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Why Human Rights Requires Free Software
andyo writes "Why Human Rights Requires Free Software: Report on a practitioner's view of the critical role free software plays in the work of human rights activists around the globe."
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When we now consider the right to Free software a basic human right, I think we are all starting to take ourselves a little too seriously. It's not like someone is trying to outlaw the writing of Free software, or suppress the Free software movement (okay, maybe Microsoft is trying to talk trash about it, but they can't really do anything to stop it). Or is this the prelude to an argument that people should have access to source code for proprietary commercial apps, because not having it is a violation of their human rights?
Free software is good. But that doesn't mean that all software should be Free. It's a big jump from intellectual openness to Stallmanism.
i don't want gnu/human gnu/rights.
Nero-burning ROM for Linux!
Does this mean that people who lived before the invention of free software were not really free? Someone should go write a letter to Locke about this.
I'm sure this is quite offtopic, but what the hell.
/. is wasting a lot of space posting the transcripts of what some microsoft employee says, then the 20 rebuttles from the free softwar community. I think I could do without it. Any chance we can make "Free Software-Good/Bad" it into a category so it can be filtered out by everyone? Or maybe just throw it in with the "Jon Katz" category...
Is it just me, or does anyone else think it's overkill to give a spot on the front page to every article that expresses an opinion on how good/bad free software is?
Sure, the first few discussions that reach the mainstream public... that makes sense. Now,
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
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really? you seriously think software is more tangible than say free speech?
i assume you mean tangible the engilish word:
if you look at the first definition, i doubt you could apply this more to software than speech. sure you can touch a tape wich contains speech or software. but you are not touching speech or software directly.
wrt the second, i can reaize software, but i can also realize free speech. i was arrested a couple weeks ago in dc while realizeing free speech. the effects of free speech are quite evident on society, as are the effects of sofware. i would say they are equally tangible in this reguard.
now lets look at the third. can software really be valued monetarily? say some company charges $30 for software X. if i make a copy of it is each copy worth $30 or is each worth half of the original ($15). say i email software X to 1000 people. how much are those copies worth? since it's sofware they can be exact copies, does it devalue the original in some way?
take gnu sofware when considering the third definition. it can be obtained for free, and you are free to copy it. there is no monitary values associated with these transactions what so ever.
more tangible than speech? i dont think so.
-- john
Doesn't he first state it should be "free" and not "open source" and later, he compares proprietary solution with open source?
Unix makes easy tasks hard and hard tasks possible. Windows makes easy tasks easy and hard tasks $29.95.
A lot of people can see how the institutions that try to impose software and copying restrictions choke off freedom in the USA, but those economic forces and pressures will eventually reach China when they come into the information age too.
China's government will not be so restrained, and it could easially lead to a brutal or even genocidal crackdown when it comes to billions of people and trillions of dollars in intellectual property controlls. For the USA to insist that China impose strong intellectual property controlls inspite of it's culture to the contrary is outright reckless and irresponsible. The freedom to copy is one of the last glimmers of freedom in an otherwise militant police state. IMHO we are setting ourselves up to swallow some bitter Chineese medicine.
Imagine an American scientist bringing a closed, proprietary encryption program or statistical package to political activists in a foreign country and saying, "Just use this; take my word that it works right."
As someone who works for a company that produces statistical software I found this comment to be rather close-minded and wrong. My company, along with most others, goes through extensive certification testing to make sure that our software produces correct results. Our software is used by a broad range of academics, private sector researchers, government workers, and not-for-profit groups; and not once have I ever heard anyone even suggest that our program produces purposefully inaccurate results.
Quite honestly, there are no open-source statistical software packages that even come close to offering the benefits of our package. Although R has shown some promise, the documentation that comes with our software alone is worth the price. I have yet to see an open-source package that comes with the same in-depth encyclopedic reference documentation that we produce.
Just because it's closed-source doesn't mean we're evil.
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That conversation snippit really got me thinking about this. What does everyone else think?
Many if not most of those who did survive probably owe their good fortune to one of the first "computers": the British Colossus machine that was used to crack German codes. This significatly shortened the war, stopping Hitler's plans before they were carried out to completion.
Anyway, the money not spent in the IT budget doesn't just disappear. It is spent on something else more directly related to the company's business, thereby generating more jobs somewhere else in the economy.
Hey, every IT employee should expect that day to come: the day they can be replaced with technology. It's no different now than in the Industrial Revolution except that the people being replaced now are from the same group that built their replacement. But that's capitalism, and in the long run becoming obsolete is good for society.
Free software will become increasingly valuable to companies because of economies of scale. If every company wrote their own web server in-house, none of them would approach the power of Apache. Now that they're realising the value, we've got to convince companies of two things:
In this case the College students were able to deliver better than the IT workers. This is in part due to reuse of old labor (code)as well as presumebly cheaper pay.
As far as cheaper pay there are already systems of natural and artifical checks and balances to keep an equilibrium of pay for services releative to the cost of living.
As far as free labor (code), the laborers have to feed themselves and therefore will have to dedicate resources to paid labor. Also, the "free" labor could have been part of an assignment for a class that would be bartered for college credits that would eventually be bartered for a degree.
So in conclusion, yes free software is causing companies to fire experienced professionals and replace them with part time college students. However, this is not neccessarally a bad thing. If the professionals are really that damn good they will be able to get another job. If they can't then society probally has little need for their labor and they will learn new other skills or work for what the college students are working for. The obvisious conclusion of this is there will be less college students taking up computer science/CIS and less free software written. This will cause a greater demand for programmers and greater rates of pay. Hence capatialism will keep the market in check.
--- Justin Dearing http://www.justaprogrammer.net/ We're just programmers.
As well as it should be, but I believe that the effort to "prove" that the program used to process the data is trustworthy is going to be as difficult as "proving" that the collected raw data is trustworthy. One could, perhaps not easily, take the data that was collected and plug and chug it into another statistical program to see if the results were anywhere close to what the first presented results where. That could be considered one way to "prove" that the processing was legitimate, as long as the programs were not from the same software house.
But just go ahead and try to prove that the data were correct. But that's not the argument here.
I'm wondering if Oram's argument was more of an idealogical one rather than a practical one. I don't see why someone should be disbelieved just because they used a Microsoft product or a SAS product. I would also think it highly unlikely that a maker of shrink-wrap software would somehow be at fault, except perhaps through their own stupidity, for erroneous results, especially since their credibility is on the line.
On top of all that, wouldn't an open software package created mostly by, or presumed created by, a group of a particular nationality (KDE presumably made mostly by Germans, for one) come under more criticism if that particular nationality was related to the question that the(ir) software was being used to solve? Hmmm....
I'm starting to think that this article was an excercise in political correctness since I would highly doubt that someone would want to go through the effort in taking apart the program used to prove that it was correct. It would instead have to be an assumption that it was correct because it was Open Source. And how often have we had perfect Open Source programs that never needed patching?
Disclaimer: I use Open Source software, except for Quicken (sorry).
Is this thing on? Hello?
Since when do you have a right to copy something you don't own or intend to buy? People like you are the reason why there are few that take legitimate opposition to draconian copyright seriously. Instead of arguing "I have a right to use my IP in any way I choose for my own use (commercial or personal)" you argue, "I have a right to do anything with any IP I encounter for my own use." Tell me, which one sounds more mature and one like the rantings of some child who never grew up?
Why, whatever did the framers of the Magna Charta, the Declaration of Independence, or the Constitution ever do before the concept of Free Software?
What a bunch of tripe. Human rights requires vigilance and dedication. Software systems are a non-sequitur--they can express freedom, but they cannot create it.
!#@%*)anks for hanging up the phone, dear.
A bit much to complain about that when so many people have been made redundant by computers over the past thirty years. Go and talk to a former newspaper printer, for example.
So they've found a more efficient way of doing the job without employing quite so many VB monkeys. That's exactly the right step. The IT department exists to serve the needs of the company, not to provide jobs for tech workers.
And it's not as if any of the laid-off programmers are going to be unable to find a new job, even in today's market.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
You're absolutely right. I too am getting a little sick and tired of all this 'preaching to the converted'.
I'd like to see this story on the front page, for example, if it originated in mainstream media; then, the topic of discussion would have been something more useful like reaching out and getting heard by the unwashed masses.
These articles get posted and people are all "oh how wonderful it would be if Joe Sixpack read that and acknoeledged the truth in it". Bleh, spare me.
Post these things again when the story pops up on NBS or CNN or the beeb.
Just some flamebait here to complement your offtopic, Mr. evilviper.
Blearf. Blearf, I say.
The level of nastiness that this post has generated is very disappointing. There are some silly comments in the slapdash story, especially the comment about closed and non-free software being inferior because it is less transparent. Mathematica, MatLab and the like should all be independently verifable simply by the inputs and results and also by the inclusion of results of those programs in peer-reviewed scientific journals.
The point of the article, which would be a better point of debate, is that data collection and analysis by human rights organizations benefits from free software.
What free software provides human rights folks is a platform for doing specific kinds of work and letting a community improve that platform.
Here's a personal example: I'm developing a web based research and reporting system to track people who are kicked out of their HUD apartments for a drug or alcohol related arrest (not conviction) under the crazy One Strike law. We're both using free and open source tools and will, upon release in the near future, release this thing as quite modest free software.
The advantage is pragmatic: I can create a sophisticated system that other people can use to gather their own data on this subject and share/compare with ours. Are there nationwide trends and implications for this law beyond Chicago, the city where I work? Are there methods for analyzing this data that we're missing? Do other locales have specific pieces of information that we don't need to worry about in Chicago? Free software makes these questions easier to answer than proprietary software. Most of the mathematics required is stuff that any undergrad with numerical methods and statistical analysis under his or her belt can easily code, so that isn't really any issue.
It's a shame that the discussion on Slashdot thus far has been so hasty and angry, because even if it's a flawed article, it should really make people how they connect the "nerd" part of Slashdot with the "stuff that matters" part.
Online citizen journalism from the inner city: The View From The Ground
It is one thing to argue that an author should offer his works of authorship to the world as public domain without limitations, or even with sufficient limitations to satisfy RMS that it is "free" as he defines the term. This debate is one thing, and I do not speak to that issue here.
It is entirely another thing to claim that the failure of a society or individual to do so constitutes some form of Human Rights violation. Frankly, to do so is inanely naive and demeaning of the importance and significance of human rights. It is entirely different to argue that something is a Real Good Thing, and another to argue that it is essential to the survival of a decent human condition.
If there is a case to be made for this proposition, the article doesn't set it forth. All it contains is a combination of turgid rhetoric, wild (perhaps false) overstatements and illogical rationalizations. The argument here is virtually indistinguishable from arguments that all property, real, personal and otherwise, likewise constitutes a violation of Human Rights. Fine, but that is a radically different debate -- and there are far more refined arguments to be made than are made here. This "argument," at end, is just sophomoric whining.
That has nothing to do with human rights, it's just a political issue. People don't starve to dead or get murdered just because RedHat removed a flag.
The thing about "it widens the imbalance between the rich and poor" is pretty typical Marxist rhetoric, but for one little thing. Marx would probably say that "widening the imbalance" between rich and poor is a good thing, because things have to get worse before they can get better. Only when the world has hit rock-bottom, economically and socially, will the working people of the world wake up to their circumstances and bring in the True Revolution.
Or so Marx would say. It seems clear from history that Marx was wrong about just about everything. He seemed to base his reasoning on the assumption that the upper classes (the bourgeoisie-- cool, that's in my spell checker!) are inherently corrupt and that the working classes (the proletariat) are inherently noble. Thing is, though, that if you take somebody out of the working class and put him into the upper class, nine times out of ten he'll become a died-in-the-wool capitalist. Marx didn't count on this aspect of human nature.
So yeah, I agree with you. This is, in fact, just bullshit, but I think so for a slightly different reason. See, the capitalist thinks that inequity is a good thing because it creates a slope of upward mobility that all people can aspire to climb, thereby inspiring all sorts of good things that make the world a better place. And the socialist or communist thinks that inequity is a good thing because it will, sooner or later, bring about the Revolution that will make the world a better place. I don't know of a rationalized political philosophy that argues that inequity between classes is something you should oppose directly.
I think the author of this article was probably an amateur.
I write in my journal
The rest of the planet DON'T like you, we could care less who raped who's goat 5,000 years ago
/. discussion?
Why is it that goat sex must find its way into
every
Considered harmful.
A similar outrage occurred at our office the other day: Someone made a long-distance phone call!
Now, not long ago, he would have had to hire someone who knew how to write, have them buy paper, ink, and a quill and write a letter, give it to a horse courier, have them ride across the country, stopping at several general stores for oats and saddlesore ointment, patronize the occasional saloon, and deliver the letter, whereupon the same process would be repeated for the response.
But now, just because some unthinking bastard came up with a more efficient and less resource-intensive way of getting the same thing done, all those people are out of work.
Something is seriously wrong in our society, and free software is clearly at the heart of it. Just imagine, people building on what others have done so they don't have to waste time re-inventing the wheel with each new project. What ever happened to morality?
"Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it." -- GBS
You're glossing over a whole lot with your "basically closed" quip.
XML is useful for something like exchanging purchase order data, because the transactions take a defined form that will remain relatively constant over the lifetime of the relationship between the entities trading data. You paid me $X for Y units of product Z. We set up a DTD, and presto, our computers are talking.
When you're doing statistical analysis of human rights data, you have to quantify data that few if any information-rich parties have an interest in exchanging. The secret police are not going to write an output handler that conforms to your DTD. Therefore you have to adapt your strategy to the information that's available. Hospital records? Interviews with witnesses? Army documents? The form is different every time, as are the specific types of data and their mapping to the phenomena you're actually trying to analyze. That's why it's tough to have a standard data definition.
Leaping from that to an insinuation that the data format is somehow then "closed" is absurd. Any statistician who wants to be taken seriously will publish as much detail as possible about the methods used for data collection and coding.
"Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it." -- GBS
For Fuck's sake, I know it's in vogue to bash Marxism, which is fine, but don't spout off about what Marx said or didn't say when it's patently obvious you haven't read a word of his work. He never said widening the imbalance between rich and poor was good, and in fact he wrote in Capital that capitalism was revolutionary in that it allowed for the development of the very concept of human equality. And while your absolutely correct that his belief that the industrialized countries would experience benign socialist revolutions was flat wrong, his analysis of the commodity system under capitalism still reads as quite salient.
As for your argument that capitalism embraces inequality, you're right about its effects, but you're dead wrong about its theoretical base. For Marx the very notion of human equality arises because capitalism taught us to see people as possessors of commodities (rather than as "free," "slave," "serf," or whatever). While capitalism inevitably creates inequality, it does make possible the idea of equality. So Marx did think some good came from capitalism, in spite of what many (including many Marxists) believe.
Disclaimer: IANAM
statistical procedures in Microsoft Excel 97. Computational Statistics and
Data Analysis, 31(1): 27-37
The problems have not been corrected in an XP box I just tried.
It is my firm belief that the code must be available for review for it to be good science, and closed source is one of the greatest problems in science today. You are expected to document every aspect of your research, except for the actual implementation, that doesn't make any sense.
It doesn't need to be free as in speech or even Open Source in the OSI sense, but it sure helps.
Employee of Inrupt, Project Release Manager and Community Manager for Solid
In this case the College students were able to deliver better than the IT workers.
"Maybe" better than the IT workers.
Next July, when the college kids are off biking through France, and the database needs some tuneup or added feature...One manager might find himself out looking for a new job.
There is something to be said for onsite staff.
What I really want is for somebody to pay me to sip tall drinks while I sit on a beach in Hawaii. Unfortunately, very few employers find that to be a productive enough activity to staff up in that area. Oh well, life's a bitch.
That has nothing to do with human rights, it's just a political issue. --FooBarWidget on Slashdot.
Can I quote you like this in my .sig?
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
No.
I grew up in Louisiana. When I was a teenager, the state legislature considered a bill that would make marriages between first cousins legal.
How are these two even remotely connected? The former is a bill restricting what you're allowed to do, in what is in today's technological society a pretty fundamental way. The latter is "allowing" something which, even if you consider it ill-advised, isn't properly the business of the state at all.
The only way you could be connecting these proposals would be if you were saying that they are equally ridiculous. I suppose they are, but in diametrically opposite ways; 1) it is far from ridiculous that first cousins should be allowed to marry*, but a law allowing it is ridiculously unlikely to pass, and 2) it is ridiculous to mandate crippling the normal functions of computers in today's world, but the legislation required is very likely indeed to pass in one form or another. Some precursor legislation has already passed, viz. the DMCA.
*Yes, I know I'm open to flaming here, but the ban on 'incest' between first cousins is not based on any solid genetic ground; it's a taboo, pure and simple. Even if there were any significant increased risk to offspring it isn't the place of the state to determine these things, any more than they should mandate sterilization of women over 38, or men with a family history of testicular cancer, or people with poor eyesight.
Of course there's nothing wrong with what the GNU project does! The whole point is that the original poster was saying that you have a right to copy anything you want. Big difference between the GNU philosophy and that philosophy. One is voluntary, the other is not.
I cry "TROLL!" Poster is missing the point, willfully I think.
Q1) What stops the experienced IT staff (who understand the systems and the people using them) from using free software to cut the development time and/or licensing costs of the project?
Q2) How do a "couple of kids" brought in at short notice put something usable together quicker than 5 experienced staff who were already working on it. (Unless the 5 staff were idiots ripe for firing anyway)?
Answers: "Nothing" and "Not likely to happen".
I am a programmer. I write software for use within the manufacturing industry where I work.
I use free software to do so whenever possible.
It often allows me to be more productive thereby increasing my job security.
It also allows me to see inside it, and opens up options that would never be available with closed software. So I can be more creative, thereby increasing my job security.
Those 5 IT staff (if they existed) should have been cruising freshmeat from day 1 of the project, eh?
-- What do you need?
-- Gnus. Lots of Gnus.