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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.'"
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.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
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?
... 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.
The blogger's summary said the speech evoked "memories for me of Martin Luther King's speeches". Ummm
Crack - Free with every butt and set of boobs
I suppose there's a certain irony to the fact that the talk is available only in proprietary formats from those links.
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?
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
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: 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.
Doctors destroy health, lawyers destroy justice, universities destroy knowledge, religion destroys spirituality
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.
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.
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".
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".
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?
- Old Man of the Mountain ---- "I want to disturb my neighbor"
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.
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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.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
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.
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.
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.
Disagree with me? Tell me why, but follow these rules.
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.
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.
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
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.
Join the Free Software Foundation
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".
You are welcome on my lawn.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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What if I want Firefox for an architecture with a small amount of RAM? What other web browser runs on plenty of handheld devices?
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.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
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.