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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.'"
Indeed, I'm still wondering why people haven't switched to MPEG-4/MP3 or H.264/AAC .mp4 files yet.
.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.
And no, DivX/XviD aren't
"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.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
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
--fatboy
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.
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...
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.
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.
Digital Citizen
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.
How we know is more important than what we know.
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.
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.
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.