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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.'"
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?
Moffitt's concern is legitimate. Patent owners sometimes attempt (with varying degrees of success) to restrict the ability of purchasers of products covered by the patent claims to use/modify/dispose of the products that have been purchased.
For example, there is something called the "doctrine of permissible repair", which I believe attempts to draw a line between a purchaser's repair of a patented device, and the unauthorized "making" of the device (and resulting patent infringement).
There is also a case where Company A sold a nebulizer (a device for administering medication in aerosolized form) with an imprint "for single use only". Company B began a business of refurbishing the nebulizers (stripping off unsterilizable parts, sterilizing the rest, and adding replacement parts) that allowed hospitals to reuse the devices at a fraction of the cost. Company A sued Company B for patent infringement and won.
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
Actually, no. We were, however, neighbors for at least a year and didn't even know it. I'm actually in his new home town right now, and may drop by to see him this weekend.
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I noticed
It's getting about time to leave everywhere
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