Moglen on Social Justice and OSS

NewsCloud writes "What does Firefox have to do with social justice? How will the one laptop per child project discourage genocide? How soon will Microsoft collapse? Watch Eben Moglen's inspiring keynote from the 2006 Plone Conference (Archive.org: mp3 or qt; or YouTube). The video presentation is ordinary, so the mp3 is an equally good format. 'If we know that what we are trying to accomplish is the spread of justice and social equality through the universalization of access to knowledge; If we know that what we are trying to do is build an economy of sharing which will rival the economies of ownership at every point where they directly compete; If we know that we are doing this as an alternative to coercive redistribution, that we have a third way in our hands for dealing with long and deep problems of human injustice; If we are conscious of what we have and know what we are trying to accomplish, when this is the moment for the first time in lifetimes, we can get it done.'"

Comments

Great presentation

[byolinux]

Especially when he points out that the best efforts of Microsoft can't produce browsers as good as the Free Software community.

Re:Great presentation

[Anonymous Coward]

I really doubt the "best and brightest" at microsoft are working on IE7. Rather, I suppose they are system programmers seeking revenge on pussy web developers who've never saw a specification they didn't want to ream with their nose. It may be one of the few justices in the world, IE x.x.

In any event, IE7 is pretty painless for the end user. Firefox has god knows how many more man hours put into it. It's pretty pathetic they can't even keep up with a small shop like Opera. I guesss when nobody is paying for your work it can't be inefficient. So much for the 'bazaar' with really big iron gates and power hungry gestapo running the watch.

Re:Great presentation

[Bananenrepublik]

He forgot about the best browser -- which is not free software: Opera.

Re:Great presentation

[byolinux]

What if I want Opera for an architecture they don't compile it for, what if I want to build something upon Opera, what if I want to change Opera?

I can't. That's not the best browser, that's a maybe a more technically compliant browser than some, but it's not the best.

Re:Great presentation

[OldHawk777]

What's in your soul?
Priceless is not equal to Valueless.
Democracy is not equal to Plutocracy
Capitalism is not equal to Corporatism.
Social-Justice is not equal to Socialism.
Self-fare is not equal to Welfare.
Honor is not equal to Power.
Wealth is not equal to Money.
Faith is not equal to Dogma
Friend is not equal to Associate
Family is not equal to Group
Community is not equal to Team
Freedom is not equal to Control ... is not equal to ...

If you don't understand me by now, then you are
HomoSapient, but you are not HomoPrescient.

In politics, religion, corporatism what is
left/right depends not upon the meaning.
In politics, religion, corporatism what is
left/right depends upon desired perception.

Therefor, politics, religion, corporatism has no true value, but they do have transient social significance. I cannot consider (the inanimate) politics, religion, corporatism ... institutions as having feelings, thought, or permanent value for humanity. History sweeps institutions, gods, empires, economies ... away. We should not let humanity meet the soulless fate of historically transient dogmatic institutions/people.

Where humanity is sustained, evil cannot reign! WoeFolk Continent Knights (WCK)

Economy of sharing to compete?

[Gothmolly]

With what? The traditional economy goes something like: I have something, which you want, and you have something which I want. We trade. This non-concept of "economy of sharing" goes like: I have something, which you want, and I am morally obligated to give it to you, by virtue of the fact that I have it. Where is it in my interest to do so, if I do not accept your premise that I am somehow inherently obligated to?

The "one laptop per child" mentality is great at giving people the information that they need in order to succeed, but it will not make them succeed. It will ensure that everyone starts the race at the same point, but it will not make everyone a winner.

Re:Economy of sharing to compete?

[Aim Here]

You miss the point. It's about marginal costs and the commons.

The 'economy of ownership' is the one where people say 'This stuff is mine! Give me money or you can't use it, even if it costs me nothing for you to have it.

The 'economy of sharing' is where people say 'This stuff can't, or shouldn't be owned at all. If anyone wants to use it, they can and if anyone wants to help improve it, bonus!'

The commons notoriously has problems with things like overgrazing and overfishing, and the notion of sharing what you produce has problems if it costs you something to share. With digital goods shared on the internet, neither of those are a problem. Software doesn't wear out, and it doesn't cost me anything if two people share my work over a website or p2p network. The fixed costs associated with creating free software in the first place do have to be covered, but that hasn't been a problem so far.

The internet works with a different set of economic rules from the traditional economy. Stuff like Linux and Apache are economic equivalent of bumblebees. They shouldn't work under the old rules, yet they do.

And because of that, the ethical rules should change too, but they haven't, yet. In a world where Ubuntu and OpenBSD can be made without having policemen to stop them being copied, why should we employ policemen and jails to prevent Windows or OSX being copied? Jailing people is violent and evil, m'kay, and should only ever be used as a last resort. The primary justification for employing copyright protections in the first place was just to produce copyrighted works - if the works are now getting made without those protections, then there's no excuse for attacking and threatening people just to make an equivalent work that might compete with it...

Umm, I think that's Moglen's point, more or less. I'm still waiting for the *cough*quicktime*cough* movie to download...

Re:Economy of sharing to compete?

[Sique]

Yes... where is the economy in giving birth to children? Where is the economy in giving a present to loved ones? Where is the economy in giving education to minors? Where is the economy in giving directions to a stranger in your town? Where is the economy in giving playing cards to someone who is sitting with you at a table? Where is the economy in giving advise or stating opinions on Slashdot?

As you can see: We are giving for completely uneconomic reasons all the time. Does that make us bad people?

Re:Economy of sharing to compete?

[radarsat1]

This non-concept of "economy of sharing" goes like: I have something, which you want, and I am morally obligated to give it to you, by virtue of the fact that I have it.

You're wrong. You are describing a communist system, where wealth is distributed evenly, rather than according to how much each person is worth.

That's not open-source. To me, there is a huge difference with open-source: It is specifically about acknowledging how much something is worth, giving credit where it's due, and respecting the wishes of the authors. Thus, if you build something on top of what I have built, and I have shared it, all I ask is that you share it too. There is nothing in open-source that says that if you build something from scratch, you absolutely must open-source it. Only if you use parts of what other people did. Frankly, I think that's a reasonable request.

What it means is that it's more efficient than traditional innovation, because it means not having to re-invent the wheel. All we ask is that you open your code, too. You're perfectly free to not use what someone else did, but it would be re-doing a lot of work, so I don't recommend it.

Where is it in my interest to do so, if I do not accept your premise that I am somehow inherently obligated to?

You're only obligated if you are using something someone else did. Again, how is this not reasonable? If you're going to go and sell some code you wrote, but it includes a bunch of code I wrote, and I stated originally that I'd prefer you to share your code if you use it, then you're not inherently obliged to, you're obliged to according to the license agreement that you chose to comply with.

The "one laptop per child" mentality is great at giving people the information that they need in order to succeed, but it will not make them succeed. It will ensure that everyone starts the race at the same point, but it will not make everyone a winner.

Absolutely. However, the hope is that it will, in total, create more winners. Or at least even out the distribution of winners over the globe. Right now there is a serious imbalance in the world that is making it a very unhealthy place to live. We can't just keep giving money to developing countries, hoping that they'll invest it properly and fix all their economic problems. Instead, this is an attempt to help them help themselves, a much better approach IMHO.
Anyways, notice that the OLPC project isn't exactly a charity. It is an effort to create a machine that is useful, but made in such a way that the target demographic can actually afford it. This is perfectly moral from a capitalist perspective. (Yes it is a non-profit organization, but as far as I'm concerned that doesn't change anything. They are still selling the machines, not giving them away.)

Re:Economy of sharing to compete?

[multisync]

I have something, which you want, and I am morally obligated to give it to you, by virtue of the fact that I have it. Where is it in my interest to do so, if I do not accept your premise that I am somehow inherently obligated to?

Do you only do things that directly benefit your own interests? How about benefiting from living in a more altruistic society, one which you would contribute to as well as benefit from? Particularily if the thing you "have," which I "want," is digital in nature and therefore technically trivial to share with others.

Re:Economy of sharing to compete?

[OeLeWaPpErKe]

Everything you state is forbidden by some religion or another. So perhaps this will help by making people less dependant on idiotic religions ( http://thereligionofpeace.com/ ) and more on knowledge.

Re:Economy of sharing to compete?

[griffjon]

My favorite was when the MIT Technology Review compared Negroponte (who's received a lot of funding to develop the OLPC and will be selling them in huge batches) to Andrew Carnegie, who used questionable robber-baron business practices to make tons of money, and then funded the building of libraries via grants nationwide, and then set up a maintenance grant provided that the city also contributed funds to the ongoing support of the library.

Anyhow. They're selling machines, at an overall low cost (though there's not much work on the actual implementation part of them yet), without letting people do pilot projects in their own countries before signing on to buy millions of machines through World-Bank debt-financing. Woot.

While I'm on a rant; while I think the OLPC counter-point to Bill's "why can't they just use cell phones?" comment is valid; who want to read a book on a cell phone (Ok, BESIDES me, that's not the point) cell phones are great communication tools, but poor educational tools. Nevertheless, the whole OLPC-will-prevent-genocide is poorly phrased. Citizen journalism will reduce the risk of genocide (I'm not sure I even buy this point, media coverage of Darfur has certainly had mixed, at best, results w/r/t US policy); but OLPC doesn't => citizen journalism any more than cell phone video recording, TelSur style handicams, and so on.

Re:Economy of sharing to compete?

[0xdeadbeef]

Where is it in my interest to do so, if I do not accept your premise that I am somehow inherently obligated to?

Because if you don't, I'll take it anyway. Sharing, like private property, is a human convention that evolved to avoid wasteful violence.

But that is beside the point. It is in your interests to participate because you'll have more in the system than outside it. Your only "obligation" is the terms of the license of the software involved.

Re:Economy of sharing to compete?

[Sique]

Giving birth is forbidden by a religion? Ok... maybe there are some "Last Day" sects who say that those are the last days of the world anyway, so you shouldn't procreate anymore. But for some reason those sects don't last longer than a generation ;)

Giving advise, pointing out direction and educate the minors? How do those religions survive? How do the pass on even the interdictum of advisory, direction giving and education without pointing out that it is actually forbidden?

Re:Economy of sharing to compete?

[xappax]

This non-concept of "economy of sharing" goes like: I have something, which you want, and I am morally obligated to give it to you

I think the "economy of sharing" is more a reference to the "gift economy", in which people exchange things with each other not because they stand to gain personally from the transaction, but because they want to. There's nothing obligatory about the gift economy, quite the opposite. It's the voluntary nature of gift giving that makes it what it is. If a market economy is organized around the greed/competition instinct of humanity, a gift economy is organized around the group affinity/nuture instinct.

I know this concept flies in the face of everything people learn at Harvard Business School, and pretty much invalidates most market theory, so I'm not going to waste my time going into much detail, but the fact is that many, many exchanges throughout the world take place through the gift economy, and it is the primary form of economic exchange in many successful communities - the Free Software Community being one of them.

Re:Economy of sharing to compete?

[Anonymous Coward]

One of the better counter-arguments is that long-run improvements in output depend on the rate of technological progress, and the major open-source works are largely derivative, feeding off of an ecosystem created by the commercial IT industry (including the commercial software industry, eg Apple, AT&T, Microsoft, et al).

I've no idea how it will play out, or which scenario is optimal for technological progress in the long run, but most of the original work which open-source has copied was developed with industrial funding. Moreover, there aren't really any examples of open source taking on the sort of platform leadership role Microsoft, Intel and others have done on the PC since the mid-1980s (ie basically guiding the evolution of the platform).

If we start to see open-source software take on the sort of role traditionally filled by Microsoft, eg partnering with Intel and other large hardware vendors to drive development of a PC (or similar) platform, I'll agree that software copyrights aren't needed to ensure technological progress. In the mean time, Linux is a long way away from being anything even remotely like that, even if it is reasonably good at reacting to the platform developed by Microsoft, Intel, et al. Linux users are in a sense actually free-riders, benefiting from Microsoft's platform development investment (but perhaps paying for the contributions of Intel and others).

To some extent, I think it's comparable to writing. A lot of people write for free, but that doesn't mean getting rid of copyright for academic publications wouldn't cause serious problems for students. The wider availability of existing textbooks and derivative works would provide a short-run benefit to education, but in the longer run, the industry's economic profit would be negative, and thus resources now devoted to producing textbooks would be moved to other activities. A lot of textbooks, particularly at the undergraduate level, simply wouldn't be written, and education would suffer as a result.

Re:Economy of sharing to compete?

[Anonymous Coward]

The true members of the Catholic Church don't have the right to sex nor giving birth. The sisters have no right to "give birth".

Re:Economy of sharing to compete?

[E 99]

Yes... where is the economy in giving birth to children? Where is the economy in giving a present to loved ones? Where is the economy in giving education to minors? Where is the economy in giving directions to a stranger in your town? Where is the economy in giving playing cards to someone who is sitting with you at a table? Where is the economy in giving advise or stating opinions on Slashdot?

Yes, but you see, the ability to do this, i.e. to practice charity, which is the moral way of life, is in many ways dependent upon having the resources to give, which in turn is dependant upon a healthy free market economy. Obviously, you can be just as moral without any resources, but there is dramatically more that you can do for others if you do have resources. I think that Open Source is largely a result of this spirit. However, it is a result, not a cause, and I think it has exactly NOTHING to do with most the ideals mentioned, such as Justice. Justice has more to do with the free market. Charity is about rising above justice.

Re:Economy of sharing to compete?

[Scrameustache]

With what? The traditional economy goes something like: I have something, which you want, and you have something which I want. We trade. No:

I have something you want, and I won't let you have it unless you have something I want.

This non-concept of "economy of sharing" goes like: I have something, which you want, and I am morally obligated to give it to you, by virtue of the fact that I have it. I have something you want. Here, take it.
Now, is there anything you have that I want?

Re:Economy of sharing to compete?

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually is it more like this:

The traditional economy goes something like: I have something that I created using X-amount of energy, which you want either because I have convinced you that you need it or I have forced you to need it, and you have something which I want, which contains more energy than I used to create my something. We trade.

The concept of economy of sharing goes like: I have something, which you decided that want, and I am going to give it to you so that you can create something with it that I may want. We may trade.

Re:Economy of sharing to compete?

[Sique]

I guess you don't understand what Catholicism and Celibacy is about :) Priests, monks and nuns are in no way more "memberly" than laymen (even though they often act that way ;) ). A member of the catholic church is everyone who is baptized in a catholic rite and was never excommunicated. The one baptizing the new member doesn't even need to be a priest, a diacon can also hold the rite. And diacons often are people who are or were married (and now widowed), and whose children are already grown up.

The requirement for priests to be celibate was created to prevent dynasties in the clerical hierarchy (even though it didn't help all the time). But it is for the hierarchy only, not for the church as a whole.

Re:Economy of sharing to compete?

[ThosLives]

Kudos on having the wherewithall to participate in the Peace Corps! Based on your post, and because of that bit of info, I have a discussion that is probably going to incite quite a lot of reaction but is, I think, quite necessary:

How does 'journalism' prevent genocide? In my estimation, things like genocide (or other violent oppressive activities) are also somewhat economic, though with a different flavor: Those that would commit genocide (or other oppressive activity) generally do so as long as the perceived and/or actual benefits of so doing outweight the risks of continuing. So, if there is a defenseless population and there is no other group willing to provide force, then an in-power group may continue oppression. If a third party gets involved, say with the typical 'peaceful' means of sanctions, that will only work if the oppressors depend on something that the sanctions prevent. If there is a hypothetical situation where part of the US starts oppressing another part, I doubt there are really any sanctions that any other country could put on us to cause us to stop (despite what people think, in a pinch parts of the US could be self-sufficient). The only thing left is to apply force back.

The only caveat is the subtlety about what constitutes "perceived or actual benefits" - for some oppressive regimes, the perceived benefit of completely eliminating some other population outweighs the risk of being the recipient of any other physical force - this is why diplomacy can fail with groups with radical enough beliefs.

However, for systems which do have some limit of "ok, enough (threat of) force will make us back down", then I might be able to see how journalism can help, because that might cause those external forces to start threatening some measures. In general, though, I don't know that journalism can do anything, because the response of the audience of that journalism must actually act; journalism by itself doesn't do anything.

At the end of the day, it all boils down to how likely the oppressor is to back down under the threat of force; if the oppressor won't back down from mere threat, then the only recourse is something more violent, either something like a siege (what I would call passive violence) or something more direct.

Re:Economy of sharing to compete?

[Planesdragon]

The traditional economy goes something like: I have something, which you want, and you have something which I want. We trade.

Yep. Works really great for bread and knives.

This non-concept of "economy of sharing" goes like: I have something, which you want, and I am morally obligated to give it to you, by virtue of the fact that I have it.

Nope.

I have something, which is of use to you. Giving it to you in no way deprives me of that thing. I am therefore going to give it to you, so that, when you have something in a like vein, you will give it to me.

This works fairly well for things like ideas, songs, and inventions. It doesn't work at all for bread and knives. It works especially well for bread and policemen, though.

The question is not "does this make sense." The question is, "are you selling a knife or an idea?"

Re:Economy of sharing to compete?

[Orange Crush]

One of the better counter-arguments is that long-run improvements in output depend on the rate of technological progress, and the major open-source works are largely derivative, feeding off of an ecosystem created by the commercial IT industry (including the commercial software industry, eg Apple, AT&T, Microsoft, et al).

That theory perpetuates the strange myth that FLOSS is in some way non-commercial. Lots of people make lots of money off of the likes of Linux and the like, it's just a different business model from selling bits on a disc in a shrink-wrapped box. Commerce and Industry (and a dash of DoD) were the driving forces that created modern IT in the first place.

Re:Economy of sharing to compete?

[NineNine]

why should we employ policemen and jails to prevent Windows or OSX being copied

Because they chose not to "share" their work, and that's their right. By forcing them to "share" their work, then that's coercision. That's taking somebody's work from them by force. That's very bad.

Re:Economy of sharing to compete?

[lawpoop]

"Yes, but you see, the ability to [practice charity]... is dependant upon a healthy free market economy"

If that were true, then how come the world's major religions ( Islam, Christianity, Buddhism, and Judaism ) asked people to practice charity hundreds or thousands of years before the development of modern free markets?

Re:Economy of sharing to compete?

[maxume]

Plenty of people give presents expecting something in return. Even just gratitude.

When you educate a minor, as a society, you do so because he contributes back to society considerably more than it costs to educate him. Parents that educate their kids have the benefit that a child that can give them anything is more likely to than one that simply can't.

Playing cards with someone can be viewed as trading company(Common to all trade, both parties are better off than if they didn't trade, that it costs them little and gains them much doesn't change the economics).

Commenting on slashdot can possibly make the world a smidge more reasonable(from the commenter's perspective) making life a hair easier, in some nebulous way, and hey, ask an economist if he thinks viewing a movie is an economic decision, he'll say yes, the same relationship applies here, I contribute my time and get back slashdot.

Re:Economy of sharing to compete?

[griffjon]

Oh, I don't personally think it could prevent at all; at best it will reduce the duration by providing media coverage=> increased number of people knowing about it => more of a political issue in governments that have the ability to step in and stop things.

I mean, there's a LOT, and I mean, more than I've been fortunate enough to see myself ever before, of techno-utopianism that goes with the OLPC (and web2.0 too), and how these things will change the world and save the children and so on. I've gotten called out for being a wet blanket on this, but I've also seen computers distributed to schools used for status symbols in the principal's office (keyboard cord still in original plastic-and-twist-ties, even), and I've seen the manhours that it takes to deal with "donated" 486 computers - hundreds of dollars to get them out of customs, then days and days of hard, nasty, sweaty labor swapping out broken parts, installing an OS from floppies (no CD, no network card, no modem card, no USB...) (and I'd forgotten how friggin sharp the metal edges used to be!), just to get a craptacular computer that doesn't run anything that's been released in the past decade, doesn't interoperate, and looks so frankenstein that no one wants it...

OK, ranting, sorry.

Anyhow. Citizen journalism is good. Witness the speed with which the story about the UCLA cop that tasered a student got around the net thanks to the provocative cell phone video. Remember Rodney King! The problem is... uh, what happened to that UCLA cop, anyhow?

So basically, you're on track in my opinion. Reporting is good, but action is what actually has to happen for things to change. But most development agencies don't like to actually be tied to quantitative hard data anyhow, because the link between development aid and economic improvement requires a lot of twisty analysis and multiple regressions to find anything that's significant.

Re:Economy of sharing to compete?

[Anonymous Coward]

Commerce is the process of buying and selling, and insofar as "free software" is neither bought nor sold, even if service and support for it are, it is not commercial. Simply put: the services and support are commercial; the software isn't. It's quite simple, really.

Re:Economy of sharing to compete?

[vga_init]

Yes... where is the economy in giving birth to children? Where is the economy in giving a present to loved ones? Where is the economy in giving education to minors? Where is the economy in giving directions to a stranger in your town? Where is the economy in giving playing cards to someone who is sitting with you at a table? Where is the economy in giving advise or stating opinions on Slashdot?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gift_economy

Is that what you meant? The reasons people have for doing things like giving childbirth and sharing with the poor are complicated and hard to explain. Morals come in to simplify the matter--to say "you should do this just because it's good and it doesn't accomplish anything." Actually, it does accomplish things, and it helps the community to function as a whole. They might not make much sense from an extremely narrow and selfish kind of economy, but for better or worse you are a product of society that society made to preserve itself.

Re:Economy of sharing to compete?

[Lemmy Caution]

ensure that everyone starts the race at the same point

Not even close.

Do you think people pay for private schools just for laughs? And there are other issues involved. See this article by Paul Tough (or Google for a either a synopsis of it or a cut-and-paste version) for more of what create gaps in education and achievement.

There are also issues of infrastructure that create huge gaps, as well as social ties (often, to do well, one must leave home--and perhaps abandoning relatives who need your help.)

Re:Economy of sharing to compete?

[Chris Burke]

With what? The traditional economy goes something like: I have something, which you want, and you have something which I want. We trade. This non-concept of "economy of sharing" goes like: I have something, which you want, and I am morally obligated to give it to you, by virtue of the fact that I have it. Where is it in my interest to do so, if I do not accept your premise that I am somehow inherently obligated to?

Is this post from 1997, arriving here on /. today due to some strange space-time anomaly?

Your non-concept is indeed that, not the concept. The real "economy of sharing" concept goes like: You make what you have available to others. Others do the same for you. You have access to a vast wealth of resources, and you contribute to that vast wealth by sharing what you have. Someone may take what you have shared, improve it or combine it with other shared resources, and then share the result, giving you back something more than what you gave.

Back in the day when the only people participating in the software "economy of sharing" were students, acamedics, and professionals working in their spare time it was easy to treat it like a hippy commune, something that may be a nice utopia for them but couldn't possibly work in the real world where dollars are all that matter.

Fast forward to today, when many companies have a large investment in free software technologies and have gained tremendously from doing so, and the question "Where is it in my interest to share?" seems hopelessly outdated and out of touch.

I used to believe this was possible, but now I consider it a foregone conclusion: Free software, the "economy of sharing", is going to flourish and dominate in the world of software for entirely practical and self-interested reasons.

Re:Economy of sharing to compete?

[Instine]

"Yes, but you see, the ability to do this, i.e. to practice charity, which is the moral way of life, is in many ways dependent upon having the resources to give, which in turn is dependant upon a healthy free market economy."

BS. Haveing lived in farming comunities where many folk are very cash poor yet resource rich, and generous, and now living in a Top five rightest world capital, were the reverse is true, relatively speaking, I can say catagorically that you are talkling out your arse. "a healthy free market economy" is niether the answer to your every question, nor, in truth, the system in which you actually reside. In a City, you abide by more rules and regulations, taxation and regulation (yet this is where you'll find the 'free market economy zealots'). In the country, people give you things as a favour. You return the favour when you resource is in season, none of this gets taxed, or regulated in any way. Nothing could be freer.

Sure, its hard to imagine Firefox without cities, and what you believe to be a 'free' economy, but now that we have reached where we have, it is easy to see how the majority of the work in improveing firefox et al, could, very soon, be done in 'poor' rural areas. And no money would continue to change hands.

As for justice vs morality, it's purely subjective. I find it unjustifiable to not be charitable. Some find it justice that the poor stay poor and die young. Morality is simply the futile argument that one has greater truth than the other.

Re:Economy of sharing to compete?

[mysticgoat]

I'm just going to address two points, because doing so is simplistic and I don't have time at the moment to correct the deeper underlying errors in parent's suppositions.

If we start to see open-source software take on the sort of role traditionally filled by Microsoft, eg partnering with Intel and other large hardware vendors to drive development of a PC (or similar) platform, I'll agree that software copyrights aren't needed to ensure technological progress.

I listened to the entire presentation. Moglen does a good job of demonstrating that the OLPC initiative is of intense interest to major hardware manufacturers precisely because it is exploring ground-breaking technologies. So this is happening. Another example is Google's interactions with hardware manufacturers to push the development of CPU cluster technologies (where the underlying driver is the Linux beowulf paradigm).

I find that I can only agree with parent post on this point to the extent that I am ignorant of what is actually going on in the world. And I find that I am not sufficiently ignorant to be able to agree with parent's point at all.

Linux users are in a sense actually free-riders, benefiting from Microsoft's platform development investment...

Well, if we ignore that Linux is actually based on Unix as simplified through Minix, and is therfore completely independent of the evolution of DOS to Windows. Of course to really appreciate how much we have to ignore, one has to know that DOS was itself built on the earlier efforts of CPM and the Apple II firmware to model, as best it could be done in the late 1970s, the file management and other key components of early Unix. And to fully appreciate the state of ignorance we would need to achieve to support parent's statement, we need to also know that the Windows GUI is not a Microsoft original: it is based on the work that Microsoft did under contract to IBM (and therefore IBM's design specifications) to recreate the experimental GUI interfaces that Xerox PARC had been developing on its Unix machines. The various GUIs that run under Linux are also derived extensively from the Palo Alto Research Center work, in fairly direct lineage. Again, there is nothing in this corner of the Linux world that is derived from Windows development.

But the power of ignorance is great indeed. By the power of ignorance alone, Microsoft is perceived as having brought computing to the masses, when in fact Microsoft has basically been a very good marketeer of derivative works that are usually of lower technical quality (but cheaper development) than the original material that had been "embraced and extended".

Re:Economy of sharing to compete?

[shywolf9982]

The "one laptop per child" mentality is great at giving people the information that they need in order to succeed, but it will not make them succeed. It will ensure that everyone starts the race at the same point, but it will not make everyone a winner.

That's the difference between FOSS and communism. The purpose is not to prosecute "egualitarism", which boils down to levelling everyone's life at a given standard (hence stripping off freedom). That's what communism did.

Social justice, which is something that the Western World has pursued since, I'd say, 1779, is about not bringing up obstacles to keep some people from expressing their potentials and reaching fame and fortune if they deserve it. It's the same concept of a free, toll-less market: if I bring up obstacles that have the sole purpose to give me (or the products from my country) an "unfair" advantage over other products, I'm doing something immoral, because I'm artificially raising foreign products prices in order to make them less appetible to my consumers. This is something that here in Europe we are debating since a long time.

It's not like you cannot make money with Free Software. Red Hat is the example of a company that, while committing fully to the principles of FOSS, is still able to produce a profit.

The whole concept of "economy of sharing" is: if I have something that doesn't cost me nothing to produce, it is immoral to sold it out. The bakery example served quite well.

Software is, literally speaking, ideas. Nothing more, like math. And it is moral to make people pay for something that does not physically exist nor requires you cost to be imagined? Wouldn't it be more moral to make people pay to solve problems (eg, use your mind to generate ideas that help them?)

It is really a complex matter (we're not talking just about software, but virtually all the knowledge). The whole point of free software is "give people the tools, if they are good they will lift themselves up". And yes, such an approach would help the developing countries more than shitloads of money that ends up being ate by some corrupt dictator

Re:Economy of sharing to compete?

[Anonymous Coward]

I have something, which you want, and I am morally obligated to give it to you, by virtue of the fact that I have it.

The reason you're obligated to share it, is that you created it as a work derived from something that someone shared with you. e.g. You "give back" your Mozilla patches to the community, because the community gave you that unpatched Mozilla, which despite lacking the change that you made, was still pretty valuable.

Where is it in my interest to do so, if I do not accept your premise that I am somehow inherently obligated to?

I guess you found downloading, using, and having the right to create derived works of Linux, Mozilla, KDE, etc as something that was in your interest. If you didn't want to create a derived work, you were free to make something of your own and not share it. But you decided that building on others' work was the easiest and most efficient thing to do. Open Source's value to the developer, results in Free Software's value to the user.

Re:Economy of sharing to compete?

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually you are forcing people to not copy their work, the people themselves aren't being forced to copy it for anyone. It was their choice to release the software in the first place after all, if they didn't want to share, they should not have sold it.

Re:Economy of sharing to compete?

[a.d.trick]

Because they chose not to "share" their work, and that's their right. By forcing them to "share" their work, then that's coercision. That's taking somebody's work from them by force. That's very bad.

Your making the assumtion that ideas have ownership. If ideas can't be owned then it's not 'their' work and they have no right as to what others do with the free knowledge.

Ownership is simply an idea that we have contrived because it is economicly useful. There's nothing particularly obvious about it. That's why the Native Americans got pushed around so easily. It didn't make sense to them that land could be owned, so they would trade land for piddly trinkets. It wasn't until later that they understood what the Europeans meant by owning land (The concept of land ownership wasn't useful to the Native Americans because they didn't have a high population density, there was always plenty of free space).

Re:Economy of sharing to compete?

[Money for Nothin']

Doing things for non-economic reasons doesn't make somebody a "bad" person. People do things for irrational, emotional reasons all the time. But economics very much applies to each of your examples, rational or not, emotionally-driven or not.

For example, you ask "where is the economy in giving birth to children?". How about a tax break? Same goes for getting married.

In playing cards, the economy is (at least) in making oneself happier by using their time in a way that improves their happiness more than some other way (that is, the opportunity cost of one activity vs. another is their marginal increase in happiness). Perhaps some money too, if the players are playing for money...

I could go on with your other examples (there are so many in educating children that many a graduate paper has been written on that very subject), but I think my point is clear...

Re:Economy of sharing to compete?

[mysticgoat]

Agreed; it is in the best interests of all the participants, from multinational companies with revenues of billions to students who have yet to earn their first dollar, to keep the FOSS communities they are involved in free and open. And that's why FOSS is emerging as the dominant software development mode for the foreseeable future.

Consider just this aspect of the economics: it takes hundreds of programmers tens of thousands of hours to develop and improve the applications we use today. Microsoft uses the 20th century model of hiring these hundreds of programmers, at a large payroll expense. It also has big expenses in maintaining the hierarchal structures that keep each of its minions on task. Compare that to 21st century FOSS projects like OpenOffice, Linux, Firefox, or Apache. These projects have no payroll expenses and, since they are largely self-organizing, minimal structural expenses (which are gladly paid by the corporations like IBM and Redhat who benefit from the development efforts). The end products these communities create have no marginal cost (distributing 1 million copies of Firefox via the internet costs the Firefox project no more than distributing a hundred copies). The outcome of the competition between a FOSS product and any proprietary product that does the same thing is inevitable.

Microsoft's final efforts in preserving itself demonstrate this: MSIE v7 was not a product it wanted to produce but one that it had to produce to keep pace with Firefox; MS has been converted from being the market leader to playing catch-up with a freebie. Vista's penetration into the installed base of other Windows boxen is not assured and is definitely going to go forward slowly: nobody is forming lines at the sales counters. However the continued slow erosion of that same installed base of Windows users, who constitute Vista's core market, continues. Experienced individuals, private organizations, and government agencies are converting to Apple, BSD, or Linux for a variety of reasons, and there is no longer a huge reservoir of newbie computer users to sell to. Further, there are indications that this erosion is happening at an accelerating rate, even though people know that Microsoft is bringing out a new product that sucks less than Windows. Meanwhile back at Redmond, if Microsoft has a marketing strategy for converting Linux or Mac users back to Windows or Vista, it is keeping it a big secret. Which is a very strange way of doing any kind of marketing.

Re:Economy of sharing to compete?

[Joey7F]

Because they were practicing ancient free markets. Free markets have always been around, it is specifically, socialism that is a relatively new construct (as a governing philosophy)

Re:Economy of sharing to compete?

[maxume]

Because slavery and servitude were commonplace, and causing the death of a heathen wasn't murder(the meaning of kill has drifted a bit...)?

Charity more or less requires wealth, nobody has come up with anything better than (lightly regulated) free markets for generating wealth. The company store isn't the problem, paying employees in store credit is.

The gp is overstating things a bit, but a good deal of the charity those religions encouraged went towards making those religions more powerful, so perhaps we should look for a different example.

Re:Economy of sharing to compete?

[Anonymous Coward]

but there is dramatically more that you can do for others if you do have resources.

luke 12:47 And that servant who knew his master's will, and did not prepare himself or do according to his will, shall be beaten with many stripes. 48 But he who did not know, yet committed things deserving of stripes, shall be beaten with few. For everyone to whom much is given, from him much will be required; and to whom much has been committed, of him they will ask the more.

I think that Open Source is largely a result of this spirit. However, it is a result, not a cause,

why can't it be both a cause and a result? why can't someone who experiences the result of open source be spurred to freely contribute to projects they wouldn't have otherwise contributed too?

and I think it has exactly NOTHING to do with most the ideals mentioned, such as Justice. Justice has more to do with the free market. Charity is about rising above justice.

you think the free market brings about justice as a necessary effect? i think you've over simplified a complex issue, myself.

selfish and self centered people will never bring about justice in the long term - and it doesn't matter what kind of system has been set up around the selfish and self centered people. the average african american's wealth is less than 1/10 of the average white person's wealth. is that "justice?" some studies have shown that a college educated black man has the same chance as being hired as a white guy with a felony drug conviction - and they both used the *same* resume (it was a study so they could use the *exact* same resume). is that justice? american's are getting fatter and fatter as they let the rest of the world starve. american's accumulate more and more crap and still have head down to the pharmacy and pick up their anti-depressants du jour. the government is busy financing wars so that our grandchildren can pay for them - with plenty of interest. local governments are bankrupt. state governments are bankrupt. what part of $9,000,000,000 and counting debt that we are handing off to future generations is "justice?" much of this debt was accrued during good times - wait until the bad times hit. wait until china and europe start investing in euros and not dollars. wait until oil is bought in euros and not dollars. wait until the dollar is run into the ground and buried.

what is 15% of $9 trillion - b/c that may well be required to pay interest alone with no extra money to even run government at all.

this isn't justice - don't believe the hype.

Re:Economy of sharing to compete?

[lawpoop]

As long as there have been Kings and rulers, there have been monopolies, taxes, price controls and tariffs, public storage of grain in temples, public works projects such as roads and pyramids -- government interference in the market. The only places where mostly free 'markets' existed were between kingdoms, in the form of long distance caravan trading and shipping. And even then that was controlled by regional bosses and outposts of the kingdoms. The holy texts that admonish us to practice charity and alms-giving are taking about the wealthy and powerful in society helping the poor.

There were no free markets in Feudal Europe. It wasn't until the middle ages and the enlightenment that the concept of a free market, where two rational consumers were free to negotiate a price and trade with whomever they wanted, was developed. Before then there wasn't really free trade -- there was distribution patterns based on tradition. If you were a serf, you had to give a certain amount to your lord -- you couldn't just travel to the next town and sell grain on the street. Whatever was left over fed your kids. Slowly, over time, as Europe grew wealthier, and peasants were allowed to travel, it slowly became ok to trade or sell your goods to someone else.

If you read what the proponents of the free market were saying in Europe, one of the biggest hurdles they have to overcome was that prices *must* be static. God had set up a world with a specific order, and if you go mucking around changing things like the price of pigs or apples, you were upsetting the very foundation of the world. If you had a market where anybody could charge anything they wanted, why, that would be utter chaos! If the price of apples changes today, maybe tomorrow things fall up instead of down! The next thing you know the sky would come crashing into the Earth, because you were upsetting the natural order.

The idea that we came out of a 'state of nature' where people were practicing ancient free markets is pure libertarian fantasy.

Re:Economy of sharing to compete?

[Kerto]

Clearly you didn't listen to the speech because a very clear point with respect to this was made. If we have the ability to produce bread at a marginal rate of zero it would be immoral to allow people to starve. I don't know why i took the time to reply to your comment other than to say your ignorance annoyed me so much that i felt maybe you should start at the same point as everyone who did participate.

Re:Economy of sharing to compete?

[Anonymous Coward]

But the power of ignorance is great indeed.

Indeed, you're an excellent example of this problem. I'll offer a few things for you to ponder on, but feel free to ignore them if you'd rather remain in blissful ignorance.

In the 1990s, laptop computers started to take off, and one of the things that made them viable was power management. There was a specification called "Advanced Power Management" (APM), and this was developed by Intel and Microsoft. Linux developers/users were subsequently able to make use of this standard, without having contributed anything to it: ie as free-riders.

As power management needs increased, Microsoft and Intel began work on a new standard called "Advanced Configuration and Power Interface" (ACPI), with additional support from Compaq and Toshiba. This new standard allowed much better power management than was possible under the old APM scheme, and users of laptops, as well as desktops and even servers, have benefited substantially from it. That includes, once again, the Linux free-riders who benefit from the ACPI platform, without having contributed anything to it.

Another, earlier example is graphics hardware. In the 1980s, typical graphics hardware consisted of a simple frame buffer, which was written to by software, or of tightly coupled hardware and software developed together. For Windows, however, Microsoft took a different route, and developed a set of device-independent APIs called GDI (graphical device interface). They then worked with video hardware producers, to enable them to build hardware to accelerate higher-level GDI operations, like drawing shapes and lines. The result was the spread of accelerated 2D graphics cards within the PC market, which free-riders writing PC X11 servers were able to take advantage of when writing their own graphics software.

This sort of thing has been repeated over and over again in the industry, going all the way back to the beginning. Indeed, it was Microsoft who convinced IBM to offer graphics on the IBM PC (which was originally only going to offer the text-mode MDA video adapter), and Bill Gates even did some design work on the EGA graphics adapter (along with a lot of other work on the PC, eg designing the memory layout). Gates also convinced Compaq to produce a 386-based PC after IBM refused (fearing that it would compete with their mainframes). Since the early 1980s, Microsoft and Intel have spent enormous amounts of money developing standards to advance the state of the PC platform, and that's why the PC killed off all of its competitors.

Your basic mistake seems to be in thinking that the PC platform somehow drives itself, and that Microsoft's contribution has been some sort of imagined development of "new ideas", like the GUI, most of which long predate even the existence of the PC market, and were all but inevitable once PC hardware became advanced enough to support them. If you actually had any knowledge of the way the PC market has developed since the early 1980s, you'd know that both Microsoft and Intel have been central to it, in a co-ordinating role. Droning on about the how Microsoft (or Intel) copied this or that idea completely misses the point, but that's sadly par for the course amongst Linux zealots, who have this strange belief in an invisible force that guides and co-ordinates the PC industry. That "invisible force" is actually quite visible, and the most important parts of it are Microsoft and Intel.

Re:Economy of sharing to compete?

[twodot72]

You're wrong. You are describing a communist system, where wealth is distributed evenly, rather than according to how much each person is worth.

What do you mean "rather than". In a communist system each person is considered worth equally much, and the wealth is distributed accordingly, ie. equally. The only difference is really how the worth of a person is established (equal by default in the communist system or according to productivity in the capitalist system). Both systems then distribute the wealth according to this "valuation". Well, in theory that is. Neither system has ever actually worked that way in real life. But that's another discussion...

Re:Economy of sharing to compete?

[SABME]

>If that were true, then how come the world's major religions ( Islam, Christianity, Buddhism, and Judaism ) asked people to practice charity hundreds or thousands of years before the development of modern free markets?

Because the world's major religions preach that your spiritual welfare is more important than your material welfare, no matter the market or political system of your culture. Material wealth and comfort can distract you from what is important in life. Practices like compassion and doing good works lead to spiritual wealth, and enhance your spiritual life, which is more permanent and true than your physical life.

Re:Economy of sharing to compete?

[anandsr]

I didn't know that there was a single person responsible for making America a great Country. Thank you.
I have no doubt that it was those 2800 libraries that caused America to become the super power that it became in the mid-19th century.

Re:Economy of sharing to compete?

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't feed the trolls, dear. It makes the rest of the astroturfers look bad.

Everyone knows that the entire personal computer revolution sprang complete from the mind of Bill Gates (with Steve Ballmer as midwife). Even the most basic things like graphics standards could not have come into being without Bill Gates first conceiving of them, because, well, because (let's face the awful truth of it) IBM and everybody else in the business is a incompetent ass.

Re:Economy of sharing to compete?

[radarsat1]

What do you mean "rather than". In a communist system each person is considered worth equally much, and the wealth is distributed accordingly, ie. equally.

You're absolutely right. Thanks for the insightful correction.

Re:Economy of sharing to compete?

[Anonymous Coward]

I can see you're keeping with the time-honoured Slashdot tradition of conceding an argument relating to open source by referring to the winner as either an "astroturfer" or a "basement-dwelling hippie", depending on whether the winning argument is more anti- or pro-open-source, respectively. I accept your concession, and wish you better luck next time.

Re:Economy of sharing to compete?

[mysticgoat]

Just now getting back to this. I don't usually respond to AC posts but evidently if they are modded up as "interesting", they'll hit my radar screen.

Mention has been made in parent of Advanced Power Management, Advanced Configuration and Power Interface, and Graphical Device Interface. These were introduced as specifications, which they are, and then described as standards, which they are not. In each case these were specifications developed by a couple of companies in a closed process where the companies saw a mutual market advantage in openly publishing them.

The marketing advantage was that of further differentiating the Intel / Windows environment from other computing platforms, so that developers who chose to write software for Windows would find insurmountable barriers to porting their work to other platforms. Not that it couldn't be done, but that doing so would be certain to require too expensive a rewrite to be economically worthwhile. The long range strategy was to starve competing platforms of developers (and do so in a way which looked very benign to any executive doing a superficial overview of the technology).

That Linux has been able to thrive under these conditions is testimony to the ingenuity and prowess of the Linux communities. The parent's description of "the Linux free-riders who benefit from the ACPI platform, without having contributed anything to it" couldn't be more wrong; Linux has managed to grow because a lot of hard work went into surmounting the limitations imposed by the ACPI and the other specifications that were intended to monkey-dance developers into the Windows corral (and were remarkably successful at doing so with commercial developers).

I think the basic problem with parent post is a conflation of "specification" with "standard". The two are very different, addressing entirely different levels of thinking. It is fair to say that when an industry standard has been put into place, it will drive the process of developing a specification (which in turn drives the development process). IOW, development is done until the elements of the specification are met; and the specification is written to meet the elements of the industry standard.

Boglin

[EinZweiDrei]

Notably more well-recieved that Eben Boglin's address, which was admittedly just a lot of arm-waving and scare tactics.

Interesting, but a little too high brow for me

[Salvance]

OK, this guy has some great points, but he's just too educated and high brow for a Sunday morning. He could have covered his points in 1/4 of the time and made them more accessible to the general public (in the audio that is). But then again, since when do lecturing lawyers try to be accessible and understandable?

The blogger's summary said the speech evoked "memories for me of Martin Luther King's speeches". Ummm ... ok. I think that's going a bit too far. Will anyone remember Eben Moglen's Plone conference keynote 5 years from now? I can't even say that sentence without laughing a little.

Re:Interesting, but a little too high brow for me

[kebes]

He could have covered his points in 1/4 of the time and made them more accessible to the general public

I think it's worth keeping in mind that the speech we all listened to was an invited keynote address at the Plone Conference in Seattle. His audience was a bunch of free-software experts (Plone is a FLOSS content management system). Making his talk 'more general and accessible' would have bored the audience. The intention of the talk was to remind some free-software developers of the 'why' of free software, and to encourage them to 'keep at it' because they are part of something good and something that can really help the world.

So again, keeping in mind the context I think it was a very good speech and very well-targetted. Admitedly you can't just show this video to someone who has never heard of Free Sofware (there are too many obscure references, acronyms, etc.), but that wasn't the point. For many slashdotters, however, I imagine the content hits very close to home and was quite interesting. I enjoyed it, at any rate.

Re:Interesting, but a little too high brow for me

[Anonymous Coward]

Let me guess: golf balls hitting things at 200mph is more interesting than listening to Moglen? Maybe you should boost those golf balls to 300mph so they fit into more people's attention span?

Video Format

[draevil]

I suppose there's a certain irony to the fact that the talk is available only in proprietary formats from those links.

Re:Video Format

[Yvan256]

Indeed, I'm still wondering why people haven't switched to MPEG-4/MP3 or H.264/AAC .mp4 files yet.

And no, DivX/XviD aren't .mp4 files, they're MPEG-4 data inside AVI/ASF containers (sometimes with VBR MP3, which ain't even allowed in a strict AVI file) that just won't play on a Mac without crashing/slowing down the whole system.

Re:Video Format

[mrchaotica]

"MPEG-4/MP3" and "H.264/AAC" are still proprietary formats. What I'm upset about is that this video hasn't been made available in an Ogg container with Theora and Vorbis streams.

Re:Video Format

[Kopl]

Having a player for open formats != fanatic. I sort of wonder what kind of person thinks that.

The propriety formats are bad because they allow abuse of patent laws. This is because they make money, not from innovation, but from people not being able to play content from a player that hasn't had that fee paid.

Re:Video Format

[Anonymous Coward]

Ogg containers with Theora and Vorbis streams still require expensive computers built with propriatary components.
What I'm upset about is that this video hasn't been made available as a printed flip-book animation with the soundtrack on phonograph.

Re:Video Format

[zefrer]

Well maybe you need to get a better video player, have had no problems whatsoever with those files under linux, using either mplayer or xine. And im terribly sorry, real h.264 encoding takes forever and a day compared to divx encoding. Sometimes the extra time(its a lot) is not worth the better sound quality and marginal video quality h.264 offers over divx.

Re:Video Format

[Anonymous Coward]

The file on Archive.org that the article refers to as "qt" is a H.264/AAC file.

Re:Video Format

[Yvan256]

Yes but is it H.264/AAC data inside a plain .mp4 file or within a Quicktime wrapper that Linux users won't be able to access?

Re:Video Format

[IntergalacticWalrus]

Which non-proprietary format should they use then? The only free video format is Ogg Theora, but it has yet to be finalized, much less get mainstream support.

(and no, anything by MPEG or derivated from MPEG isn't free)

Re:Video Format

[Anonymous Coward]

Who cares if someone claims to own patents on a format as long as I can use it freely with free open-source codecs and players. They even claim patents on GNU/Linux. It's improbable they will ever try to enforce them, let alone on end users.

Re:Video Format

[Anonymous Coward]

Linux users can access Quicktime files just fine.
The file format has been openly specified since the 80s, and is supported in a bunch of players (including basically everything that supports .mp4 files, since they're practically the same format, just with some different atom types). It was the old sorenson codecs that used to give linux users problems, and hardly anyone uses them now, these days it's all h264/aac.

Re:Video Format

[ben there...]

For that matter, nobody should distribute DVDs, because MPEG-2 is licensed by the same MPEG-LA group.

(Personally, I can't wait for people to move off of XviD and DivX, and on to modern codecs like H.264 and VC-1. Theora doesn't really seem to be part of the picture.)

Re:Video Format

[Anonymous Coward]

er... make that since 1991.

Re:Video Format

[massysett]

Why is this getting modded funny? It's insightful that the two websites associated with this video (plone, archive.org) are saying "open source" this, "open source" that, and yet they are not even offering the option of open source codecs. Choices are mp3, Flash, Quicktime. The sites are obviously throwing "open source" around while not realizing the importance of promoting it.

And yes, it does have practical ramifications. If I want to download the video, that's not easy in Flash, and getting Quicktime to play in Linux is absolute hell.

Widespread internet access could cause genocide

[Anonymous Coward]

I know I've wanted to kill a few people after looking at their MySpace pages.

Re:Widespread internet access could cause genocide

[Anonymous Coward]

Osama has a MySpace page? I know he's on MSN, but a MySpace page is just to much ...

Is he related???

[Anonymous Coward]

Is he related to Buddy Ebsen?

Anyone have this in a downloadable Vorbcast format?

Re:Is he related???

[Anonymous Coward]

No, but I have a cock-up-your-ass-cast for you. Bend over.

Delusional

[Timesprout]

Microsoft are going to collapse in the next couple of years and this somehow will prove the validity of the sharing model? I dont think so, MS will be around for a long time yet. If Microsoft survive and so well for a couple of years will Moglens theory of sharing then be proved false?

re: Salvation through education

[transporter_ii]

The laptop was developed under the motto:

"Because information can save the world"

I think that in America, there is a long history of beliving that education is our salvation. This was a very popular belief in the mid-1800s, and has continued on to this day. For instance, no matter how bad our schools do, we believe that giving them more money will fix the problem and save us.

See this quote by Horace Mann:

"the common school is the greatest discovery ever made by man: we repeat it, the common school is the greatest discovery ever made by man.. .Let the common school be expanded to its capabilities, let it be worked with the efficiency of which it is susceptible, and nine-tenths of the crimes in the penal code would become obsolete; the long catalogue of human ills would be abridged; men would walk more safely by day; every pillow would be more inviolable by night; property, life, and character held by a stronger tenure; all rational hopes respecting the future brightened." (Clarence Carson, A Basic History of the United States, vol. 3, p. 91).

I think the Laptop program is just an extension of trying to "evangelize" our philosophy on the rest of the world.
That said, however, I think the more people who can get around the controlled press with these devices, and blog and create their own content, the better off the world is. It's salvation...no.

Genocide?

[Rydia]

You know what stops genocide? Functioning governments with the ability to combat rogue elements within the country, or the diplomatic relations required to get help. Functioning militaries, headed by civilians and not career officers. Strict regulation of trade along with neoliberal economic policies to help ease countries out of depressive states. Ground-up education as both an educational and social tool to create civic awareness and consciousness.

A bunch of laptops to some starving, poor, thirsty people who live in terror of their government or paramilitary groups the government can't control are going to do a whole freaking lot.

Please.

Re:Genocide?

[antifoidulus]

He seems to think that somehow giving everyone a video camera will solve genocide because it will be all over the news. Um, there was a lot of video of the Rwandan genocide and yet it went on. Ditto for Darfur etc. So I fail to see how more video would actually stop the genocide.

Oh, and the potshot "that the government of the United States chooses to ignore" is complete bullshit. The world (as am I) is already mad enough at the US for intervening where it should not have, why would the rest of the world be happy if the US went to war because of some video some kid posted on youtube? Futhermore, the US isn't the only one ignoring genocide. While the US is doing nothing in places like Darfur, the EU is doing next to nothing.

Re:Genocide?

[Broken scope]

When you say militaries headed by civilians, you mean an elected official like a secretary of defense, or do you mean civilians in the position of the generals. Deciding tactics and troop movements?

Re:Genocide?

[Anonymous Coward]

You realize you basically just described Third Reich Germany, right? I mean, not that what you list is bad, but it pretty clearly doesn't stop genocide--it's the right idea, but far from complete.

Re:Genocide?

[Anonymous Coward]

Ok....

and $100 laptops could of helped how???

Re:Genocide?

[Gregory Cox]

The potshot that "the government of the United States chooses to ignore" is completely justified.

Firstly, there are other ways to intervene than with air raids and tanks. If the US government took a more active role in assisting negotiations and dealing with the root causes of the conflict, who could complain? The fact that they went into Iraq instead merely shows that they had the resources to help but chose to spend it on ousting Saddam.

Secondly, saying that other countries are guilty of the same thing doesn't put the US in the right.

To get back firmly on topic, maybe video can make a difference. Remember the fuss al-Jazeera stirred up? If a few shocking images make it onto YouTube and word of mouth spreads, politicians might have to start taking notice.

Re:Genocide?

[Beryllium Sphere(tm)]

>Ditto for Darfur

The government of Sudan has been very strict about not allowing reporters into Darfur.

Re:Genocide?

[Beryllium Sphere(tm)]

>You know what stops genocide? Functioning governments

Considering cases such as the US government and the native Americans, the Soviet government and the Ukrainians, the Turkish government and the Armenians, and the example that's too hackneyed to mention, it seems that effective governments are a risk factor for genocide. Even the apparently anarchic Rwandan genocide started with government-sponsored pogroms.

Re:Genocide?

[dasunt]

A bunch of laptops to some starving, poor, thirsty people who live in terror of their government or paramilitary groups the government can't control are going to do a whole freaking lot.

Perhaps we need H.E.A.P. instead.

Re:Genocide?

[Chemisor]

> You know what stops genocide? Functioning governments with the ability to combat rogue elements within the country

Uh, you do know that all genocides that have ever been committed in history, were committed by governments?

Re:Genocide?

[hawkeesk8]

The thing is, you never know what is the catalyst to a revolution. What does access to cheap text messaging have to do with social justice? Well, a popular uprising of youth in the Philippines armed with cell phones, overthrew a government.

Re:Genocide?

[b.burl]

you know what stops genocide?

I'm just taking a stab, but knowing enough about anthropology/archaeology/evolution to reject pseudo-speciation and the fatuous concept of race. And in so doing recognize that separating humanity based on {insert stupid racial categorizations here} is the province of the ignorant and pathetic. You will not kill your neighbour if you see him/her as fully human.

Re:Genocide?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yah you keep living in that la la land of negotiations. Warlords don't give a fuck about you whether you like it or not and will shoot you in the face when you try to negotiate; these people roam the land high as fuck on drugs and line them up along pits to mow them down.

I say for one of those other coward European countries to stand up and sacrifice some troops or like you say try to negotiate since they are so determined that negotiation works these days with warlords/druglords. As far as I am concerned if you want to look at the root problem in Africa than go after the cocksuckers in Europe who left all their colonies to shit after they exploited them back in history; while were at history lets get those damn Romans who used to enslave all of them.

The automatic rifle changed Africa forever; another sad thing is that you toss an AK-47 in dirt for 10 years and it will rust like shit. Dig it up from the ground and throw some oil on it; that baby will still fire great after a couple round clear it out. This problem is going nowhere quickly and they aint gonna negotiate with no fucking white guy.

Re:Genocide?

[QuantumG]

Open, widespread, anonymous communication. What the hell is so hard to understand about that?

Re:Genocide?

[Anonymous Coward]

Strict regulation of trade and neoliberal economic policies? Isn't that kind of a contradiction in terms?

Re:Genocide?

[Hijacked Public]

We, not 'reporters' we but people with cameras who sometimes think of themselves as photjournalists and have toted them around Darfur, have published loads of photographs. It doesn't seem to be helping much quite yet and I don't think videos would either.

The people with the muscle to actually do something about it have placed much of Africa into the 'let them solve their own problems' column on their spreadsheet.

Re:Genocide?

[Omnifarious]

Then, perhaps, instead of being irritated over what they aren't doing, you can find a way to fill the gap yourself instead of badmouthing a project that's at least trying to do something useful.

Personally, I think OLPC has great potential. People seriously underestimate the ability of good communication to help people form and maintain communities. And having any sense of control over anything at all is very helpful for fostering a feeling that perhaps more things than previously imagined can be affected by your efforts.

I listened to someone who said that all the battles over proprietary control of information I thought were important were in fact pointless and something only geeks would ever care about. I believe that my friend has been proven wrong. It seems that the most important battles of this age are going to be over proprietary control of information, and that my values and ideals are proving to be important. I would've held them regardless because I thought them good regardless of how important they were.

And I think the same thing can be said of OLPC. I think a lot of people who call this project useless or stupid are mired in a way of thinking that will ultimately keep third world countries in their place forever. Anything that can give people a sense that they can make a difference, especially children, will have an effect that I don't think anybody can imagine.

Re:Genocide?

[arifirefox]

yes, it's about giving them access to information and ideas that can't be controlled by their government that will lead to that ground up education that you are talking about!

Well, there's your problem:

[mrchaotica]

Stop looking at people's MySpace pages!

Social Justice?

[saikou]

I just wonder what will a person that lives paycheck to paycheck have to say about social justice when asked by an OSS developer that has several computers at home and perhaps can afford that nice new $550 video card.
I wonder.

Re:Social Justice?

[Broken scope]

You mean most of the general public that is in debt up to their ears. I consider living on credit paycheck to paycheck.

Re:Social Justice?

[Soko]

It does not seem fair. Those who sacrifice, save and work hard should be rewarded. Those who do not, should not.

I agree - hard work should be rewarded. I have no problem with people who start a company with a great idea and become very wealthy - I'm very glad for them when it happens. What irks me is that some horde their wealth and effectively take it out of circulation. The only reason anyone would want to hold on to over $1Billion (US) is for POWER, not living well.

On a global scale, often, when I see the struggling indigenous people of wherever, they have placed restraints on their economy or their economy is a structured (ie planned) economy that has inefficiencies in it. These types of economies look like the economies proposed by those seeking "Social Justice".

Oft times those restraints are a wealthy few who wish to keep the wealth and therefore power. Currency has to be in circulation in order for others to earn it. To me, "Social Justice" means that some reasonable limits should be placed on the accumulation of wealth, otherwise you end up with an Aristocracy. As I said, it's not the money the wealthy control that I'm against, it's the undue influence over their fellow citizens because of their un-necessary hording.

Soko

Re:Social Justice?

[PapayaSF]

You are correct to be suspicious of the term "social justice." Nobel Prize-winning economist Friedrich Hayek demolished the concept in his book Law, Legislation and Liberty, Volume 2: The Mirage of Social Justice.

Re:Social Justice?

[Etcetera]

What irks me is that some horde their wealth and effectively take it out of circulation. The only reason anyone would want to hold on to over $1Billion (US) is for POWER, not living well.

Only an idiot would make $1 Billion and then stick it under their mattress. The way people with money make more money is to invest it. Even if they're putting it in one truly massive CD (heh), that's still money that's being used to give out loans, purchase capital, etc...

The fact that they're not spending it on a daily basis does not mean that that money "sitting around" in a holding company isn't having positive side-effects.

Besides, don't people complain about ugly American "conspicuous consumption"?

Re:Social Justice?

[Anonymous Coward]

Will an OSS developer actually be able to use that $550 video card? OSS users/developers get ignored by hardware companies...

Re:Social Justice?

[gaspar ilom]

It's about what the rules of the game are. You can keep what's yours, so long as you got it fair and square.

But when power concentrated so much that it tips the whole playing field, creating a vortex that sucks-up ever more power -- then we've all got a problem. That system is so powerful that it gets people like you thinking: "I earned what's mine -- my neighbor can go screw himself."

So what -- you're better off than your neighbor -- but are you better, in absolute terms, than you could be in all possible worlds? The reality is that the system doesn't have to be the way it is -- and we could all be a lot better off.

But, come to think of it:
Perhaps your self-righteous indignation results from how gleeful you are that you're doing better than someone else -- and you just don't want that imbalance disrupted, because then that good feelin' will go away.

Re:Social Justice?

[mspohr]

You seem to fear that social justice will take away your stuff (wealth). It would be nice if you would act in the spirit of the enlightenment and willingly promote social justice to help your fellow man even when it might cost you something but most people do not do that. However, Moglen offers a "painless" path to social justice through FOSS.

In fact, one of Moglen's main points (I listened to TFA) makes the point that FOSS can bring about social justice without having to resort to the conflict that inevitably arises when trying to achieve social justice with the redistribution of scarce goods and power.

FOSS works with well with capitalism to provide information and communities at very low marginal cost. This improves social justice without having a government redistribute wealth and the destructive resulting conflicts. The only conflict is with monopolies and unless you make your living from some monopoly rent (i.e. RIAA, Microsoft, etc.), you have nothing to fear.

Re:Social Justice?

[Anonymous Coward]

1) You're trying to create a false impression of OSS developers by implying that they're charitable because they have plenty of money.

2) I think that they would thank developers for creating software that works and doesn't cost anything, if they're clued in enough to know that alternatives to proprietary software exist.

Re:Social Justice?

[daigu]

It does not seem fair. Those who sacrifice, save and work hard should be rewarded. Those who do not, should not.

Are you saying that we live in a meritocracy? So, the trend since 1980 that you can see in this chart (Table 680) showing that the top 5% of people had an increase in their percentage of all earnings move from 14.6% to 20.5% must be because the top 5% must have started working harder since then, right? George Bush is president because he was the guy most deserving to be president in the country?

Social justice is simply the idea that there are structures in place in our society that benefit some at the expense of others - irrespective of individual effort. Even if you believe that market economies are the most efficient (which is a dubious assertion because market economies fail to account for externalities like pollution in their price), you have to acknowledge that the U.S. does not have a market economy. Subsidies and government controls in all their myriad varieties exist because certain things (agricultural production, industrial capacity, etc.) need to be maintained to mitigate the unfortunate highs and lows (which are highly inefficient) that are built into free markets.

So, the question is that if you are going to have controls, then you need to make sure that the distribution of the benefits are equitable and designed to reward behaviors you approve of like sacrifice, saving and hard work. The simple fact is the current system is not set-up that way, and it is clear from looking at the progression of income distribution (unless you want to make a classest argument that somehow the distribution of hard working people is more highly clustered in the upper regions of income).

Re:Social Justice?

[Stradivarius]

I don't think the post was suggesting that we live in a pure meritocracy. Simply that rewarding merit should be a feature of our economic system.

There's no doubt that some degree of regulation is necessary to deal with exactly those externalities that the market doesn't account for. But that doesn't mean that the government should have as its aim the forcible redistribution of people's possessions.

First, there is no commonly accepted definition of what an "equitable" redistribution would be.

Second, the closest you'll probably get to such a definition in the US is the grandparent-post's suggestion of rewarding those who "sacrifice, save, and work hard". Trying to keep track of whether each citizen fits that definition is pretty much impossible.

Third, the result of that impossibility is that the government is then forced to resort to gross substitutes like total income or total assets. Such measures totally neglect the question of how somebody got to be at the bottom of the income/asset distribution, which is really fundamental to the question of fairness or justice. Did the person just get some bad luck outside of their control, or were they lazy? Helping the former is seen as just, helping the latter is not (it's enabling a freeloader). By making no distinction in the redistribution, you are adding unfairness to the system.

Rather than attempt a well-intentioned but inevitably unfair income redistribution, the far better solution is to fix the structural problems that create unequal opportunity. You'll always have some people who work harder than others, and it's okay if those folks make more money. But we need to try our best to make sure everyone starts off on as level of a playing field as we can.

In today's economy, I believe we could get much of the way there by fixing our education system. The biggest source of unequal wealth is unequal education. If you have a crappy school as a kid, you're much less likely to go to college, or get into a good college. That in turn makes you much less likely to get a well-paying job.

Unfortunately, our politicians so far seem disinclined to fix this structural problem (actually a few structural problems - no incentives for schools to perform well, difficulty of removing poorly performing administrators or faculty, funding that is tied to property taxes and thus perpetuates existing inequality, etc). So instead they try half-measures that add additional unfairnesses into the system, as if they will somehow "cancel out". But the old adage about "two wrongs don't make a right" is particularly true when you create policies that cover the nearly infinite different personal situations that occur in a whole nation.

For example, rather than fix the broken schools that are disproportionately attended by minorities, our politicians have enacted "affirmative action" policies that discriminate against non-minorities in college admissions. For the minorities who attended poor schools, it's too little too late - they're already behind their new college classmates. Non-minorities who suffered in poor schools are doubly penalized. This is not a fair system - but it's what comes from trying to address outcomes directly rather than dealing with the underlying problems of opportunity.

Re:Social Justice?

[bitspotter]

//It does not seem fair. Those who sacrifice, save and work hard should be rewarded. Those who do not, should not.//

There's a simple problem with the idea that a person should be rewarded for how much work they do.

By this measure of value, someone who works with his bare hands will be paid more than someone who uses a machine.

Furthermore, I don't see it being long before machines are able to completely outwork (and out-learn, in an economic sense) human beings. Unless we change our tendency to idolize labor in the way you describe, the result will be concluding that humans are worthless because none of them can outwork machines.

Re:Social Justice?

[leereyno]

Its called Marxism.

Welcome to the duplicity of the left.

The left is very very good at play word games. They'll choose a word that sounds nice, such as "social justice" or "diveristy" and they'll then redefine it to mean something very different from what its literal interpretation would suggest. This word has now become a propaganda tool in their ongoing war against....well just about everything that is good. They'll co-opt a word or term, and then use it to promote their agenda. At first people interpret this term in its literal sense, or in whatever sense it has within the culture that the leftists are now trying to get mileage out of. Over time more and more people come to associate this term with the new definition that the leftists have applied to it, decreasing its value as a propaganda tool till eventually the term is abandoned and another term is selected in its place.

This is how the term "liberal" came to be associated with leftists. Once upon a time the term described someone like Milton Friedman in economic terms, or Thomas Jefferson in political and sociological terms. Then the marxists started using it to describe their own bullshit. After a while the original meanings of the word were all but forgotten. Today the term has become very ironic. The people and ideas that are described as "liberal" are almost always anything but. Now that this term has lost its deceptive power the left has taken to calling themselves "progressives."

This scam is very effective against people who are easily taken in by how words make them feel. If I say "I'm a progressive in favor of diversity to advance the cause of social justice," just to use the three buzz-words that I've listed so far, what am I really saying? What I'm really saying is "I'm a gramscian marxist who seeks to create racial or ethnic strife and animosity for the purpose of undermining society with the ultimate goal of replacing that society with a communist one."

Welcome to leftist-newspeak 101.

Once you understand how the left co-opts language and uses it to hide their true intentions, an awful lot of their bullshit becomes painfully obvious.

Another trick they play is what I like to call the "I'm offended!!" ploy. The left has succeeded in convincing society that it is very important that we don't say anything that might offend anyone. If this were a simple matter of being polite and refraining from insulting someone's mother, then that would be fine. Unfortunately what they really mean is that no one should express ideas or beliefs that the left, or one of its designated "victim groups," does not agree with. So when muslim groups such as CAIR whine about descriptions of terrorists as murderous thugs, this is the game they're playing. It is a form of back-door censorship and unfortunately it is something that far too many people give far too much creedence to. It seems that in any issue the question of whether this point of view or that sentiment is "offensive" always comes up. It is patently irrelevant. The only thing that matters is whether or not it is an honest criticism. When someone makes an honest statement of what they truly believe, the only thing in question is whether they are right or wrong. How "offensive" their beliefs or ideas are doesn't matter. The "I'm offended!" ploy is used to silence those whose ideas you cannot refute. It is an attack upon honest open debate, which isn't surprising given that the left doesn't tend to fare very well in that arena. Once their ideas are understood, and especially after they have been seen in action, their destructiveness becomes obvious and they are cast aside. Only by manipulating language and hijacking the discussion can the left avoid having their ideas tossed out.

Very very few leftists actually understand what they are doing in all of this. If they were capable of that level of introspection and intellectual honesty they wouldn't be leftists anymore. Rather this is a process that has evolved natually through simple t

Re:Social Justice?

[fferreres]

I agree on the usual way the term is used...and also ...

>Those who sacrifice, save and work hard should be rewarded.

Believe that there are many people that fall in that category that are extremely poor. And there are many in that category that are rewarded in spite of not falling in the category.

If you believe hard work and willingness to save is the measure, the fight to make it happen, or change your assumptions.

Re:Social Justice?

[daigu]

Regulation (or deregulation) is redistribution. It is clear from the previously cited chart that the Top 5% have benefited from a redistribution of income since 1980. I don't think this redistribution of more income to the top 5% is a function of their increased education, for their working harder, based on merit, because the other groups are less educated or for any other reason other than an economic structure has been changed to benefit those at the top - to use your terminology, it was/is a "forcible resdistribution" that the government facilitated.

It seems appropriate that public policy should address this issue. While people may not agree what constitutes equity or even what policies might help create it, it would be easy enough to target giving the lower 40% a greater share of the income and track it over time and balance it against other measures like productivity, GDP or what have you - with the understanding that maximizing these other measures is actually secondary to other concerns (such as maintaining a clean environment, making sure citizens aren't living in poverty, etc.)

I agree with you on the structural point. However, I don't think the problem is primarily education. I think the primary problem is concentrated wealth. If you start out in life with a $1 million dollar trust fund, you are going to have different opportunities than someone that has to earn money to put food on their parent's table - irrespective of your education level.

I'd also say that there is subtle sexism and racism in play. Let's use your example. If there are 10,000 applicants to Harvard and 2,000 openings. Let's say that there are roughly 2,500 applicants with roughly the same profile (that is qualified to attend the school) and 1000 of them are minority candidates. Affirmative action should be showing a preference for candidates that are members of traditionally discriminated against groups when all else is equal. I don't have any issue with that - but people that talk against affirmative action typically assume that this is not the case. Why? Why assume they attended poor schools at all?

It's one thing to talk about a specific instance and say that people were giving opportunity they didn't deserve. I think that is the exception. However, can we agree, in principle, that affirmative action as I described it is not a bad thing?

Re:Social Justice?

[Stradivarius]

It is clear from the previously cited chart that the Top 5% have benefited from a redistribution of income since 1980. I don't think this redistribution of more income to the top 5% is a function of their increased education, for their working harder, based on merit, because the other groups are less educated or for any other reason other than an economic structure has been changed to benefit those at the top

Agreed. An interesting question is what caused the economic structures to change? Regulation/deregulation? Given the amount of regulation that we have (and often need), it's probable IMO that regulatory changes played at least a partial role. There has also been a shift towards "knowledge work" in our economy, which leads to greater disparities in productivity (and hence income), and also tends to require little financial capital to start businesses (which tend to produce lots of income when successful). I don't know how we untangle those effects to see how much of the effect was from what. I guess if I did I'd be an economist :-)

There are actually some interesting statistics about what the top 5% means - currently it's people making $157,000+ a year (sources: current and from 2001). Well-off for sure, though not as high as I'd assumed. The Wikipedia article actually breaks it out by percentages in each $10,000 increment of income (though the last two bars in the graph are actually $50k increments, which is why there's an odd spike there).

I don't think the problem is primarily education. I think the primary problem is concentrated wealth. If you start out in life with a $1 million dollar trust fund, you are going to have different opportunities than someone that has to earn money to put food on their parent's table - irrespective of your education level.

It is certainly true that someone with a $1 million trust fund has enormously more opportunities than the rest of us. The children of those in the top 5% of earnings also have better opportunities. But few people are in that situation. I'm much more interested in what's happening to the other 95% of people. It's not like there's a fixed amount of income to go around, such that the top 5% getting more necessarily means the other 95% get less. If the economy grows, we can all earn more; and if we got to a point where everyone had enough to live good lives, but a few people still made way more money, I think I'd be okay with that. Problem is that we're not at that point. So I see the problem as how do we as a society help folks in the 95% with the problems that impact them.

Maybe it's just a philosophical point, but I think it can make a difference in what types of solutions come to mind, and their likelihood of being implemented. We see the 95% problems all the time - the skyrocketing cost of healthcare and loss of insurance, the job insecurity caused by the shifts in our economy to more education-intensive jobs (and the loss of some less-education-intensive jobs folks have relied on for years), risks in retirement and Social Security, etc. I think people are willing to fund through their taxes solutions to these problems, because they're serious problems and people see the need for some level of a safety net. But I believe you'd have a much harder time convincing people there should be new or higher taxes on people in the top 5% simply by virtue of the fact that they've gotten to the top 5% and the income levels are uneven - it's seen as punishing success.

Affirmative action should be showing a preference for candidates that are members of traditionally discriminated against groups when all else is equal.

I think pretty much everyone would agree the idea of helping individuals who have been disadvantaged by circumstances beyond their control (whether it be by racism, poverty, etc.). But that's not qu

Re:Social Justice?

[daigu]

You could point to other factors as well. There has also been a shift to service jobs, which also includes retail, hospitality and so forth. These are not higher paying, more productive jobs. They are also jobs that people in higher economic strata need.

We have a progressive tax because people that benefit more from society (e.g., they can spend their time being a surgeon rather than cleaning their house) should pay more tax. I don't agree with the idea that a progressive tax is penalizing people for success. It is contributing some of the income to society, so everyone can share in the benefits - including the person cleaning their house. It is in no way punishing success. It is sharing the benefits with all the people that have made success possible.

As for the other point, discrimination is widespead. Everything from women being paid .75 cents for every dollar a man earns to country of origin bias. An obvious example, think of the government and the media's response to Katrina. Racism is institutional, you think it is a coincidence that the U.S. population is 12.3% black and the population of federal and state inmates is 43.9% black? I call it what it is - racism. Ever think of what your income potential is as an ex-prisoner? If it exists in such an obvious way in our justice system, do you think it might exist, but be slightly less obvious, on the job - especially since corporations, like government, tend to be run by older white men? I think it is safe to assume it is there - even if we personally might not see how it manifests itself (since we aren't the target).

You have made some good points. I do think education opportunity is important. However, I don't think it alone will solve the larger problem - which is poverty. I also think that trying to use education to address poverty is problematic public policy since poverty itself is a barrier to education.

Re:Economy of sharing-an example

[zogger]

This is how I finally bingoed to what FLOSS was all about. I had read the words but still didn't get it, I mean I was already using Linux and still didn't get it. But I thought of an analogy. FLOSS is like the olden days community barn raisings. Individually, it was pretty expensive and very difficult for one guy to build his own barn, collectively, members of the community go over on the weekend and help each other out, each contributing the tools and expertise they were the best at, eventually they all have very nice barns, then they can all go about the business of being farmers, were they made their livings at.

People remain resistant to technology

[Anonymous Coward]

It changes nothing. It enables us to be more what we are. I keep hearing how technology will change politics and social interactions and it does not. I don't expect laptops to stop genocide or topple MS. I want some of that skunky bud the mega-progresssives get. Must be good stuff to make them believe this shit. Sorry but true and I don't intend to flame. Poor people need good government, property rights, civil rights, basic services, and time to lift themselves up. Africa, in particular has little of this, and no stinking laptop or other technology is going to change that. This is a strain of the same western developed world's arrogance that got us into Iraq.

Re:Hahah

[Kopl]

Data/Knowledge is a lot different than things like cars. You can share it at no cost to yourself.

Eben Moglen as a lawyer

[camcorder]

First time I saw Eben Moglen in from-the-hawai shirt, I had no impression about he's a lawyer and also who's the one behind FSF's legal moves. Later on he started to talk about GPLv3 in a way that he's fighting with audience, then I had my first impression of his lawly background. And now with a suit. Luckily with pink shirt.

Re:Eben Moglen as a lawyer

[Anonymous Coward]

Moglen used to work for Swaine, Cravath, and Moore, one of the most prestigious firms in the country. So he's definitely got credentials.

As a visionary though, he's showing himself to be a complete tool. OLPC stopping genocide. mmmyeah okay.

Re:Eben Moglen as a lawyer

[rbarreira]

then I had my first impression of his lawly background. And now with a suit.

One could almost call it a lawsuit?

in much simpler to understand terms...

[3seas]

first understand that we are all consumers and producers.
With that in mind:

"Consumer choice rules"

And when the choice is not acceptable to the consumer, they put on their producer hat and make it for themselves and to share.

That's OSS!!

The essence why Richard Stallman wrote the GPL in the first place.
He was unhappy what rights his employer, at the time, was claiming of his work.

Re:in much simpler to understand terms...

[WilliamSChips]

He never left academia although his friends did. He created the GPL, FSF, and GNU because to get the source to a buggy printer driver he had to sign an NDA.

Re:in much simpler to understand terms...

[westlake]

And when the choice is not acceptable to the consumer, they put on their producer hat and make it for themselves and to share.
That's OSS!!

when did the programmer become the consumer in any ordinary meaning of the word?

programming is and will remain as alien a skill as brain surgery to the overwhelming majority of users. communication between the OSS programmer and the non-technical end user remains poor.

Re:in much simpler to understand terms...

[3seas]

Yeah?

You sound like a roman numeral accountant saying that anyone who thinks nothing can have value must be crazy.

Though it may have taken 300 years, the hindu arabic decimal system with its "nothing" holding a place value (zero) turned out to be so easy and powerful that teh adverage person could easily out do the roman numeral accountants.

The same it is with programming, there is a way to approach it that is easier and even boring.
It's just a matter of approaching it in terms of abstraction physics. Some that we all use everyday and regardless of whether or not we use computers.

Richard Stallman believes in Free Software and I say software will never be genuinely free untill the creation of it is easy enough to do that most anyone will upon the need or inspiration to.

see http://www.threeseas.net/abstraction_physics.html and recognize the ten base actions.

More from Moglen

[Fiznarp]

Moglen also spoke recently at the Sakai conference in Atlanta. He is representing the Sakai Foundation in their fight against Blackboard's software patent.

He gave a keynote Wednesday morning and then appeared during lunch for a debate of sorts with Matthew Small, VP and General Counsel for Blackboard, Inc. It's quite entertaining, IMHO, especially if you have strong feelings about software patents.

You can listen to the podcasts here (look at the Wednesday schedule, day 2 for download links):
Conference Schedule

(Sakai is an initiative supported by several higher educational institutions to build an Open Source learning management system.)

Re:More from Moglen

[Anonymous Coward]

There is a transcript of this fine speech at http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Software_and_Communi ty_in_the_Early_21st_Century.

More Columbia Rubbish

[chromozone]

That was just a Marxist software speech - nothing new in it. It's the same psedo virtuous template that gets applied to other things. "this is a moving speech because Moglen is not talking about software licensing as much as a multi-generational movement for social justice that many of my closest friends care deeply about despite their having very little knowledge of technology. As the lecture unfolds, Moglen's commentary invoked memories for me of Martin Luther King's speeches." Wha....? So people with "little knowledge" of technology now "care deeply" about the social justice of software liscensing? The reason they care is because they are shallow and suggestible. A lot fo people have no real virtue these days so they are easy prey for rhetoric that sounds "sorta" noble but has no root in reality. A lot of these "ivory tower" sorts who buy into this rubbish are already guilt ridden and prone to self loathing. "If we know that what we are trying to do is build an economy of sharing which will rival the economies of ownership at every point where they directly compete; If we know that we are doing this as an alternative to coercive redistribution, that we have a third way in our hands for dealing with long and deep problems of human injustice" Human injustice is due to character flaws and spiritual emptiness(ego pride selfishness etc) and Marxism always wants to hide that fact behind superficial economics. It's like saying "People aren't bad it's their choices that are bad so we will just have to make sure there are no options". These sorts are guilty of what they accuse others (capitalists) of being. Marx did once say "accuse others of what you do".

Ok...

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't buy that it will curb genocide. First of all, if people are attacking my village I am going to either be fighting or running; I'm not going to stand around cranking my laptop to capture grainy images/video and upload them to my blog. Ignoring that for the moment, I don't think it would make a difference anyway; unless the images are of U.S. soliders we (in general) are reluctant to do anything. Images of dead Iraqi children are easily obtainable at a number of websites, and occasionally hit the air waves on CNN, but that doesn't change policy on the ground. We have very little interest in Darfur, and there are many websites documenting what is going on there, yet we do nothing. The sad fact is that we just don't care because there's nothing in it for us. If we see something we don't like we can simply change the channel. Out of sight is out of mind.

The speaker's goals are admirable, but his zealousness is blinding him from reality. My personal opinion is that OLPC will have mild success in some more highly-developed regions, but generally it will be a failure. Ultimately time will tell.

And from the first link:

Tonight I sat back with a tofu burrito from Gorditos and a glass of wine to watch Eben Moglen's keynote to the 2006 Plone Conference...

LOL, what the fuck?

Re:Ok...

[Anonymous Coward]

Why should I do anything about Dafur? Because you feel badly about it? War is in the history of the establishment of all great civilizations.

I feel 'sorry' for the people caught up in it, but I feel that it is not my place to meddle in their affairs.

Re:Ok...

[BoberFett]

Tonight I sat back with a tofu burrito from Gorditos and a glass of wine to watch Eben Moglen's keynote to the 2006 Plone Conference...

LOL, what the fuck?

You should agree with the author because he's better than you. Why? Because he's sophisticated (wine) and cares about the planet (tofu).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeal_to_authority

Re:Ok...

[Anonymous Coward]

Moglen is the ultimate idiotarian. Authority bad, sharing good. oh ah what a simpleton.

Social Justice?

[fatboy]

I have issues with the concept of "Social Justice" (in this country, the USA). I can understand helping people in poverty. Having the government give them the training and tools to get out of poverty is something anyone can understand.

That is not what I see when people speak of "Social Justice". I see them attempting to have an even distribution of wealth, by using the government as the enforcer of what is socially just.

It does not seem fair. Those who sacrifice, save and work hard should be rewarded. Those who do not, should not.

On a global scale, often, when I see the struggling indigenous people of wherever, they have placed restraints on their economy or their economy is a structured (ie planned) economy that has inefficiencies in it. These types of economies look like the economies proposed by those seeking "Social Justice".

This is just a Sunday morning rant. As always, I could be wrong :)

Not even a token gesture toward software freedom?

[jbn-o]

How ironic that the /. headline mentions "OSS" (open source software) yet Prof. Moglen is General Counsel for the Free Software Foundation; an organization that not only predates the Open Source Initiative (which coined the term "open source") by over a decade but has a different philosophy which sometimes reaches different conclusions about what software is acceptable than the open source philosophy does. For the open source movement, running non-free software is okay (not that an open source proponent would call it that; the open source movement exists in part to not talk about software freedom at all). For a free software proponent, non-free software is avoided except when writing a free replacement for a non-free program. The difference in reaction to non-free software is quite striking.

You can see how that plays out in this /. story: none of the formats this talk has been transcoded to can be played by all users with free software even though this could have been accomodated. Instead of including options free software users could use, we have a list of (what are for most users) non-free alternatives. MP3 is patent-encumbered in many countries, so citizens of those countries can't have free MP3 encoding or decoding software. The QuickTime container format can be free, but the codecs most often used with QuickTime are non-free. Flash can be played with free software but the free replacements aren't yet to the point of maturity where it can be used as a drop-in replacement (and even when the job is done, MP3 soundtracks on Flash video+audio files will pose a problem).

The solution has been around for some time and works well: add Ogg Vorbis audio files and Ogg Theora+Vorbis video+audio files. These files can be played on all platforms and there are implementations which are free software for everyone.

You're trying to go back to the dark ages.

[Anonymous Coward]

In the dark ages, if someone knew something of value, they kept it a secret. Only members of the guild could get the knowledge needed to earn a living in a trade. What brought us out of the dark ages was the idea that knowledge should be shared. Scientists started to publish their findings and technology shot ahead. With the printing press and widespread literacy, knowledge became free. In fact, the whole idea behind patents is to encourage the publication of knowledge. Ditto for copyright.

So, you can shill for Microsoft, the RIAA et al and send us back to the stone age (literally, you should read 'The Ingenuity Gap' by Thomas Homer Dixon http://homerdixon.com/ingenuitygap/) or you can get with the program.

Re:You're trying to go back to the dark ages.

[Anonymous Coward]

I've yet to see a coherent argument from the anti-copyright brigade, to support their claim that abolishing copyright would not impede the creation of new works.

As you said, the reason copyright exists is to encourage sharing, so what do you think will happen if you get rid of it? Some people will continue to create/distribute their works, but others will either stop creating, or take great pains to ensure secrecy about anything of value they write (knowing that if they don't keep it secret, they'll have no way of profiting from it).

I realise a lot of people aren't overly concerned with making a lot of money, as long as they can earn a living, and would still create and share works in their areas of interest. I'm in fact one of them: I love my field, and will continue to write in it as long as I can, whether or not it's profitable. However, I'm realistic enough to accept that, without copyright, a great many people would refuse either to create or to share their intellectual works.

Re:You're trying to go back to the dark ages.

[b.burl]

I have yet to see...
eys wide shut?

Question for the Board

[Anonymous Coward]

If we know that what we are trying to do is build an economy of sharing which will rival the economies of ownership at every point where they directly compete;

What happens if we (in Western Europe and America)are trying to build "an economy of sharing" and the rest of the world isn't? Who wins?

This isn't a flame. Its a serious question. What happens in a global competitive environment when one's domestic for-profit industries compete with grassroots, open source initiatives -- and the rest of the world capitalizes on the latter to become more competitive. Is this akin to killing the cow for the milk?

Re:Question for the Board

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a good question. Here are my thoughts:

First off, I'm not sure that the rest of the world won't be participating in the "economy of sharing". The economics that make open-source a good bet for the companies that contribute to it applies to the rest of the world too.

Second, we should probably note that most goods/industries do not have the zero marginal cost that software does. So those industries will probably benefit from more capable and less costly software infrastructure, without losing much themselves. After all, those industries get the same benefit their competition does from cheaper software, so it's a win-win.

The question is more complicated for the software industry.

What I think will happen is that the profit margins in software will get closer to that of other industries, rather than the astronomical figures we have today. There will still be a need for people to write software, so people will still be hired to write it, either as FOSS or as a proprietary application.

I believe that the trend we see today will continue, where free software becomes a highly functional, low-cost option for common infrastructure needs (operating systems, browsers, all the stuff that has a sufficiently large demand that it's cost-effective for industries to fund open-source versions of them). Proprietary companies will still thrive, because there will always be some unmet software need that can be traded for money. But those companies will need to innovate more rapidly, because commonly used proprietary apps will spawn free competitors. It will become extremely rare for a company to sell basically the exact same software for decades. The application will either evolve tremendously or lose the market to a free competitor.

That will be a challenge for the industry. Some will meet it by staying a step ahead of the free alternatives. Some may meet it by selling programming services/contracting rather than products.

The big unanswered question is whether the folks actually *doing* the programming are still going to be Europeans and Americans, rather than folks in countries with much lower costs and standards of living. But that's really not a function of the "economy of sharing", as it is a function of the outsourcing phenomenon in general.

Reasonable expectations

[SysKoll]

I'm all in favor of the OLPC project. It's a great project, but it shouldn't be seen as a world savior either. OLPC is a project that will make a few Westerners feel good and will help a few thousand (or tens of thousands) people acquire the basics of computing, provided that they are in the right conditions to start with.

But OLPC is not going to convince warring tribes that they should start loving their neighbors. It's not going to resolve hatreds and conflicts that have been raging for decades, if not longer in some cases.

Before a new technology has a chance to improve lives, the basic sociological problems have to be solved. In a place where slavery is OK (they still exist), where women and children are fair game, and where the winner takes all, law and stability extend only as far as the reach of the local warlord -- until the next one takes over. And having to fight bouts of malaria while trying to avoid being caught between warring factions doesn't help making time for learning to read, much less for learning computing.

So let's have reasonable expectation here. If the project is supposed to create world peace, then it will be doomed a failure regardless of its achievements.

Re:Reasonable expectations

[Anonymous Coward]

Slavery exists all over the world. The living/working conditions of many illegal immigrants and housewives are very close to slavery.

Moglen for president ;-)

[Anonymous Coward]

Obviously Moglen gets it, he understands the business case for free software and also sees the potential to effect wider social change. Quite the intellectual, his speeches are imbued with a sense of anarchic fun that must be unsettling for the status-quo. For this reason alone, they're always worth hearing, even if you think his optimism may ultimately be misplaced.

Go LTFF (Listen to The Fine File?)

freedom and resources

[argoff]

One problem. For the longest time, we have already had more than enough food to feed the world. The primary problem of getting food to the poor was never a cost or distribution problem, it was a political and freedom problem. The fact that we have entered the information age with free software has not changed this problem. While society has advanced greatly in the sciences over the last 150 years. Society has gained nearly nothing in the advancement of freedom and liberty. The US constitution was the cutting edge of that, but has not increased our liberties and powers for a long time.

Notice that how even though Linux is free, that the place that it is used the most is silicon valley - more than any other place in the world. A free market Mecca. Not Africa, not China, not India. That's because it's not about costs, but about freedom. And free markets are not about markets, but about freedom too and people taking advantage of it to create wealth and prosperity where none existed before.

Contrary to what he said, the free market still has limits, but now the limit in supply and demand centers around services and not around content controls. The information age is doing for services what the industrial revolution did for production.

Re:freedom and resources

[Maxo-Texas]

I agree -- food isn't the issue.

more food = more people = more conflict.

more food = less time working to make food, find food = more time to think = more conflict.

Humans are wired for conflict, especially between the ages of 13 and 30.

More children = more conflict.

---

As long as we respect other people's rights to raise their children by teaching them other people are not human then the problem.

Only by teaching their children different beliefs can we change their culture.

I suppose the laptops might help in that regard- the children would see concepts they would otherwise not be exposed to.

Re:freedom and resources

[Thomas the Doubter]

This is a very interesting point - although we have advanced greately in material wealth, our liberties and powers have "not increased much in a long time". As someone who is "wealthy", it is easy to see that the name of the game is control.

Significantly, the timely emergence of the concept of Intellectual Property appears to be aimed directly at the economics of control: who has access to what, when, and under what conditions. It is clearly mostly a system of control - which makes most all of us poor in what really matters - our freedoms, choices, and powers, all the while draining off increasing sums of money.
All is not dark, however...Along come some wild prophets, such as RMS, and they show us there is another way. Do not play the IP game - assert your natural and God-given freedom. The poor in spirt shall inherit the earth. Thomas

Re:freedom and resources

[argoff]

I suppose the laptops might help in that regard- the children would see concepts they would otherwise not be exposed to.

In 1960's China. Millions and millions of people were dying from starvation as the farms were not producing enough food. But, no amount of new farming tools was going to help it. No amount of charity was going to stop the massive death tolls. So what stopped it. Well, the farmers revolted and forced China to switch back to a private property system. The point is that people don't need charity, they don't need tools, they needed understanding and freedom. Handing these kids laptops is like handing them farming tools. They don't need a freaking laptop, they don't need high speed internt. What they need is some understanding of liberty (and some guns parhaps). Maybe being connected will get them that understanding, but I doubt it. Has slashdot turned back the tide of statisim here in the US, nope. The internet in the US has only made the mob more capable of enhancing their power base to coercively take from one group and distribute to another.

Re:freedom and resources

[flyneye]

It takes a village to raise an idiot.-Hillbillary Marx

Re:More Columbia Rubbish

[Stormwatch]

I thought it was Lenin who said: "Accuse your enemies of doing what you do, label them of what you are."

So, all you really want is an Ogg file :-)

[cheros]

If I condense those paragraphs down it appears that all you're really saying is that you would have liked the talk to be in Ogg format. Plenty of conversions on Google, but I do agree they ought to have thought of that - I guess they decided to get the word out first before converting...

Joking aside, I'm not sure I believe in a conspiracy to snub Free Software. Whatever fork argument you use, I still think that both strands still share more ideas than they care to admit, only the way they approach the world is different.

The Open lot is a bit more pragmatic (I'd call them the 'I want it NOW' crowd), the Free crowd has a more philosophical stance, with RMS as the ultimate cheerleader (argh, that called up a picture of RMS in a skirt - give me a moment to recover, aaargh :-). I think the Open crowd is paving the way to the Free approach - the world does not work with black and white cut-overs unless someone just got raided by FAST/BSA and makes guitars for a living.

Without the Free ideas the Open crowd would eventually wander back into the proprietary world, with the Open guys making it happen now the Free ideas would just remain ideas - another ideology but now worth paying attention to. I think both are required to make a difference.

But that's just MY view - feel free to disagree.

After all, it's a free/open world .

stop the socialism

[TheSHAD0W]

What does "social justice" have to do with open-source software? Or with closed source? Or with anything? Trying to justify cooperative or closed efforts based on what you think their benefit to mankind will be is off-point. The closed source software occurs because someone wants to make money. The cooperative effort exists because people want to volunteer their efforts. Using the government hammer on the people who want to make money because they're detrimental to society by "consuming money" is as smart as beating down the open-source people because they're "destroying the free market".

Re:stop the socialism

[the_skywise]

Hey don't go against Slashdot's truthiness here!

Re:stop the socialism

[stubear]

Didn't you hear? A puppy is killed to make each copy of Windows. How does Apple avoid the closed source puppy killing business? It doesn't matter becasue their OS and computers are nice and shiny so anyone who bothers to do the research is immediately distracted. Duh.

Re:stop the socialism

[Omnifarious]

I wouldn't use the government hammer on people who produce proprietary software largely because I think it's quite clear that it's not needed. But people who produce proprietary software are doing a lot of harm that isn't strongly related to money.

I believe that proprietary software is essentially fraudulent because you are not really getting anything for your money. It's more that you're buying a service, and someone is handwaving about it being a good by making sure that you get a box and a disk or some other material good so you can feel like you really bought something. But in reality, you've bought nothing.

For example, many EULAs for proprietary software now stipulate that the 'vedor' can turn off the software remotely if you do something the vendor doesn't like. What other good that you buy can be mysteriously taken from you without a trial or any other sort of proceeding by the person you bought it from?

Free Software is the only honest software IMHO.

Personally, I don't like the term 'social justice' either. Because it seems like some sort of fuzzy ill-defined term that can be used as a justification for all kinds of evil things.

"What does Firefox have to do with social justice?

[G3ckoG33k]

"What does Firefox have to do with social justice?" Dunno. Ask the Debian maintainers...

Re:Hahah

[Anonymous Coward]

Data/Knowledge is a lot different than things like cars. You can share it at no cost to yourself.

Yes, but both cars and data take time and resources to create. If I could snap my fingers and make a car magically appear, then I would have no problem giving my current car away for free. However, that's not the case. Thus, it's only fair for a seller to ask you to pay for data/knowledge that he has created, just as it's fair for him to ask you to pay for a car that he has created. We should not let the fact that sharing is trivial blind us to this moral truth.

The self-importance is awe inspiring

[oldmanmtn]

Because what has really been holding back the third world all this time is the lack of source code to their C++ compilers.

Open Source (or Free, or whatever the f*ck) software is fanstastic, but Jesus, can we have a little perspective please?

Re: The self-importance is awe inspiring

[mixnblend]

Well, to give you a little perspective,one person, attending varsity on the tip of Africa, decided that there was a gap in the market for a paricular product...so he dropped out of varsity because he believed his idea would work....problem...he had no money.What happened? He and some of his friends started a compnay out of his parents garage...developing with OSS tools..python etc...and because these tools were free they were able to develop a workable and usable product..which a very well known US company bought out for millions of dollars. What happened next? The young man took the money that he had made developing his incredibly useful product..which he wouldnt have been able to afford to develop legally if he'd had to use proprietary software...and re-invested by amongst other things founding a company by the name of Canonical...

Now...because one guy had a great idea and was able to pull it off utilising open source software, which he wouldnt have been able to do if all the technology or development software he was utilising was proprietary, the world has a really great linux distro, kids in schools in South Africa who would otherwise never have seen a machine have labs (funded by this man), and get exposure to computers and how to utilise them, whereas in the past this opportunity would never have been presented to them.

I went to varsity with one guy who had never ever seen a machine before he got to first year...can you imagine having to pass a CS degree (you got good results in school and worked hard) never having had any experience with computers...This software movement and its representatives have the right to be self important...why?..because this movement gives anyone with a great idea the tools to make that idea happen...the freedom to package a great operating system, translated into all South Africans' languages, allowing children to make use of technology that they would never otherwise encounter...

Except for the 'Social Justice' theme...

[The Monster]

Every time he said 'Social Justice' he fed the perception that Free Software is a communist plot. I suspect a lot of people will miss the part where he said that it is no longer necessary for a revolution of the have-nots to dispossess the haves.

Re:Except for the 'Social Justice' theme...

[yankpop]

Every time he said 'Social Justice' he fed the perception that Free Software is a communist plot.

Only among those who are already predisposed to do so. Social justice != communism. Moglen can't prevent you from bringing your biases to the table, but he can hope that you will judge his presentation on its merits, and not on the values you attach to words he is using.

yp.

Re:Except for the 'Social Justice' theme...

[yoder]

"Every time he said 'Social Justice' he fed the perception that Free Software is a communist plot."

That is only because some people are easily fed "trigger" words or phrases and easily trained to react a certain way whenever they are used. Reasonable people understand that social justice does not equal Communism. During the Cold War and even today these easily trained people are more than willing to turn on their friends, neighbors, and even family because of this fallacious sense of pseudo patriotism.

Re:Except for the 'Social Justice' theme...

[operagost]

That's funny, because as an example, the Pope recently released a paper in which he criticized Islam by the way of the comments of an ancient theologian and people suggested he should have expected that reaction. It does seem to matter what your audience's reaction will be.

Re:Except for the 'Social Justice' theme...

[Saint V Flux]

"Social justice != communism"

True. Social justice is merely the absence of justice under the delusion that laws will make people smarter / stronger / cause them to spend their money wisely / etc.

Re:Except for the 'Social Justice' theme...

[killjoe]

The pope misjudged the rigid dogmatism of his audience. Perhaps moglen did the same.

Re:Except for the 'Social Justice' theme...

[mi]

I suspect a lot of people will miss the part where he said that it is no longer necessary for a revolution of the have-nots to dispossess the haves.

Trouble is, if it still was necessary (in his opinion), he would've done it...

Re:Except for the 'Social Justice' theme...

[illuminatedwax]

It very much matters what words you use and who your audience is. Yes, many people might know that social justice is not communism, but he's not trying to prove an academic thesis, he's trying to persuade people towards his argument. It is a bit odd, too, because the FSF is usually very strict about which words they use, to the point of being obnoxious (but it's a necessary sort of obnoxiousness).

Re:Except for the 'Social Justice' theme...

[Anonymous Coward]

Reasonable people understand that social justice does not equal Communism.

Mind you, even Communism does not equal communism! It is one of those "trigger" words you talk about. The fact is that when you say "Communism" you are in fact thinking in Stalinism and dictatorship, and not in directed economy and shared property of production equipment. I am sure it was not very different when german people heard they leaders say "Jew".

Re:Except for the 'Social Justice' theme...

[yoder]

"Mind you, even Communism does not equal communism! It is one of those "trigger" words you talk about. The fact is that when you say "Communism" you are in fact thinking in Stalinism and dictatorship, and not in directed economy and shared property of production equipment."

I was going to bring something like that up, but thought that it would just muddy already murky waters. Thank you for pointing that out.

You try fitting a headline with /. short character

[newscloud]

count Fair point though.

Here's a transcript of the talk

[H4x0r Jim Duggan]

A friend in the free software community has transcribed this talk:http://plone.org/events/conferences/seattle-2 006/.

Re:What a gasbag

[Ed Avis]

I think Moglen's point was that he hoped to get 'social justice' without 'coercive redistribution', that is, without the theft-and-redistribution part that you dislike.

Why use QuickTime ??

[Qwavel]

Maybe I didn't look hard enough but the only download-able format I found was QT. Why do this to us? Why not MPEG? Given the theme, I could understand if they wanted to make it available in Ogg, but QT? I can play MPEG with just about anything. Is there some sort of free codec pack that I could use (on Windows), rather then having to install another annoying proprietary player?

Re:Why use QuickTime ??

[HellYeahAutomaton]

QT is pretty much standard. Why not rip it with one of the Firefox Add-ins and convert it to pretty much any format you want?

Don't let laziness stand in the way of your open source format idealism.

Re:Why use QuickTime ??

[VGPowerlord]

QT is pretty much standard.

DiVX and Windows Media are "pretty much" standard, too.

However, if you want to go by real, ISO standards, that leaves the various MPEG suites, of which MPEG-1 is the most widespread.

Re:Why use QuickTime ??

[Anonymous Coward]

You can use Mplayer from http://mplayerhq.hu/ - download the windows binary and the codec pack, and then extract the codec pack into the codecs directory, and associate the mplayer binary with Quicktime files. This will play virtually all video formats. MPlayer might be illegal in countries with software patents or other silly laws, but it is a great demonstration of what is possible through free software.

SORRY, here's the working LINK:

[H4x0r Jim Duggan]

Heh. That'll teach me to check my URLs. ...nah.

Here is a temporary copy of the transcript: http://ciaran.compsoc.com/texts/moglen-2006-oct-pl one.html

It will have a permanent link soon, and that will be listed at: http://ciaran.compsoc.com/texts/

Re:Economy of sharing-an example

[quixote9]

Humans have spent millions of years sharing, and just a few thousand owning. Sharing is what got us, as a species, so rich that we could afford to lock up resources, whether it cost anyone anything for others to use them or not.

Owning can speed up the pace of innovation by several orders of magnitude, but it can also slow it down. You don't need DMCA, DRM, and other insane intellectual property rights to do that. The medieval guilds in Europe, for instance, also slowed down the pace of innovation by a couple of centuries, and they did it using trade secrecy rules that worked just as well (or badly, depending on your point of view).

But the important thing is that sharing and owning are NOT mutually exclusive. Buddha had it right: it's the balance that's important. Microsoft shouldn't be allowed to own the ones and the zeroes, but sharing everything absolutely equally doesn't work well outside of a monastery either. The balance point, for me, is where you have the most innovation that benefits the most people and allows compensation to flow to the creators, not everybody except the creators.

One thing that's always brought up about "sharing economies" is the tragedy of the commons. That's where resources held in common and owned by nobody get trashed because nobody takes care of them. Our current environmental problems fall into this category. But the thing to remember there is that sharing only becomes a tragedy when it's a free-for-all. In that case, sure, it's a rip-off for whoever is the biggest thug. We don't have to let that happen. If the commons is adequately regulated, it can be used by everyone AND retain all its value, like a well-run city park.

Moglen has articulated the value in the new / old way of sharing, and brought so many separate things into one vision, it's like looking into a prism and seeing glorious rainbows. Love it.

Re:More Columbia Rubbish

[caseih]

Your implication that Marxism is Communism, or something otherwise bad or evil, is quite false. Marx said a lot of things. Further most people, myself included, don't hardly have the slightest clue what Marx really proposed or believed in. Certainly the Communist Manifesto was *not* Marx. It was the Communist Party's charter for which they paid Marx to draw up according to their own ideals, not Marx's.

Talking to people (in the ivory towers no less) I have learned that Marx wrote many many things that touched on the great and important issues of the day. Many do not realize that Marx predicted what would happen in America. He predicted that cold hard capitalist worker abuses would lead to unions and a reformation of American labor, even within the context of our somewhat free market system. He was exactly accurate in these areas and many others. And it's a good thing we "listened" to Marx or else we'd have never made it through the industrial age intact. Although I would strongly disagree with Marx over globalisation, it seem that the US has listened to him very well when it comes to protectionism of domestic markets. The US is all about free trade and free markets when it is our trade and your markets, not when it's your trade and our markets. Marx does have some flaws.

Now from what I know, the Free Software movement is definitely *not* communism, but rather humanist capitalism at its finest. And yes, it does represent, in my opinion, the true ideals of Marxism too. This is a good thing, in my opinion. It does not take away anything from those who espouse themselves to be libertarian, free-market thinkers ( http://www.politicalcompass.org/ really opened my eyes to where I stand in relationship to our government leaders)

Funny you should talk about character flaws and spiritual emptiness. For Max himself did believe that religion was a bandaid to the this problem, and not a solution. Rather he said we should find and solve the underlying causes of this emptiness, such as the dull, monotonous, slavery of factory worker life, common in his time. I happen to agree with the latter statement, but not with his opiate comment. Programming in a cubicle, notwithstanding a great salary, leads to emptiness and a lack of fulfillment in many circumstances. The Free Software ecosystem, on the other hand helps to offset this monotony and tediousness but encouraging us to exercise tremendous creativity. I believe this can really benefit and complement companies who develop software.

So why is Marxism such a bad thing? It has already brought the US stability and amazing economic development. And honestly if you really listen to what Moglen and the FSF say, they want to bring the same leaps and strides to computers and people, as in the computer industry specifically, we face many of the same issues Marx wrote about. If anyone is truly interested in what Marx had to say, throw away the "Communist Manifesto" and read his real books.

OMG

[Anonymous Coward]

we are all COMMUNISTS ?!?!

Why did you ruin my sunday morning man, I was having a good time, now I need to revisit my McCarthy tapes once more ...
Snif..

Re:OMG

[RealGrouchy]

we are all COMMUNISTS ?!?!

No, we're all Amish.

Now go throw your car away.

- RG>

Re:OMG

[indifferent children]

No, we're all Amish.

I'm Proto-Neo-Amish: I refuse to use any technology invented after 2063.

Re: Salvation through education

[0xdeadbeef]

I think that in America, there is a long history of beliving that education is our salvation

And being the most powerful nation in the world somehow invalidates that sentiment?

Education *is* the salvation, our very history is proof of that. But there is also a strong tradition of anti-intellectualism masquerading as anti-elitism in this country, and as our wealth encourages laziness and the expectation of success, that sentiment is now the stronger force. The failure of throwing money at a problem as a substitute for interest and participation, and actually understanding the problem, does not invalidate the solution.

Ogg Vorbis, please

[ArcRiley]

I have to agree. I'd hope the Plone group would be "with-it" enough to realize the ethical conflict they've put themselves in by only releasing a video about freedom using proprietary codecs.

While keeping in mind that 80%+ of Internet users have never heard of Ogg, a vast majority of the people listening to Moglen have & would highly prefer it. Besides, Vorbis is vastly superior quality to MP3.

Re:Hahah

[Kopl]

Nice post. You are right, if a producer wants to be paid for his product, and a consumer wants it, then they should be paid for it.

Thanks to the editors

[Harmonious Botch]

...for not posting anything else for several hours so we all had a chance to watch the nearly hour long video.

Missing the Point

[Anonymous Coward]

Much of the disdain about FOSS comes from a fundamental misunderstanding that reflects pretty much the way that one views the entire world as a whole. The aim of FOSS is not about making sure that no one makes money; moglen pretty much concedes that that economic imperative is required. The issue is really how and why various players (such as M$, but even worse the telcos) are able to propagate their monopolies of a commoditized industry under the guise of the "free market". The answers to how one answers some of the following representative questions pretty much dictate your view on the FOSS movement.

1. Why does the EU continually chide MS?
2. Why is the US continually sliding most broadband metrics?
3. Why was the whole WiFi movement possible?
4. Is IE a product or a platform?

It is in this vein, why GOOG has become such a market darling and a posterchild (obviously not to the extent of Linux) of the OSS movement. FOSS is not about not allowing companies to make a profit. It is more of a recognition that at some point, the perpetuation of the monopoly becomes detrimental to society as a whole. Even the Founding Fathers recognized this.

Re:More Columbia Rubbish

[gaspar ilom]

Human injustice is due to character flaws and spiritual emptiness(ego pride selfishness etc) and Marxism always wants to hide that fact behind superficial economics.

Addressing your first point: The ability of people's behaviors and intentions to affect reality clearly DO depend environment, conditions, and *context.* (your second point is rubbish: that's not what "Marxism" is -- and Moglin's lecture wasn't even about Marxism.)

So, if the power of intention is mitigated by context, then OF COURSE you can re-structure society and its rules to shape the collective result of peoples' behaviors toward a particular outcome.

At a minimum, it doesn't matter if those behaviors are the result of "character flaws" -- or even whether those flaws are genetic, biological, or social in origin. (although, the point I'm making is even stronger if those "character flaws" are found to be social/environmental in origin.)

For example:
In a hierarchical system where vast power can be concentrated into the hands of a few decision makers -- one "bad apple" can more easily create "evil" results that harm everyone else. In a a system where power is distributed more evenly, that ability for a "bad apple" to do harm would be diminished.

Notice that it's irrelevant whether everyone has those same character flaws, to greater or lesser degree. (It just so happens, BTW, that the system we do have puts exactly those kinds of bad apples in positions of power -- that's just an emergent property of that system perpetuating itself.)

Haven't you ever wondered whether it's the system we have now that leads to things like: externalities, global warming, and psychopathic corporations? -- Or was that all just the result of immutable, inner character flaws?

This is not what Moglen's talking about

[Geof]

This (from my transcription) is what he means by social justice:

There is no moral justification for charging more for bread that costs nothing than the starving can pay.

His vision has no government or other enforcer. It is realized due to a restructuring of economic production around products based on software which is free. Here is how he describes past efforts to achieve social justice:

the greatest problem of human inequality is the extraordinary difficulty in prising wealth away from the rich to give it to the poor, without employing levels of coercion or violence which are themselves utterly corrosive to social progress. . . . We cannot make meaningful redistribution fast enough to maintain momentum politically without applying levels of coercion or violence which will destroy what we are attempting.

An information economy based on free software, however, can be different:

We find ourselves now in a very different place. . . . It's a place where the primary infrastructure is produced by sharing. The primary technology of production is unowned. . . . We have begun proving the fabric of a twenty-first century society which is egalitarian in its nature, and which is structured to produce for the common benefit more effectively than it can produced for private exclusive proprietary benefit. . . . a world in which the resources of the wealthy came to us, not because we coerced them, not because we demanded, not because we taxed, but because we shared. Even with them, sharing worked better than suing or coercing.

Re:This is not what Moglen's talking about

[bitspotter]

Yes!

Physical property requires coercion to redistribute. The legal norm of propety developed as a simple extension of the physical norm.

But with intellectual property, the situation is reversed. Intellectual property requires coercion to retain.

Without a government enforcer, physical property cannot be redistributed, and is instead owned. But without a government enforcer, Intellectual property cannot be owned, and is instead redistributed.

Capitalism. Re:Economy of sharing to compete?

[Anonymous Coward]

The underlying assumption you have there is that you lose what you trade.

This is actually a mercantilist theory.

Capitalism already has it that both parties taken together gain more than just that which is traded.

If I have a log, and I make a deal that I'll give you a plank in return for a saw... I might actually end up with several planks and a saw, you end up with the one plank, which you use to finish a barrel which you can then trade for something else... etc...

On balance, we each gain more than that which we traded for. Capitalism is non-zero sum.

With digital media, you don't actually have any negative values on your balance when you make a trade. If I give you a copy of my program, I still have my program myself as well.

Counter intuitively, the highest total gain for both of us is when I don't actually request anything back, as you will then be most likely to be willing and able to accept my deal. (It's a no brainer.)

If you have several people making similar trades like that, society still advances. IT's very strange.

Note that I can still earn money to trade for finite resources if I like: I can trade the time I take writing software (time is a finite resource) for money.

This is in fact how I earn my living.

So in the end it all makes economical sense, it's just slightly counter-intuitive.

And if you think *that's* a counter-intuitive capitalistic concept already, wait 'till you hear of things like leverage or put options.

As to giving everyone equal chances at the start. I think that's just being a good sport, don't you?

Access to what?

[Quiet_Desperation]

Is it really access to knowledge, or just access to more mind degenerating nonsense?

Too much of what you find on the Internet is garbage. From the web page equivalents of open mike poetry nights at the local coffee house, to vacuumheads like 9/11 or moon landing conspiracy theorists, there's a lot of rubbish.

Will the network spread truth and liberty, or will the lies just spread faster? Is it a tool of freedom, or a global generator of intelletual smog?

Here's how you save the world:
1. Global education with a solid core of scientific method, basic logic and critical thinking skills.
2. Free access to all known forms off birth control.
3. Bust up the organized religions. Seriously, we have GOT to wean humanity off that shit. It's like every problem in the world can be traced back to some religious text or another.

Re:Access to what?

[Shados]

If you give people #3, #2 will almost come on its own, so you can ommit it :)

Re:Access to what?

[monoqlith]

There's a lot of rubbish everywhere, not just on the internet. The internet provides infinite shelf space for content and commerce. Like with anything, this can be rubbish, or it can be substantive. There are plenty of examples of both. Fortunately, by and large, you get to choose what content you view, which sites you go to, which emails you read, and what products you buy. Some things that you think are rubbish are not rubbish to other people. I expect that we are both democrats with a lower-case 'd.' We think that people should be able to choose what they value. If they value information that we don't value, that's their right.

The important thing about the internet is that it facilitates access to information for everybody. The internet is thus the major (re-) democratizing force in the world. Access to information is never a bad thing - no matter what you hear from those who prefer secrecy, ownership, and deprivation of something which is inherently free and open. Information 'wants' to go places - it will not be locked up gladly. The internet recognizes this.

As for your suggestions

1. Definitely agreed. The internet coupled with your recommendation of good education and critical thinking will ensure that people don't assent to false beliefs.
2. Yes.
3. It's not religion that's the problem with violent religious practices. It's the people. People who are uneducated, deprived, and can't think critically about which beliefs they assent to. This is already addressed by your number 1.

Re:Access to what?

[Quiet_Desperation]

I really dislike the "information wants..." arguments. It smacks of pseudotheological silliness. Religion is a mind cancer, along with other rigid ideologies (including the political ones). Toss 'em all on the scrap heap of history, I say. Religions are the worst, though, because the faithful claim justitifcation from a higher power. At least you can debate things with socilaists and capitalists.

Re:Access to what?

[monoqlith]

Re the information 'wants' - I put it in single quotes. Not meant to be a literal attribution of desire to information. Information tends is more accurate. But it would be pretty hard to deny that people - socialized animals - can resist communicating to each other. This is why information tends to leak. Great efforts must be employed in order to contain it. It was really a remark about people more than information.

The reason religion is contagious and often insidious is because it is used in place of education. It teaches people *what* to think before they know *how* to think. This is bad. It gives people the idea that they have answers to questions they haven't even got around to asking. It can be addressed by strong education which teaches things like independent thinking and logic rather than rote memorization, ritual and dogma.

If you're an atheist: it is just as presumptuous to claim there is no god as it is to claim there is one. That is why I remain safely agnostic, and don't pretend to know what I can't.

Re:Access to what?

[arifirefox]

sounds like North Korea will save the world! oh wait...that will totally suck. I prefer freedom.

Re:Access to what?

[Quiet_Desperation]

I'm just another agnostic. :) Or a "practicing agnostic" as I like to put it.

Re:Hahah

[Silvah]

Hey, you're right, my time is 100% worthless.

Shoot! I guess all those teachers and professors tricked us into paying them for knowledge, because they can 'share it at no cost' to themselves.

Figure out the difference between price and cost before you even consider responding...

probably not in the sleightest

[stinkytoe]

How will the one laptop per child project discourage genocide?

While i fully support the OLPC project in spirit, and fully believe that the aims of the OLPC project are completely chivalristic (sp?) in nature, where did they ever promise to end genocide? I honenstly believed their aim to be to simply lower the tech barrier between poor and priveleged children. No more, no less. Where in the hell did the issue of genocice (of any stripe) come into play?

When I hear the words "Social Justice" ...

[Jack Action]

At that point did you reach for your gun?

Re:When I hear the words "Social Justice" ...

[Anonymous Coward]

As soon as I ran out of chairs.

Yours,
Steve Ballmer

Science is a better analogy

[Beryllium Sphere(tm)]

Scientists work hard, harder than you probably realize, and what do they do with their results? They give them away to the entire world in journal articles.

But then, everything the scientists built on was published by previous scientists.

Everybody winds up better off than they would if someone were to impose artifical scarcity on knowledge in order to make it work more like a naturally scarce resource such as land.

Re:Economy of sharing-an example

[ultranova]

But I thought of an analogy. FLOSS is like the olden days community barn raisings.

With the additional benefit that with FLOSS, once you have one very nice barn, everyone can get a copy of it with a push of a button.

TCP/IP

[Anonymous Coward]

is open source.

'nuff said.

Re:TCP/IP

[Anonymous Coward]

Firstly, the most widely used implementation of TCP/IP is Microsoft's, which is not open source. Secondly, TCP/IP was developed by the US Department of Defence (DoD) in the 1970s, and is a product of the American military-industrial complex, not some sort of 'sharing economy'.

The DoD-funded implementation of TCP/IP for Unix, done at UC Berkeley in the 1980s, was released in an open-source form, allowing anyone to use it. This was done for the simple reason that its development was funded by American taxpayers, so the state policy was to allow any of them to use it. State spending can hardly be considered an example of a 'sharing economy', unless you want to apply this label to all spending on police, armed forces, etc.

Re:TCP/IP

[Barsteward]

"Firstly, the most widely used implementation of TCP/IP is Microsoft's, which is not open source." Was it not BSD's implementation in the first place?

Re:TCP/IP

[Anonymous Coward]

Was it not BSD's implementation in the first place?

As far as I know, it wasn't. BSD brought TCP/IP to Unix, and gave us the Berkeley sockets API, but Microsoft's implementation of this API is obviously not open source. Based on what people who have seen the code have written, Microsoft's implementations of BSD sockets and TCP/IP aren't based on BSD code either. There could be mass conspiracy to pretend there's no BSD code there, involving everyone who's ever worked on Windows networking, all the university employees and students who've seen the code and all the corporate/government users who've also seen it, but I find this rather implausible.

In any case, developing something like BSD sockets is really quite different from co-ordinating the development of a multi-vendor platform, as Intel and Microsoft have done with the PC since the early- to mid-1980s. BSD sockets is a decent API for accessing TCP/IP, and the fact that it was shared is nice for everyone, but that also means it had no real role in driving any particular platform: ie just about every platform supports TCP/IP, so even if we were still using expensive single-vendor systems, we'd still probably be using TCP/IP.

I suppose my real question is whether a "sharing" or "volunteer" economy is a viable model for the software industry. There's ample evidence to show that the closed-source commercial software model works, and that the corporate-subsidised model (open- or closed-source) works, as well as that the state-subsidised academic model (open- or closed-source) works. The evidence for the success of the "sharing" model is, I think, much weaker. That isn't to say it's unviable in every case -- clearly it works in certain niches, but "sharing" has always done, in all sorts of niches, across a range of industries.

Re: Salvation through education

[Beryllium Sphere(tm)]

>education is our salvation. This was a very popular belief in the mid-1800s

1800s, and even earlier. The Massachussetts Education Act of 1647 established schools partly for fear of the results of ignorance.

Why is it

[Anonymous Coward]

Why is it that those who speak out about 'social justice' make 100,000+ per year? Shouldn't Moglen give away more money before he tells others what to do?

That isn't spending it, though

[Anonymous Coward]

Because they generally end up with MORE than $1Bn afterwards. So they must have taken it off someone else.

If a billionaire said "Bugger it, I'll die in twenty-forty years time. If I spend a million each week, I'll still have some left over" and actually *blow it*. As in dies poor (or about to get to that stage, one hopes).

The operative word is "economy"

[FallLine]

Yes... where is the economy in giving birth to children? Where is the economy in giving a present to loved ones? Where is the economy in giving education to minors? Where is the economy in giving directions to a stranger in your town? Where is the economy in giving playing cards to someone who is sitting with you at a table? Where is the economy in giving advise or stating opinions on Slashdot?

As you can see: We are giving for completely uneconomic reasons all the time. Does that make us bad people

All these things happen, yes, but they are not the "economy". You do not put food on the table by giving birth to children, giving free directions to strangers, playing cards, or giving free advice. They do not lead to a productive economy. To the contrary, if anything the healthiest expression of them is dependent on there being a productive economy that allows people to benefit (almost always DIRECTLY) from the fruits of their labor. If you work hard and produce, say, corn, you can sell it in a viable economy (barter or cash) which in turn allows you to provide for your family, to have time to help strangers, and so on. If you look at, say, Communist Russia it was not want of desire to share that led to their privation, it was the forced redistribution of wealth and income that all but eliminated your ability to do so. Even if the individual wanted to be more productive in order to give more, their potential to do so was greatly reduced as a consequent of the fundamentally flawed economic system imposed by the regime... The individual lacked both the inputs (tools, labor, better crops, irrigation, fertilizer) and output (selling) ability.

Which returns us to the point at hand. You can't base an economy off of something that is 100% free. There MUST be exchange as a general rule. Yes, you can give and share with people within this world part of the time, but this secondary to your ability to actually earn a living. The mere fact that some software is produced "for free" and that a very small number of them are even remotely competetive with the non-free alternatives does not mean that this system is self-sustaining or that it will work elsewhere.

Re:The operative word is "economy"

[Sique]

Lets put it right: You can't build an economy on something that is not scarce. If everyone has unlimited access to something, there is not much of an economy here. Economy happens if something is in limited supply, and then there are strategies to distribute that to those interested. The body of those strategies is called "Economy" (which is actually greek and means 'common naming' = e.g. finding a common price). As long as the common price is zero, there is no actual common pricing. :)

Information is a strange beast because it is, once it is created, in principle unlimited, and just the costs of copy are occuring. For a long time the costs of copy were relatively high, because you had to manually copy every information bit. In those days the creation of something was costing you only a tad more than copying it, so the supply was basicly determined by the costs of copy. Middle age monks in Europe actually tried to avoid the impression of creating something new at all cost, and all the scholastics was about rearranging a canon of knowledge and information. To copy the common body of knowledge was one of the most important tasks for a monk.

Then there were the first methods invented to replicate something in several copies: sigils, wood cuts, jigs, molds, etchings (o.k. most of them were invented long before, but seldom used to copy knowledge). Those were the first information processing items where you had an economy of scale: suddenly the cost of creating just another copy was much lower than creating the first one. You still had a very high cost for the creation of the first copy (the master copy, the actual wood cut or etching for instance), but every additional copy was cheap. Creating the master copy was still an artful and creative process, comparable with the actual cost of the creation of the work of art. In those days many artists were actually "master copy creators" by trade. But at this point it actually paid to be a copist, because you were able to create something in demand cheaper than others, because you could use the economics of scale. But still the creator of the work and the copist were often the same person.

But then there was the invention of the printing press. Suddenly the cost of creating the master copy was getting considerably lower, because you could assemble it from prefactured parts. The initial cost then was mostly paid by setting up the printshop itself, independent from the information you wanted to copy. Suddenly even the process of creating the master copy was disattached from the actual process of creation of a work of art. So at this point there was an incentive to create a "common pricing" for works of art completely independent from the actual cost of copy, because the owner of the printing press need something to feed into it to get it paid off by selling the copies. This was also the time when the idea of copyright was born, mostly as a way to fight off competitors for the own printing press. Everyone else selling the same work of art would have limited your own ability to recurr your costs. There was the treat of mutual destruction between the printshops: Are you printing mine, I'll print yours, and sell it cheaper. Giving the actual creators some rights to their own works thus was in the very interest of the printing press owner and treating the competitor with the shutdown of the printshop for the violation of it was a sharp weapon to keep most printing press owners faithfully for most of the time, and until today the "printing press owners" are the fiercest combattants for stronger copyrights.

Today everyone can (in general) create a copy of any information completely on his own, because even the cost of generating the master copy is fastly approaching zero. With scanners, photocopiers, burners, computers and the thorough digitalizing of any information you can get information in any form you like, and you are instantly able to create a master copy which in turn can be copied without limit. Today everyone is a print

Not really...

[NineNine]

Scientists work hard, harder than you probably realize, and what do they do with their results? They give them away to the entire world in journal articles.

Pure scientists often do this, but not applied scientists. Some of the best applied scientists in the world work for GE, 3M, DuPont, Toyota, IBM, etc. That scientific work is most definitely NOT given away. Pure scientists give away their information for reasons outside of economic benefit (academia is a different world, entirely), but often, there is no direct economic benefit for knowing the age of the Sun, or the density of chlorophyll in loblolly pine needles.

Bingo!

[NineNine]

Bingo! You're exactly right. Very well written and thought out.

Re:More Columbia Rubbish

[NineNine]

Haven't you ever wondered whether it's the system we have now that leads to things like: externalities, global warming, and psychopathic corporations? -- Or was that all just the result of immutable, inner character flaws?

The system that we have in place has been proven throughout history to be the most effective system that there is. It's not perfect, but because of human flaws, communism simply doesn't work.

Re:Economy of sharing-an example

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't see Moglen sharing his six figure salary.

A wise man once said...

[Anonymous Coward]

...give a man a program and you feed him for a day; teach a man to program and you feed him for a lifetime. Or something like that.

Inspiring, motivating, stimulating keynote.

[yoder]

That speech does a great job of subverting all of the "social justice equals Communism" manure that has been spread.

Re:Inspiring, motivating, stimulating keynote.

[Chemisor]

Indeed, it really makes a difference in casting "social justice" into the same relationship with "communism" as "intelligent design" has with "creationism".

Re:Inspiring, motivating, stimulating keynote.

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't understand your comment. Are you pretending the writer of the dotCommunist Manifesto is an anticommunist?

Re:More Columbia Rubbish

[leereyno]

An "economy of sharing" works for software because its value is not diminished when it is shared. If I create a piece of software that is useful to me, it is still just as useful if I give you a copy of it. Extend this a little further, to where any improvments either of us make is shared with the other and you've got the basis for the open source development model. Under this model value is increased by sharing, which is why people share. If the value was not increased then no one would do it. Don't be confused and assume that this is altruism because it isn't. Human beings will be charitable, but not with their mortgage payments.

The problem is that the economy of sharing doesn't apply to everything. If I make a widget and I give it to you, I don't have it anymore. Its value to me has now been reduced to zero. But what if I have a widget and you have a doo-dad and your dood-dad is worth more to me than my widget, and my widget is worth more to you than your doo-dad. Odds are we're going to trade these two items. Extend this a little further with the introduction of money as a medium of exchange and you have the basis for a market economy.

Neither of these approaches was consciously designed, but evolved naturally through human interaction. What Moglen and others like him don't seem to realize is that trying to implement the cooperative model where it has not naturally evolved, and therefore is not as effective or beneficial as the model which has naturally evolved, will always result in failure and an ultimate outcome that is far WORSE then any of the shortcomings they were originally trying to address.

To me this seems obvious, but it is clearly not obvious to everyone. Leftists have an interesting effect upon me. They make me feel very wise and intelligent. It is sad that so many seemingly intelligent and demonstrably educated people are so completely clueless about human nature and its role in the human condition. As a conservative, there are things that I've just always understood intuitively for as long as I can remember. I'm able to apply the lessons of human nature that I learned at an early age. So many others seemingly never learned these lessons, or are incapable of applying them correctly. Either way there is some sort of intellectual or emotional deficit at work. I feel sorry for people who just don't get it, but my pity does not extend to the point of allowing them to implement their destructive policies and ideas. A dog that has rabies is worthy of pity, but you still put it down.

Lee

Re: Salvation through education

[ceoyoyo]

Education has been valued for a lot longer than the US has existed, and it's got a really good track record.

You seem to be confusing "throwing money" at schools that fail to educate and the value of education itself. Education can take many forms: it can be formal, in a school, apprenticing to a master or just gaining experience through working.

Re:Economy of sharing-an example

[Bertie]

That was a very well argued, well written post, and I wish there were more like it on Slashdot. However, I have to disagree with you on one point:

One thing that's always brought up about "sharing economies" is the tragedy of the commons. That's where resources held in common and owned by nobody get trashed because nobody takes care of them. Our current environmental problems fall into this category.

To my mind, our current environmental problems are more down to the capitalist mentality of exploiting a resource without much thought for how long it's going to last, because when it's all gone, you just move on to making money out of something else. As you say, humanity's spent much longer sharing than owning, and societies with a relatively weak concept of ownership, such as the Native Americans, generally had a more long-term view of how to manage the resources at their disposal, and of their place in the grand scheme of things.

Of course, the utter mess that communist nations made of things kinda runs against my point, but I suppose they had a different agenda that turned out to be just as harmful.

Academic Research is an flawed analogy

[FallLine]

Scientists work hard, harder than you probably realize, and what do they do with their results? They give them away to the entire world in journal articles.

But then, everything the scientists built on was published by previous scientists.

Everybody winds up better off than they would if someone were to impose artifical scarcity on knowledge in order to make it work more like a naturally scarce resource such as land.

This is a flawed analogy.

First, most universities these days are, in fact, patenting and copyrighting these academic scientists' technology if it is deemed to be of commercial value. Both the schools and often times researchers make money by licensing this technology or spinning off companies (Billions of dollars worth).

Second, the scientists are being paid substantial sums of money to perform research (much of which is further subsidized) regardless of the results (this money is coming from wealth tax payers, alumni, students, corporations, etc). This is not free and they are far from self-sustaining. Their position is more akin to that of an employee than that of an entreprenuer/tech. company. They take almost no risk--they get paid regardless of what happens and they live a pretty comfortable lifestyle while doing so.

Third, the scientists do not live in a scientific vacuum. Much of their research depends or benefits greatly from commercial products and innovations. Consider the word processor, the spreadsheet, super-computers, high speed networking gear, fiberoptics, various motors, PCs, modern microscopes, ... you name it. You might argue some of these core "ideas" came from academia, but they are not using the original academic brainstorm, they are using highly evolved products and services that are orders of magnitude better (generally actually involves making it practicable) than what might have been "invented".

In any event, my point is not that university research is worthless or that its "openness" is always inherently bad. To the contrary, I assert that both fundamental/open research and closed/IP systems should exist and that they can and do benefit each other. However, the notion that we can convert our economy over to a largely "open" one in which all ideas are freely shared is foolish. These few scientists exist and do what they do largely because we can afford to pay them to do so. We simply cannot afford to subsidize the great mass of self-titled software developers to produce in the same way so that they can produce a bunch of free and open software. We must instead support a system that rewards intelligent risk-taking behavior, so that those that actually make contributions actually profit, and this system generally requires some significant degree of closedness (usually as enforced by IP rights).

Re:More Columbia Rubbish

[leereyno]

You might want to quit while you're ahead because your understanding of history is profoundly flawed.

If you actually wish to understand the history of Marxism I suggest you read a book Joshua Muravchik titled "Heaven on Earth: The Rise and Fall of Socialism" ISBN # 1893554457. Amazon has used copies listed at around $12 after shipping.

Listening to leftist academics talk about Marxism is like going to stormfront.org to learn about Naziism.

Re:Economy of sharing-an example

[mdfst13]

FLOSS is like the olden days community barn raisings. I think that this analogy still misses it. With a barn raising by twenty people, at the end, just one family has the barn. No one else uses that barn.

The problem with all these analogies is that software is not analogous to physical things. Software is more analogous to the design of the barn. If I decide that it would make more sense to have a barn with two doors rather than one door, it doesn't hurt me in any way for every other barn to have two doors.

Open source relies on the following:

1. Software is near free to duplicate but comparatively expensive to design.

2. Software is individual. My current needs are different than your current needs. Thus, even with the same base, both of us need to do additional work.

3. Needs change. Thus, the needs that I have tomorrow may match the needs that you have today. Therefore, giving you my work today may save me work tomorrow.

4. Bugs happen. If you find a bug and fix it for me, that saves me work. This is especially true of security bugs.

Where open source falls down (relative to closed source) is that it lacks a good way for non-programmers to pool resources in large groups. Look at MS Windows XP (WinXP) for example. WinXP apparently costs about $25 per user to develop (using an average cost of $50 per user and a profit margin of 50%). Assuming 400,000,000 users, that's $10 billion to develop WinXP (given Win2000 and Win98SE). Using a cost per developer of $200,000 per year, that's 50,000 developer years.

Open source does well in areas where the software is used by technical people. For example, traditionally (albeit increasingly less so), web servers have been operated by professionals. As a result, it has made sense for those professionals to use a web server that they could modify (Apache). Office suites have traditionally been used by non-technical people. As such, most office suites do not allow modification, only extension (through macros and more modernly, VBScript).

Barn raisings worked because in small communities, it's possible to get everyone to work together (people who don't go to raise your barn don't get your help with their barn). However, that's a bad model for trying to convince a business. It lacks guarantees (me doing work for you today does not bind you to do work for me tomorrow). To convince a profit minded boss, you have to demonstrate that open source reduces costs.

What Kind of Biased System Results in That Tag?

[Anonymous Coward]

Tagging this: "communism"? What kind of built in bias would result in a tag like that for this article?

It's pretty sad if you think making knowledge available to everyone is "communism". The public
school system in the US has the same goal, you know. What exactly is the agenda here?

Re:What Kind of Biased System Results in That Tag?

[Anonymous Coward]

If enough people add the tag, it gets shown, dumbass.

Re:More Columbia Rubbish

[vykor]

You mean Joshua Muravchik, neocon extraordinaire of the American Enterprise Institute? Why, that'd be like going to stormfront.org to learn about socialism. No bias there, no sir.

Children are an investment

[Chemisor]

> Yes... where is the economy in giving birth to children?

Children are the only way to buy something every living thing wants -- the continuation of the species in general, and of your own genes in particular. The act of procreation is, to put it bluntly, your biological purpose, and it really ought to have some value to you, and consequently, be worth paying quite a bit for.

> Where is the economy in giving a present to loved ones?

In our culture giving presents is the way of telling your loved ones that they are your loved ones. If you don't give them presents, they just might think you no longer value the relationship. If you want to have a relationship, this is the way you "buy" it. And if some of you are screaming "how commercial!", well, just try not giving out any presents this Christmas and see whether people still like you just as much. You might be surprized.

> Where is the economy in giving education to minors?

Just as preservation of the species is your biological purpose, preservation of knowledge is your social purpose. Through knowledge passed to our descendants we achive an immortality of sorts. Quite worth paying for, I think. Furthermore, you will yourself reap the benefits of you children's education in your lifetime, since well-educated people tend to have well-paying jobs and not need you to support them. The multitude of educated people supports your life in every other way possible, by maintaining the infrastructure of our civilization; providing you with food, clothing, shelter, the computer you are now using, and the web browser which shows you these words.

> Where is the economy in giving directions to a stranger in your town?

The sooner he can find some place to spend his money, the sooner your town can benefit from the incoming monetary flow. Ask anyone living in a place supported by the tourism economy.

> Where is the economy in giving playing cards to someone who is sitting with you at a table?

If you don't give them cards, they won't play with you. If the game is poker, this may win or lose you money, depending on how well you play.

> Where is the economy in giving advise or stating opinions on Slashdot?

In personal satisfaction. I might for instance get a pretty big ego boost right now by pointing out that you should spell that "advice", rather than "advise" ;) Nah, just kidding!

As you can see, we are always giving for some economic reason, all the time. Does that make us bad people?

People should earn what they have

[blurryrunner]

I'm all about helping the poor having basic necessities, but I definitely think that anyone (poor or not) should earn what they get. I think one of the greatest things that has undermined US culture and other cultures is poorly designed welfare systems. I think people have come to expect too much from others. People have come to believe that they are entitled from someone for the basic necessities in life. The other problem is that once people believe they are entitled to something, it is nearly impossible to convince them otherwise.

I don't want people to suffer and die. But I think that in terms of money, people should what they earn. In terms of knowledge, however, I think think it should be free. For the betterment of society, people should earn the money they get to provide incentive for creating knowledge and knowledge should be shared to be efficient in creating more knowledge and providing opportunity for increased quality of life. There a probably even better reasons than that--feel free to reply.

I think there is a fundamental conflict between the two. Having knowledge that others don't provides a means for one to receive more money that another. Sharing that knowledge will lower that individuals prospects of gain (and power derived from it). It seems that creating knowledge creates power, sharing knowledge shares power.

It will be a nearly impossible change to completely free knowledge because its freedom comes at the cost of those who have money and power. I think that the way to both encourage people to earn what they get and share the knowledge they create is one of the most important problems that society has to solve. I feel that to the extent that a society can embrace both is the extent to which it will progress.

br/

----------
not a sig

Re:People should earn what they have

[flyneye]

Wow,you said what I wanted to say,but far more eloquently.
I'd like to add,though that tacking the word "social" on to anything is just a part of the "entitlement" cultures way of sharing the money I earned among themselves.Kind of sounds like socialism doesn't it?
Also realizing that justice is an illusion relative to perspective is another way for the "entitlement culture" to grow up and get a life.For instance what child murderer is truly brought to justice even with his own life? From an average perspective he can't be,from a philosophical perspective,he gets his comeuppance in an afterlife.
It is unrealistic to expect justice in anything but a storybook.

Re:People should earn what they have

[KiahZero]

So you're proposing we get rid of inheritance entirely? After all... people should earn what they get, right?

Re:People should earn what they have

[flyneye]

Dependent on the relative you tolerate during their lifetime,inheritance may still not cover the effort.

No, that's not all I'm saying.

[jbn-o]

No, that's not all I'm saying. I don't think it's fair to the topic to condense one's thoughts to sound bites (where one is inevitably constrained to repeating the same cliches which give power to the status quo).

I appreciate it when open source minded hackers deliver free software to people, and I am grateful when open source advocates stand with the free software community pushing for no software patents and no DRM. We need more social solidarity to make better lives for ourselves, and I'm grateful that the free software movement argues for increased social solidarity. But when you say "the Open crowd is paving the way to the Free approach" you wouldn't know that to look at the chosen audio and video formats. Not one of the alternatives provided can be played on a completely free software system for many users around the world saddled with governments who adopt software patents.

Far more credit is due to the free software movement than the open source movement has made it acceptable to say aloud. The free software movement was working on and distributing eminently practical free software before the open source movement existed. Some of the software worked on then is still critically important today (such as GCC, the GNU Compiler Collection, initially written by RMS who initially called it the GNU C Compiler). Today, the important license work on the most widely used licenses (GNU GPL, GNU LGPL, and GNU FDL) isn't being done by the Open Source Initiative, it's being done by the Free Software Foundation including RMS, who is credited as the chief author of GPLv3. GPLv3 represents the first GPL that anyone in the open source movement has ever participated in because the two prior versions predate the OSI and the open source movement.

I've written more on the topic of free software and open source, so I won't repeat it here except to say that I am reminded of RMS' response to a questioner at FISL7 (quoted at the previous link) and how "open source" became a useless phrase, according to Eben Moglen.

Re:More Columbia Rubbish

[0xdeadbeef]

People like you are the walking stereotype that drive me toward social darwinism.

But on the point, isn't it tragic how this LAMP website was forced upon you?

Eban Moglen isn't anti-copyright!

[Anonymous Coward]

Eban Moglen, a law professor at Columbia Law School, is largely responsible for the GPL. He's not anti-copyright. In fact, he is very clear on the fact that the GPL only works because of the copyright law.

The problem is not pro or anti copyright. It is that what works for Microsoft and Britney Spears doesn't work for me. Microsoft, Disney and the RIAA want a copyright regime that works for big business and not at all for small producers. In fact most Canadian (as opposed to American branch plant) record producers are against the RIAA approach. http://www.canada.com/nationalpost/news/issuesidea s/story.html?id=3367a219-f395-4161-a9b9-95256c6138 24 They aren't against copyright, just the abuse of it.

Re:Eban Moglen isn't anti-copyright!

[Anonymous Coward]

Richard Stallman is responsible for the GPL, even if Moglen has cleaned it up a bit since he came on board, and Stallman is adamantly opposed to copyright. Yes, he uses copyright law to enforce the GPL, but it's quite clear from his essays on gnu.org that he's against copyright for software. His use of copyright law to enforce the "copyleft" is seen as the best option unless and until copyright can be done away with altogether.

Moglen may not be as much of a nutter as Stallman (I'll have to take your word for that), but he's not the one running the show. Stallman is the man who ultimately decides what goes into the GPL, and Moglen just makes sure the legal formulation most effectively represents Stallman's intentions (which I've little doubt he does very effectively).

Re:Hahah

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey, you're right, my time is 100% worthless.

Yes, it is. End yourself.

Transcription

[Geof]

If you want a non-proprietary format, I have transcribed Moglen's speech.

Re:Economy of sharing-an example

[rthille]

Which is why I'm always disappointed by the (very human) tendency of OSS programmers to roll their own half-falling-down barn rather than improving another barn.

Human nature sure is a bitch.

It's neither

[FallLine]

I agree - hard work should be rewarded. I have no problem with people who start a company with a great idea and become very wealthy - I'm very glad for them when it happens. What irks me is that some horde their wealth and effectively take it out of circulation. The only reason anyone would want to hold on to over $1Billion (US) is for POWER, not living well

I'm glad you're not opposed to entrepreneurs (like me), but your understanding leaves much to be desired.

First, I hate to be the one to tell you this, but it is almost impossible for anyone to take large sums of their money out of circulation. Almost anything you do with that money is, in fact, putting it right back into circulation. Whether you spend it, save it, or invest it, the money is ultimately going in someone elses hands (unless you do a scrouge mcduck and horde it in your money bin).

Second, wealthy individuals have most of their wealth invested in securities, startups, and closely-held companies. In fact, most startups are funded heavily by wealthy investors at their earliest and most risky stages of development. Ignoring for a minute that the government basically prohibits non-wealthy (non-qualified investors) from investing in private corporations, the majority of middle class people do not only have much less money to invest, they have even less that they can afford to loose in a non-diversified high-risk class investment. Though you might argue the entrepreneur could get investments from 1000x as many middle-class investors instead this would make it MUCH harder to raise capital and would require a lot more hand-holding (especially since these investors would tend to be less financially savy). In other words, concentrated wealth is actually beneficial to startups and other high-risk investments which tend to benefit society most.

Third, a great percentage of the "wealth" of the wealthiest part of society is invested in one investment (e.g., the company they founded...and these are often very closely held). This "wealth" is often very much paper wealth that is not liquid in practice. For instance, Bill Gates is worth billions of dollars, but most of this is in MSFT and he could not sell it for anywhere near the current market price without causing Microsoft's stock to plummet. Many other wealthy individuals also own private companies where selling off a stake of their ownership is very difficult to do (especially without risking losing control, valuation, waste time talking to new investors, etc).

To me, "Social Justice" means that some reasonable limits should be placed on the accumulation of wealth, otherwise you end up with an Aristocracy.

This is just another way of saying you want the government to forcibly redistribute income and wealth for its own sake (not just for revenue purposes). You might at least consider the impact of what this forcible redistribution of wealth might mean to society. For instance, if you would propose, say, taxing people worth 50M or more at, say, 80% marginally, you should at least understand that these people are not going to risk additional capital to say, fund a high-tech biotech company (90% chance of losing everything), let alone personally start said biotech with greater personal risk, tremendously hard work, stress, and so on.

As for your comment about wealth accumulation, the truth is not so cut and dried. For instance, there is serious academic research that has shown that the wealthiest individuals (top 2%, 1%, .1% and even .01%) have actually lost significant shares of their share of wealth relative to the rest of society and that an increasing proportion of their income is being derived from work (e.g., salary, business income, etc.... not merely passive investments). Please see: http://elsa.berkeley.edu/~saez/estateshort.pdf

Re:What a gasbag

[Anonymous Coward]

Even reading the writeup makes me gag; every time I read nebulous expressions like "social justice", I want to reach for my gun (which I don't own one of, but there you are). What the hell does that mean besides theft and redistribution itself according to one man's idea of "fair"? I think paraphrasing a Nazi may not be the best way to make your point. Unless this is some sort of clever satire.

the bosses will convince themselves

[zogger]

I wouldn't even bother trying, not in 2006, becase enough of it is out there now that it isn't totally unknown nor unused. Those businesses (and bosses and shareholders and the boards) that grok how open source works and take advantage of it will get a competitive business advantage in the long run and will be successful. The ones that don't will wonder why and look around and see for themselves, or hear about it at the bar or on the golf links, etc. Joe rich boss A to rich boss B at the golf course after a pitcher of margaritas -> "Man, we were able to skip an entire upgrade cycle with that expensive belchfire software by going to this stack of what those geeks we keep down in the dungeons call "open source" shit. We saved a millyun clams!" "Get outta here!" "Nope, works great, what a pleasure to tell them belchfire sales weasels to go take a hike!"

Along those lines anyway.

Anyway, ya'all in IT can rassle it out. I do farming and gardening and I do "open source" seeds as opposed to "closed source, propietary" seeds. I can save my seeds legally and effectively every year, do my own tweaking and customizing by keeping only the best open pollinated stuff I grow so that every season it gets better, for my particular needs. Some doods like that expensive hybrid action and GM and whatnot, go drop serious folding money every year, I have tried them..meh, not seeing any huge diff at all (sometimes it is even suckier than my open pollinated frankly) and I certainly save a bundle by doing my own seeds for the most part. We who do that with seeds have a rich sharing culture that goes way, way back well before computers and software were even invented, seems to work out just fine.

It's gotten so bad...

[PopeRatzo]

We've hit a really low point as a society, when "Social Justice" are dirty words. How long will those of you who believe that absolutely unfettered economic darwinism ("Free Market") think you can throw out a word like "socialism" and think that Americans are going to drool on command? How long will we have to watch cultures diminish as a powerful few use "capitalism" to enrich themselves while constantly greater numbers of our fellow humans fall into poverty.

Here in the Great U.S. and A. we're seeing a level (by percentage, yes) of poverty that would have made the victims of the Great Depression nod in recognition. It's not about having enough to eat, it's about having anything like a hope that your children may do better than you. Racism, sexism, religious fanatisim are all nothing compared to the daily damage done by the twisted notions of Ronald Reagan Free Market Radicals, who use all sorts of fancy theory to rationalize watching their fellow man go needy.

I used to think it was about greed. That it was pure desire for self-engorgement that drove these miserable characters. But the longer I watch the parade of pigs, generation after generation of bottomless pits that grasp upon some academic lickspittle like Milton Friedman in order to feel a little better about themselves, the more I'm starting to think that it's something much uglier than simple greed. I'm starting to believe they really need, in a deep, dark part of their being, they need to see other people suffer. It's not enough for them to win - they have to see someone else lose. Then they'll stand up on their little self-made pedestals and talk about this great, Christian Country that we live in.

I remember a few months ago, the younger brother of Rush Limbaugh - David I think is his name - on a conservative radio show talking about those despicable socialist democrats. I remember a gentleman who from his accent was calling from south of the Mason-Dixon, making a very strong case for the teachings of Christ being driven by a desire to help the poor, and, I quote: "It makes sense that the biggest horses pull the heaviest load" (he was referring to the notion that the rich ought to be paying more taxes than the poor). Ol' David Limbaugh corrected him of course, saying that there were many places in the Bible that were in favor of the kind of self-serving capitalism we practice in this country. "Can you give me an example?" the caller asked. There was a momentary pause, then the host broke in to announce some commercials. It was the kind of moment when you realize that there's an America that these media big mouths have no idea of, an America that still understands that we are all in this together.

And before you tell me that "the rich are paying a larger percentage of taxes than ever before", I've done the research: It's only because the rich have increased their income by such an enormous degree that of course they're paying more. It's because they're making so bloody much more than they ever have before that even the tiny amount they deign to pay at tax time adds up to a tremendous amount.

The next time someone tells you that the top 5 percent of Americans are paying 50 percent of the taxes, remember, it's because they're making 90 percent of the money.

Remember it too, every time you hear that Barack Obama, or AL Gore, or whoever ends up running for president from the Democratic Party, is "nothing but a Socialist".

Re:It's gotten so bad...

[Anonymous Coward]

amen, thanks for posting that.

Re:It's gotten so bad...

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow... time for decaf holmes.

#1) You're wrong. Yes, pretty much all of it.

#2) You sound like a whiney douche.

Re:It's gotten so bad...

[Anonymous Coward]

Spoken like a true frothing communist!

Thanks for proving the point that social justice===communist.

Re:It's gotten so bad...

[bigpat]

We've hit a really low point as a society, when "Social Justice" are dirty words. How long will those of you who believe that absolutely unfettered economic darwinism ("Free Market") think you can throw out a word like "socialism" and think that Americans are going to drool on command? How long will we have to watch cultures diminish as a powerful few use "capitalism" to enrich themselves while constantly greater numbers of our fellow humans fall into poverty.

I agree. And I believe we have also hit a low point as a society when "free market" is also a dirty word. Free market has never meant a lawless market, but people like you still describe it as if it is a den of thieves. The free market is a place were people can come to exchange goods and services without the threat of coercion by force, it is a place were government will enforce equitable contracts made willingly and in good faith with the use of force. Ideally, it is also a place were the exchange of goods and services take place without regard to biases individuals might have against other individuals or perceived groups. Historically, free markets have been places were individuals have been able to come in order to better themselves through hard work and reputations for honesty. A free market is not incompatible with a concept social justice. The "free" in free market is free as in freedom.

The next time someone tells you that the top 5 percent of Americans are paying 50 percent of the taxes, remember, it's because they're making 90 percent of the money.

The rich pay a higher percentage of their income in taxes than do any other so called group. What you just said is a lie, pure and simple. A lie meant to divide people. A lie meant to assuage the guilt of the poor for taking more than they are worth from others. A lie meant to enslave the middle class. A lie that is so obviously false that you should be ashamed of yourself for spreading it.

Oh you meant to say wealth, sure you did. But wealth is not income, wealth is a made up number. Wealth is me looking at your house and saying that I bet someone would pay a lot for it. Wealth is not income, wealth does not always generate income. But when wealth does generate income it is already taxed at very high rates. So, you say that 40% is too little, that taking nearly half of people's income is too little? How much is too much?

I have been keenly aware of the false numbers that you and your kind have been spreading on the Internet. People are overtaxed and overworked and you would justify their continued oppression by spreading false rumors and lies. The rich and the middle class pay more than their fair share while the poor pay nothing or very little.

Yes, there is an inequity in this country and it is this: That the political class would prey upon the weak to better themselves. That the political class would scare people into giving them more power and control over other people's lives. That the political class would conspire between the two parties and act as one single unified political machine seeking to enrich their co-conspirators at the expense of the poor, rich and middle classes alike.

Re:It's gotten so bad...

[DougInKY]

This sums up my thoughts exactly. Thank you for such a wonderful, well thought out discourse.

Re:It's gotten so bad...

[PopeRatzo]

bigpat said:
"...the guilt of the poor for taking more than they are worth from others.."

You should be ashamed of yourself.

Re:It's gotten so bad...

[bigpat]

You should be ashamed of yourself.

I am, but are they?

Re:It's gotten so bad...

[Anonymous Coward]

Wealth is not income, wealth does not always generate income. But when wealth does generate income it is already taxed at very high rates.

Counter example: Hold a dividend-paying stock for more than 1 year and the capital gains rate is 15%. This is a very low tax on income generated from wealth.

Re:It's gotten so bad...

[bigpat]

Counter example: Hold a dividend-paying stock for more than 1 year and the capital gains rate is 15%. This is a very low tax on income generated from wealth.

I would agree that if income is taxed, then it should be taxed at the same rate or rates regardless of source. Otherwise you simply get people doing things they wouldn't otherwise do in order to avoid the higher taxes. But 15% is not exactly a "low tax". Lower tax relative to our otherwise high taxes, but I would not call it a low tax.

Dividend rates of return for public corporations are usually very low, not usually more than 1-2%, so I suspect that this rate is a gift to some privately owned corporations that are paying their owners in dividends. Not exactly fair, I agree. It is not fair to other people earning large regular salaries on a yearly basis.

Re:Economy of sharing-an example

[ChatHuant]

I think that this analogy still misses it. With a barn raising by twenty people, at the end, just one family has the barn. No one else uses that barn.

The problem with all these analogies is that software is not analogous to physical things. Software is more analogous to the design of the barn. If I decide that it would make more sense to have a barn with two doors rather than one door, it doesn't hurt me in any way for every other barn to have two doors.

Thinking about barn doors, designing and debugging the concept will take some of your time though. This is time you're not using to create income. Since you're giving the results of your thinking away without compensation, you have a net loss - so it *does* hurt you. There is no direct material advantage to come up with new concepts and designs - an individual is better off building his barns (and earning income) and incorporating somebody else's new designs as they become available (since they're free). Non-thinkers will therefore be more successful than thinkers (at least, from the net income point of view).

Now I've heard two main counter-arguments to that: first, that by contributing to the global pool of knowledge, the whole community is better off (so it's a moral obligation to contribute without asking for compensation). That may be true for the community, but people *don't* think that way. While the open-source as communism trope is really too simplistic, this is a similarity - and it was one of the big failures of communism. Communism also required that individuals put the common good over the individual good. They tried to force that through indoctrination (AKA "education", "creation of the new man"), coupled with enforcement. Of course, it didn't work. A system designed around people as they are, as opposed to how we'd like them to be has more chances of success.

The second argument I heard is that people can earn non-material compensation from putting their intellectual work in the public domain. That compensation can be respect, reputation, karma, whuffie, or other types. I don't really think that works though (and the failure of the model is pretty obvious in the failure of shareware). People can respect the )(*& out of somebody, but very few will translate the respect in material contributions. And when push comes to shove, your kids can't eat respect.

Re:Economy of sharing-an example

[Anonymous Coward]

Irony is RMS and Molgen were beaten by a radical dude and his sidekick cousin a couple of thousand years ago that ran around telling people how great it was to share and help each other though life, until the executives of a monopoly that enscribed clay tablets incited a riot and had him temporarily killed.

Conflation or truthiness?

[FallLine]

Today everyone can (in general) create a copy of any information completely on his own, because even the cost of generating the master copy is fastly approaching zero. With scanners, photocopiers, burners, computers and the thorough digitalizing of any information you can get information in any form you like, and you are instantly able to create a master copy which in turn can be copied without limit. Today everyone is a printing press owner (ok... some people have still to rent it in a copy shop or internet cafe), and the necessity to sell some of your copies afterwards to pay for your initial costs has disappeared. People who have to get paid for operating a printing press to earn a living are in competition with billions of people who don't need payment for it, but can also operate a printing press. Thus the very base of copyright has disappeared. The competitor of the printing press owner is no longer in danger to get bankrupt just because the first printing press owner starts to copy the same works of art. The treat of mutual destruction has dissappeared and thus the finely spun system of copyrights and licenses is hollow and no longer based on economics, there is just some morality left in it. From an economic point of view paying a creator for his work of art is now purely voluntarily, because no one can force you with economic means (e.g. the treat of competing with you).

You are either very much confused or you are being willfully ignorant. The rational for intellectual property rights in US law has always been fundamentally about securing the rights of creators of ideas (authors, inventors, etc) in order to advance the interests of society. The publishers (or copiers) themselves were never seriously contemplated as being the reason for creating or continuing to support IP law (only by proxy--if the rights are assigned to them). Don't believe me?

Read Article I, Section 8, of the U.S. Constitution (1787):

The Congress shall have Power... To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries;

If the Founders had concerns for the actual act of publishing itself, they would referred to this directly and they would not have used words like "exclusive" rights being assigned to authors and inventors.

Your argument does not even make logical sense in that time and place in history. The printing press was invented hundreds of years before and newspapers were in circulation at the time (a clear indicator of relatively cheap printing). They did not have copy machines at the time or any similar labor saving machines that would allow you make copies from the printed page itself. In other words, the simple act of destroying the plates, say, would have been sufficient to prevent would-be competitors from taking shortcuts (if, in fact, the setup costs were all that significant in the first place). The followers-on would be in the same boat (in your imaginary world that ignores the cost of invention) and would thus be unlikely to crowd out the market for publishing (if anything, it would simply drive down costs to its most economical point).

Read this: http://www.earlyamerica.com/earlyamerica/firsts/co pyright/centinel.jpg

The Founders recognized that the authors/inventors ability to profit from their efforts was threatened by the ability of 3rd parties to readily produce copies at marginal costs roughly equal to that of the author/inventor (or their agents/publishers) and thus remove any incentive to create since they would consequently have no ability to command a premium for their work. That copying has only gotten easier (for more people), cheaper, and faster does nothing to change the underlying rational. Most books and software still require a major commitment of time and energy to produce (more $$$/time chasing often smaller markets). Both the ideas and the actual implementations themselves are the hard part, not merely distributing them.

Re:Conflation or truthiness?

[Sique]

First: I am not talking about a rationale for copyright. I am talking about the economic forces that allowed copyright actually to work. There surely is a rationale to build a perpetuum mobile. There are just no physical laws which allow them.

Second: Copyright is older than the U.S. The reasons why the Founding Fathers took an idea and put them into their work is a completely different topic from the question why this idea was coming up in the first place. Without the invention of the printing press (for works of art) or the industrial production (for inventions) there was no economic need for copyrights, patents or trademarks. A hypothetical U.S. founded in 1450 wouldn't have had copyrights.

Re:Conflation or truthiness?

[Sique]

A hypothetical U.S. founded in 1450 wouldn't have had copyrights.

Until 1477, that is. After that copyright was viable because owning a printing press was a huge investion, and it had to pay off. Ok. Some very rich people might have had a printing press purely for fun, and some revolutionaries were having them for completely different reasons. But in general people owning a printing press had somehow to conduct a business with it, and thus they were vulnerable as soon as they put their products to the public. Ever noticed that all traditional versions of copyright always make a difference between a "private copy" and a "public copy"? They may name it differently (Fair Use, or Not for Profit or whatever), but in the end the intention is always the same: As long as the copy stays private and doesn't have too much impact to the public, it is mainly tolerated, because otherwise one would have intrude into the privacy of people to detect copyright infringment.

But it wasn't necessary. Not licensed prints were (relatively) easily to detect on public markets, and with making the marketing of counterfeit copies hard, it was possible to keep the copyright infringment relatively low and maintenable, because it didn't pay off economically.

But with the "everyone is printing press owner" the economic need to go public with the output of the printing press has vanished. So you can't tackle copyright infringment anymore by making it hard to sell the copy in public. For the first time in history you have to stop the actual process of making the copy itself, because otherwise the damage is already done. For the first time in history you have to infringe on privacy to keep copyright alive. And I don't know if Adam Smith (who first stated that the limited exclusive right to the own ideas may be a tradeoff that is worthwile because it is an incentive to create), or later on the Founding Fathers would have been so fond about Copyright if they had known that you have to trade both free markets and privacy for copyright to enforce it.

Re:Conflation or truthiness?

[FallLine]

First: I am not talking about a rationale for copyright. I am talking about the economic forces that allowed copyright actually to work. There surely is a rationale to build a perpetuum mobile. There are just no physical laws which allow them.

I can only guess that English is not your first language as your prior statements and your current ones are far from easy to read. As for your updated argument, it does not follow. Both Patents and Copyrights are economically enforceable today in the first world. The fact that, say, Microsoft makes BILLIONS of dollars in profits every year is testament to this fact. The only way you might be able to debate this, say, is if you could prove that various government entities have had to raise their law enforcement dollars by so many billions of dollars each year to protect Microsoft's IP. This case simply cannot be made.

Besides which, if copyrights are merely "uneconomical" to enforce, this problem is the IP owners, not yours and it is certainly not a reason to abolish the legal protections of IP. Additionally, you have to remember the costs of printing and editing have reduced dramatically for publishers so they have additional savings to compensate for now that they did not have before (not to mention a MUCH larger overall market).

You seem to forget that reasonably strong copyright protections are possible at several choke points (copying tools, DRM, original media formats, distribution networks, etc). Intellectual property is so hugely important to the success of overall economic success of the first world that there is almost no price tag too high -- even if enforcement is largely conducted by governments so as to pool costs effectively -- we can't afford NOT to have adequate protections.

Second: Copyright is older than the U.S. The reasons why the Founding Fathers took an idea and put them into their work is a completely different topic from the question why this idea was coming up in the first place. Without the invention of the printing press (for works of art) or the industrial production (for inventions) there was no economic need for copyrights, patents or trademarks. A hypothetical U.S. founded in 1450 wouldn't have had copyrights.

Adam Smith was a contemporary of the Founding Fathers and he only published his seminal work, The Wealth of Nations, a few years before the Constitution was promulgated. It is difficult to say who this idea came from originally, though England passed the first known copyright law in 1710 (Statute of Anne). Regardless, it makes little difference. The motivations and the economic factors are the same, only the price points are somewhat different.

A hypothetical US founded in 1450 may not have had copyrights, but nor would the US (or Europe) have an viable book writing industry to protect in the first place or enough literate customers to write for. So I fail to see your point...

Re:Conflation or truthiness?

[Sique]

You surely raise valid points why it makes sense to have copyrights. What I am disputing is something very else: Why do they work, and when are they to break? With different publishers competing and having a vital interest in keeping the competition from publishing the same works, they will come to a kind of gentlemen agreement too keep from each others turf, independently of a legal framework for copyright. In this case copyright and the interest of a publisher go nicely together. Publishers have to take care that the publishing market allows them to make a profit (which they have to share with the creators of the work, but more important is the fact that there is a profit at all).

People who copy just for themselves don't have a direct interest in a working publishing market because they aren't in the business to make a profit there. Their interest is at most indirect: they might be interested in keeping the creators compensated as an incentive to create more works, but they never negotiate with the authors directly, and they don't have any say in how much of their payment actually goes to the authors. For them there is no publishing market, just an arbitrary price set for a copy, which is completely independent from the price they have to pay to create the same copy themselves. So they don't need a working publishing market, just the ability to get hold for a short time of a single copy of the stuff they want (it might even be just aired to their TV set).

To explain this further: Imagine 3D-scanners and 3D-plotters being available to everyone for a low price. How much will design be worth? If you have a set of cups, saucers and plates, and one plate breaks: Will you really go to a store and buy a new plate, or will you just take one of the remaining plates and create a perfect copy of it (and thus deprive the designer of his share of the money)? How do you actually protect design in a world where everyone is able to create perfect copies of anything he can take?

Re:Conflation or truthiness?

[FallLine]

You surely raise valid points why it makes sense to have copyrights. What I am disputing is something very else: Why do they work, and when are they to break? With different publishers competing and having a vital interest in keeping the competition from publishing the same works, they will come to a kind of gentlemen agreement too keep from each others turf, independently of a legal framework for copyright. In this case copyright and the interest of a publisher go nicely together. Publishers have to take care that the publishing market allows them to make a profit (which they have to share with the creators of the work, but more important is the fact that there is a profit at all).

It seems that you are attempting set up a strawman argument. Publishers do not behave independently of copyright. To the contrary, publishers behavior very much revolves around obtaining a license agreement for the copyright and always has since copyright has been signed into law in the US and other enlightened countries. No publisher can publish a work without the permission of the author (or their assignees). If authors only allows one publisher the ability to publish their work (as is usually the case--the publishers want exclusivity in exchange for publishing and promoting said work), then the publisher can set their price without having to take into account that competitors might publish the same work for less. Competing publishers cannot publish other publishers work (99.999% of the time) without serious legal repercussions. This, however, does not mean that they can set the price without consequences--they may have agreements with the author, bookstores, distributors, not to mention customer backlash, etc.

Put differently, the exclusive right of the authors over their work, by way of copyright law, is what gives the publishers, by extension, wide latitude to set prices and thus make a profit. The author needs the publisher to publish and promote their work (and often provide editing and other services) so in exchange for these services, they give the publishers exclusive rights to their work. The two parties are interdependent one each other and this relationship is supported by copyright.

People who copy just for themselves don't have a direct interest in a working publishing market because they aren't in the business to make a profit there. Their interest is at most indirect: they might be interested in keeping the creators compensated as an incentive to create more works, but they never negotiate with the authors directly, and they don't have any say in how much of their payment actually goes to the authors.

Whether the end users have a direct short-term interest or not is almost besides the point. Both copyright law and government and industry recognition of the importance of the support of it through various means does, in fact, prevent blatant violations. Besides which the truly enlightened reader would realize that the author is at least partially dependent today on the publisher to create a market for them. You can theorize all day long about not needing publishers, but the fact is that they DO and none of this changes the fundamental issues of recognizing, supporting, and enforcing the ownership rights of IP.

Markets might shift a bit. Publishers might become a little less important (less so because publishing and distribution is apt to become less important with the advant of digital distribution). If we're going to make predictions about what might be, then I predict that authors of works that are readily digitized will simply refuse to publish in formats that are easily copied. These people will publish in Digital Rights Management (DRM) formats and these formats will constantly be changing faster than end-users can break it. In addition, aggressive enforcement of those that serve to break DRM or distribute copyright materials (e.g., P2P networks, Media Players, etc) will keep piracy at low enough levels that copyrighted works continue to remain viable.

Violating pillows?

[2008]

"the common school is the greatest discovery ever made by man: we repeat it, the common school is the greatest discovery ever made by man.. .Let the common school be expanded to its capabilities, let it be worked with the efficiency of which it is susceptible, and nine-tenths of the crimes in the penal code would become obsolete; the long catalogue of human ills would be abridged; men would walk more safely by day; every pillow would be more inviolable by night; property, life, and character held by a stronger tenure; all rational hopes respecting the future brightened." (Clarence Carson, A Basic History of the United States, vol. 3, p. 91).

They had a real problem with people violating pillows back then? I can guess how that might work, but I can't see how schooling would stop it. Maybe because you meet real girls there?

Some helpful background to this presentation...

[Freed]

...is "The Corporation" by Joel Bakan, in both video and book forms. Corporations are of greater power than ever, and it is helpful to take a break at least once in a great while from media that is, after all, owned by corporations.

The communism vs. capitalism distinction is worn out and unproductive, and both the presentation and "The Corporation" are good examples of efforts to draw finer distinctions and alleviate the systematic perpetuation of human suffering.

There will naturally be astroturfers without a conscience, but if the honest cynics patiently consider these efforts, they might find reason to look to a better world.

Microsoft is how first-world nations roll

[Anonymous Coward]

The $100 computer thing is great for MS. It's going to let people get computer literate, then when they realize they want to do something better, it's going to lead them into... a Windows machine.

Lunix will then acquire the worldwide stigma of being the crappy OS of the unwashed masses who can't afford anything better. It will be like comparing a Lunix Pinto to a Microsoft BMW.

So when people get tired of winding up their toy Lunix machines... they can go with a shiny new WIntel or WAMD system.

Re:Microsoft is how first-world nations roll

[indifferent children]

Lunix will then acquire the worldwide stigma of being the crappy OS of the unwashed masses who can't afford anything better. It will be like comparing a Lunix Pinto to a Microsoft BMW.

Linux will be the OS of the unwashed masses, and of the supercomputer clusters. Doesn't that mean that Microsoft is more like a Yugo than a BMW?

No.

[twitter]

If Microsoft survive and so well for a couple of years will Moglens theory of sharing then be proved false?

No, sharing has already produced superior results and the theory is already proved.

Microsoft's survival over the next two or three years will only prove that money can manipulate markets and laws. Vista will completely end their credibility. Their survival depends on increased government subsidy and protection at the expense of your freedom.

Re:Economy of sharing-an example

[zogger]

pretty good, man!

Re:Economy of sharing-an example

[Eskarel]

Real irony is the fact that that the opinions of "that radical guy and his followers" have been coopted to justify opression, murder, and theft. After all "God" chose Dubya to be president.

Survival?

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft's survival over the next two or three years will only prove that money can manipulate markets and laws. Vista will completely end their credibility.

So twitter, help me out here... You've said repeatedly that Vista would be "the end of Microsoft". So now they're going to "survive" for two or three years (max?), but they'll lose their "credibility". So they're no longer going to "disappear"?

Re:More Columbia Rubbish

[chromozone]

S0 - reading what you wrote your basically an apologist for Marx even while admitting you don't know what he said/meant. Moving on...

Re: Salvation through education

[transporter_ii]

And being the most powerful nation in the world somehow invalidates that sentiment?

Might does not equal right...or intelligence.

Education *is* the salvation, our very history is proof of that.

Given that the United States has some of the highest incarceration rates in the world:

the U.S. currently has the largest documented prison population in the world, both in absolute and proportional terms. We've got roughly 2.03 million people behind bars, or 701 per 100,000 population. (slightly old data alert)

...Maybe we need a One Laptop Per Child plan here. Or how about a One Laptop Per Prisoner program? Or should our prisoners here be denied salvation? Ironically, giving prisoners internet access really pisses a lot of people off, so information obviously isn't capable of salvation in all situations.

Oh wait, even the poorest people here in the United States could find access to a computer if they really put their mind to it (most as close as a public library).

Also interesting to note that it is our educated (highly?) in the United States that make the laws that lock up huge numbers for non-violent crimes. And given that these lawmakers certainly have access to computers, obviously, information was not salvation for our incarcerated, once again.

Personally, I'll put my faith in something other than education.

Transporter_ii

Why I have an allergic reaction to 'social justice

[The Monster]

We've hit a really low point as a society, when "Social Justice" are dirty words. How long will those of you who believe that absolutely unfettered economic darwinism ("Free Market") think you can throw out a word like "socialism" and think that Americans are going to drool on command?

I'm always mystified by the people who, thinking that 'economic darwinism' is a Bad Thing, advocate 'economic creationism' in its stead. The reason why phrases like 'Social Justice' cause me to react is that they're used by the Clever Kids to try to redefine, and thus win, arguments.

The term seems to suggest that if A has sufficiently greater wealth than B, the situation is 'socially unjust', without considering the actions that led to the situation. If the disparity of wealth is due to A having worked harder to produce his wealth, it would be the antithesis of justice to 'correct' the imbalance by coercive force.

How long will we have to watch cultures diminish as a powerful few use "capitalism" to enrich themselves while constantly greater numbers of our fellow humans fall into poverty.

It's good that you use scare quotes there, because politically-connected people using their connections to gain advantage in the market is not what I call "capitalism"; it's more like "mercantilism". But consider this: The nations with the poorest citizens are precisely those where coercive force dominates economic transactions; those where the lowest economic classes do the best are where force (and the threat thereof) is kept to a minimum.

We did an experiment last century, where we divided a country between capitalism and socialism. In order to maintain the experiment, the subjects in the socialist part of the experiment had to be confined by a wall, manned by guards with orders to kill anyone who tried to get out. But, hey, as long as all the inmates are equally poor, it's 'Social Justice', right?

Here in the Great U.S. and A. we're seeing a level (by percentage, yes) of poverty that would have made the victims of the Great Depression nod in recognition.

The 'poor' under the definition of 'poverty' in the US of A would be considered wealthy in any country on the planet a century ago. By embracing 'social justice', you can feel smug about spreading misery equally.

I am a proponent of Free Software precisely because it's about freedom. The pursuit of 'social justice' by coercive force is incompatible with freedom.

BTW, wasn't Moglen wearing a NICE suit? I don't suppose Starvin' Marvin can afford a fancy lawyer suit like that.

Re: Salvation through education

[transporter_ii]

Education has been valued

I agree. But I think the key word here is valued. I think there is a difference between valuing education and seeing it as our salvation.

Throughout most of history, up until the mid-1800s, if someone introduced an educational device under the banner of "salvation to the world through information/education," the majority of people would have been horrified at that statement.

Education can take many forms: it can be formal, in a school, apprenticing to a master or just gaining experience through working.

I totally agree. But you do realize that to an educrat, to admit that someone can learn outside of the established educational system, is heresy.

Transporter_ii

We're of the same opinion - just forked :-)

[cheros]

I was actually just gently winding you up :-).

Let me put it in a simpler way. Although I agree with your observation that "in the beginning there was Stallman and there was light" (Linux would have never happened without GNU and Stallman really hasn't gotten his fair share of praise for that), you have to look at some reasons for the Open lot to get more attention, and part of that is simple pragmatism (and GNU/Linux is also a pain to pronounce :-).

RMS created GNU code, but Hurd is still nowhere near usable AFAIK - pragmatists use Linux because it's here and it works. Depending on the distro you go from 'clean' (Debian) to 'potentially heavily polluted' (Novell, post MS deal), with something like Ubuntu in between for as long as it takes to eradicate the proprietary bits (i.e. it leans to clean but accepts some pollution until it no longer needs it). I call that pragmatic, because it offers a tactical interim step (Open) to what is a long term strategy (Free).

So I can see the sense of both, and what actually bothers me most is the desire of both camps to segregate into a "them and us" attitude. It wastes energy better used for collaboration, and if I were a large monopoly worried sick about the unassailable competition I'd use that weakness to sow discord.

I don't particularly care that one club has a green flag and the other a red one, at the moment it's IMHO more important they keep marching in the same direction. At present I think they do, but more by accident than design..

Killing the World's Poor to Save Them?

[MSTCrow5429]

This is warmed over Marxist nonsense. An economy of "sharing," placed in direct opposition to the right of ownership, is a round about way of endorsing Communism. OSS is not Communist. It is capitalist, in that it places the right of how to dispose of the owner's property to the property owners. Who, if they so decide, can give it away. The only, only way to help the world's poor is to support the birth and growth of institutions of liberal democracy, which will set the ground for a freely democratic and capitalistic society. Trying to prevent the "other" from achieving the success that we have is a form of imperialist violence, that will only mire future millions in poverty and an early death.

Re: Salvation through education

[ceoyoyo]

An educational device perhaps, but not an education. Go back to any period of history, pick some kid and offer him a chance at an education that would otherwise be out of reach -- apprentice a poor Egyptian to a master mason, send a Roman era peasant to learn a trade or give an nineteenth century child a yearly allowance and send him to boarding school, whatever. That might very well BE his salvation, and societies with citizenry with a high level of education have rarely failed to dominate their more backwards neighbors.

Most of the world is probably still laughing at the idea of a notebook computer being the world's salvation. The geeks seem pretty excited about it though.

It's true you can learn outside a classroom, and you SHOULD, but classrooms are very good for giving a basic level of education to the entire population. Sometimes they're implemented better than others though. Most places in the world have perfectly good public education systems. Mine was fine. Not everybody is capable of taking responsibility for a modern education upon themselves. In fact, VERY few children, or their parents, are capable of doing that.

Re:Economy of sharing-an example

[quixote9]

I think we actually agree, even if we're using somewhat different words. Capitalism doesn't have to be a free-for-all, but very often in practice it's hard to distinguish from robbery with a fountain pen. "Exploiting a resource without much thought for how long it will last" is practically the definition of the tragedy of the commons. It takes regulation to prevent people from not caring or, worse, using a resource up as fast as possible to get the most benefit before somebody else gets some of it. (The environment, as a place to dump stuff, is a "resource" people don't care about in this context.)

I think the reason communism worked so poorly is not because of a problem with the principle of sharing itself, but because the communists tried to make people share stuff that they normally would not. Stuff like their houses, or the food in their kitchens. In some ways, it's the mirror image of the patent-the-alphabet problem we have now, where people are trying to own stuff that can't be owned.

Re:Economy of sharing-an example

[mindstrm]

You are correct, but that's an example of the tragedy of the commons.

I know driving my car pollutes the world unnecessarily, but I also know that my car is only one of millions, and that any difference I make by driving or not is really inconsequential, so I continue to drive.

Karma to burn, so why not?

[StarKruzr]

You are a fool. Social justice refers to conceptions of justice applied to an entire society. It is based on the idea of a just society, which gives individuals and groups fair treatment and a just share of the benefits of society.

Re:Karma to burn, so why not?

[yoder]

That is some sick thinking there.

Re:Karma to burn, so why not?

[Saint V Flux]

Yes, it's sick to think that people have a right to what they earn. I know, damn me for not wanting to rob you of your rightful possessions! God, what a horrible person I am! See, this is why I get such a kick of of Liberaldot.org -- if you don't worship Uncle Stalin and Aunt Hitler, you get modded down. You don't bother to actually come up with an argument or read some history or anything else. Really, it's pathetic.

Re:Karma to burn, so why not?

[yoder]

Of course when thinking fails, regurgitate the liberal, Stalin, Hitler tripe. Don't look now, your ignorance is showing.

I've taken a cursory look at this discussion and can't find anyone who even hinted that their intent is to steal the rightful possessions of hard working people and redistribute it. Now on the other end of the discussion I've seen a few messages that accuse others of being Communist, Hitler, Stalin, and (gasp) liberal. So there does seem to be a one way discussion going on here. The liberals and moderates are trying to discuss a very complex and difficult issue and on the other side of the isle are the farting noises, name calling, and the ubiquitous "La la la la! I'm not listening you poopy head!"

This issue is obviously beyond you and so I should not expect anything substantial as a response, but I can always hope.

Re:Karma to burn, so why not?

[Saint V Flux]

The issue is beyond me? That's amusing seeing as I'm the only one who's actually talked about what social "justice" (sarcastic qoutations marks, because there's nothing just about it) actually is. If my points are so wrong about how social justice is nothing but punishing success and rewarding laziness / poor choices, you'd be able to come up with a counter argument instead of just the typical slashdot bullshit of "Oh, you don't worship and all powerful government -- you're stupid". Everyone knows that social "justice" is just a way to drag down those who are successful and have made good choices so that those who are unsuccessful and have made poor choices can feel better about themselves. Oh, and for your comment of "I've taken a cursory look at this discussion and can't find anyone who even hinted that their intent is to steal the rightful possessions of hard working people and redistribute it" -- you've obviously never looked at how social security, medicare, welfare, etc work.

Quicktime!!

[massysett]

*cough*quicktime*cough*

Quicktime!

This is Eben Moglen, general counsel of the FSF. The Archive.org website says "Open Source Video."

And my choices are...YouTube, with proprietary Flash technology, or Quicktime!!

Social Justice?

[Descalzo]

That is only because some people are easily fed "trigger" words or phrases and easily trained to react a certain way whenever they are used. Reasonable people understand that social justice does not equal Communism.

People who advocate 'Social Justice' use the term to produce a specific reaction: support. Many people who hear the words are easily trained to react a certain way (support) whenever they are used. Reasonable people understand that 'Social Justice' does not necessarily equal justice. It is not their fault that they react defensively when they are presented with meaningless words as a cloak for the same old ideas. We have indeed been trained to automatically mistrust high-sounding words.

Plus, people often have different ideas what justice means.

Re:Why I have an allergic reaction to 'social just

[Anonymous Coward]

Brilliantly said.

Software as an input to production of other goods

[Geof]

I think you're misunderstanding what he's saying about software as the "primary underlying commodity" of the 21st century. He's not suggesting that the third world should be developing software. Rather, he's saying that software is now an input to economic development in general. If a poor country is producing textiles, for example, they will need software in order to manage orders, inventory, designs, and so on.

The parallel with steel in the 20th century is that you need steel to make cars. If you don't have steel, you can't make cars - and car-making was one of the distinguishing activities of developed countries. So before you make cars, you need to make steel. If steel were free, the situation would be different: a steel industry would not be a precondition to development. So free software makes development possible where it wasn't before.

Now my example with textiles ignores another piece of the argument. Moglen is concerned with production being performed by communities, and those communities are, to a significant extent, built around software. So the key role of software is not streamlining 20th century industrial processes (such as just-in-time delivery), but in enabling new ones. That textile industry might not be industrial. Rather, it might be based around large numbers of people working from their homes making custom hand-made cloth. However, while a single individual could not integrate into the global economy, these producers are networked: they share and build on each others' designs, and cooperate to sell their products on a global scale (negotiating collectively with IKEA perhaps). The ability to work together like this depends on the network, which is (at least partly) held together by software.

Hence the speech at a Plone conference. The poor countries aren't so much developing Plone, they're using it to leverage whatever comparative advantage they have.

I do sympathize with your skepticism, however. Moglen is making extraordinary claims with little or no evidence. There is real doubt about the concept of a knowledge or information economy. Knowledge work is very hard to define, encompassing jobs as diverse as journalists, stockbrokers, and surgeons[1] who don't seem to have a lot in common. Much of the economic shift in the rich countries has been towards the service sector, but again there is ambiguity: truck drivers, for example, are considered as service providers, but that service is so tightly integrated with the production of physical goods that it doesn't seem to make sense to separate it. A further problem is that the economic benefit of knowledge work can be very hard to measure. This is a real problem in a capitalist society, because business people and investors need to be able to predict a return on investment[2]. So, we shall see just how significant community production is, and whether software really does under-gird 21st century economies. I think Moglen's right, as it happens, but there are good reasons for doubt.

[1] This list from F. Webster in Theories of the Information Society.

[2] See Nicholas Garnham, "'Information Society' as Theory or Ideology", in Manuel Castells, edited by Webster and Dimitriou.

Re:More Columbia Rubbish

[leereyno]

His grandparents were communists who were so extreme that even the bolsheviks thought they were out there.

If anyone knows anything about socialism as it actually exists, as opposed to the pie-in-the-sky proclamations of its adherents, it would be him.

Lee

Because everything else is a RAM hog

[tepples]

What if I want Opera for an architecture they don't compile it for

What if I want Firefox for an architecture with a small amount of RAM? What other web browser runs on plenty of handheld devices?

Re:Because everything else is a RAM hog

[Boltronics]

Here's a few suggestions:

• Minimo (MPL)
• Links (GPL)
• Lynx

Re:Why I have an allergic reaction to 'social just

[soulhuntre]

Very well said indeed.

Hear hear!

[Xenographic]

You're right. I don't really know the motivation either--I cringe every time I hear the justifications people come up with for their greed, especially when they quote someone like Ayn Rand. It makes my blood boil to hear people come out with such twisted notions of "liberty" that are just flimsy pretexts to excuse attitudes that should never be acceptable.

It's disturbing, though. Because while I really do care about others, I find it nearly impossible to care about the people who spout such nonsense. And yet, perhaps that goes back to game theory? In the repeated version of the Prisoner's Dilemma, it's to everyone's advantage to punish anyone who refuses to cooperate for any reason. In fact, any population which does NOT punish greedy bastards in that game will invariably be overrun by them, even though it's to everyone's advantage to cooperate all the time...

Ironic, huh? That game is so often studied because it so resembles real life greed and real life situations. So although their justification is allegedly logical, it breaks down because their strategy of greed isn't dominant. Of course, I suppose I should qualify that... cooperation will, in fact, lose out if it's snuffed out to below some threshold and there aren't any people willing to band together and cooperate enough to form a critical mass of people working together. Alternatively, there are problems when we get down to an effectively non-repeat game because almost everyone is unknown to us--people we'll never see or care about again. Of course, I'm hardly the first person to notice something like that...

Re:Hahah

[soulhuntre]

"We should not let the fact that sharing is trivial blind us to this moral truth."

You're not gonna be able to make this point on Slashdot where finding ways to steal the works of others without their consent is basically a moral principle.

Re:Why I have an allergic reaction to 'social just

[rtb61]

Beware politcal branding, socialism ain't socialism when it ain't socialism. Stalinism and maosim certainly weren't socialist they just choose to brand themselves as such. A democracy dominated by lobbyists and mass media is not a democracy, it just brands itself as such. As for the USA, as far as I know, 1950-1970 the average population was far richer than it is now, after 20 odd years of rapant lobbyist corruption. You never ever got rich by hard work, a greed quotient was the only demand, the greedier the richer and in terms of social qualities the least desirable trait of modern societies.

Something I want?

[Descalzo]

Your computer, please. At least, if it's nicer than mine.

My car is a '90. Is yours newer? That might be nice.

If you get more than $36,000/year, I'll take some of that, because I make less, and have a family.

Also, any video games you aren't using anymore.

And a small Mr. Pibb.

If I have misunderstood you, please explain.

Re:Why I have an allergic reaction to 'social just

[yankpop]

Once again, you are bringing your own biases into play here. Social justice does not necessarily include the forced redistribution of wealth, although some people do make that connection. Moglen very explicitly does not -- he mentions several times that we don't need a revolutionary re-ordering of society.

He's advocating a model of social justice that focuses on giving everyone equal access to community resources, in this case Free software. Not all software, just that produced by the Free software community. He doesn't demand the code for IE7, rather he starts from the premise that Firefox makes IE7 irrelevant. The promise of Free software is that it provides a way to give everyone access to community software products, as well as information more generally. With the one laptop per child project and the growth of open publishing, the kid in Soweto will have access to a lot of material that until very recently was available to only the privileged few in the west. It's a leveling of the playing field, and it costs us nothing.

Nothing Moglen said suggests he wants to take from the rich and give to the poor. That's the point. It costs us nothing to share these resources. Maybe that kid in Soweto will use her knowledge to build the next Google and make a billion dollars. Maybe she won't. It's up to her, and Moglen never suggests that we should be doing anything more than taking down barriers. The point is she can have access to these common resources without taking anything away from the rest of us.

This is social justice, just like universal suffrage and pay equity. It does not have to conflict with capitalist economics, the two can coexist. The social justice offered by Free software comes from the provision of a set of tools that are not encumbered by traditional concepts of ownership. You can still use them to create wealth for yourself, and you still get to decide how to use your wealth.

yp.

Odd to see you complain about word usage...

[Xenographic]

> I'm always mystified by the people who, thinking that 'economic darwinism' is a Bad Thing, advocate 'economic creationism' in its stead. The reason why phrases like 'Social Justice' cause me to react is that they're used by the Clever Kids to try to redefine, and thus win, arguments.

No argument you can't win by throwing in a dig at religion, huh? :] I mean, it's not like that was some lame attempt at making people stop thinking critically and go "creationism is bad! I'll believe this other guy!" or something. Then again, it seems oddly appropriate to have you posting such a thing with a name like "The Monster" ...

It's not "economic creationism" anyhow. More like "economic cooperation." Or perhaps I should call it an intelligent design? :] After all, the Prisoner's Dilemma of game theory shows that cooperation that punishes a lack of cooperation (e.g. strategies like Tit-for-Tat) are dominant over most ranges, secure against invasion unless perhaps they stop punishing noncooperation, and actually strictly better for all participants. Oddly, this is why the GPL works--it refuses to cooperate with anyone who will not reciprocate. If you don't share your improvements, you can't have ours. BSD is nicer, perhaps even freer, on some level, but vulnerable to 'invasion', in game theory terms, by those who refuse to share alike. Not that the people who use that license care about such things, and they're free not to care.

So it's not like you can say that cooperation is somehow unreasonable or illogical. It's convenient--too convenient--to suppose that everyone who doesn't have much doesn't work hard. Frankly, in every factory I've seen, those who have the least and make the least work the most.

So as for how just things like income taxes are, I'd like to point out that, frankly, the poor pay more in taxes than the rich, even if the dollar amounts are lesser. True, we exclude the very bottom levels from being taxed, but even for an average income person, the few thousand dollars paid have a very real affect on their lives. One pays with extra fat, the other gives of their livelihood. Such things can be the difference between being stuck in a dead-end job because your paycheck just won't stretch far enough no matter how many hours you toil at the factory, no matter how thin you stretch the budget, nor how many days you spend eating easy mac or ramen each year. For the rich, those funds that don't go to the tax preparer mean little more than, at most, cutting your vacation in Paris down from four weeks to three. If there's injustice in this, I do not think it's on their side.

And if you think otherwise, tant pis. C'est la vie.

What an odd way to save them?

[Xenographic]

> Here's how you save the world:
> 1. Global education with a solid core of scientific method, basic logic and critical thinking skills.
> 2. Free access to all known forms off birth control.
> 3. Bust up the organized religions. Seriously, we have GOT to wean humanity off that shit. It's like every problem in the world
> can be traced back to some religious text or another.

Silly me. I'd have tried to make sure that all the world could have clean water, nutritious food, shelter, and security from other people trying to kill or harm them. Or possibly other such useless things, instead of trying to preach atheism to them all as you do in #3.

Besides, I Mao and Stalin already tried your method, especially #3, suppressing religion and purging (executing) millions. How did that work out, again?

Or haven't you figured out yet that when people make a scapegoat for all the ills in the world out of some group of people that they become monsters? Do you even know about the Christians in ancient Rome, burnt "witches" in early America, Jews and Roma in the early 20th century, all those people purged by Mao and Stalin... the list is quite long; I can't do it justice.

Both religious and atheistic reasons can be used to scapegoat people; neither is the root of this problem. The fire of hatred reaching something like a flashover point, however, is...

Re:What an odd way to save them?

[Quiet_Desperation]

Did I say we shoulld execute millions? Did I say we should scapegoat people? You're arguing against a strawman, but then again this is Slashdot- AKA Grand Strawman Central. I have no idea how you got that from my post. I didn't say athieism, either. I argued against *organized* religion. There's a difference, but your own preconceived notions blind you.

And pretty much 99% of all witch burnings happened in Europe.

Re:What an odd way to save them?

[Xenographic]

> Did I say we should execute millions? Did I say we should scapegoat people?

No, but you spent all your time saying we should 'save the world' by preaching at people about how to live instead of helping them stay alive.

Re:Why I have an allergic reaction to 'social just

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm always mystified by the people who, thinking that 'economic darwinism' is a Bad Thing, advocate 'economic creationism' in its stead.

In the USSR they teached that evolution leads to communism, in the USA they teach that evolution laeds to better life for eveyone. I just shake my head in disbelief.

Re:Economy of sharing-an example

[rohan972]

To convince a profit minded boss, you have to demonstrate that open source reduces costs.

I'm a profit minded business owner. My country (Australia) has approx 20 million people. Lets say (without regard to how likely this is) that I could help get FOSS widely used. Maybe I'm paying someone to write a program, maybe I'm advocating, maybe I'm donating hardware loaded with FOSS to community organisations or schools. Not costing me more than a few thousand dollars, hypothetically, and I'm not doing it all, but making a contribution. Imagine it got to the point where 5 million people saved about $500 dollars by using FOSS, repeated every couple of years. That's effectively a quarter billion dollar injection to the economy my business operates in every couple of years.

Just from a business perspective, if you can increase the disposable income of the people in your target market by a few hundred dollars for next to nothing, it would be very short sighted to not do so. It's a good investment. Sure, it's not a guaranteed return, but neither is anything else.

For a good perspective on what I think FOSS means to capitalism, have a read of Paul Zane Pilzer's book "Unlimited Wealth". I've no idea what he thinks of FOSS himself, but if you read his six laws of economic alchemy, and compare proprietry software to FOSS, you'll see why some capitalists are really drawn to FOSS, even if they find it hard to understand and figure out what to do with it.

Re:Economy of sharing-an example

[rohan972]

Now I've heard two main counter-arguments to that: first, that by contributing to the global pool of knowledge, the whole community is better off (so it's a moral obligation to contribute without asking for compensation).

Try, the whole community is better off, so your target market has more disposable income. Thinking from FOSS in a business rather than FOSS as a business. My other post in this thread explains my view more fully

Re:Economy of sharing-an example

[QuantumG]

I don't see Moglen sharing his six figure salary. That's gotta be the funniest comment I've ever read. He does more pro bono work than any other lawyer in history.

Who pays for the first copy?

[Christian Linhart]

While I agree with most points of Eben Moglen's great speech, including the point that Microsoft's days are counted (I think that the days of all big organizations are counted due to the effect of the Internet on society, and, even if this sounds ironically, I think this includes Google.)
I don't agree with his statement that the problem of payment of the first copy is solved.

In fact I think that this problem is far from being solved and I think that this problem is the single most important reason for most closed-source software not being liberated today.

Let me explain this in more detail below. I also give a real life example to illustrate this.

While the situation has improved and some free software developers now get payed for writing free software (usually as an employee), I think that still, most free software developers do not get fairly compensated for their work.

Plus, I am sure that there are many shareware authors and individual software vendors who would be more than happy to liberate their software in case they get compensated for the cost of creating the software and have a viable perspective of being compensated for the further development and maintenance of the software.

How do I know that?

First, I am one of them (independent software vendor).

Second, I know from experience:

I am far from having the cost of development of my software product payed. So the cost of making the first copy has not been payed yet.
In the current stage of development of my business, this is an accepted part of the business plan:

The plan is to first create the software by temporarily bearing the cost myself by using savings, leisure time and incurring debt with the plan to recover that cost later by selling licenses.

Now, selling licenses is a difficult process in its own, so I'd be more than happy to have somebody pay me the total cost of creation of the software in exchange for releasing it under the GPL.

Since I think that my project is a fairly typical one, I give some specific numbers here, so you get an idea of the scope of the issue:

So far, I have invested about 6000 hours of work into this project. Now to convert this to an amout of money, this has to be with an hourly rate. In this example I use the hourly rate for programming services as proposed by my local chamber of commerce, which is a fair number which is calculated in a way that it pays for all expenses related to that work, including taxes, social security, office space, etc.

So I wind up with ost of development of about EUR 576000 or US$758476 so, about 3 quarter of a million dollars.

Now, in that early stage of executing my business plan I have recovered about EUR 27000 or USD 35500 (turnover minus cost of marketing) that's about 4.7% of the cost. The majority of which was payed by one single customer for licenses in the years 1998 and 2003.

Likewise, in the current state of my business plan I have a lot of debt and since I maxed out my debt capacity, I earn the major part of my living with a day job as an employee writing closed-source software for somebody else.

Now, you probably don't care about my current debt levels and about my business plan, and rightly so. I write this as a real life example for illustrating what holds small companies and individual developpers back from open sourcing their software and you may care about that.

You may also not care about my product (and I don't mention it here you gotta find it yourself) but maybe you may care about it. Maybe my product could have a very positive indirect effect on the popularity of the Linux platform if it were open source. (I hope that it being closed source still has part of this effect but of course open source would increase the number of users and thus increase the effect.)

So my point as gained from from experience is:
Getting payment for the cost of the first copy is the major reason why many small software compa

No lap tops for adults!!

[Anonymous Coward]

No lap tops for adults!!

Social justice!1

F%#k for-profit!1

Re:Why I have an allergic reaction to 'social just

[yoder]

Very well said. Good point.

Re:Economy of sharing-an example

[Anonymous Coward]

such as the Native Americans, generally had a more long-term view of how to manage the resources at their disposal, and of their place in the grand scheme of things.

Oh, yes. Noble savages, living in harmony with nature.

Re:Why I have an allergic reaction to 'social just

[PopeRatzo]

No, in the USA they teach that evolution is a religion. Don't you listen to Dennis Prager, Michael Medved, Laura Ingraham on the radio?

If not, good for you.

Re:Why I have an allergic reaction to 'social just

[indifferent children]

I'm always mystified by the people who, thinking that 'economic darwinism' is a Bad Thing

Some of us don't think that "survival of the richest" is the best model for a society.

Re:Why I have an allergic reaction to 'social just

[notjustthisguy]

Despite the fact that I'm a rich evil Republican and multiple Bush voter, I thought the speech was pretty good. However, there were a number of cringe inducing moments. A note to Eben: Don't say nice things about Mao, ever. I don't care how good the backyard steel foundries were. Just don't say it. It's a little like Limbaugh complementing Hitler on the creation of the Volkswagen. And find a synonym for social justice please. Something that's not already associated with grand failures like high density public housing and the Gore presidential campaign. Eben made the point that the problem with past attempts at social justice were based on coercion and so failed and eventually spiraled down into repressive authoritarian regimes. But he needs to make the point more forcefully. Come out strongly against coercion in the cause of social justice and even Ann Coulter will listen politely.

You got it backwards

[The Monster]

No argument you can't win by throwing in a dig at religion, huh? :] I mean, it's not like that was some lame attempt at making people stop thinking critically and go "creationism is bad! I'll believe this other guy!" or something.

Actually, it's not a dig at religion, but at those who believe that a complex eco(logical)system can spring out of random, with nothing controlling it, and be perfect and holy, not to be messed up by men; but insist that a complex economic system must have a creator. I guess I was just too clever for the room.

Then again, it seems oddly appropriate to have you posting such a thing with a name like "The Monster"

I'm 6'6", 300#, and there's some similarity to my name, which is why the nick got hung on me. You should go look up the etymology of 'monster', and you might understand why I like it.

As to the rest of your rant, the free market is not opposed to cooperation. In fact, cooperation is the basis of a free economy. Every time you buy or sell something, you're cooperating with your business partners. Government uses Men With Badges And Guns to enforce its dictates, to prevent such cooperation. That's good when it's cooperation between Mafia enforcers, who are themselves using coercive force against others, but not so good when it's done to distrubute wealth in accord with 'Social Justice'.

Re:You got it backwards

[Xenographic]

Like I pointed out, progressive taxes are the only fair ones. Because one pays out of their fat and another from their livelihood.

I'll wait for you to complain that I skipped answering the rest of your post after you did that to mine, though :]

Etymology of monster:

c.1300, "malformed animal, creature afflicted with a birth defect," from O.Fr. monstre, from L. monstrum "monster, monstrosity, omen, portent, sign," from root of monere "warn" (see monitor). Abnormal or prodigious animals were regarded as signs or omens of impending evil. Extended c.1385 to imaginary animals composed of parts of creatures (centaur, griffin, etc.). Meaning "animal of vast size" is from 1530; sense of "person of inhuman cruelty or wickedness" is from 1556. In O.E., the monster Grendel was an aglæca, a word related to aglæc "calamity, terror, distress, oppression."

From http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=monster

Listen to it again.

[The Monster]

Nothing Moglen said suggests he wants to take from the rich and give to the poor.

Go back and listen to him again. Several times he referred to 'Social Justice' requiring 'too much coercion' that resulted in more harm than good being done. This suggests that he finds a certain amount of such coercion in the name of 'Social Justice' is all right, so long as enough 'Social Justice' is produced to counteract the injustices perpetrated in the process.

At this point, as the old joke goes, we've established what he is; we're just haggling over price.

Re:Listen to it again.

[yankpop]

Ok, it's hard to skim an audio file, so I'm not going to spend another hour on this. However, Moglen does clearly outline the problems with coercive/violent redistribution of wealth between 16:30 and 18:00, stating that "we do not have to do that anymore". You read that as meaning we do not need to use 'excessive' coercion, but I think the rest of his speech makes clear that no coercion at all is necessary.

To turn it around, where does he propose coercive redistribution of any kind? What kind of coercion does he advocate? The point I took from the talk was that with the development of Free software development models we no longer need to find the balance between just redistribution and excessive coercion - Free software decouples coercion from redistribution. In fact, redistribution is no longer even meaningful. You can redistribute dollars by taking taxes from the rich and giving them to the poor. How do you redistribute Free software? You can only distribute it to people, you can't redistribute it, ie take it away from one person to give it to another.

I think you miss the most important point. In an industrial economy with finite resources social justice may have required coercive redistribution of wealth, and that redistribution was basically impossible to achieve in an equitable way. In an information economy the resources are not finite, so redistribution, in the sense of taking from one person to give to another, is no longer needed. We can all share the resources without requiring that anyone give anything up.

yp.

Re:Why I have an allergic reaction to 'social just

[aron1231]

I absolutely love your formula for defining 'Social Justice'. Focus purely on wealth and ignore every other variable - of course that will produce a result in your favor.

Allow me to throw some tidbits for you to chew. Suppose we have human 'A' who is a wealthy white male who did absolutely nothing to achieve his wealth other than being the lucky nephew of a rich uncle, and does absolutely nothing now other than sit on his butt and drink soda. Now, suppose we have a second human, 'B', who is a Mexican immigrant, who is dirt poor but works 80+ hours a week for dirt money. In this scenario, we have the DETAILS that fill the void between 'A' and 'B' that you so cleverly ignored. Would you say that there is 'Social Justice' between person A and B and their wealth discrepancy? Or maybe you are person 'A'....

Re:Economy of sharing-an example

[jesterman]

Buddha had it right: it's the balance that's important.

Even tough I enjoyed reading your comment, I think it doesn't go all the way for me.

First, our ideia of "owning", frankly and naturally, doesn't seem to fit well with the 'actual' real world, where there is no such thing as "owning" something. There is only the ideia of 'owning', and the ideia that if I own, the object is under my desire and control (at least, that's what we belive). From our point of view, that seems fine, is what we know. But I think that there is a perspective where this seems absurd. I don't think it makes sense to have a balance on owning and sharing, because owning (in this terms) doesn't really makes sense (at least, for me).

The vision we have on ownership doesn't imply a (strong) sense of responsability. I think there are communities that, instead of having the idea of ownership, have the idea of responsability. Where you own a land, actually you are responsible for that land. If you have a great sum of money, it doesn't mean it is yours, in a sense that you can do whatever you want with it. It means that a great sum of resources are in your responsability to manage. Not for you, but for all, and for itself.

Even tough there are some forms of laws that imposes some kind of responsability, responsability itself it is not the driving force behind the idea of ownership. I belive ownership as responsability sounds way more natural. And I belive that what is natural, sooner or later, wins.

...but sharing everything absolutely equally doesn't work well outside of a monastery either

That would be an extremme, probably one that Buddha would have avoided and tought. Also, I'm not sure if it's appropriate to see things that way. After all, is not about 'sharing everything absolutely equally'. Monasteries (at least, the ones I know) don't work that way eihter.

Firefox is about ownership and sharing

[arifirefox]

it is *my* browser and I can do anything I want with it and I don't have to give it all away. That's why it is under the MPL. But it's also under GPL if you want to share. Isn't choice good?

Re:Economy of sharing-an example

[quixote9]

Not that I'm actually a Buddhist, but I do seem to keep quoting them.... About ownership, I once heard the Dalai Lama quote a saying: "Those who have cows have care of cows." That's a lot more like your concept of ownership (and mine) than what I guess you could call the Fox News concept of it.

What I really meant with my imprecise language was that you can't do violence to people's sense of justice. Which is also a very imprecise way to put it, but what I mean is that basic feeling where if you've put a quart of ice cream in the freezer, it's _really_ annoying when your roommate eats it all. Communism let everyone eat everyone else's ice cream, so to speak. Nobody's going to stand for that over the long term.

On the other hand, if I'm reading Slashdot and 10,000 other people are reading it at the same time, nobody loses. That's the kind of thing that can't be owned, and people actually lose by it when somebody tries to lock it up. There can be the right to benefit from your work, certainly, but that's different from ownership.

Anyway, I should probably shut up because I'm not sure I'm making any more sense than before. I like your attitude. I wish everyone had it!

Re:Why I have an allergic reaction to 'social just

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm always mystified by the people who, thinking that 'economic darwinism' is a Bad Thing, advocate 'economic creationism' in its stead.

What do you mean by "economic darwinism"? Darwin's ideas of natural and sexual selection don't apply particularly well to an economy, so I'm curious.

The reason why phrases like 'Social Justice' cause me to react is that they're used by the Clever Kids to try to redefine, and thus win, arguments.
The term seems to suggest that if A has sufficiently greater wealth than B, the situation is 'socially unjust', without considering the actions that led to the situation. If the disparity of wealth is due to A having worked harder to produce his wealth, it would be the antithesis of justice to 'correct' the imbalance by coercive force.

To me, social justice means giving everyone similar opportunities in life, and letting them do what they like with them. I can speak with experience of the Scandinavian welfare state model, and say that this is a very expensive undertaking. Allowing everyone to make the most of their abilities costs a lot, especially if they end up being subsidised through five years of higher education (including the cost of living), but the recipients of subsidies contribute back to society later, to the extent they're able to. It is a great waste if those who can contribute intellectually are prevented doing so, because they have to work instead of studying.

Should those with more pay more in tax, both absolutely and proportionally? I think the answer is quite obviously "yes". Those with more wealth benefit more from the protection provided by the state, and paying taxes has less impact on their ability to live comfortably than is the case with those who are poorer. A stable society allows many to prosper, and those who do have a duty to repay society.

As for "free software", I use some of it, but I also use some commercial software. To me, it is not a moral issue, and there is no moral difference between, eg, Windows and Linux. I use whichever works better on my hardware, and offers applications that let me get my work done most easily. Like most users, I haven't time to tinker with source code to most of the software I use, so the "freedom" to have it is mostly irrelevant. I'd rather specialise in my own field, and pay someone else to specialise in tinkering with source code (either by buying a software licence, or by buying a software support contract).

Colaborative Markup of documents software?

[rthille]

At one point, he's talking about new software they wrote to enable people to work on marking up the new GPL v3 document. Anyone know what the new software is called?

People should appreciate what they have

[wilec]

"I definitely think that anyone (poor or not) should earn what they get. I think one of the greatest things that has undermined US culture and other cultures is poorly designed welfare systems."

Personally I think that while poorly designed and implemented social welfare systems are a problem, they are less of a problem than inherited affluence. There are way to many who do not appreciate the importance of the assistance they get from their parents or other benefactors. In my experience the most vocal critics of public social support systems are those who have had overly generous private support systems, ie: wealthy or at least comfortably well off parents or grandparents. In my 50 or so years I have found that neither sloth or intelligence usually have much to do with ones fiducial conditions. Sometimes fiducial success results from where one places such as a priority in life coupled with a dogged persistence toward some such goal, more often though it is due to the initial bootstrap one has received from ones ancestors. The most fiducially successful persons are those with lives that are reflective of both base issues. And yes many of the more reflective and intelligent successful persons are aware and appreciative of the bootstrap, many more however are clueless of its importance in their lives, indeed most of these types see such as something they are entitled to.

"People have come to believe that they are entitled from someone for the basic necessities in life."

In a civilized society the idea an individual should be entitled to the basic necessities in life is not really that bad of an ideal to build upon. However as a member of said society they also have a responsibility to contribute as best they can back into said society. I know that I sound a bit like Karl Marx but he was not entirely wrong, you have to place yourself in his time and place to understand his views. I do believe there is a social responsibility that we a have, if nothing else to our ancestors efforts and honor. This is coming from someone that considers himself very much an (small o) objective thinking independent person with a (small l) libertarian view of life.

"In terms of knowledge, however, I think think it should be free."

I agree and besides "It wants to be"! I know that was shameless and I guess it sounds a bit silly to anthropomorphize such, however in the big picture we all "stand on the shoulders of giants". The base ideals that Thomas Jefferson had that gave birth to the patent system allowed people to receive benefits from their creativity and efforts for a reasonable period of time. Too bad it has been corrupted almost to ruination by shameless greedy types.

"It seems that creating knowledge creates power, sharing knowledge shares power."

This ignores the synergy that can and usually does result from sharing of knowledge. The gnosis and thus power of both the original creator and those they share with can both increase as long as the transaction is open both ways. BTW your entire perspective on this is, from my view, at the heart of what "free" software is about, GNU/Linux is one excellent proof of of the models success.

Wabi-Sabi
Matthew

Wrong

[StarKruzr]

"Everyone" doesn't "know" that about social justice. Social justice simply means that you have a safety net for people who fall through the cracks. It doesn't mean unlimited welfare. It doesn't mean 70% tax rates. It doesn't mean you don't have the "right to succeed" or any of that other retarded libertarian bullshit. It means you have a nation that takes care of its people. If someone makes poor choices, they should have the RIGHT to start again and try to make good choices.

Fuck off, you compassionless asshole. I hope someone robs you blind right after you lose your job.

Re:Wrong

[Saint V Flux]

Yes, libertarian "bullshit" like equal rights, freedom, and the right to your own property. There are plenty of ways that people can start over again if they royally fuck up WITHOUT VIOLATING THE RIGHTS OF OTHERS. I'm not compassionless -- I give away plenty to people who need things or are worse off than I am. The difference between you and me (on this issue anyways)? The fact that I believe in GIVING, you belive in FORCEFULLY TAKING.

Re:More Columbia Rubbish

[caseih]

Hmm. Why not just read Marx himself. I think I'd rather do that.

Nope

[StarKruzr]

The difference between you and me is that you are a Communist and I am not.

Yep, that's right. Or close enough to one for government work (ha).

Both Communism and your brand of extreme libertarianism count on the same thing that simply isn't fucking true: everyone is generous, everyone wants to work as hard as they can, everyone is just hunky-dory, so of course they will work as hard as they can! Of course they will give to charity!

Wake up, Pollyanna.

Re:Nope

[Saint V Flux]

No, communism is about the government owning everything and taking to give everyone their "fair" share. If you're too fucking lazy to do the work, why the hell should you be rewarded for it? If you don't learn the material, you don't pass the test. You don't work, you don't get paid. It's very simple. Just because you're alive doesn't make you special.

If you want to give money to people to pay for their mistakes (and I personally know people who think people who work for money are a joke), that's your perogative. However, you have no right to steal money from everyone else just to make your Marxist dreams of an all powerful government come true.

If you think libertarianism and communism are even remotely similar, then you really need to pick up a book, instead of reading revisionist history on the internet.

Artificial economies and trading systems

[rhyre417]

There are competing models.

You need someone to pay for your time, not just the first copy of your work.
That's like playing the lottery with your time. Some companies are wildly successful
at it, but most are not.

In Italy, Artists had patrons. In current economic systems, many "software artists" work
for companies. Sometimes, the software you create while employed by a company has limited
economic value to that firm, due to changes in the underlying business, or other changes in
focus or management. But there's currently no reasonable way to liberate that software
except through some well-known mechanims such as Open Sourcing it.

A similar issue exists in online gaming, where you can create really cool characters and capabilities, but
they are only good inside the artificial world of the game.

Other companies are willing to allow you to market it outside of their corporate niche
as a standalone commercial venture, as long as they get a cut of the revenue, or some other
form of compensation. Perhaps they even have an internal venture arm that allows them to invest
in your company. Such companies are extremely rare.

The risk is that all profit-motivated companies might enter into a mutual patent-licensing scheme,
which would (arguably) have a tendency to displace out all other forms of open-source competition.

The alternative systems must be allowed to compete. Shouldn't they?

Reading comprehension is fundamental!

[StarKruzr]

I didn't say "what they were about." I said "what they count on."

Re:Reading comprehension is fundamental!

[Saint V Flux]

Libetarians don't "count" on generosity either. They merely point out that it's unjust to rob someone, regardless of where the money goes to.

Re:Reading comprehension is fundamental!

[StarKruzr]

1) It isn't robbery if it's democratically decided upon
2) Then you admit that the necessary services that you claim would be supported entirely by charity would in fact be horrifyingly underfunded and destroyed if you had your 'druthers?

Great. Just wanted to make sure we were clear that in your compassionless world, no one gets a second chance, and if you don't have health insurance and get seriously ill, kiss your ass goodbye.

Re:Reading comprehension is fundamental!

[Saint V Flux]

1) You don't have the right to vote away someone else's rights
2) There are very, very few necessary services (limited basically to roads and national defense)

Great. Just wanted to make sure we were clear that in your "ideal" world, the government owns everyone and everything and can do whatever they want with them, and if you have children and want to give them a better life, well you can kiss that dream goodbye because it might make someone else feel bad.