Slashdot Mirror
Nick Moffitt Interview
Swedish hacker-wannabee writes "Nick Moffitt is in an interesting interview at Gnuheter. Moffitt: 'I want to see a future where when I buy something, I own it. I don't want corporations and governments telling me how I may or may not use my own private property in my own home or among my friends. I want the ability to take apart my toaster or my alarm clock and see how they work, or combine them into something new. I don't think this future is possible without some serious effort on the part of hackers.'"
... Jack Moffitt of Ogg Vorbis fame? :)
Basically this is a whiner article if you ask me.
Ignore the "p2p is theft" trolls, they're just uninformed
Seems to be slashdotted already, so here's the text (don't mod up, karma is just fine thanks):
So who the hell is that Nick Moffitt? He keeps showing up at mailing lists and in any context where the GNU might be mentioned. Moffitt is always rather militant, but never boring. I decided to pick Moffitt's brain on behalf of the Gnuheter readers.
As a general rule, Gnuheter never publishes interviews or news stories in any other language than Swedish. After all, Gnuheter is all the leading forum on open source and free software in the Nordic countries. The Americans have Slashdot, Newsforge. The British have The Register. So why publish an interview in English? Well, I thought Nick Moffitt is interesting enough to reach a wider audience. Plus - and probably more important to yours truly - most of his answers can not be easily translated, regardless of Moffitt's crazy rants about localization. Please be advised that some of the hyperlinks in the interview will crash your computer, should you use Microsoft Windows and Internet Explorer.
That much said, I leave the microphone to the soon to be famous Nick Moffitt. Enjoy!
# Who is Nick Moffit?
It's Moffitt, actually. The name is Scottish, and was originally "Moffat". Centuries of misspelling have created 24 different variations on the name that are recognized by clan Moffat. I've actually been to Moffat, which is also a town in the lowlands off of M74 somewhere.
I'm a big fan of urban rail, and I've been getting into photography both with the aiptek pencams (which are marketed as spycams in the UK), and with the Russian LOMO LC-A 35mm camera. I'm a Debian bigot, but I've been fiddling with Gentoo recently. I'm mostly hacking on the LNX-BBC lately, and maintaining GAR.
I've lived in San Francisco for the past seven or eight years, and have instigated a lot of nefariousness around here. I've seen the dot-coms come and go, which means I've seen a full cycle of San Francisco's life go by. Much of SF's growth has been based on gold rushes, whether it be gold, military construction during WWII, the magazine industry, or whatever. You can see a brief explanation of San Francisco's most recent craziness in the FAQ.
So right now my city is in hard times, but I plan to stick with it. It's the only real city West of the Mississippi river!
# Why?
I was a big BBS weenie in the late 1980s/early 1990s. I probably wouldn't have cared so much, but I found that the Citadel BBS software had such a neat development community in the Seattle area. It was just so cool to see development of the BBS being discussed ON the BBS network. After all, the source code was "public domain" (which is impossible under current copyright law in the US, but emulatable via the MIT X license nowadays).
So I got hooked on this whole free-for-all, where prospective developers read up the code on their own time and flung code into the discussion areas for prospective inclusion or adaptation into the BBS. It was only natural that I'd get hooked on the GNU community in the same way.
# What is Crackmonkey and why should we care?
So around about 1997 I wrote what was probably my first GPL'd program. Before then I had just been throwing code snippets out and figuring that licensing wasn't important. The program was a hideous Perl CGI that solved some problems I saw with the then-current state of Web-based BBSes and guestbooks.
But when there was a bug with the BBS, it meant that no one could discuss the problem on the BBS! So I started the crackmonkey mailing list. The original message never made it to the archives, but my brother quoted the entire thing in a mockery of novice listserv users.
Eventually the list dwarfed the BBS (since Web pages are still clumsy for holding conversations), and the phenomenon known as CrackMonkey was born. I think it was about 2000 when I implemented the "no Windows MUA" filters, making it so that you pretty much have to use Free Software to post to the list (or be clever enough to fake it).
The list was modeled largely after the discussion list that accompanies Pigdog Journal. They were a bunch of San Francisco Bay Area BBS weenies, while the original CrackMonkeys were old Seattle BBS weenies.
The crackmonkey.org Web site has always been just sort of this neglected pile of pages that lead you to the list. Even the FAQ is just a bunch of mailing list postings that I felt like including. It's also been a source of controversy, since it used to garble the kernels of folks who visited it with IE5. See the fanmail section for some love I got from IE users.
Crackmonkey's motto is "Non Sequitur arguments and Ad Hominem personal attacks".
# Seven Dollar history of Unix - is that something to send to my mother?
It's funny, but that document is three years old, and incomplete. I had always planned to write a final chapter about the San Francisco user group community and the progression of the dominant distro among hackers as SLS -> Slackware -> Red Hat -> Debian. I was just stuck in the middle of it all, and couldn't find a smooth way to work it into what was essentially a historical document.
I am always surprised when I see reporters including my own sentences in their boilerplate descriptions of Unix and Linux. That paper is designed to help spread the meme that the Unix community always wanted Free Software, and it just took GNU, Linux, and BSD to get it to us. In that aspect, I have been incredibly pleased with its popularity.
I never expected it to be so heavily linked. It's currently the sixth real hit for "unix history" on google, after Open Sources and the official Dennis Ritchie documents.
Some day I'll add a little more to it, I suppose. I'd like to add a bit in between Unix and BSD about the Software Tools book (which was sort of the Cygwin of the 1970s), and finish the final section. The user group communities in the Bay Area have dwindled away, largely because installing and using GNU/Linux isn't as exciting or new or challenging any more. Installfests made sense in the Slackware era, but now any newbie can point-and-click through a Mandrake install. I can now safely write about the user groups in the past tense.
It's definitely something to send to your mother, though. It's a nice quick introduction to the assumptions made by free software hackers. It presents the perspective that proprietary software is this weird thing from the 1980s that really should never have caught on.
# Why should we not use GIFs? What should we do instead?
The original GIF spec was written by someone who wanted an open standard that could be implemented independently by anyone. Unfortunately, he didn't realize that the compression algorithm he had specified was patent pending.
Now, decompression algorithms are often self-explanatory, since it is the job of the file format to tell decompressors how to unpack something. But the compression algorithms are prone to all sorts of arbitrary distinctions without differences.
So if you ask 17 programmers how they would have solved the problems that LZW solved, you get 17 different (but correct) solutions. Thus, the patent is difficult to challenge in US courts.
As a result, the displaying of GIFs is not under threat by patent claims -- mozilla is likely in good shape. But the generation of GIFs is subject to the whims of UNiSYS, which is this old dinosaur company that doesn't make anything anymore (relying on old patents for revenue).
So this means that if you distribute a GIF that you made with the gimp, you're liable to be sued by UNiSYS! This is because neither the UC Berkeley XCF or the GNOME folks or the FSF licensed the LZW compression algorithm from them. So if you put up a Web site in the US that has GIFs on it, you're likely in trouble.
So what do you do if you have a bunch of GIFs on your site, and you don't want to be sued by Unisys? You pay Unisys US$5000! That's what they charge for people who distribute GIFs that were made using Free Software. If you run 72 Web sites on your machine, you'll have to pay US$360000!
PNG, however, uses the same algorithm that gzip does. It's an unencumbered format for lossless compression, and the browser support for the basic features is already there! People complain about how the PNG support in old IEs and suchforth isn't very good, but they're usually talking about the features of PNG that GIF doesn't have. PNG files tend to be smaller than their GIF counterparts, and they even support alpha channels!
# If GNU is the answer, then what was the question?
How can I use computers without being antisocial? How can I be sure that my hacking won't be sealed off from the light of day? How can I connect with other hackers via What It Is We Do?
# What should the Scandinavians do about the Windows domination?
It seems that Microsoft is now giving away software to governments that are looking to avoid them. It's tough for people to see the hidden costs in their stuff, since they usually charge you up front. They've been able to FUD about Total Cost of Ownership because people really are skeptical about things being free (as in beer).
I recall about two years ago, Iceland was having trouble convincing Microsoft that their market was big enough to warrant an Icelandic localization. They couldn't even convince Microsoft to let them do it for free. I thought this was an excellent opportunity to show how GNU could be made to work in places that no other OS could. As a bonus, they would create jobs inside Iceland instead of sending more dollars to the US economy.
The real trick is to make the localization seamless. If I were to see a Russian OS that was later localized to fit the US market, I'd probably still think of it as this strange Russian thing that was trying to break into the US market. GNOME and KDE have major development efforts in Northern and Central Europe, and the Linux Kernel was started by an ethnic Swede. Yet things are still primarily in English (just look at dmesg or syslog!).
Quite possibly my most widely-used project is GAR, which is the build system used by the LNX-BBC project and GARNOME. It's a lot like the BSD ports system, but GNU make is much cleaner to write in than pmake. I regularly see output from a localized make, but with all sorts of English compile errors and such:
| dparammanager.c:914: dereferencing pointer to incomplete type
| make[5]: *** [libgstcontrol_la-dparammanager.lo] Erreur 1
| make[5]: Quitte le répertoire
If you can make it readily apparent that GNU is not specifically a US product, you may be able to stir up some nationalistic pride and anti-US sentiment about the majority of proprietary OSes. Keep the money and the jobs at home! This stuff is written by Scandinavians!
# What was refund day really about?
It was originally someone's idea of a protest. Everyone should go to their vendors and demand refunds as per the Windows license that came with bundled PCs. It said right there in black-and-white that if you didn't use Windows, you should return it for a refund.
But that lacked pressworthiness. It would be loose and there would be no visible statistical record that "wow, all these people are demanding their refunds!". So Rick Moen and Don marti and I started planning a trip down to Foster City, CA to demand our refund from Microsoft. We'd already tried the vendors; and they weren't the ones who wrote the license, so they ignored us!
Ultimately it was a way to get the message out that there were people who didn't want Windows. We were pointing out that PC does not mean Microsoft. We were challenging a lot of people's assumptions. We had to convince people that
1: no, we actually never used this stuff even once and
2: the license plainly encouraged us to get a refund.
# Will you ever give up?
No way! We hackers now have our own page in history, and the GPL lets us hack in perpetuity. We've got the leverage to fight for the rights of hobbyists and hackers everywhere. I see a lot more fighting ahead for the GNU and EFF types. It's going to be a lot of legal bickering, but free software is also just going to keep getting better!
So we'll have lots to fight for, and lots to play with. Beaujolais to our side!
Here are some things that I still want to fight for:
1: Even though Unix is 32 years old, GNU is nearly 20 years old, Linux is 11 or 12 years old, and Windows 95 is 7 years old, articles always refer to "the upstart Linux operating system".
2: Every year that goes by, RMS's "The Right to Read" seems less and less like Science Fiction and more like a realistic projection of the future. We need to defang the DMCA in the US and other laws that threaten our ability to distribute our original works as artisans and hackers.
3: Software patents are still going strong in the US, and working their way into other countries. What a horrible state of affairs!
I want to see a future where when I buy something, I own it. I don't want corporations and governments telling me how I may or may not use my own private property in my own home or among my friends. I want the ability to take apart my toaster or my alarm clock and see how they work, or combine them into something new. I don't think this future is possible without some serious effort on the part of hackers.
# Finally, I guess Bill Gates wonders why you are such a nuisance. Why is that?
Heh. I doubt I even show up on his radar. I went to a rival high school to his (I grew up in Seattle), and never really paid that much attention to Microsoft after Windows Refund Day. My attitude toward Microsoft is usually
"Oh yeah, don't they make keyboards or something?"
We live in a wonderful era, where GNU lets us more or less totally ignore these proprietary systems if we want to. It's good that some developers are playing with these systems in order to write some of their best features into GNU, but they use Windows so that I don't have to!
:wq
What scares me is what is he going to do when he combines that toaster and alarm clock.
Are we going to get toast at 6:00am every day or an Alarm that burns your head if you do not turn it off quick?
Medevo
You know, I think we need to start thinking of the hackers of years gone by. This sort of clear, concrete idea of what's at stake will really help get through to the baby-boomer engineering crowd and explain, "You know that radio you took apart when you were a kid? For the next generation, it will come with an EULA and be protected from tampering by at least 4 fedral laws that carry fines and prison terms."
There is a generation out there, most of whom have no idea what this generation think, but who will feel compelled to action if they think future engineers and tinkerers will be disuaded from early experimentation.
How can we get that message out? Where do we tell that story? Certainly there are media outlets like Popular Science, Scientific American, etc.
Anyone out there a well credited sociologist and want to take on the comparison of 1950s/60s egineering boomers with the early 2000s hackers and the threats to their future that boomers never had to worry about?
This is a good interview. The right of property ownership was a basic tenet on which this country was founded. I agree that it is tragic to see laws passed such as the DMCA that dictate what one may or may not do with one's property. Indeed, the last time we had a crisis over property ownership, it lead to the bloodiest war of our history, the Civil War. This is an issue that affects us all.
That said, we have seen a growing trend towards larger corporations. Improvements in communication and transportation technologies have made larger, more distributed businesses practical for the first time. This trend shows no signs of slowing.
Sadly for the consumer, this implies a decrease in the number of providers of any given service or product. This need not (and likely will not) bring with it a decrease in the competitiveness of the markets involved, though anti-globalists will no doubt wail about the end of "competition," which is apparently a count of corporations rather than a metric for economic efficiency.
The long and short of it is, even in the absence of patent and copyright laws (and there's no reason to suspect that they would go anywhere) that specifically give businesses extra rights in these situations, manufacturers will still have the ability to contract with their customers (retailers), who will have the ability (and, for the sake of argument, the contractual obligation) to contract with we, the end users. And these contracts will largely prohibit us from hacking, reverse engineering, and anything else that the manufacturer deems threatening.
If we do see a time when property may be freely modified and inspected, unhindered by contracts and EULAs, then it will be in a true free market system, well after the government has been done away with and the economy has had time to restabilize. Until then, the market will just not be competitive enough (in the true meaning of competition; number of businesses doesn't matter) for corporations to risk their intellectual property by offering consumers less restrictive terms.
Karma: Good (despite my invention of the Karma: sig)
Right, except that you just REVEALED YOUR CUNNING PLAN in a PUBLIC FORUM.
As nice and simple as this sounds, I find that I end up not really understanding it. If I buy the toaster and the alarm clock and take them both apart and put them together in a new way, I should also be able to sell my creation.
Ok. I'm fine with that. And I can see where licenses, patents, and other legal entities get in the way of this.
Unfortunately, the Open Source community depends on a number of licenses that completely prevents this. If I actually buy a copy of Linux I can tear it apart and modify it, but I don't have the rights to simply resell my new creation. There are a number of requirements I have to meet before I can do that. I have to essentially provide a free copy of my changes in raw form to Big Brother and everyone else in order to do that.
Hmmmm. This has just gotten a lot more complicated. Do I want other people tearing apart my work and distributing the new creations as theirs? Do I want to tear apart other people's work and distribute the new creation as mine?
I think that's a question we need to ask ourselves. Do we want everyone to have these freedoms and are we willing to accept how these freedoms can be abused by corporations and individuals?
No Zen is good zen
- ... Lameness filters (It blocks a lot of legitmate posts)
...
That is very true. I have tried to post code in the past only to be treated to errors such as "average line length to low" or "too many odd characters".It's crazy. I can't think of any other technology/computer nerd discussion board doesn't let you post code.
Can anyone remember what that thing is that translates C to English and back again? Some guys used it on DeCSS in a song.
My toaster sends emails, plays dvd's, works as an alarm clock, you can watch TV on it, use it as a baby monitor, opens the garage door, stores 30 gigabytes of MP3's and works as a radio.... Oh yeah, it also does something with bread.
If you can't use Slashdot for everything you want to, you should march up to the office and demand your $0 back!!!!!!
Karma: Non-Heinous
If I buy a car that's not a convertible, but I want to turn it into a convertible, that's fine.
The manufacturer doesn't have to help me, they don't have to give me any details, but I -am allowed- to take a saw, forcefully remove the car top, and hack a soft top in there.
(Note: I haven't read the article because it's \.'ed, so I might be completely off-base, but I don't think so.)
OTOH, the way things are going now, with the DMCA and all, it is going to be legally prohibitedfor me to make modifications on items that I OWN, which is not right under any circumstances; and that's not the kind of future I want.
Gnuheter is a play on the Swedish word 'nyheter', which means 'news'.
Pfff! That's nothing! Hitler wrote a BOOK about how he was going to take over the world, AND NOBODY CAUGHT ON! Go figure.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
[...], and those that just say fuck it and carve their path in life.
We have those now, they're called inmates.
Unfortunately, the Open Source community depends on a number of licenses that completely prevents this. If I actually buy a copy of Linux I can tear it apart and modify it, but I don't have the rights to simply resell my new creation. There are a number of requirements I have to meet before I can do that. I have to essentially provide a free copy of my changes in raw form to Big Brother and everyone else in order to do that.
This is a strawman, and a rather silly one at that.
First, you can sell derivative GPLed works. You simply have to make the source code available to any of your customers who request it. This is really not much different than being required to make a registration certificate available to the purchaser of your car (so they can license it and own it legally), or for that matter, being required to sign an agreement restricting you to neighborhood building or aesthetic standards when purchasing a piece of property in an exclusive neighborhood.
The GPL exists because the government has, in a fit of profoundly illadvised stupidity, created a regime of government enforced monopolies designed to empower publishers while disempowering artists and consumers. As such, being an artificially maintained monopoly marketplace, the realm of copyright (and patents) is not something you can shrug off with physical, competetive market equivelents.
Were there no forced monopoly on copyrights, i.e. if no one had the power to take something in the public domain, modify it slightly, and make the result unavailable to you in any meaningful sense, the GPL would be unnecessary. Unfortunately, as we all know, this isn't the case at all.
The GPL protects everyone's freedom. It doesn't give you the 'freedom' to incarcerate another (i.e. taking someone else's work, modifying it, and locking the results away from them), but in so doing it protects you from being 'incarcerated' (having the same done to your code) in turn.
It is, in this increasingly hostile world of privately owned ideas and fenced off areas of scientific and intellectual endeavor, probably one of the few, and arguably most important, contracts actively designed to protect your freedom from an increasingly irresponsible and predatory cultural and legal climate. The fact that it doesn't allow you to exploit us without mercy is something the rest of us are quite greatful for, even if it does irk you some.
Now, if you want to do away with the GPL, do away with copyright law altogether. When we stop granting artificial, government enforced monopolies, then the GPL, along with a whole bunch of far more offensive licenses than that, will go away, and none of us will have to lose our freedom in the process. In the meantime we need licenses like the GPL, as an innoculation against the sort of diseased, rights-restricting EULA's and licenses purpetrated by Microsoft, the copyright cartels of hollywood, and others too numerous to count.
And this all, of course, has absolutely nothing to do with ownership of physical goods in your home, and the copyright cartel's current efforts to take even that right of ownership away from us in order to shore up their own monopoly regimes.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
I don't know how you got moderated up. Perhaps this misconception is more prevalent than I thought.
If you are speaking about the GNU GPL, lets take a look at a part of the actual license:
The actual license: http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html
(emphasis is mine)
Let me hit you over the head with it one more time. You can sell GPLed software for any cost you like, any cost that you think the market will allow.
The difference is that you don't get any exclusive right to the software. And that is what the Free Software Foundation means by freedom. That everyone who gets a copy of the software gets the right to copy, modify, redistribute, and even sell the software. These rights shouldn't be exclusive.
This is also wrong, simply with the quote from the GNU GPL above. The word "may" is important, it means you have the freedom to "may" or "may not" distribute the software. That means, I can't tell you to give me a copy of your GPLed web browser off your computer, even if you modified it. Its called privacy.
In fact, no respect for privacy was one of the original reasons the FSF considered the original version of the APSL as non-free.
From http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/apsl.html
This?
Contempt and animosity? How so? Any more so than the boomers showed for the establishment in the 60s?! Please, this is a joke. Anyone who doesn't care about the strength of research and engineering for future generations is probably not in the target audience for such public debate.
I certainly hope you wrote that with tongue planted firmly in cheek and don't actually believe that copyright is for an unlimited time.
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
Jesux, man. Which one are you? Winkel?
--
I noticed
It's getting about time to leave everywhere
Obviously there is an attempt within the IT and semiconductor communities and all of the businesses that they interact with to extend control of products deeper and deeper beyond the purchase transaction itself.
What intrigues me is that this giant push coming from so many directions is creating a pressure. This is just basic physics here right. You push something and you dissipate that force in a specific direction, but the force does not disappear. Indeed, rather than disappearing, it generally tends to seek to return from whence it came. Think of the tide here: it rolls in, it rolls out. Over the course of a day the tide may come in and may go out, but in between the turning of the tide the waves come up the shore and receed far back into the sea many times.
As businesses push their control of products beyond the point of sale, they have every reason to expect that they will begin to lose control of their products before they are sold. Now who's creating the waves here?
Well, we all know that the waves are mostly created by the moon so it's a bit misleading to ask who created the waves. The question for us on the shore is whether the tide is coming in or going out. I think it's going out if you're the ones trying to control the products beyond the point of sale. You can push water, but it's very hard to hold in your hand.
You imply that copyright is not for an unlimited time. I won't refute that, since I've already stated I really have no knowledge of copyright law. However, I do know a women (Alice Randall) was recently sued and because she wrote an parody to 'Gone With the Wind', a book that was made into a movie back in 1936. She won the suit, but only because she proved it was a 'parody' and not a 'sequel', and thus protected by our 1st amendment rights as you have stated in other posts. Had it been a 'sequel', it would have been against copyright law (so I read). In this case, perhaps the copyright for the book wasn't unlimited, but 66 years (and still going) is pretty long.
I'm really not trying to be trite, I'm just trying to understand how the systems works as of now.
I only know that if I try and and take someone else's work, be it a book or a video game or a movie, and make copies to resell, that it is against the law. And it doesn't seem to have any time limit to it
You are correct. Let me explain:
According to the Constitution, copyright is for a limited time only, and then the work passes into the public domain. The Constitution does not define the limited time, but leaves that to Congress to define through law.
IIRC, the origional copyright term was 14 years, and could be renewed once for an additional 14 years. Over the last century the content industry has repeatedly and successfully lobbied Congress to extend those terms, resulting in the current law which is something like Authors Life plus 75 years or 95 years for a Work for Hire (ie, one that is owned by a corporation). Everytime copyright terms are about to expire, the content industry lobbies to get them extended again. Generally, the copyright of Mickey Mouse is the driving force behind this, hence all the Disney references in copyright discussion.
There is some concern, that the DMCA makes copyright effectively indefinate for digital works incorporating some sort of access control. I believe this is true, and that's one of several reasons why the DMCA should be struck down. (It's also totally unnecessary, since copyright infringement is already covered by an existing body of law, and contrary to popular belief, the internet does not make things magically "diferent")
This state of affairs is ridiculous, and goes far beyond the constitutionally stated purpose of "promoting science and the useful arts". Letting my great-great-grandchildren collect royalties on my works does nothing to promote progress. In fact, I can see no way in which it does anything but discourage progress, as nothing is created in a vacuum, and Intellectual Property laws effectively create dead ends in areas of investigation.
Sorry for the rant at the end there. I hope that explains a little bit why people are so up in arms about the current state of copyright.
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
Thank you for your informative reply. I never even knew that copyright was even mentioned in the constitution, IANAL. It has spurred me to go and do a bit of research on the topic myself, including reading up on the Eldred v. Ashcroft case (and reading the relative constitution passage). But yes, I now can understand better some of the posts I've read here and other places, and also makes some of my earlier posts seem pretty ludicrous. Oh well.
You might want to look into the history of copyright in British common law as well, since US law is pretty heavily based on it. One interestig fact is that copyright was origionally created for the purpose of censorship (in 1662 I think, but I'm too lazy to look it up right now).
:-)
Anyway, welcome to the dark side
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
http://open-spaces.com/article-v2n1-loren.php
That is an excellent article. I've been looking for something convincing to send to my Senators, who seem to be held in the thrall of Disney, and I think this is it.
Thanks.
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.