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Eben Moglen on the Global Software Industry Post-GPL3
Dan Shearer writes "Three days before GPLv3 was released, Eben Moglen delivered the annual lecture of The Scottish Society of Computers and Law in Edinburgh, Scotland giving his thoughts on 'The Global Software Industry in Transformation: After GPLv3.' The text transcription, audio and 384kbit video are up at archive.org. Eben looks back at the 'legislative action' achieved by the GPLv3 community over the last 18 months, and also from the 22nd century. A riveting presentation for all present."
You see here on slashdot people frequently go on tirades about how somebody _was_ wrong. Or about how something _is_ a bad idea and is flawed. It's a common misconception that people have about themselves that this sort of behavior somehow means that they are smart.
You see... Pointing out bad things that intellegent people do does not make you yourself intellegent. Very stupid people can find flaws in other things very easily.
However what intellegent people can do is make predictions. That is take what they know, and what history has shown, combined with their own cognitive abilities to make interesting and insightfull comments about the FUTURE.
You see.. You don't need to be a Time Lord to know what is going to happen. You just have to be very smart.
This is how you know your ideas, beleifs, and assumptions are right and other people who disagree with you are wrong. If you can accurately predict the future then you are right.
And by being right and knowing what is going to happen next allows you to be _constructive_. If you can plan ahead and leverage what you know is going to happen. This allows to you change things for the better, or at least what is better for your own self interest. You can be successfull in business; Like Bill Gates did with Microsoft, for example. Or you can create fundamental changes on how society operates; Like how Richard Stallman did when he created the GPL, which created the legal framework that helped make Linux and the open source movement successfull.
This is in contrast to stupid people which generally just going around finding flaws in other people and other things, tearing things down. Then acting all scared at change and mystified about how things are not remaining the same.
You can go back to 1990's and such when things like GCC and Linux were just started.
It was very common for people to say stuff like:
"Nobody in their right minds would ever work on a FREE compiler. Sure it's a interesting toy, but GCC will never be able to replace "
"Ha! Linux in the enterprise? Sure it's a cheap OS for cheap hardware. But nobody in their right mind will ever use it. When people need to get REAL work done they will never give up their "
So what Eben Moglen is talking about is what is going to happen POST GPLv3 release. He is a very smart guy and is probably going to be mostly right.
The lesson to take home here is:
"One does not need to be from the future to know what is going to happen tomorrow with reasonable accuracy"