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Slashback: Assembly, Avoidance, Civility
Good place for a lemonade stand. The march of the gigantic temporary European computer city-state goes on: Late writes that "Assembly 2002 starts in Finland on Thursday at 12.00 EET-DST (GMT +3). With over 2800 computer places and an expected total of over 4500 visitors, Assembly is one of the largest combined demo- and lanparties in the world. Those of you who can't make it, can watch our streamed TV broadcast. We'll be broadcasting all the competitions, at least part of the seminars that include such speakers as Rob Hubbard (C64 music legend) and a whole bunch of other programs."
You are condemned to live even longer. h4mmer5tein writes: "The BBC has an update on the asteroid story from a few days ago saying that it won't, after all, hit the earth in 2019. More information is being collated but it seems that 2060 is unlikely to see an impact either."
Iron IronGorilla adds: "Much like a Microsoft crash^H^H^H^H^Hrelease date being pushed back, NASA is reporting here that we are not, in fact, all going to die on February 1st, 2019 ..."
The dangers of meeting someone who means what he says. A few weeks ago, reader Al3x wrote his account ("Results of the Commerce Dept's DRM Workshop") of the recent gathering in DC of (officially invited) representatives of the entertainment industry and the less-officially invited members of the public. Alex criticized the approach of several members of the Free software community on hand for the discussion, including Richard Stallman.
Stallman writes in response:
"Al3x went to the July 17 Washington Digital Restrictions Management panel feeling admiration for me, but left disappointed with my views and actions. I think his disappointment was partly due to a couple of misconceptions, so I hope this explanation will partly restore his good opinion of my work and methods.I cannot deny Al3x's charge that I, and the rest of us, defied the rules of the meeting by refusing to be completely silent. If it is wrong to disobey an unfair system, I stand convicted, but I am not ashamed. However, in the scale of civil disobedience, ours was very mild. Women demanding the vote sometimes chained themselves to doorways, which might have been inconvenient for some passersby. Blacks demanding an end to segregation sometimes broke rules, and even laws, by sitting in a Whites-only diner or at the front of a bus. It is up to each of you to decide your ethical approach to judging acts of disobedience to an unfair system.
Al3x criticized NY Fair Use for 'preferring to show up and disrupt the debate' rather than ask for a seat on the panel. Our occasional laughter and less frequent verbal comments did not disrupt the panel, and all the panelists were able to express their views; but because our means were so limited, we could not communicate very much. We would have much preferred to participate officially, on an equal footing with Jack Valenti, but they had refused our request, just as they refused the EFF. Our measured protest appears to have obtained for us the chance for a seat on a subsequent panel.
After the meeting, Al3x asked me for my views on intellectual property. As it happens, I think it is a grave mistake to formulate one's views in terms of 'intellectual property,' and I explained why.
I explained that the term 'intellectual property' lumps together disparate areas of law, including copyright, patent, trademark, and others, and that they are so different that it is a mistake to try to group them together. The public policy issues of these various areas of law result from the details of how they restrict the public, and those details are different; if you try to form your opinions about 'intellectual property,' you will miss all of these issues, and you will be led to propose sweeping generalizations which cannot help being foolish. I explained the problems of the term 'intellectual property' to Al3x hoping this would help him and others he communicates with avoid that pitfall in thinking.
I suspect a miscommunication took place there, because when I said that his proposed copyright system for music might be a good one, he perceived that as a contradiction. Perhaps when I said 'the term "intellectual property" is bad,' he heard me as saying 'everything people call "intellectual property" is bad.' That, however, is exactly the sort of sweeping overgeneralization that the term 'intellectual property' leads people to form; it is to discourage such simplistic views that I ask people to avoid the term. I have views on copyright, views on patent, and views on trademark, but I do not have *any* position on 'intellectual property.' As Al3x learned, I'm not 100% opposed to copyright, though I believe it should be much less restrictive to the public than it is now.
See http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.htm for more explanation of the problems of the term 'intellectual property.' If you're interested in my views on copyright, see www.gnu.org/philosophy/copyright-and-globalization.html.
"Much like a Microsoft crash^H^H^H^H^Hrelease date being pushed back, NASA is reporting here that we are not, in fact, all going to die on February 1st, 2019 ..."
C'mon, we may all hate Microsoft, but this has nothing to do with the story. Delays happen and are bad, but I seriously doubt Microsoft is the worst offender. Adding such gratuitous "humor" to stories lessens the force of honest critisism by making Slashdot look like a bunch of immature extremists who shouldn't be taken seriously.
Asteroids:
Don't worry, I'm sure another unforseen Earth-path asteroid will be along shortly.
Richard Stallman:
That unfairness is rampant in our courts and in the churches...but one really cool thing is that the churches won't throw you in prison for demanding that you and the surrounding people (congregation) actually learn what of the world (because it usually is, not of God) the person up front is talking about... so if you really want to fight this unfairness, be sure to go to a church and ask questions, and insist that the person up front answers you when they ask that you let them continue... I regret to say that in the past I have let them...
Acting like a fucking angst ridden teen at a meeting and passing it off as a form of civil disobediance is not only useless to the cause against certian forms of DRM, it's counter productive. It makes the rest of us look like the ass Stallman has made himself out to be.
Further, comparing his "civil disobediance" with that of that of the civil rights movement and women's vote, is the most asinine of comments.
Civil liberites my ass. Someone doesn't give you a seat on the pannel, so you go to the meeting and make jokes. Think you'll get one next time?
Stallman has done many great things, I'll fully admit, but this latest, and his comments are the actions of a child.
Imagine! A human justifying his actions and beliefs to make himself appear in a more positive light. What an absolute asshole.
I think we just accidentally indicted all of humanity and anything that has ever been or will ever be sentient, though.
All clarification is revisionist.
Armed with my new ideas about "free as in free speech" I decided to write a manifesto for Free Music. I shared an early draft of it with my brother and suggested to him that we release our recordings on a free music license. He did not like the idea at all, and was disturbed by the manifesto.
I went back to my computer, opened up the document in OpenOffice and read through it again. I realised that the arguments I had adapted from GNU were just too extreme to be embraced by the uninformed public, especially by the artist community. I wanted my manifesto to be persuasive to the average musician, not just to those who happen to have read all of the philosophy section of the GNU website. I think a more effective way to "evangelize" open source projects is to emphasize the superiority of the development model for human creativity projects.
So now I'm not sure what to think of RMS. His views are extreme, and they don't sell very well to the average person. But extremeism is needed, so let him do all that he can to further the cause.
The astronomer probably didn't go running to the press. He did the right thing, upon discovery of the object, subjected it to peer review. After all, he'd need help obtaining the data necessary to confirm or deny the potential threat, if he even was aware of it to begin with.
:)
What generally happens is information about the rock is posted in a circular for other astronomers to work on, and the press also obtains a copy of this. They get the information before the astronomers have had a few days to work out the actual orbit and run the story, because hey, planetwide armageddon makes for great news
And follow up stories about how we're NOT going to die afterall ALSO make for great news.
-Restil
Play with my webcams and lights here
So a non-ass sits quietly while Valenti and assorted media giants determine what the government should do about citizen's rights?
Last I checked the government is there to represent the citizens, they are not there to create laws to make it easy for the RIAA to continue 1970s business models at the expense of consumer freedom. The fact that this sham of a panel was put together without significant represenation for user rights justs makes it clear how deep the WA 'hos are entombed in an "Enron" mind set.
Business as usual. Too bad if we take your savings and your rights.
God forbid someone speak out of turn. My how impolite!!!
RMS was not comparing the Free Software movement to the civil rights movement. He was demonstrating that civil disobedience sometimes results in positive effects. That's the point of the disobedience in the first place.
Your response is very ironic, as it demonstrates the type of generalist misunderstanding to which RMS referred.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
I think the key concept here is "creativity"(1). Perhaps the open source development model (typically defined as being a loosely-collected group of developers working together via some collaborative medium such as the internet, for fun and not necessarily profit) works well for projects that can be said to be "creative", but unfortunately 99.995%(2) of all software projects are not what I would consider "creative". They may be reimplimentations of something that's already been done (say, a media player, or a word processor, or a text editor, or a compiler, or ...), though they may be adding new concepts and capabilities. They may also be just plain drudgery (specialized software for an accounting firm, for example). Are these projects "creative"? Depends. I'd probably say "no", for the majority of them, but you may have a different opinion. As well, even where "creative" applications are concerned, a majority of the code is boring code that needs to be written but is more busy work than anything else. In general (and there are exceptions to this, of course), most open source developers prefer to focus on the more "fun" parts of the software rather than doing the various menial tasks that need to be done(3). This is understandable, because if you're not getting paid to do this, you're doing it in your spare time. Why would you want to spend your spare time doing something boring when you could be out doing something else instead?
Anyway, on to my point. What I'm getting at here is that the open source development process is not necessarily superior to more traditional proprietary development processes, nor is there an overwhelming amount of evidence to suggest that it may be. For every successful open source project out there that can be held up as a shining example of the open source development process, there are hundreds of projects languishing under the model, with little or no "external" (ie, outside the initial author or group of authors) development or bug reporting, and a whole lot of these projects have only gotten so far as implementing some of their cool ideas and just get bogged down when they get into the other 80% or so of the code that's not "cool"(4). At least as far as proprietary software is concerned, you can be reasonably sure that the boring parts will get done as well as the interesting parts, because there is incentive to do the boring work (ie, a paycheck).
------
1. For "creativity", I'm using the definition of the base "creative" as "Characterized by originality and expressiveness; imaginative", and not the more broad "Having the ability or power to create".
2. I'm making up my statistics, but the actual numbers are not important. What is important is that the number is large. It may be 75%, or 83%, or 99%, but it's still a large majority.
3. Prime example: the addition of fairly useless "fun" things to Mozilla, like Chatzilla, at a point in time where development resources would've been better spent fixing bugs aiming towards a 1.0 release. Yeah, yeah, Mozilla did finally release their 1.0 version, but the fact still stands that many of the contributing developers apparently were more concerned with writing "cool code" than with fixing bugs.
4. Check Freshmeat or SourceForge (SourceForge is much worse about this than Freshmeat) some time and see all the stagnant open source projects that have never gone anywhere, nor ever will. There are literally hundreds, if not thousands of them. Temper the successes of each Linux, Apache, FreeBSD, or other high-profile open source project by the failures of all of those projects. Note that I'm not saying the ratio is any better in the proprietary world (though if I had to guess, I'd say it is), but at least with proprietary software there's some form of motivation aside from "This'd be cool".
As much as I would normally agree about RMS, I think in this instance, he actually comes across as a seemingly reasonable and intelligent individual. If only he were this clear and non-bizarre in his day to day "proclamations" of everything computing. If you read what RMS has written, and check out the link, you'll find that for once, he comes across in a way that isn't embarassing to most geeks.
RagManX
If you want to have an educated opinion, you owe it to yourself to check out RMS's positions personally.
--Mike
"Not an actor, but he plays one on TV."
I think that RMS's fundamental problem is that he doesn't communicate well in sound bytes. He's somebody who has spend a huge amount of time sitting down and thinking out his views on a variety of topics related to software, and now to various aspects of "intellectual property". Unfortunately, those views are complex (as they should be given the complexity of the subject) and not easily distilled into neat and easily digested statements.
When he tries to turn his views into soundbytes, he winds up emphasizing his ideas that are most radical. This makes him come off like a foaming at the mouth radical who just wants to smash the proprietary software business. When he actually gets a chance to explain his views at length, it's possible to see that he's really thought these things out and that he has real, compelling reasons for his views. Almost any radical idea will sound more reasonable when you get to hear the reasons for it, especially if they're the result of as much thought as Stallman's.
There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.
I just cant figure out if his /. anti-fans deride him because its the hip in-crowd thing to do, or if it's MS employees. ;)
/. may not really have any influence, but it does get attention from many tech sources. I can easily imagine an employee or two deciding to troll during their lunch hour.
If I'm really cynical that day, it's because people are just stupid. Not those who just don't agree with everything he says, or not like the way he conducts himself. The people who insist the GPL is just like the MS Office EULA because both involve some kind of restriction, or that no one would ever make software every again without the restrictions in that EULA. Sure, it might be convenient for our faith in humanity to assume that the person is an MS employee, or at least owns a lot of stock in similar firms. Then it'd just be an insincere mistruth spread because of good ol' fashioned greed. But the idea that people without any personal motivation to do so would sit around and decide that this is what they really believe... Well, that's just depressing.
Today I'm feeling apologetic for my cynicism, so I'll say they're MS employees. It's plausible --
The enemies of Democracy are
I disagree with much of what Stallman has said and written over the years. It wouldn't bother me so much were it not for his continued use of evocative propaganada in his writings.
What seems to "bother" you is that Stallman has advanced persuasive arguments in favor of an idea that conflicts with your existing world view. Rather than rethink that world view in light of the new information, you emotionally reject it as "propaganda." This is, in fact, a very human reaction. It is often difficult for people to accept new ideas, even good ones, that conflict with their entrenched existing ideas. This is particularly true when the person in question has an economic interest in maintaining their current world view, as you do.
In your post and in your essay, you spend a great deal of time attacking Stallman and his ideas as "propaganda," without rebutting those ideas. This is called an argumentum ad hominem attack ("against the man") and is considered a very poor argument--I'll resist the urge to call it "propaganda." And no, simply stating that you hold some particular belief as fundamental (e.g. "I believe that the owner of a computer program has the right to sell it") is not a rebuttal.
When I see an author trying to persuade me emotionally rather than through reason or logic, it makes me suspicious.
Indeed. These are emotional issues to those who understand them; DRM legislation, for example, could potentially have a devestating long-term impact on our society. I find Stallman's ideas to be exceptionally well-reasoned and logical. Clearly, you react to them very emotionally; I suggest you read Stallman's ideas again and give them some thought.
The fight against DRM is NOT a fight to reproduce comercial music or, worse, use multiple coppies of M$ junk in your house as some might believe. The fight against DRM is a fight to maintain control of your computer. It's a fight to be able to make your own software, and other content, and share it with your friends. DRM will end your ability to do these things as surely as the DMCA made DeCSS illegal and prevents you from using a freaking cue-cat bar code reader as you see fit. DRM can not work unless someone else is root on your computer. How else can unspecified files be "protected" against copy? This is as unAmerican as any other form of censorship and must not be allowed to pass without comment.
This fight is more imprortant than any previous civil rights battle since the US Delcaration of Independence. That someone who is root on all DRM encumbered machines will wield more raw power than any previous tyrant. Those that own the filters will be able to spy and deny copy on demand. This way DRM will end your rights to free speech, press and security of your personal papers and effects. With free speech and press go truth itself. Without security of your private papers effective opposition is impossible. Of course, a society like that will not prosper, but neither will it necessarily crumple on it's own. As the US government turns it's back on the Bill of Rights, hope for freedom in this world grows dim. There's no place left to run.
Thank you RMS for doing what you do. Good luck.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Perhaps that would pertain if CommieLib were arguing about some "general rule". He is not. He is simply saying that the avenues available to RMS are totally different from those available to Rosa Parks.
In the 'real example' cited in the FAQ, the arguer takes on a clearly inconsistent position: that it is "always" wrong to oppose the law, and that Dr. King did the right thing.
But here, CommieLib has said nothing of the sort. The point is that RMS's analogy is wrong, because the situation is different. In the civil rights movement, it was necessary to turn to civil disobedience because the system did not provide another way for contrary opinions to be heard.
After all, you cannot vote to change things if you are discriminated against at the polls.
But here it is completely different. RMS chose to disrupt a private function, even though there are many other, more effective, ways to get the message out. In the end he hurts his own cause by making it look ridiculous.
What seems to "bother" you is that Stallman has advanced persuasive arguments in favor of an idea that conflicts with your existing world view.
No, I told you exactly what bothers me: Stallman depends more on an appeal to emotion than he does on appeal to intellect. When other people do this, they're often trying to convince their audience to believe or to do something that they might not otherwise believe or do. That give me the creeps.
As I've written elsewhere, my disagreement with Stallman exists on a plane separate from my objections to his rhetoric. In other words, in my eyes he is not only Wrong, but also Bad.
In your post and in your essay, you spend a great deal of time attacking Stallman and his ideas as "propaganda," without rebutting those ideas. This is called an argumentum ad hominem attack ("against the man") and is considered a very poor argument--I'll resist the urge to call it "propaganda."
Propaganda is a very specific term for a set of rhetorical techniques. The word does have negative connotations, but I honestly can't think of a better one to describe what RMS does. The connotations aren't always negative, anyway. In the 20's, the word "agitprop" appeared, which is a combination of the Russian word agitatsiya (or "agitating") and propaganda. The word was used by Russian Communists to describe their own efforts. So your assertion that calling it propaganda is an ad hominem attack is pretty off base. If I wanted to make an ad hom attack against RMS, I'd call him a left-wing radical Communist who dresses funny. That's an ad hom attack.
For more information on propaganda techniques in persuasive writing, look here, or here, or here. These resources are good both for creating your own propaganda, and also for recognizing the propaganda of others. I'd suggest that you read about these techniques and familiarize yourself with them, then revisit RMS's writings. See how many instances of the propaganda techniques you can find. It's fun; it's like a little game.
I suggest you read Stallman's ideas again and give them some thought.
I read Stallman's ideas incessantly. But I read them critically and dispassionately, keeping a copy of those propaganda guides open beside me as I go. It's a terribly educational experience.
Without having an opinion one way or the other on the impact of RMS's behavior at the meeting, I am one person who was active in the civil-rights movement in the early 60's who is not offended by the comparison of it to the fight to restrain IP claims. (I'm also author of several minor patents -- example.)
US-led intellectual-property laws (all mixed together, as Stallman points out) are a growing method of forcing the poorer parts of the world to send money to the richer parts. The biggest problem is not copyright, but patents such as the ones that make many needed medicines too expensive to use throughout most of the world. Taking money from impoverished sick people (or countries) just for the privilege of using an idea is as immoral as were the earlier colonial and feudal expropriations that were also justified by ownership ideas that are now discredited.
Laws that let you keep other people from using ideas need to be limited to what can be clearly shown to benefit people in general. When numerous trivial ideas are granted patents, and unjustified but ruinously-expensive infringement lawsuits are routinely used to stifle independent invention, it is clear that the correct balance has been lost. While the protests should not be limited to DRM (it won't help for people to see entertainment piracy as the only IP issue), I think that the fights on DRM are an important element in awakening people to the dangers posed by greed backed up by political power, even if the greatest such dangers are not DRM ones.
The civil-rights movement and the women's-rights movements were glad to make use of precedents from the ACLU's free-speech efforts to stop pornography prosecutions and from alliances first formed to repeal alcohol prohibition -- even if the issues were not directly related in theory, the enemies of more freedom were pretty much the same in all cases, so that all the freedom efforts reinforced each other in practice. Efforts for more IP freedom are in the same tradition.
While I hesitate to buy into the comparisons with martyrs of civil rights and women's suffrage, I understand and sympathize with RMS's views. I also agree that a miscommunication about his views on intellectual property occured, and clearly a well-written text can offer a much more cohesive explanation than five minutes of conversation on a hot DC sidewalk.
But perhaps this is exactly the point: I've recieved an outpour of sympathetic responses from red-blooded geeks from all parts, bemoaning our self-appointed representatives and their complex, often unrealistic viewpoints that can be explained only at length and implemented only in a closed system of their own design. However, the beautiful thing is: RMS, the NY Fair Use crowd, and their ilk have just as much right to their style of politicking as those of us who desire efficient and reasonable lobbying. And, as one Slashdotter enlightened me, it does take all kinds to really expose a tangled issue like this.
I am largely in agreement with RMS, with the GNU philosophy, and with the notion that 'intellectual property' is both a misnomer and a vile construct. But I've also been mired in enough DC politics from a young age to know that idealism lies well beyond the goal in sight, and as disheartening as that may be, it's the price of "majority rules" democracy. I appreciate RMS clearing up our misunderstanding, and I appreciate those of you who wrote in support of a more moderate geek political platform.
I am not sure what you are saying. Is freedom of speech and freedom to control your own possessions not a right? Do we have to picket the White House and have the DC police beat us up and rape us before we can compare our cause to past causes? The great civil rights leaders of the past did not try to create the world you now enjoy because people were dying. They did it because it was the right thing to do.
Stallman used the same propaganda technique-- and some others-- in his writings on "free" software. I put the word free in quotes there because what he means by "free software" and what the word "free" actually means are two very different things.
And these criticisms are essentially the same used against Dr. King. He was in it to make himself famous. He said one thing, like the blacks must be free, and meant another thing. Like be free to live next door. Or be free to take my job. Or be free to have a better car than I do. Or be free to rape my daughter (because of course, consensual sex would be unthinkable between a good white girl and an evil black man). Some of these things Dr. King did mean, and it was just a matter of perspective.
Just to sum up, I think Stallman's politics are misguided and wrong, but that's not what really bothers me. What really bothers me-- what really leads me to think that he might actually be dangerous, subversive in the bad sense of the word-- is the way he presents his ideas so carefully. His message is so clearly meant to appeal to emotion at the expense of reason that it makes me wonder what it is he's trying to slip past me.
Which of course was the situation in Selma in the spring of 65(?) and April 4, 1968. At that time everyone, at least in principle, thought black people were human, but we couldn't have them living and shopping with us good white people. But you know, the so-called 'Dr.' King's ideas go just too far and are subversive to the integrity of this one America under god. He gives those great sermons and gets all those other uppity colored folks all riled up, like they might actually believe they have a right to a seat on the bus, or have a right to drink at our water fountains. It is clearly just the emotional response of the inferior race who has no capacity for understanding the importance of a reasonable, logical, common sense discussion. If they would just sit down and talk sensibly, we could all get along. They could live in their ghetto, and take the bus in to clean our toilets and wipe our babies asses.
Which of course was the thinking that lead to murder of protestor in Marion, Alabama by a state trooper, which lead to the march in Selma where more protestors were killed. After the march, a Unitarian minister, James Reeb, who marched along side about 20% of his colleagues in this historic march, was brutally beaten and murdered by the good Christian citizens of these United States, presumably for supporting the subversive message of peace and equality spouted by Dr. King.
Finally, let me say that the DRM issue may or may not be a civil rights issue. But if you are going to attack it, at least try to use some new arguments.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Interesting tactic, it seems you used it in the linked article as well. A bit of the old reverse psychology. "Oh dear me, I know I'll be modded down, but someone has to tell it like it is to the horde of slashdot."
On to the meat.
Your objections to Stallman above and in your linked article seem to be tainted by some work you had to do because someone in your company didn't read the license to a bit of software before using it in a compony product. Boo hoo. You should be mad at that person, not the author of that software or the GNU project or Stallman in general.
You go to great lengths to attack Stallman's use of the word "free" and how software (as a non-entitity) can't be free in the way Stallman means it. What about free speech? Right or wrong, the "free" in Stallman's free software speaks about the rights of individuals the same way "free' in "free speech does.
Also, read this again and tell us if you are being more honest than Stallman is:
Oh the irony. Maybe you should tone down your language a bit. Stallman a "political extremist"? Please, that does such a disservice to real political extremists. Further, he doesn't try to associate himself with civil rights protesters so much as to point out that breaking of rules and even laws can be justified if you believe the aim is worthy. He points out that this has to be a personal decision based on who is doing the rule breaking - sure you can agree with that? "Martyr" is your emotionally laden word. Does that even apply to the examples he gave or did you introduce the word for your own propoganda (I'm thinking of the women suffarage protesters who chained themselves to doors, here, if some of them died I meant no ill will).
I could go on, but have work to do. Heed your own advice.
XML causes global warming.
Stallman isn't embarassing, he just isn't PC enough for you. The man has convictions, that's all. Which is good... Are you embarassed by the ideas he has, or by the fact that he has consistently refused to kiss ass in order to air them in public? If it's the latter, you need to review your worldview. Whether or not his methods will work with a stuffy group like Congress is another matter... but I don't see him changing much and I like that, even I do disagree with him on some things.