Slashdot Mirror
Stallman Crashes Talk, Fights 'War On Sharing'
schliz writes "Free software activist Richard Stallman has called for the end of the 'war on sharing' at the World Computer Congress in Brisbane, Australia. He criticized surveillance, censorship, restrictive data formats, and software-as-a-service in a keynote presentation, and asserted that digital society had to be 'free' in order to be a benefit, and not an attack. Earlier in the conference, Stallman had briefly interrupted a European Patent Office presentation with a placard that said: 'Don't get caught in software patent thickets.' He told journalists that the Patent Office was 'here to campaign in favor of software patents in Australia,' arguing that 'there's no problem that requires a solution with anything like software patents.'"
I'd prefer Stallman's outspoken extremism vs the quiet extremism that corporations would place us under if no one spoke up.
Nice work ... there should me more people like him :)
Bonkers are the people who see what's going on around them, and say and do nothing.
bought about the creation of the middle class, modern democracy, and the death of the feudal system and the aristocracy
it took awhile. the feudal system and the aristocracy in their time were just no brainer common sense, and the idea of challenging them was either something to be laughed at or you must be crazy to believe they could ever end or to doubt their validity
the internet means the death of the entire concept of intellectual property
it will take awhile. in our time some people just take the idea of intellectual property as just no brainer common sense, and the idea of challenging it is either something to be laughed at or you must be crazy to believe it could ever end or to doubt its validity
in today's age, stallman is but a distant voice in the wilderness, but he's actually 100% correct, just way ahead of his time, too far ahead, to gain any traction
the simple truth is that intellectual property is a completely flawed concept. it made sense before the internet when media had to be physically printed and physically distributed. much as the feudal system made sense when only a few could afford book knowledge
all that intellectual property has going for it now is legal and cultural inertia. it is of course completely philosophically untenable when media can be shared at zero cost at great distances with millions instantaneously. it will take time, but intellectual property is going down the tubes. the intartubes
let us work hard to hasten its demise
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I recall when I went through a rather lengthy discussion with the UK government about software patents, and the state of the law. It became very clear that regarding patent law, the UK government and the UK patent office is very heavily influenced by advisors who are, almost to a man, commercial patent lawyers. The remaining industry spokesmen are from big business.
It doesn't take a huge amount of understanding or research to see that SME innovation has more or less been destroyed by the existing patent processes. Entry into big success is done through innovation still - but not so much via the patent route. I would contend that companies like Facebook was successful, NOT because of whatever patents they may have held, (or bought), but because they were able to identify a market demand and react to it faster or more successfully than existing big industry was able.
This comment was written with the intention to opt out of advertising.
"The bitch of it is that you probably did the right thing. But you did it in the wrong way. In the inconvenient way. Now you have to pay the penalty for that. I know it stinks, but that's the way it is."
President Susanna Luchenko to Sheridan, Rising Star, Babylon 5
weinersmith
Copying other people's stuff and giving it away isn't "sharing."
If you want to share, create your own work and give it away for free.
In the past (and present) this is precisely what Richard Stallman did with GNU. He wanted software to be free. Instead of bootlegging copies of Windows (or MS-DOS) he created his OWN stuff and gave it away for free. Now Linux is a force to be reckoned with. If he had simply pirated other peoples' work, this innovation would have never happened.
Shouting, running, making a fool out of himself. I think if only he would do the sort of things he does without calling a ruckus, then people might take him more seriously.
May be he doesn't care about being taken seriously. May be he just wants people to be serious about defending their own right to free expression. And I am sorry for people who are turned away from his lucid arguments because they think that non-violent protests against economic oppression and political censorship are "extremism": can people be any more docile?
Given the number of corporate shills who show up at F/OSS conventions peddling things like, "'you people' need to get over software patents" or "sometimes you just can't just hand the source over to the client, its just good for business" or "I'm not calling you people communist -or even traitors, but you have to wonder about someone who doesn't genuinely care about the shareholder's position", I have no problem with Stallman shitting in their yard. Good for him.
The headline says "crashes".
The article says "interrupted", but gives no details.
The article has two pictures (#18 and #19).
#19 looks like Stallman posing after the event for the benefit of the camera.
#18 is probably the interruption.
All you can see from the picture is that Stallman (and friend) stood at the front of a conference room holding poster-board signs.
It looks like Stallman has a sheaf of papers in his hand, so maybe he said something.
In other words, if he would just keep his mouth shut, not make anyone uncomfortable, and not live out his philosophy, he would be acceptable to you. Get back to us when you've done even _an eighth_ of what RMS has done for software freedoms that all of us benefit directly from.
Reply to That ||
I think Ballmer only has the patent on using a chair as a projectile whilst making a point. Making a fool of oneself has too much prior art behind it.
Reply to That ||
I would tell the corporate world that free software is good for the economy, and good for their business.
There are plenty of vendors out there who have built products on top of Linux, Apache, etc.
If Linux, Apache, etc. were not available for free, these vendors either would not have been able to launch their products, or would have paid huge licensing fees for crap like the Microsoft web server, driving up their prices.
If it weren't for these kinds of public software projects, everything would be more expensive, from consumer electronics to enterprise appliances.
I think the Internet's fate is sealed, in it's current form. It was always under the control of a single government, so it's only a matter of time. We need to go to darknets or replace the infrastructure with something community-run - probably a bit of both.
I wrote about this before:
http://search.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1634334&cid=32019410
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
if you can't afford a book, you can't afford to learn. and you can't afford a book if the only ones around are scribbled by monks. and so, a dummy, who can't read and knows nothing, you go work the fields, like your serf parents before you
fact: the printing press created the middle class as we know it today. the existence of a large middle class supports the notion of a democracy being an effect political possibility
the cities have always had craftsmen and tradesmen, since before roman and even egyptian times. but they were always tiny sectors, not the vast middle class we know today. that one of those tradesmen, gutenberg, invented the printing press, thereby resulting in the explosion of the middle class: this is solid historical fact
but thank you for cherry picking small fragments of reality to support a conception of history which is patently false. pfffft
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
How much "interest" does the janitor cleaning Microsoft's floors really have?
That depends on how much of his pay the janitor has squirreled away to buy MSFT stock.
Let Human Rights be for humans.
Humans own companies' stock, and these humans benefit when the company benefits. Humans work for companies, such as the inventors listed on every patent assigned to Microsoft.
If you try and tell people about "Why Software Freedom is Important", they will listen to you, agree with you, then buy Apple anyway. If you tell them "Apple is crap!", at least some of them will understand it.
PlusFive Slashdot reader for Android. Can post comments.
You have a crucial point that you fail to see: those two forms of IP are already distinguished in legal institutions: copyright and patents. the problem, is that both legal institutions are being extended out of control... but the difference is there, and we only need to adjust one (patents) and abolish the other.
But independently of that particular solution, the fact that technological development makes some particular form of social institution or enterprise obsolete is not the problem. If the invention of the wheel made some forms of transportation obsolete, considerations about the preservation or future or pre-wheel forms of transportation should not be valid arguments in discussions about development and deployment of the wheel.
In other words....it doesn't matter. The problem right now is not how are we going to secure that there are incentives for people to invent stuff, but that the mechanisms that we do have in place, that were never created with that intention but also work as incentive structures, are becoming unacceptable threats to the public interest and freedom.
First we need to stop the escalation into police states that the extension of these mechanisms is bringing about, THEN we should let the people that are trying to make money inventing stuff work out how they are going to actually make any.
In other words: the "technological development" argument is moot. it is not going to happen, period. So don't use it to respond to my complaints about my lost freedoms, because i'm being monitored, censored, persecuted, fined and incarcerated NOW, and you want me to worry about the potential profit problem of some corporation in some undefined future. get your priorities right.
As a subsidiary argument, you can reconsider the reasons that were argued in its time for the implementation of IP protection. it was never "let's secure a revenue stream for the author", it was much more a thing of "let's secure the integrity of the produced media for the future, by preventing unauthorized sub-par copies to be made and distributed". That line of thought rests, however, on the direct correlation between cheap copy and low quality copy that digital media makes obsolete.
entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem
One could understand an argument of "Why Software Freedom is Important", "Apple is crap!" is too shallow for anything but simple agreement or disagreement.
"they will listen to you, agree with you, then buy Apple anyway" that's called the "nod politely and slowly back away" maneuver.
But Apple didn't invent the portable MP3 player. "Research, invent, commoditise, sell" is a plausible-sounding business plan, and I'm sure it sometimes works out that way, but much more commonly, companies learn from each other's mistakes and release competing products with small improvements. Apple realised people wanted an MP3 player that was slick rather than geeky-looking, so they repackaged it. That was their innovation. And it's a good thing - I'm not knocking that kind of incremental innovation. Patents harm that way of innovating, though, because the only companies that can play the game are those with big enough patent portfolios to deter their competitors from suing.
The portfolio problem applies to blue-sky innovation too. Imagine you invented the portable MP3 player from scratch in your garage and patented it. A year later, Apple releases the iPod. What are you going to do? If you sue, they can just pull some ridiculously broad patent out of their portfolio and counter-sue until you lose everything. The best you can do is to sell your patent to one of their competitors for use in their portfolio, and good luck getting a decent price when the buyer has all the lawyers.
There is one area where patents work more or less as expected, though, and that's drug development. Drug companies have a pretty good track record of throwing money at a problem until they get a usable drug (often usable for a different problem, admittedly), patenting the drug, and recouping their investment within the lifetime of the patent. Everything would be wonderful except for two catches: the money available to pay for a drug doesn't always match its social importance (the malaria problem), and the price of the drug while it's under patent may be too high for many of the people who need it (the HIV problem).
We've tried to patch the malaria problem through charitable funding of drug development, and the HIV problem through charitable subsidisation of drug prices, but both patches exacerbate the underlying problem by putting yet more patents and yet more money into the hands of the incumbent drug developers, meaning that next time we run into similar problems they'll be even more expensive to solve. The only solution I can think of is to create a public interest exception for patent licenses, coupled with public funding of socially important research, because the private money will move to areas that aren't covered by the public interest exception. But that sounds too much like dirty commie talk for a lot of people's liking. ;-)
May be he doesn't care about being taken seriously. May be he just wants people to be serious about defending their own right to free expression
The problem is, by projecting the image of himself that he does - a bearded fanatic with glowing eyes frothing at the mouth - he does a great disservice to the cause he tries to represent, because it gets associated with him, and all personal negative connotations necessarily carry over.
PR is good and necessary for any cause, but it should be done by people good at it.