Eben Moglen Explains Freedom and Free Software in Two Video Interviews

Eben Moglen, says Wikipedia, "is a professor of law and legal history at Columbia University, and is the founder, Director-Counsel and Chairman of [the] Software Freedom Law Center, whose client list includes numerous pro bono clients, such as the Free Software Foundation." And if that wasn't enough, since 2011 he's been working with FreedomBox, a project working toward "a personal server running a free software operating system, with free applications designed to create and preserve personal privacy." Prof. Moglen is also one of the most polished speakers anywhere, on any topic, ever. That's why, instead of editing this interview Timothy Lord did with him, we simply cut it in half, removed a little introductory and end conversation, and let the Professor roll on. The second half of this interview will run tomorrow. It's at least as worthwhile as the first half, especially if you are interested in Free Software.

Comments

You need to have the Adobe Flash Player

[Anonymous Coward]

You need to have the Adobe Flash Player to view this content.
Please click here to continue.

Re:You need to have the Adobe Flash Player

[bug1]

You need to have the Adobe Flash Player to view this content.
Please click here to continue.

You lucky, lucky bastard. (in my best monty python voice)

All i see is normal white background, i didnt even get a button that doesnt work.

Access

[mfwitten]

Please provide links to downloadable files for future videos; please don't force your users to suffer some terribly inefficient and limited player like that of an embedded flash player—not only does, say, mplayer use far fewer cycles to play the same damn video, but I can also speed up playback to nearly 2x the rate (without comical effect!), which saves me time, thereby allowing me to spend more time viewing slashdot advertisements.

Re:Access

[Jeng]

I am always amazed when someone mentions the advertising on this site since almost everyone uses ad-blockers theses days, but also if you are in good standing slashdot gives you the option of not seeing the advertisements.

I really don't think slashdot makes much from displaying advertisements.

Now if slashvertisements are real, well they may make some money off those.

Re:Access

[YurB]

I'm writing just to tell that I'm too in need of the ability to kick out that flash player, this time because my netbook screen's 1024px width is just cutting off approximately 30% of the flash player fixed-width box here... If it was html5, it would have been a completely different story. Let's begin making the world better by making small better:)

Re:Access

[YurB]

By the way, recently bought a used machine without sse2 and found that Adobe has "improved" their flash player not to execute on machines without sse2 (I've heard that they were able to make this a linux-only issue which is especially illustrative of how they're doing their cross-platform work.)

Re:Access

[iroll]

Don't you think you might be projecting just a teensy bit? Most people aren't suffering when they watch a video on youtube. Neither are their computers.

If you're a sophisticated enough user to care about the number of cycles mplayer uses versus flash, you should be sophisticated enough to, say, install a userscript like ViewTube

http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/87011

...that will send the video format (codec and size) of your choice to a non-flash player of your choice. You can even download the video and watch it offline later!

Those rare individuals who can't watch a flash video and can't figure out why are probably not suffering either, because they probably don't care.

Re:Access

[mfwitten]

I have flash version 11.2.202.243.

There are tools for downloading youtube's videos.

Care to try again?

Re:Access

[mfwitten]

This is a straw man argument.

I'm talking about slashdot, not youtube, for which there do indeed exist simple tools.

Re:Access

[Jane Q. Public]

I agree. Slashdot's implementation of Ooyala Player really sucks. It doesn't even work in my Firefox... probably because I have Flash Local Storage turned off.

Give me a damned link to YouTube or whatever, and let me watch it on my own.

Re:Access

[mfwitten]

I'm amazed that your comment is getting modded up, even though it has basically nothing to do with my point.

Re:Access

[iroll]

Reading this and your previous post, I don't think you know what a straw man argument is.

Re:Access

[mfwitten]

* straw man, strawman (a weak or sham argument set up to be easily refuted)

* straw man: a fabricated or conveniently weak or innocuous person, object, matter, etc., used as a seeming adversary or argument: The issue she railed about was no more than a straw man.

* A straw man, also known in the UK as an Aunt Sally,[1][2] is a type of argument and is an informal fallacy based on misrepresentation of an opponent's position.[3] To "attack a straw man" is to create the illusion of having refuted a proposition by replacing it with a superficially similar yet unequivalent proposition (the "straw man"), and refuting it, without ever having actually refuted the original position.

You were attacking a superficially similar yet unequivalent comment that I didn't make, creating the illusion of a successful refutation. Remeber this the next time you hear the term "straw man".

Re:Access

[Jeng]

My point was that slashdot probably doesn't really care if you do or do not view their advertisements.

I agree with you that there really is no reason why my comment should be modded up.

Re:Access

[iroll]

Just because you can copy and paste doesn't mean you can parse. Keep trying, though!

Re:Access

[Lennie]

A HTML5 video-tag would have been fine too.

Re:Access

[melikamp]

If they don't have Flash spying on you, how do they know which ads are best for you?

Re:Access

[theshowmecanuck]

He's a troll or an idiot or both. And you are correct, if someone wants to use software that can't do the job, it's their problem. If someone like Slashdot provides the service at no cost, they shouldn't also be asked to kiss the asses of the smallest percentage of viewers. The majority who have proprietary software are obviously the ones who actually spend money. Why would a for profit company care what people who don't spend money for their stuff, think? Especially if their income is at least in part advertisements to entice people to buy.

Re:Access

[Anonymous Coward]

Why would you have "recently" bought such a piece of shit? You could have dumpster dived a Core2Duo system that is infinitely less shitty than the system you are whining about Adobe not supporting.

Re:Access

[YurB]

Sometimes such a "piece of shit" is just enough. I've spent $30 on it plus some $5 on additional RAM and $15 on a DVD burner. In fact, I still have a Pentium II (350 MHz), and it's able to serve very well as a NAT and a small web server for personal purposes. I just think that if machine works and can be useful, why not use it? Of course I don't run Windows 7 on that machine (and I have no interest in doing that), but for what I need it for, it's just perfect.

Re:Access

[CamD]

https://code.google.com/p/get-flash-videos/
It's also in the Debian repository, possibly others.

To stream (in mplayer, by default):
$ get_flash_videos --play "$slashdot_url"

It's a feature not a bug

[Jeng]

That's why, instead of editing this interview Timothy Lord did with him, we simply cut it in half, removed a little introductory and end conversation, and let the Professor roll on.

Yea, that's the ticket, we don't need editing, just cut the video in two. Also, lets make sure to remove context like introductions.

Ok, since all you did was cut the video in two and remove context, did you at least make a transcript this time?

Re:It's a feature not a bug

[Anonymous Coward]

no, but they did include the video on FOSS in Flash.

Re:It's a feature not a bug

[Jeng]

The transcript is so I and others can skip sitting there watching and absorbing.

Re:It's a feature not a bug

[eugene ts wong]

There is a link under the video to hide or show a transcript.

Re:It's a feature not a bug

[Anonymous Coward]

Ok, since all you did was cut the video in two and remove context, did you at least make a transcript this time?

Are you not seeing the hide/show transcript link below the video!? Very well, for people who cannot click:

Eben Moglen: Software Freedom Law Center was created in 2005, and is a non-profit legal services company, which provides free legal advice to non-profit makers and distributors of free and open source software.

So, our job is to provide legal advice to the people who make and distribute free software, who don’t have a revenue stream to pay for legal services. We are supported almost entirely by the generous donations of businesses that make use of FOSS in their products and services. And they provide that support to us because good legal advice to the people who make the software in the non-profit sector ensures them fewer difficulties and easier business climate in the use of that software for their business purposes.

They pass that software on or deliver services over that software to their own customers, and having good legal assurance and good understanding of their relationship to the manufacturers and distributors of that free software is benefit to them. So, we are essentially people who explore a world of win-win solutions on behalf of the developers at FOSS.

Timothy Lord: And the supporters you mentioned, are any of those big names in the free software community now or is that businesses that people wouldn’t realize is supporting them?

Eben Moglen: Oh, that’s IBM and Hewlett Packard, and Oracle, and Qualcomm and others around the world who have very big businesses that make very big use of free and open source software, and the use they make is use which is on the basis of their understanding that everybody is following the rules and everybody using those rules in creative and productive ways is profitable to them.

Timothy Lord: Now, was there a gap that you were filling when you founded this a few years back?

Eben Moglen: One way of thinking about it is that I had been working for a very long time with Richard Stallman doing legal work primarily for the Free Software Foundation. And sometimes I did work that helped people in the commercial world, either in relation to the Free Software Foundation or in matters that had nothing to do with the Free Software Foundation, but I had been between 1993 and 2005 basically a law professor part time doing all of this work.

When the SCO lawsuit concentrated people’s attention in the industrial community on both the value of the software to them, and the amount of disruption, inconvenience caused, and difficulty that even one frivolous lawsuit could create, there was an opportunity to get people to concentrate on the value of supporting community organizations. And that’s really the gap that SFLC was created to fill.

I see it, as a law professor, also very much as a vehicle of training to provide lawyers, to business and to the community, alumni of SFLC, if you like, or counsel at Red Hat and Executive Director of the GNOME Foundation, and are in other ways, pillars of the community both on the commercial and on the non-profit side. I think of our helping to create a social community knowledgeable in the affairs of law, the affairs of business and the affairs of free software as a crucial gap also that SFLC fills.

Timothy Lord: You mentioned the SCO lawsuit, have you seen a change in the business world’s attitude about free software as a result of that software patents and disputed trademarks, things like that?

Eben Moglen: My view is that these are forces operating all out of the same fundamental reality which is the enormous commercial importance of sharing. It has been underestimated in the view that capitalism took of itself in the middle of the 20th century, and this is sort of a surprise becaus

Re:It's a feature not a bug

[Jeng]

Also I, like many here, read slashdot at work and if you are reading a web page you may be doing some research or something, but if you are watching a video then it is pretty clear you are not doing your job.

Re:It's a feature not a bug

[Jeng]

Wow. thanks, I didn't noticed that.

Re:It's a feature not a bug

[Jeng]

Thanks, didn't think to look at the section between the media player and the comments, I would have figured a link to the transcript would be in the summary.

Re:It's a feature not a bug

[tehcyder]

Also I, like many here, read slashdot at work and if you are reading a web page you may be doing some research or something, but if you are watching a video then it is pretty clear you are not doing your job.

Exactly. Also, where I work you aren't allowed to sit at your desk with headphones on ignoring the outside world, so even if you could get away with watching the video you still wouldn't be able to hear it, which is kind of a disadvantage for an interview.

Re:It's a feature not a bug

[eugene ts wong]

You're welcome. Thanks for the opportunity.

...and the irony!

[AliasMarlowe]

Did they even ask Eben Moglen's opinion on presenting an interview with him using the non-free flash player?
And I concur with mfwitten - please provide a downloadable link, even if it's to the accursed ooyala.com...

Re:...and the irony!

[jalet]

I don't know for Eben Moglen, but I can say for sure that RMS didn't appreciate when we recorded and streamed a conference of him with proprietary software and codecs (RealServer+RealVideo).

Not only did we re-encode the video into an open format, but we went so far as to develop an entirely Free conferences/courses recording and streaming software (based on GStreamer) as a result.

Unfortunately the original website is down, but the latest source code is currently available from http://depot.univ-nc.nc/sources/ for those who might be interested.

Re:...and the irony!

[jalet]

And while I'm at self promotion, the next time he went we recorded him with this software : http://stream.unice.fr/polytech/rms20080505/

Additional features of this software suite (slides capture and sync, PDF creation, re-encoding...) can be seen at http://tv.univ-nc.nc/conferences/

is this VBR?

[mpgalvin]

Free-as-in-Irony issues aside, I'm not sure I like this jankyPlayer(tm) technology... the quality pogos worse than a comcast youtube proxy.

Polished?

[keithjr]

Prof. Moglen is also one of the most polished speakers anywhere, on any topic, ever.

Except when he's straight up yelling at interviewers?

Re:Polished?

[UnknownSoldier]

Actually I was thinking the submitter must be Californian .... /valley-girl "Prof. Moglen is, like, one of the most polished speakers anywhere, EVAR!"

Re:Polished?

[Neil_Brown]

Interesting link — although the content seems not to bear out the headline.

It looks like a disagreement over stance to me, with some parts highlighted in bold to emphasise the author's point that Eben held a different view to him. There's one "," but no "" or "" — it's not as if Eben was even saying something stupid or irrelevant, just seemingly not what the author wanted to hear for his article, and characterised Eben's answers as "yelling."

Re:Polished?

[Roger W Moore]

Prof. Moglen is also one of the most polished speakers anywhere, on any topic, ever.

Except when he's straight up yelling at interviewers?

...and given the video evidence except when he is speaking. Perhaps the submitter should give their second interview for a bit of comparison before making sweeping claims like this.

Re:Polished?

[fatphil]

Thanks for the link. I'm not surprised he was yelling at that interviewer, who had terminal cluelessness.

Anyone care to comment on the content?

[crazyjj]

Now that we've had the requisite 400 posts complaining about the video codec and the bad jokes, does anyone care to comment on what he said?

Anyone?

Re:Anyone care to comment on the content?

[SirGarlon]

No. If I wanted to watch video, I would be on YouTube, not Slashdot. I come to Slashdot to *read*.

Re:Anyone care to comment on the content?

[snsh]

Got bored after watching for 20 seconds. Mad at OP for saying this is "one of the most polished speakers, anywhere, on any topic" making me think this is some sort of William Shatner or RFK.

Re:Anyone care to comment on the content?

[tehcyder]

Now that we've had the requisite 400 posts complaining about the video codec and the bad jokes, does anyone care to comment on what he said?

Anyone?

I think it was something to do with software. But as there was no violence, no sex, no swearing and no explosions I can't say I was paying much attention. Slashdot really needs to liven up its videos. Also, the soundtrack was shit.

Upload to Youtube

[Anonymous Coward]

Seriously, Slashdot, please consider it. The player is better, and crucially it's trivial to download the content then strip out the audio.

Then like most lectures I can listen to it on headphones while doing so many other things away from the computer. This is a major asset.

Or just supply the ogg. That would work fine. Just please do it. The increase in utility is enormous.

It's ironic to hear commies talk about freedom!

[RocketRabbit]

Since this guy has apparently outed himself as an actual Communist, we should beware what he says. I appreciate free software, but he seems to actually believe that free software will advance a world Communist agenda.

Notice the use of qualifiers - I don't want to get sued by some asshole. I'd have to respond by forcing them into a wood chipper, feet first, while they were still alive.

Re:It's ironic to hear commies talk about freedom!

[RocketRabbit]

Social justice and progress are the new code words for communism. Of course, you now this already, being a communist yourself.

Here's a much better interview with Moglen

[Anonymous Coward]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HJCczbSF-B8

not necessarily

[Chirs]

In the case of Linux, you get billions of dollars worth of software for free. In that case, it can absolutely make sense to hire a programmer to do work on Linux (that will be contributed back to the community) because it enables other programmers to do more directly-lucrative work.

Also, there is a vast amount of programming that gets done to customize things for a particular domain. They're not going to sell it afterwards, they just need it in-house. In this context it can make financial sense to open-source it and allow others in the same boat to use it because then they contribute back and you can benefit from their changes.

works fine here

[Chirs]

firefox 4, fedora 4, flash 11.2

Airquotophobia

[Mehmet Kse]

When I see floating quotation marks, reputation of the person who made it drops below zero. Doesn't matter what he achieved before.

Re:Airquotophobia

[Jmc23]

Always nice to see fallacious thought at play.

Smart people know how to adapt and adopt.

Feel free to return to your hand washing.

Re:Most polished speaker...

[Jmc23]

Sheep follow shiny things, intelligent people actually know how to listen.