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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.'"
Especially when he points out that the best efforts of Microsoft can't produce browsers as good as the Free Software community.
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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.
I know I've wanted to kill a few people after looking at their MySpace pages.
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.
Stop looking at people's MySpace pages!
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
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.
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.)
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
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.
/. 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).
You can see how that plays out in this
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.
Digital Citizen
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.
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"
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.
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.
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.
This (from my transcription) is what he means by social justice:
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:
An information economy based on free software, however, can be different:
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.
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.
"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.
"In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act!" -- George Orwell (Eric Arthur Blair)
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.
Muslim community leaders warn of backlash from tomorrow morning's terrorist attack.
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.
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.
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
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
If you want a non-proprietary format, I have transcribed Moglen's speech.
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.
[100% ISO 646 Compliant]
SVM, ERGO MONSTRO.
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.
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
How we know is more important than what we know.
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.
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.