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

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?

[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?

[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.

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.

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: 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: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.

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.

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: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.

Transcription

[Geof]

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