%+) to gain a stranglehold on the railways which prevented his competitors from being able to sustain margins.
Do not be mislead by the price of oil - the key in the price kerosene (in 1890 few people had cars). To quote from the Atlantic Monthly of 1881
I'd advise you get the facts straight before talking about the case.Incidently, The Atlantic Monthly article is a good read, mainly because something 119 years old is still so relevent. Here is the closing paragraph
If nothing else, it may help get the Microsoft thing into perspective.