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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.'"
Ugh, I can't read Esperanto!
How can you read the article and post something that fast?
-- When did Ignorance Become a Point of View?
Richard M. Stallman, ubiquitously known as "RMS", is the Patron Saint of the "open source" movement. "Open Source" is a method of software distribution which implements a means of copy protection by not distributing the final program codes. Instead, the user must assemble this final "executive" code by hand, thus eliminating the need for the proprietary data which must be included in a company-distributed copy.
This is all fine and good, in theory, and the Open Source movement has garnered a vast following from across the untamed corners of the internet. In this essay, I will explore how Mr. Stallman came to embrace this movement.
RMS was born in Modesto, California and attended Berkeley University. This shouldn't surprise anyone, since Berkeley is the Liberal Hive of America and RMS is an admitted communist. RMS began his bizarre lifestyle while attending Berkeley, where he occupied the attic of a clock tower. This eccentricity continues today and RMS will not travel without a grandfather clock and a spitoon.
RMS' penchant for thievery was evident from the very beginning. His attic "apartment" was filled with equipment stolen from the Berkeley computer labs. This was quite an achievement in the early '70s, when any computer equipment was the size of a refrigerator.
RMS and his hacker friends cut class regularly, opting to spend their time and parent's money constructing illegal electronics devices designed to covertly access phone lines. The group of pirates would hack into the phone company, and charge enormous phone bills to unsuspecting Republican professors.
It was during this period that Stallman met Steve Jobs. RMS' technical savvy was far exceeded by that of Jobs and, never one to like being second-best, this caused him to pursue software hacking. RMS' hacking ability was innate and he and Jobs formed an alliance which would later result in the birth of Apple Computer.
Jobs' technical accumen was matched only by his ability to sell. He designed the internal electronics and outer package design of the first Apple, which was financed by Nolan Bushnell. He set RMS on to the task of developing the computer's "operating system" - a sequence of low-level MS-DOS commands which tell the computer how to decode program codes.
Though a gifted "coder", Stallman was quite lazy and didn't fare so well with the new operating system. His sloppy design and bloated codes were barely useable on the first microcomputer. Jobs dumped Stallman and hired John Wozniack to rewrite the internal operating system codes for the Apple I.
This situation didn't sit too well with RMS. Though he effectively dropped out of college, through non-attendance, he remained in the clock tower, unbeknownst to the faculty and administration of Berekely. His bizarre reclusiveness and tendency to "hack" only in the night kept him invisible to everyone, though rumors did circulate around campus about the "haunted clock-tower" and the deformed ghost that would occasionally appear, transluscent white, on top of the tower playing a magical flute.
Stallman grew sullen and withdrew into his own world in the clock tower. He watched as the joint Apple/Microsoft empire grew to become the computer industry and he vowed to topple it by undermining the livelyhood of his arch-rival Steve Jobs (and, by extension, Bill Gates) with his illegal offerings.
Stallman conspired with Linux Torvaledse, another Berkeley student, to create a hacker operating system which could be used to leverage the internet and wreak havoc on corporations everywhere. RMS even went so far as to use Microsoft's innovative GUI (Graphical User Implementation) which he had stolen from Microsoft's mainframe computer and given the hacker alias "X-Windows". Unfortunately, RMS was not able to acquire the latest Microsoft GUI codes and was thus forced to settle for an inferior version.
RMS' continued interest in communism provided him some insight as to how to spread his hacker tool across the internet. By stressing the f
not even a blip on the radar screen. Not even a Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon factorial on Trivial Pursuit. Take your hippie drivel someplace else you pompous blowhard.
You are failing to understand why GNU was created.
You selling software is morally wrong, according to RMS.
Let me repeat. Morally wrong.
http://lwn.net/2002/features/rms.php3
Why this doesn't apply to books, music, or any other IP i have no idea, go ask him.
Now this isn't to say we should go around offing the lawyers but to be realistic we have to recognize we don't have lawyers worthy of technological civilization at all.
The best thing to do is correct the corrections system by providing alternatives to it. If programmers need a little competition to keep them honest why not the judiciary and the law enforcement system upon which its founded?
The best way to do this is simply render judgements and opinions and then leave it up to the enforcers to do the enforcing. Either the enforcers of the world will start paying attention to the right courts and the right rulings or they won't. If they don't we're screwed anyway but the least we can do is provide them with good judgements.
If I were a military or police man now I'd hate my job with a passion and desperately wish to find some courts with some compassion for humanity and justice rather than the leviathan that orders me throw people in prison to be "corrected" via gang-rape by the worst elements of society. That's the motivation for the enforcers. People want to be good -- particularly guys who want to be our protectors the most. Rendering judgements that actually upheld the nobility of creativity rather than forking the honors over to those with a brother-in-law sleaze-bag lawyer would be a natural consequence of correcting the corrections system so they could actually look at themselves in the mirror without averting their eyes.
Seastead this.
very sad.
Thankyou for sharing your insightful observations about global culture and ability to present yourself as a fantasy dwelling single-dimensional plank!
A farmer generates wealth, a factory worker generates wealth, people who produce things generate wealth. You never said generate, you said "accumulate" which really means "aquire without doing any hard work" or "steal".
Sorry but whatever text-book form of political theory you choose to make random uninformed comments about, I'm never sinking to your level.