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Moglen on Social Justice and OSS

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the something-weighty-with-your-sunday-morning dept.

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.'"

2 of 336 comments (clear)

  1. Social Justice? by fatboy · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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
  2. Re:Economy of sharing-an example by mdfst13 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.