Lessig's Challenge: Are You Up To It?

Eloquence writes "At the 2002 Open Source Conference, law professor and cyberactivist Larry Lessig, last prominently featured here because of the Eldred case, asked some poignant questions: 'How many people have given to [the] EFF more money than they have given to their local telecom to give them shitty DSL service? How many people have given more money to [the] EFF than they give each year to support the monopoly--to support the other side?' Luke Francl has interpreted these questions as a challenge, and decided to chronicle both his donations to good causes and his less voluntary payments to 'the media oligarchy' on this page: Lessig's Challenge. This is a good idea if others imitate it: If these pages become interlinked with each other, not only can they motivate us and let us track our progress, they may also help us to keep each other up to date about 'good causes' -- there's more than the EFF, after all. With Harry Potter in theatres and Lord of the Rings before us, should 'nerds' also be thinking about supporting those who fight for our rights to, say, play DVDs on an open-source OS?"

Comments

I haven't, why should I?

[Adam Rightmann]

I pay my $30 for DSL every month, without ponying anything up to the EFF. I get my DSL through my local RBOC (frontier) and I've been very happy with it, having only one significant outage in the last year and a half.

Of course, I have an old American trick, competition. Time-Warner also competes for broadband in my area with Roadrunner, so we have two competing firms lowering the prices and raising the quality.

Perhaps it's heresy to suggest on a site so filled with such anti-corporation activists that it's nearly the Democratic headquarters, but good old fashioned competition is just about the best remedy there is for monopolies on broadband, OSes and media. I know business, competition and capitalism aren't very in vogue with the anti-globalization digerati (they prefer socialist fiats, sure, drag the competent down to the level of the lazy), but without keen agressive business people, you would all be reading Slashdot as a BBS on 14.4 telephone lines and Soviet copied 386s.

As for Harry Potter, I doubt I will bring the family to see that, as it kind of glosses over just which fate will befall those who practice witchcraft and necromancy. Perhaps the seventh film will tie it all together, Harry Potter and the Abyss of Eternal Torment and Damnation.

I'm In Compliance

[Flamesplash]

'How many people have given to [the] EFF more money than they have given to their local telecom to give them shitty DSL service?

Well I have Cable but besides that I get good service. So that'd be $0 to a shitty ISP and $0 to the EFF.

How many people have given more money to [the] EFF than they give each year to support the monopoly--to support the other side?

Let's see, I haven't bought an MS product at retail value in a long time so again, $0 for MS and $0 for the EFF.

Do I win something now???

My rule to live by:

[hardaker]

Don't support any extremist.

Extremists are almost always idealistic in some way. In this case, we have MS at one side of an extreme and RMS at the other. MS wants all your money, RMS wants no one to have any. I'm much in thinking to the RMS way, but even he has spent his energy (and thus part of the money which has been given to him) in ways that I think are insane.

Lets take an example: The legal paperwork required to submit code to any Emacs related project. In principal, it's a good idea, but I strongly doubt that the energy to maintain that ideal is worth the end gain. I suspect that if it came to a trial, you'd find that they couldn't prove they had assignment rights for everyone that has submitted code. (In fact, the guidelines for accepting a patch is something like "well, if it has less than 6 lines of code changed then we can accept it without paperwork", which alone will cause problems). So, in the end I suspect this whole policy has actually just slowed down the progress of their coding force rather than really helped "get things done".

Any idealist is likely to actually impeed progress in some way. Certainly M$ is doing an excellent job shooting other people's feet, and we can all agree on that. But, I suggest that RMS is actually doing similar things some of the time as well.

So my rule of thumb: Don't support the idealists. I don't give M$ any money, and I'm not sure I want RMS to spend all my money barking up a tree just because he thinks a dog might some day be up there.

Ok, it's 6:00 and I haven't had any coffee yet. For the moderators out there: this really wasn't intended to be flamebait. I wonder if it'll hold.