Slashdot Mirror
Transcript of Eben Moglen's Harvard Speech
An anonymous reader writes "Groklaw has a transcript of Eben Moglen's Harvard Speech + Q&A up. Good Stuff. During the Q&A he made a good point to think about: 'We stand for free speech. We're the free speech movement of the moment. And that we have to insist upon, all the time, uncompromisingly. My dear friend, Mr. Stallman, has caused a certain amount of resistance in life by going around saying, "It's free software, it's not open source". He has a reason. This is the reason. We need to keep reminding people that what's at stake here is free speech. We need to keep reminding people that what we're doing is trying to keep the freedom of ideas in the 21st century, in a world where there are guys with little paste-it labels with price tags on it who would stick it on every idea on earth if it would make value for the shareholders. And what we have to do is to continue to reinforce the recognition that free speech in a technological society means technological free speech. I think we can do that. I think that's a deliverable message.'"
...who works Pro Bono for them
I am NaN
Here are you hints:
/.
Groklaw
SCO
(Richard) Stallman
With apologies, these names should ring a bell to anyone who occasionally visits
I'm feeling lucky
Simple Unexpected Concrete Credible Emotional Stories
1994-, Professor of Law and Legal History, Columbia Law School.(current)
1987-94, Associate Professor of Law, Columbia Law School.
1986-87, Law Clerk to Justice Thurgood Marshall, United States Supreme Court.
1985-86, Law Clerk to Judge Edward Weinfeld, United States District Court, Southern District of New York.
1984, Associate, Cravath Swaine & Moore, New York.
1983, IBM Corporation, Armonk, New York, Associate Corporation Counsel
1979-84, IBM Corporation, San Jose, California, Programmer/Analyst, Programming Language Research & Development
Selected Publications
Anarchism Triumphant: Free Software and the Death of Copyright, First Monday (August, 1999)
The Invisible Barbecue, 97 Colum. L. Rev. 945 (1997).
Jewishness and the American Constitutional Tradition: The Cases of Brandeis and Frankfurter (Book Review), 89 Colum. L. Rev. 959 (1989).
Taking the Fifth: Reconsidering the History of the Privilege Against Self-Incrimination, 92 Mich. L. Rev. 1086 (1994).
Eben Moglen is lead counsel for the Electronic Frontier Foundation and a professor at Columbia Law School in New York City . He's a proponent of freedom on-line, a friend (or at least acquaintence) of Lawrence Lessig, and someone who works actively as a lawyer to promote open software and copyright issues on the web.
I had him as a professor for three of my classes while I was there, and he's a lightening rod for controversy. He often interacts with professor Jane Ginsburg, who takes an opposite view of copyright (and teaches copyright at Columbia; she's also the daughter of Justice Ginsburg on the Supreme Court).
The Free Software Foundation
His Bio is Here
He was responding to the talk given by our buddy Darl McBride Text here
Save a Life. Donate Blood. Please.
There is no copyright license in the United States today more fitting to Thomas Jefferson's idea of copyright or indeed to the conception of copyright contained in Article 1 Section 8, than ours. For we are pursuing an attempt at the diffusion of knowledge and the useful arts which is already proving far more effective at diffusing knowledge than all of the profit-motivated proprietary software distribution being conducted by the grandest and best funded monopoly in the history of the world.
He is, however, the lead counsel for the Free Software Foundation(FSF) and it is in this capacity that the quote in the article writeup is relevent.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Moglen is a treat to watch and hear; in an era of dismal public speakers he's a reminder that people once went to Court and campaign gatherings just to hear English rhetoric as a fine art.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
... and one relevant to a much-debated topic here on slashdot.
Moglen makes a very lucid explanation of why the apparently-more-free BSD license is less valuable to people who believe in freedom. He characterizes the the world of free software as a "self-healing commons", that cannot be appropriated, or destroyed, and points out that a BSD-style commons is much more vulnerable to being "proprietized".
The really interesting parts of his talk, though, were the bits about open hardware and radio spectrum, and their implications on technological free speech, and of course his extensive and detailed explanation of why he thinks the free software battle is essentially already won.
Even if you don't agree with him, Eben Moglen is a persuasive speaker with very deep and powerful ideas. Very well worth reading/listening to.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
For those of you too "young" to remember, it was the "open source" advocates (Eric "ESR" Raymond leading the charge) that, imo, muddied the waters in the first place. The driving notion was that in order to find acceptance in the commercial marketplace (as if that were the holy grail we should all be shooting for), "Free Software" had to change its name and its image, because nobody whose job depended on it would ever use something that was "free". So, they created (and indeed trademarked) the moniker "Open Source Software".
I'm not saying that their methods were not in line with their goals (though I always had reservations about the goals themselves). Name makes a difference in the image. Which is exactly the point that Eben is making in his speech when he advocates not forgetting the "Free" part.
"UNIX" is never having to say you're sorry.
Eben Moglen's presentation in RealMedia video
The lectures were public. You should have come. (At least to Moglen's; I heard some people didn't feel well after McBride's.)
The evaluation of an action as 'practical' . . . depends on what it is that one wishes to practice.
It's very strange that you can't back this claim up, especially as Stallman and the FSF have made money by selling GNU software.
In fact, you can order GNU software directly from the FSF right now.
In fact, why not read what the FSF have to say on the matter straight from their own website:
Ryan T. Sammartino
"Ancora imparo"
According to "Rebel Code - Linux and the Open Source Revolution" by Glyn Moody (chap. 10), the term "Open Source" was coined in Winter/Spring 1998 (February 3rd?). Eric Raymond initiated the search for a term for this "free software" coming out, and later "open source" was decided upon. It seems they were looking for something less ambigious and more business-friendly than "free software". The term itself was originally suggested by Christine Peterson of the Foresight Institute.
regarding Stallman (quoting from the book)
"Richard Stallman always viewed this shift [from terms like 'free software' to 'open source'] with alarm. 'The open source movement is Eric Raymond's attempt to redirect the free software movement away from a focus on freedom,' he says. 'He does not agree that freedom to share software is an ethical/social issue. So he decided to try to replace the term 'free software' with another term, one that would in no way call to mind that way of framing the issue."
So it seems that, historically, there is something of a difference between "open source" and "free software"
Q: But what about the software writer?
.
Moglen: Ah, the software. .
Q: That's the kind of stuff I think I was more getting at with my question. So you have somebody who creates something useful but it has a zero distribution cost, and it's useful in a way that's not, not useful like celebrity, though I'm not sure, I don't think that's useful in some ways, but it's useful in the different sense that it takes a long time to create well.
Moglen: See, the programmers I worked with all my life thought of themselves as artisans, and it was very hard to unionize them. They thought that they were individual creators. Software writers at the moment have begun to lose that feeling, as the world proletarianizes them much more severely than it used to. They're beginning to notice that they're workers, and not only that, but if you pay attention to the Presidential campaign currently going on around us, they are becoming aware of the fact that they are workers whose jobs are movable in international trade.
We are actually doing more to sustain the livelihood of programmers than the proprietary people are. Mr. Gates has only so many jobs, and he will move them to where the programming is cheapest. Just you watch. We, on the other hand, are enabling people to gain technical knowledge which they can customize and market in the world where they live. We are making people programmers, right? And we are giving them a base upon which to perform their service activity at every level in the economy, from small to large.
[1:15]
There is programming work for fourteen-year-olds in the world now because they have the whole of GNU upon which to erect whatever it is that somebody in their neighbourhood wants to buy, and we are making enough value for the IBM corporation that it's worth putting billions of dollars behind.
If I were an employee of the IBM corporation right this moment, I would consider my job more secure where it is because of free software than if free software disappeared from the face of the earth, and I don't think most of the people who work at IBM would disagree with me.
Of all the people who participate in the economy of zero marginal cost, I think the programmers can see most clearly where their benefits lie, and if you just wait for a few more tens of thousands of programming jobs to go from here to Bangalore, they'll see it even more clearly.
-- You can be a geeklord too