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Interviews: Bruce Perens Answers Your Questions
A while ago you had the chance to ask programmer and open source advocate Bruce Perens about the future of open source, its role in government, and a number of other questions. Below you'll find his answers and an update on what he's doing now.
Er...what's left in "open source" to talk about?
by xxxJonBoyxxx
Having lived through the entire lifecycle of "open source," it seems like its place in development communities and businesses is well-established, with a mix of different licensing and deployment models for whatever anyone wants to do. So...is there really anything interesting left in "open source" to talk about? (Software patents, maybe, but even that's picked up some case law.)
Perens: There's a lot to talk about, if you consider that “Open Source” is a way of introducing people to the ethos of Free Software as much as it is an economic and technical paradigm for software development. The ethos part of the job is hardly done.
There is always going to be a conflict of interest between a company's needs and your needs as a user or customer. Who has control? It should be you, rather than the company that made the software or a government that tells them what to put in it as the U.S. Government did with RSA Security.
Imagine the billions of dollars paid by companies that thought they were buying security while RSA had a clear conflict between the government's needs and those of the customer. Now, Heartbleed has shown us that there are some problems that don't have enough eyes, but I still can't think of any way to resolve the conflict-of-interest issue without giving everyone the right to read, modify, use, and redistribute software. A third-party can then audit and repair government-inserted security issues as Red Hat did by auditing GNU TLS and making their results and a patch public. If that same problem exists in proprietary systems – and I assure you it does – you can't see it, you can't fix it, you can't help yourself or others, and if others know something they can't help you. But we've not made much progress in selling that idea to the end-user.
State of the Union address / 16 this year
by Martin S.
The OSI is 16 this year and in many ways has experienced a difficult childhood but has grown stronger as a result. What challenges do you foresee for the future?
Perens: Please forgive me for interpolating your question a bit: the Open Source and Free Software movement are important to talk about, OSI the organization isn't. And of course Free Software is older than 16 years, it goes back to the genesis of software. We're still not where we need to be: to the point where everyone can run Free Software for every task, without the threat of litigation over patents, and without being locked in by digital rights management. Regarding Software Patents, we've backslid from the time that we were able to derail a thrust for a Pan-European unified software patent system. That's essentially happening without our objection now. Why? Because we're no longer seen as a movement for helping people and giving them control, we've positioned ourselves as merely an economic and software development paradigm. That was a bad move. Folks, pump up the philanthropic and helping-others aspects of what you do! You dis-empower yourselves and our movement when you fail to do so.
I think we've also backslid regarding DRM, as shown by the W3C accepting a DRM API into their standards process. Indeed, we've not made much progress regarding viewers and reader's rights to use any device, and to have a durable copy of their media that works today and forever because it isn't in some black-box format. A lot of us convert those Kindle books to open formats on the sly, just to preserve them for the future. We should be able to do that in the bright light of day without fear. Or we should not have to do it.
I have been encouraged by the Science Fiction writers. Very many of them refrain from use of DRM these days. Their revenues don't suffer. Neither did the revenues of my own book series. Unfortunately, readers other than the Sci-Fi market don't know what to ask for. Can we tell them convincingly?
I think we all need to think about what we're doing with our lives and how we can help improve electronic freedom for everyone. Together we have the power, we're just not using it.
Automation Technology Displacing Tomorrows Worker
by SethJohnson
I'd like to know your perspective on the future need for programmers while automation technology continues to displace workers in many industries.
Perens: I don't oppose automation displacing people from their jobs, but for a reason you might not expect. Human beings are demeaned when they perform “mechanical” tasks for their employment. They are not machines! Whether picking fruit or stock in a warehouse, People are not enriched by doing it and it does not exercise their unique capabilities as thinking entities. So, I'll ask a different question: When we can automate so much, why is it still necessary for so many to do the most demeaning sort of work just to feed, shelter, and clothe their families? Our society needs to move those people into rewarding work instead of the demeaning mechanical sort. We do a very good job at generating obscene amounts of wealth for a few while too many suffer. What are you doing about that?
Regarding whether programmers will be automated out of a job:
Once “computer” was a job title for people who did math all day, and the automation that so completely replaced them in that job was called an “electronic computer”. Those people moved on to other jobs, often as programmers.
What about the future need for programmers? There was a big, government-funded scientific research project to develop “automatic programming”. It produced what we today call the “compiler”. It reduced the price of programming, but that actually increased the demand for programmers.
The job market for programmers will dry up when all of the programs that a mass of people would ever desire have been written and perfected, regardless of how automated our tools become and how powerful future computers may be. I'm not sure that such an end of need is a possible condition. It's sort of like saying that there will be no further need for horse coach designers once the coach is perfected. We stopped needing what we could imagine in the 1830's, and went on to something else.
If we ever arrive at artificial general intelligence, we may obsolete human beings as no more than an evolutionary step on the way to something else. But that is only one of many possible futures, and not an impending one.
Obamacare
by MouseTheLuckyDog
Should the software used for Obamacare be open source. I don't just mean the website, but also things like the software controlling pharmaceuticals, X-rays, MRI, maintaining health records etc. ?
Perens: Allow me a slight diversion to talk about Obamacare. My wife, son, and I have each individually been denied private health insurance although we're healthy, for what is essentially medical trivia. One insurance company rejected us on the grounds of my son having a certain medical test, even though he passed it. I own my one-man company, and until this year had no way to provide my family with insurance. Fortunately for us my wife was able to get it through her employer, but we would have been sunk if she had lost her job.
I think Obamacare will do one really big thing that truly scares the Republican Party. It will free up millions of smart people to be self-employed, who formerly stayed in the corporate world. These folks are in their 40's and 50's, have families to take care of, but previously could not reliably get insurance on their own. The small-business revolution will come not because these people actually buy care through an exchange rather than getting it through a spouse's employer, but because they know that they can get it when they need it.
The small business revolution that Obamacare drives will create disruptive technology and thus economic churn as income moves from older established companies to more new ones. This shift from mega-business to smaller business erodes the Republican money base, and that's why the Republican Party must kill Obamacare at all costs, regardless of the damage to their own people.
Now, what about the software that is used for “safety of life and property” applications? This isn't just health systems under Obamacare, it's the stuff that operates elevators, aircraft and air traffic control, your automobile, anything where a failure can hurt people.
Karen Sandler does a great talk about this called “Unchain my Heart”. She has an implanted pacemaker due to cardiomyopathy (enlarged heart), and was justifiably reluctant to have one with proprietary software implanted.
There is no question that software failures have killed people going back to Therac-25 and probably earlier, and will continue to do so.
Software that is in life-and-property-critical applications should be disclosed. It can have all of the power of copyright protection, but it should be possible to audit it. Everyone should be able to discuss its issues, with quotes of the applicable source code as needed, on-line and under public view. If the security of your Bluetooth-enabled pacemaker is a crock (as embedded software so often is), we should be able to tell you about it, and get something done.
My experience is that people code better when the whole world is looking over their shoulder.
Credit for the OSS movement
by Anonymous Coward
Some years ago, around 2006, I attended a talk from Eric S. Raymond at a venue large enough to accommodate his massive ego and still leave room for attendees. He informed that he had essentially given HP their Open Source strategy. Your name was not mentioned once. I am curious what were your discussions like at HP during your time there, specifically in regards to the ideals of Free Software versus Open Source. My question specifically: What legal and financial hurdles and impacts, if any, did HP (and other companies) face when deciding between Open Source and Free Software models? I.e., what proprietary assets/IP could not be completely "freed"? What were the savings/costs associated with the decisions?
Perens: At some point I accumulated enough credit for achievements that it became unnecessary to fight over it :-) . But I am hardly without flaws. Most visible might be that I want to get things done and don't mind trampling others if that's what it takes. I try to keep my ego down enough so that I get through those narrow doors.
The worst problems I saw at HP had little to do with Open Source. What I remember most was the sadness. There were and are many smart people there, and so many of us were conscious that the company was in a sort of death spiral and that we couldn't do anything about it. The “pretexting” scandal was to the discredit of the board, the general counsel actually took the 5th in front of Congress on national television! Carly (the CEO) asked all of the employees to take a voluntary pay cut in the same month that she and other Board officers sold tens of Millions of dollars of HP stock. I remember my boss (a Section Manager, now the CTO) announcing at a meeting that an employee had gotten a “Reinvention Memo”. That meant lay-off, a sarcastic re-framing of HP's “Reinvent” motto that showed how even upper managers like him were in despair. There was a series of ill-advised acquisitions of second-best or declining companies that HP failed to turn around, and then sold for cents on the dollar two years after acquiring them. The Compaq merger put the company at the very top of a business with vanishingly-small margins.
There was one really bad day that I guess is safe to talk about now, more than 10 years later, because the information is already in the public and thus no longer subject to NDA: Microsoft showed HP their plans to sue the Open Source projects for the Linux Kernel, Samba, Sendmail, and a list of other projects. Someone immediately shot me an HP VP's memo recounting that meeting and concluding that we should back off of Open Source before the lawsuits started. When I passed it to my boss, I was told to keep it quiet. But I was hired to be an Open Source community leader first, and an HP officer second, and keeping quiet about that meant betraying the Open Source developer community. I just hated that and it poisoned my involvement with HP.
Microsoft eventually used SCO as a proxy to achieve what it disclosed to HP that day. I'd been warned long before that happened, and could do nothing until SCO announced their damaging but ultimately unsuccessful jihad against Linux.
What I think is worth remembering about HP is that it was once the great tech company that people wanted to work for, as Apple or Google might be for many today. I think a lot of what made it great left with Agilent. The Test and Measurement business was a low-volume, high-margin business that required lots of too-highly-paid old smart people who worked in expensive labs in Palo Alto, California. That became the most costly place to do anything largely due to HP's own success. But Test and Measurement was also the brain-trust of the company, and lent its creativity to all of HP's other aspects. So we lost a lot, I think, when Agilent was spun off of HP.
HP's problem regarding Open Source and Linux was that systems running Linux competed with other HP lines running HP-UX or Microsoft, and HP was structured as Organizational Silos. Each line had its own sales-people, and different lines competed with each other for the same customer. HP-9000 folks were always complaining because Linux undercut HP-UX and thus HP-9000, as were folks who sold Microsoft Windows systems based on x86. If I said anything in the press about Open Source or Linux, a customer would ask one of those single-line sales-people about it, and it would come back to my boss as a complaint rather than a sales opportunity.
HP was always to some extent in Microsoft's pocket, although they were also aware that Microsoft had screwed them and would continue to do so. HP de-emphasized further development of the HP 9000 hardware because Microsoft had told them in the late 80's that they were soon to have an enterprise-quality NT. HP believed it, but MS failed to deliver for a decade. That lost HP Billions while Sun Microsystems took the engineering workstation market from HP. The HP officer who made that decision of course went on to be a Microsoft executive.
What we did achieve at HP was a good process for deciding what to do with Open Source when individual opportunities came up. If you wanted to incorporate Open Source in a product, or you had a business reason to Open Source something, we resolved the legal issues, the community issues, we even handled some security aspects and achieved a reasonable level of reuse. That could all be achieved by middle managers. So, everybody in the company knew that it was OK to use Open Source, but there was a process you had to go through. It wasn't particularly expensive, it did sometimes sink multiple days of some engineer in doing paperwork, but that's just due diligence and we ended up on a better legal footing when we used Open Source than otherwise.
There were things we decided not to Open Source because there was no good business reason for doing so. We weren't UNICEF, so there had to be a business reason for everything. There were times when legacy customers would have gained benefit if we brought one of HP's nine legacy operating systems to Open Source, but untangling the proprietary software that originated with third parties from the rest was too difficult. There were a few times when it was decided not to Open Source a legacy product because we were afraid that IBM might use it to sell their hardware against ours. Once that happened with a system that had only 5000 existing customers, and it would have been better for the customers for HP to open it but the decision – not mine – was not to do so.
I've since helped other companies start their own internal Open Source Process, and still do so today.
What we never achieved within HP, what I never had the power to do, was: to get HP to completely stand behind any innovative product regardless of what that meant for old-line products, to make innovation the #1 job of the company, and to grow a brand-new company from the old one every year that they were in business. They needed to embrace disruptive technologies as a pioneer rather than have the disruption done to HP by competitors. I think they tried to kill the Silo organizational structure after I left, I don't know how successful that was.
Q3 for BP
by postbigbang
What are your five biggest fears for safety on the Internet today, and where do you believe responsible admins should put their efforts for those five?
Perens: Centralization: too much depends on too few companies. It's not entirely a matter of architecture, it's a matter of getting customers to distribute themselves. So maybe it's a social engineering problem to a great extent.
Conflict of interest: Back to those companies again. They are operating your internet infrastructure, and their interest isn't yours. I found out today that my kid's school is using Turnitin. The problems with that are well covered at Wikipedia. We need a way to provide sustainable infrastructure that works for the customer, instead of exploits them. I'm for non-profit common carriers and services, using Open Source.
Politics: we still don't have much of a footing, despite our numbers, and even our wealth! We need to get more of the people we listen to and admire into elected offices, and in communications regulators like ITU and FCC. Way too much of the leadership there is from the exploitation side.
Privacy: I am afraid we're going to shoot ourselves in the foot pursuing it. We're rapidly heading for a locked-down Internet as IETF pushes for an HTTPS-only web. From there it's only a very short step to certified browsers, user digital signature requirements, Open Source and anonymity both locked out of the system. Yes, the metadata thing is unsettling, but we also have to be clear that we employ spies to work for our country and to help protect us, and they have an important job to do. We need to work on the politics of regulation and oversight of our nation's espionage rather than the nerd approach, which is to attempt to treat a social problem as a bug in the network software.
Economics: If OpenSSL had been dual-licensed AGPL3 and commercial, we would probably not have Heartbleed. There would have been money from its commercial users. Imagine companies like Intuit using OpenSSL and not giving much back to its maintenance at all! That was a mistake. IMO dual-licensing has a bad reputation because of MySQL, and also because some folks at Red Hat have promoted against it. We need to revisit it.
Moderation
by symbolset
Do you find your views on blended/mixed license models evolving over time? Is it time to lay down the pitchforks some of the time?
Perens: PR isn't really a pitchfork. It's always been about people who are calling something Open Source when it is not. Not against mixed models. If you want to have something that has some community participation and doesn't meet the Open Source Definition, don't call it Open Source or Free Software and nobody will pursue you with pitchforks. We may continue to say our way is better, but that's fair.
In that vein, keep in mind that Creative Commons is not Open Source. A few, actually a minority, of creative commons licenses are. About the only right that all Creative Commons licenses have in common is the right to read.
Open source HARDWARE
by unixisc
What are your views on Open source hardware? Is it as important as open source software, or less important, or not important at all?
Perens: Let's please call it Open Hardware, in the interest of simplicity and good marketing. Unless you are interested in calling it Free-Libre Open Source Hardware or FLOSSHW. I bet there's somebody that silly.
I think it's important. But there's an important thing we should be aware of about Open Hardware. It's backwards in a way. Richard Stallman's Free Software movement opposed software being copyrighted. Copyright does not, for the most part, apply to hardware designs because they are functional (read about CAI v. Altai to understand this). Patents apply to hardware designs, but most Open Hardware designers never pursue a patent on their designs. What then do they license to others?
It turns out that we have a group of people at CERN, and one of my favorite lawyers and Yahoo, and even me, trying to add restrictions to something that is, for the most part, already in the public domain. And it came to me that this was backwards, and that we could be working against our own interest that way.
We all get to use the vast body of electronic designs that we've read about in magazines since the dawn of ham radio. Now, imagine if those were suddenly copyrighted and under enforceable licenses.
The problem is that when we start licensing things that are actually in the public domain, we create norms that the courts take seriously. And they start enforcing licenses on things that could not be licensed before. We really can write new law when what we do gets to a court case, and we want to be careful what law that is. If we were responsible for taking hardware designs from public domain to copyrighted status, we'd be shooting ourselves in the foot.
So, for a while I was uncomfortable with my own Open Hardware evangelism. Was I doing the right thing? I think I've worked out the right path now and will be warning the community about this issue.
There's also a lot of confusion about how effective Open Hardware licenses are. If you make a 3D printer and you think your license keeps other people from manufacturing copies, sorry! It does not protect your design unless you have filed patents. Copyright won't do it. It might keep people from selling the plans, but not the devices.
We also have a bunch of people who use “CC BY-NC” licenses on their designs and then call it Open Source Hardware! Funny how eager they are to call it “Open Source” and then they don't even follow the rules of Open Source. Open Source includes the right to use in any way. If it's “no commercial use allowed” like CC BY-NC, it's not Open Source.
So, there's room for a lot of education there.
Re:How do we address the weaknesses of Open Source
by Tiger4
More to the point, how do you reply to the criticism and practice that Open Source is worthless because there is no company to back it? I run into this all the time. First, no one stop shop to get tech support from if we have trouble. Second, No company to go after for liability. Third, no company to maintain regular bugfixes and general currency and freshness. We don't have a policy against Open Source, we just have a standard the vast majority of (perfectly adequate) software can never meet.
Perens: Well, I bet your employer doesn't do as well as Google. Or any number of companies that make money hand over fist while using an Open Source infrastructure. So, I thought I could stop evangelizing on this issue. But maybe not.
Having a shop to get tech support from is important. But you guys are kidding yourselves if you think there isn't one. Even IBM will do that. Indeed, they make a great deal of money implementing and maintaining solutions that are glued-together Open Source programs for the most part.
Or is it that you want a different company for every different program, like in the proprietary world. That's not so nice when you have to use them, is it? You spend the day trying to convince them that their product is broken and having to deal with them pointing fingers at each other rather than fixing your problem. Sometimes it's nicer when one contractor really can fix all of the pieces. How do you do that without Open Source?
The liability issue is a red herring. How often have you actually sued a software provider and collected all of your damages and court costs? Many of them would go bankrupt first. I am an expert witness on some of those cases, and they cost so much to fight that you lose even if you win.
But there are the big vendors like Microsoft, you're safe with them because they have the cash, right? How often do you hear of a customer actually collecting court costs and damages from them? Go read your EULA.
If you actually want liability that works, you need the vendor to provide insurance-backed support for your individual account. That means the insurance policy covers your account, not their other 10,000 customers, and it persists with you as the beneficiary if the vendor goes away. Most companies aren't willing to pay for that.
Regarding regular bug-fixes and freshness, this is another thing that it's difficult to get for proprietary software. Do you really know what the bugs are and if they are being fixed? I bet that information is a trade secret. This is an area in which it's easier to work with Open Source.
Again, I didn't think I still had to make this sale. Usually, the companies that think they don't use Open Source these days really do, it's just that engineering hasn't told management. I get called in to help the managers make policy when they find out.
Gun Ownership
by Tenebrousedge
You are on record as being rather firmly against private ownership of firearms. Frankly, I thought this extremity of anti-gun zealotry was a Republican myth, a straw man used to rile the rabble. I understand that people in less civilized territories will on rare occasion use guns for murder and atrocity, I am not aware of this impulse being a general hazard of gun ownership.
I'm from Alaska. All the people that I know who have guns have only ever used them for hunting. I'm less sympathetic to those who can acquire an alternate hobby besides shooting, but there are yet many places where hunting is a means of subsistence. I've known many people to bow-hunt, but I suspect if your dinner depended on your marksmanship you might prefer the more effective instrument. Does your plan involve screwing hunters as well as the millions of other lawful citizens?
Originally we are a revolutionary state, and I believe the People yet preserve the right to revolution. Furthermore, Mao was right about the origins of political power: violence is the defining characteristic of government. Do you believe that the 'tree of liberty' is no longer hematophagic? Else, by what means are we intended to obtain and keep self-governance?
Perens: I'll start by calling B.S. on your dialogue above. The existence of disapproval of the private ownership of firearms isn't a “Republican myth” unless you have never heard of the United Kingdom, where – the horrors! - private ownership of handguns and the like is not allowed. You should get out of the county sometime. Indeed, you'd have to be living in Plato's cave to be ignorant of Lincoln, the Kennedys, Martin Luther King and his mom, poor congressperson Giffords deprived of part of her brain and the power of speech, and 11,000 firearm murders in the U.S. every year. So thanks for taking advantage of my interview to give a little deceptive speech rather than just ask a question.
The last time I was in Denali, where 1000 pound grizzly bears would walk right in front of me down the main shopping street in town, I felt the urge to carry some large-bore repeating rifle. Not that it's easy to stop a grizzly. But I understand that out in the boonies, it's different than it is in Oakland.
There's a crime scene with some teenager shot dead a short drive from where I live, almost any evening. And unfortunately there is no shortage of people who decide to find a dozen innocent folks, often kids, to snuff before they take their own lives or persuade a cop to do it for them.
What of my right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness when every nut-case seems to have been issued sufficient automatic weaponry to cut all that I love right out of this world?
I don't have firearms in my home, and my kid doesn't get more than a BB-gun to plink targets with, because I don't trust myself to be 100% sane for every moment of the rest of my life. People aren't built that way.
I learned that from my dad. He killed some Nazi soldiers and brought home a Luger, with the firing pin carefully removed and destroyed. So we had an authentic human trophy in the house, but not one that would fire. Dad was a reserve and was activated for both WWII and Korea. He had a Purple Heart, a bravery medal, and a panel chock full of campaign ribbons. But he wouldn't trust himself to be 100% sane for the rest of his days and keep a functional firearm at home.
Each society decides on the balance between liberty and protecting the weak from the strong. My problem with firearms is that they make you too strong for the safety of the people around you, and you are not capable of rationally wielding that strength throughout every moment of your life. People do break, and when they do, things happen for which every one of us should be sorry. So yes, I do believe the balance as it exists in the United States today is wrong. If you are not a subsistence hunter and you don't face ursus arctos and maritimus when you take out the garbage, I would indeed have you disable your weapons by leading the barrel, which is a more permanent means of disabling a firearm than just removing the firing pin.
In Jefferson's time, when individuals working together could fight off a regiment, individual ownership of firearms was an implicit limit on the power of the state. No longer can any number of people weigh their armor against that of a modern military, rather than pick at its edges dishonorably with IEDs. The Tree of Liberty today is renewed by the blood of journalists, not marksmen.
I grew up reading Heinlein, like so many of us, and was captured by the romantic image of the armed freeholder. R.A.H. didn't bother to preface his stories with any mention that he was a failure as a miner and too sickly for most of his life to survive without society's protection. For him, those stories were wish-fulfillment. Heinlein invented some aspects of modern warfare (his contribution to the Operations Room or CIC is most cited), further arming society against the individual and killing his own dream for good if it wasn't dead already.
Perhaps there are real freeholders protecting their rights with their guns somewhere, but mostly there are fat old guys with a 300-channel cable TV package and some freeholder fantasy going. Kids don't have to die for the sake of some old fart's toys.
It's damn past time that the anti-firearm folks got as much lobbying power as the NRA. There are enough of us. Count me in if you can make that work.
Thanks for the interview, folks!
Perens: I'd like to tell people what I'm up to this year.
At the moment, I'm CEO of a startup called Algoram. We make a power-efficient mobile software-defined-radio transceiver, which is to dual-licensed Open Hardware and commercial with some tricks that let us both be Open and preserve our revenue, and we're building dual-licensed Open Source and commercial software for digital radio communications. The radio can use any modulation on frequencies of 50 to 1000 MHz, although it's not made for spread-spectrum. Its major market will be commercial and municipal two-way radio, where they don't particularly want Open Source, but hams are experimenters and their Open Source development helps us.
A partner and I have funded the company out-of-pocket through getting our first product working. It's better to ask for venture funding when you already have something to sell.
I'm also operating my consulting firm to pay the bills. I work with law firms and companies that need help with Open Source. Sometimes they need policy and processes, some have been GPL violators who need a path to compliance. I am the bridge between law and engineering, explaining each side to the other, training engineers to identify legal problems in software and work with attorneys effectively, rewriting part of a customer's product to cure an infringement. I get to do good (by helping companies to comply with Free Software licenses) and pay the bills too.
I'm not doing the Free Software Evangelist job very much this year. Taking a break after working on this since about 1991 feels good. I haven't changed what I believe, but I won't be traveling much for Free Software conferences in 2014 and I've turned off a lot of writing and mailing-list participation. I will be back to that, but right now I'm focused on running a company and making something new.
by xxxJonBoyxxx
Having lived through the entire lifecycle of "open source," it seems like its place in development communities and businesses is well-established, with a mix of different licensing and deployment models for whatever anyone wants to do. So...is there really anything interesting left in "open source" to talk about? (Software patents, maybe, but even that's picked up some case law.)
Perens: There's a lot to talk about, if you consider that “Open Source” is a way of introducing people to the ethos of Free Software as much as it is an economic and technical paradigm for software development. The ethos part of the job is hardly done.
There is always going to be a conflict of interest between a company's needs and your needs as a user or customer. Who has control? It should be you, rather than the company that made the software or a government that tells them what to put in it as the U.S. Government did with RSA Security.
Imagine the billions of dollars paid by companies that thought they were buying security while RSA had a clear conflict between the government's needs and those of the customer. Now, Heartbleed has shown us that there are some problems that don't have enough eyes, but I still can't think of any way to resolve the conflict-of-interest issue without giving everyone the right to read, modify, use, and redistribute software. A third-party can then audit and repair government-inserted security issues as Red Hat did by auditing GNU TLS and making their results and a patch public. If that same problem exists in proprietary systems – and I assure you it does – you can't see it, you can't fix it, you can't help yourself or others, and if others know something they can't help you. But we've not made much progress in selling that idea to the end-user.
State of the Union address / 16 this year
by Martin S.
The OSI is 16 this year and in many ways has experienced a difficult childhood but has grown stronger as a result. What challenges do you foresee for the future?
Perens: Please forgive me for interpolating your question a bit: the Open Source and Free Software movement are important to talk about, OSI the organization isn't. And of course Free Software is older than 16 years, it goes back to the genesis of software. We're still not where we need to be: to the point where everyone can run Free Software for every task, without the threat of litigation over patents, and without being locked in by digital rights management. Regarding Software Patents, we've backslid from the time that we were able to derail a thrust for a Pan-European unified software patent system. That's essentially happening without our objection now. Why? Because we're no longer seen as a movement for helping people and giving them control, we've positioned ourselves as merely an economic and software development paradigm. That was a bad move. Folks, pump up the philanthropic and helping-others aspects of what you do! You dis-empower yourselves and our movement when you fail to do so.
I think we've also backslid regarding DRM, as shown by the W3C accepting a DRM API into their standards process. Indeed, we've not made much progress regarding viewers and reader's rights to use any device, and to have a durable copy of their media that works today and forever because it isn't in some black-box format. A lot of us convert those Kindle books to open formats on the sly, just to preserve them for the future. We should be able to do that in the bright light of day without fear. Or we should not have to do it.
I have been encouraged by the Science Fiction writers. Very many of them refrain from use of DRM these days. Their revenues don't suffer. Neither did the revenues of my own book series. Unfortunately, readers other than the Sci-Fi market don't know what to ask for. Can we tell them convincingly?
I think we all need to think about what we're doing with our lives and how we can help improve electronic freedom for everyone. Together we have the power, we're just not using it.
Automation Technology Displacing Tomorrows Worker
by SethJohnson
I'd like to know your perspective on the future need for programmers while automation technology continues to displace workers in many industries.
Perens: I don't oppose automation displacing people from their jobs, but for a reason you might not expect. Human beings are demeaned when they perform “mechanical” tasks for their employment. They are not machines! Whether picking fruit or stock in a warehouse, People are not enriched by doing it and it does not exercise their unique capabilities as thinking entities. So, I'll ask a different question: When we can automate so much, why is it still necessary for so many to do the most demeaning sort of work just to feed, shelter, and clothe their families? Our society needs to move those people into rewarding work instead of the demeaning mechanical sort. We do a very good job at generating obscene amounts of wealth for a few while too many suffer. What are you doing about that?
Regarding whether programmers will be automated out of a job:
Once “computer” was a job title for people who did math all day, and the automation that so completely replaced them in that job was called an “electronic computer”. Those people moved on to other jobs, often as programmers.
What about the future need for programmers? There was a big, government-funded scientific research project to develop “automatic programming”. It produced what we today call the “compiler”. It reduced the price of programming, but that actually increased the demand for programmers.
The job market for programmers will dry up when all of the programs that a mass of people would ever desire have been written and perfected, regardless of how automated our tools become and how powerful future computers may be. I'm not sure that such an end of need is a possible condition. It's sort of like saying that there will be no further need for horse coach designers once the coach is perfected. We stopped needing what we could imagine in the 1830's, and went on to something else.
If we ever arrive at artificial general intelligence, we may obsolete human beings as no more than an evolutionary step on the way to something else. But that is only one of many possible futures, and not an impending one.
Obamacare
by MouseTheLuckyDog
Should the software used for Obamacare be open source. I don't just mean the website, but also things like the software controlling pharmaceuticals, X-rays, MRI, maintaining health records etc. ?
Perens: Allow me a slight diversion to talk about Obamacare. My wife, son, and I have each individually been denied private health insurance although we're healthy, for what is essentially medical trivia. One insurance company rejected us on the grounds of my son having a certain medical test, even though he passed it. I own my one-man company, and until this year had no way to provide my family with insurance. Fortunately for us my wife was able to get it through her employer, but we would have been sunk if she had lost her job.
I think Obamacare will do one really big thing that truly scares the Republican Party. It will free up millions of smart people to be self-employed, who formerly stayed in the corporate world. These folks are in their 40's and 50's, have families to take care of, but previously could not reliably get insurance on their own. The small-business revolution will come not because these people actually buy care through an exchange rather than getting it through a spouse's employer, but because they know that they can get it when they need it.
The small business revolution that Obamacare drives will create disruptive technology and thus economic churn as income moves from older established companies to more new ones. This shift from mega-business to smaller business erodes the Republican money base, and that's why the Republican Party must kill Obamacare at all costs, regardless of the damage to their own people.
Now, what about the software that is used for “safety of life and property” applications? This isn't just health systems under Obamacare, it's the stuff that operates elevators, aircraft and air traffic control, your automobile, anything where a failure can hurt people.
Karen Sandler does a great talk about this called “Unchain my Heart”. She has an implanted pacemaker due to cardiomyopathy (enlarged heart), and was justifiably reluctant to have one with proprietary software implanted.
There is no question that software failures have killed people going back to Therac-25 and probably earlier, and will continue to do so.
Software that is in life-and-property-critical applications should be disclosed. It can have all of the power of copyright protection, but it should be possible to audit it. Everyone should be able to discuss its issues, with quotes of the applicable source code as needed, on-line and under public view. If the security of your Bluetooth-enabled pacemaker is a crock (as embedded software so often is), we should be able to tell you about it, and get something done.
My experience is that people code better when the whole world is looking over their shoulder.
Credit for the OSS movement
by Anonymous Coward
Some years ago, around 2006, I attended a talk from Eric S. Raymond at a venue large enough to accommodate his massive ego and still leave room for attendees. He informed that he had essentially given HP their Open Source strategy. Your name was not mentioned once. I am curious what were your discussions like at HP during your time there, specifically in regards to the ideals of Free Software versus Open Source. My question specifically: What legal and financial hurdles and impacts, if any, did HP (and other companies) face when deciding between Open Source and Free Software models? I.e., what proprietary assets/IP could not be completely "freed"? What were the savings/costs associated with the decisions?
Perens: At some point I accumulated enough credit for achievements that it became unnecessary to fight over it :-) . But I am hardly without flaws. Most visible might be that I want to get things done and don't mind trampling others if that's what it takes. I try to keep my ego down enough so that I get through those narrow doors.
The worst problems I saw at HP had little to do with Open Source. What I remember most was the sadness. There were and are many smart people there, and so many of us were conscious that the company was in a sort of death spiral and that we couldn't do anything about it. The “pretexting” scandal was to the discredit of the board, the general counsel actually took the 5th in front of Congress on national television! Carly (the CEO) asked all of the employees to take a voluntary pay cut in the same month that she and other Board officers sold tens of Millions of dollars of HP stock. I remember my boss (a Section Manager, now the CTO) announcing at a meeting that an employee had gotten a “Reinvention Memo”. That meant lay-off, a sarcastic re-framing of HP's “Reinvent” motto that showed how even upper managers like him were in despair. There was a series of ill-advised acquisitions of second-best or declining companies that HP failed to turn around, and then sold for cents on the dollar two years after acquiring them. The Compaq merger put the company at the very top of a business with vanishingly-small margins.
There was one really bad day that I guess is safe to talk about now, more than 10 years later, because the information is already in the public and thus no longer subject to NDA: Microsoft showed HP their plans to sue the Open Source projects for the Linux Kernel, Samba, Sendmail, and a list of other projects. Someone immediately shot me an HP VP's memo recounting that meeting and concluding that we should back off of Open Source before the lawsuits started. When I passed it to my boss, I was told to keep it quiet. But I was hired to be an Open Source community leader first, and an HP officer second, and keeping quiet about that meant betraying the Open Source developer community. I just hated that and it poisoned my involvement with HP.
Microsoft eventually used SCO as a proxy to achieve what it disclosed to HP that day. I'd been warned long before that happened, and could do nothing until SCO announced their damaging but ultimately unsuccessful jihad against Linux.
What I think is worth remembering about HP is that it was once the great tech company that people wanted to work for, as Apple or Google might be for many today. I think a lot of what made it great left with Agilent. The Test and Measurement business was a low-volume, high-margin business that required lots of too-highly-paid old smart people who worked in expensive labs in Palo Alto, California. That became the most costly place to do anything largely due to HP's own success. But Test and Measurement was also the brain-trust of the company, and lent its creativity to all of HP's other aspects. So we lost a lot, I think, when Agilent was spun off of HP.
HP's problem regarding Open Source and Linux was that systems running Linux competed with other HP lines running HP-UX or Microsoft, and HP was structured as Organizational Silos. Each line had its own sales-people, and different lines competed with each other for the same customer. HP-9000 folks were always complaining because Linux undercut HP-UX and thus HP-9000, as were folks who sold Microsoft Windows systems based on x86. If I said anything in the press about Open Source or Linux, a customer would ask one of those single-line sales-people about it, and it would come back to my boss as a complaint rather than a sales opportunity.
HP was always to some extent in Microsoft's pocket, although they were also aware that Microsoft had screwed them and would continue to do so. HP de-emphasized further development of the HP 9000 hardware because Microsoft had told them in the late 80's that they were soon to have an enterprise-quality NT. HP believed it, but MS failed to deliver for a decade. That lost HP Billions while Sun Microsystems took the engineering workstation market from HP. The HP officer who made that decision of course went on to be a Microsoft executive.
What we did achieve at HP was a good process for deciding what to do with Open Source when individual opportunities came up. If you wanted to incorporate Open Source in a product, or you had a business reason to Open Source something, we resolved the legal issues, the community issues, we even handled some security aspects and achieved a reasonable level of reuse. That could all be achieved by middle managers. So, everybody in the company knew that it was OK to use Open Source, but there was a process you had to go through. It wasn't particularly expensive, it did sometimes sink multiple days of some engineer in doing paperwork, but that's just due diligence and we ended up on a better legal footing when we used Open Source than otherwise.
There were things we decided not to Open Source because there was no good business reason for doing so. We weren't UNICEF, so there had to be a business reason for everything. There were times when legacy customers would have gained benefit if we brought one of HP's nine legacy operating systems to Open Source, but untangling the proprietary software that originated with third parties from the rest was too difficult. There were a few times when it was decided not to Open Source a legacy product because we were afraid that IBM might use it to sell their hardware against ours. Once that happened with a system that had only 5000 existing customers, and it would have been better for the customers for HP to open it but the decision – not mine – was not to do so.
I've since helped other companies start their own internal Open Source Process, and still do so today.
What we never achieved within HP, what I never had the power to do, was: to get HP to completely stand behind any innovative product regardless of what that meant for old-line products, to make innovation the #1 job of the company, and to grow a brand-new company from the old one every year that they were in business. They needed to embrace disruptive technologies as a pioneer rather than have the disruption done to HP by competitors. I think they tried to kill the Silo organizational structure after I left, I don't know how successful that was.
Q3 for BP
by postbigbang
What are your five biggest fears for safety on the Internet today, and where do you believe responsible admins should put their efforts for those five?
Perens: Centralization: too much depends on too few companies. It's not entirely a matter of architecture, it's a matter of getting customers to distribute themselves. So maybe it's a social engineering problem to a great extent.
Conflict of interest: Back to those companies again. They are operating your internet infrastructure, and their interest isn't yours. I found out today that my kid's school is using Turnitin. The problems with that are well covered at Wikipedia. We need a way to provide sustainable infrastructure that works for the customer, instead of exploits them. I'm for non-profit common carriers and services, using Open Source.
Politics: we still don't have much of a footing, despite our numbers, and even our wealth! We need to get more of the people we listen to and admire into elected offices, and in communications regulators like ITU and FCC. Way too much of the leadership there is from the exploitation side.
Privacy: I am afraid we're going to shoot ourselves in the foot pursuing it. We're rapidly heading for a locked-down Internet as IETF pushes for an HTTPS-only web. From there it's only a very short step to certified browsers, user digital signature requirements, Open Source and anonymity both locked out of the system. Yes, the metadata thing is unsettling, but we also have to be clear that we employ spies to work for our country and to help protect us, and they have an important job to do. We need to work on the politics of regulation and oversight of our nation's espionage rather than the nerd approach, which is to attempt to treat a social problem as a bug in the network software.
Economics: If OpenSSL had been dual-licensed AGPL3 and commercial, we would probably not have Heartbleed. There would have been money from its commercial users. Imagine companies like Intuit using OpenSSL and not giving much back to its maintenance at all! That was a mistake. IMO dual-licensing has a bad reputation because of MySQL, and also because some folks at Red Hat have promoted against it. We need to revisit it.
Moderation
by symbolset
Do you find your views on blended/mixed license models evolving over time? Is it time to lay down the pitchforks some of the time?
Perens: PR isn't really a pitchfork. It's always been about people who are calling something Open Source when it is not. Not against mixed models. If you want to have something that has some community participation and doesn't meet the Open Source Definition, don't call it Open Source or Free Software and nobody will pursue you with pitchforks. We may continue to say our way is better, but that's fair.
In that vein, keep in mind that Creative Commons is not Open Source. A few, actually a minority, of creative commons licenses are. About the only right that all Creative Commons licenses have in common is the right to read.
Open source HARDWARE
by unixisc
What are your views on Open source hardware? Is it as important as open source software, or less important, or not important at all?
Perens: Let's please call it Open Hardware, in the interest of simplicity and good marketing. Unless you are interested in calling it Free-Libre Open Source Hardware or FLOSSHW. I bet there's somebody that silly.
I think it's important. But there's an important thing we should be aware of about Open Hardware. It's backwards in a way. Richard Stallman's Free Software movement opposed software being copyrighted. Copyright does not, for the most part, apply to hardware designs because they are functional (read about CAI v. Altai to understand this). Patents apply to hardware designs, but most Open Hardware designers never pursue a patent on their designs. What then do they license to others?
It turns out that we have a group of people at CERN, and one of my favorite lawyers and Yahoo, and even me, trying to add restrictions to something that is, for the most part, already in the public domain. And it came to me that this was backwards, and that we could be working against our own interest that way.
We all get to use the vast body of electronic designs that we've read about in magazines since the dawn of ham radio. Now, imagine if those were suddenly copyrighted and under enforceable licenses.
The problem is that when we start licensing things that are actually in the public domain, we create norms that the courts take seriously. And they start enforcing licenses on things that could not be licensed before. We really can write new law when what we do gets to a court case, and we want to be careful what law that is. If we were responsible for taking hardware designs from public domain to copyrighted status, we'd be shooting ourselves in the foot.
So, for a while I was uncomfortable with my own Open Hardware evangelism. Was I doing the right thing? I think I've worked out the right path now and will be warning the community about this issue.
There's also a lot of confusion about how effective Open Hardware licenses are. If you make a 3D printer and you think your license keeps other people from manufacturing copies, sorry! It does not protect your design unless you have filed patents. Copyright won't do it. It might keep people from selling the plans, but not the devices.
We also have a bunch of people who use “CC BY-NC” licenses on their designs and then call it Open Source Hardware! Funny how eager they are to call it “Open Source” and then they don't even follow the rules of Open Source. Open Source includes the right to use in any way. If it's “no commercial use allowed” like CC BY-NC, it's not Open Source.
So, there's room for a lot of education there.
Re:How do we address the weaknesses of Open Source
by Tiger4
More to the point, how do you reply to the criticism and practice that Open Source is worthless because there is no company to back it? I run into this all the time. First, no one stop shop to get tech support from if we have trouble. Second, No company to go after for liability. Third, no company to maintain regular bugfixes and general currency and freshness. We don't have a policy against Open Source, we just have a standard the vast majority of (perfectly adequate) software can never meet.
Perens: Well, I bet your employer doesn't do as well as Google. Or any number of companies that make money hand over fist while using an Open Source infrastructure. So, I thought I could stop evangelizing on this issue. But maybe not.
Having a shop to get tech support from is important. But you guys are kidding yourselves if you think there isn't one. Even IBM will do that. Indeed, they make a great deal of money implementing and maintaining solutions that are glued-together Open Source programs for the most part.
Or is it that you want a different company for every different program, like in the proprietary world. That's not so nice when you have to use them, is it? You spend the day trying to convince them that their product is broken and having to deal with them pointing fingers at each other rather than fixing your problem. Sometimes it's nicer when one contractor really can fix all of the pieces. How do you do that without Open Source?
The liability issue is a red herring. How often have you actually sued a software provider and collected all of your damages and court costs? Many of them would go bankrupt first. I am an expert witness on some of those cases, and they cost so much to fight that you lose even if you win.
But there are the big vendors like Microsoft, you're safe with them because they have the cash, right? How often do you hear of a customer actually collecting court costs and damages from them? Go read your EULA.
If you actually want liability that works, you need the vendor to provide insurance-backed support for your individual account. That means the insurance policy covers your account, not their other 10,000 customers, and it persists with you as the beneficiary if the vendor goes away. Most companies aren't willing to pay for that.
Regarding regular bug-fixes and freshness, this is another thing that it's difficult to get for proprietary software. Do you really know what the bugs are and if they are being fixed? I bet that information is a trade secret. This is an area in which it's easier to work with Open Source.
Again, I didn't think I still had to make this sale. Usually, the companies that think they don't use Open Source these days really do, it's just that engineering hasn't told management. I get called in to help the managers make policy when they find out.
Gun Ownership
by Tenebrousedge
You are on record as being rather firmly against private ownership of firearms. Frankly, I thought this extremity of anti-gun zealotry was a Republican myth, a straw man used to rile the rabble. I understand that people in less civilized territories will on rare occasion use guns for murder and atrocity, I am not aware of this impulse being a general hazard of gun ownership.
I'm from Alaska. All the people that I know who have guns have only ever used them for hunting. I'm less sympathetic to those who can acquire an alternate hobby besides shooting, but there are yet many places where hunting is a means of subsistence. I've known many people to bow-hunt, but I suspect if your dinner depended on your marksmanship you might prefer the more effective instrument. Does your plan involve screwing hunters as well as the millions of other lawful citizens?
Originally we are a revolutionary state, and I believe the People yet preserve the right to revolution. Furthermore, Mao was right about the origins of political power: violence is the defining characteristic of government. Do you believe that the 'tree of liberty' is no longer hematophagic? Else, by what means are we intended to obtain and keep self-governance?
Perens: I'll start by calling B.S. on your dialogue above. The existence of disapproval of the private ownership of firearms isn't a “Republican myth” unless you have never heard of the United Kingdom, where – the horrors! - private ownership of handguns and the like is not allowed. You should get out of the county sometime. Indeed, you'd have to be living in Plato's cave to be ignorant of Lincoln, the Kennedys, Martin Luther King and his mom, poor congressperson Giffords deprived of part of her brain and the power of speech, and 11,000 firearm murders in the U.S. every year. So thanks for taking advantage of my interview to give a little deceptive speech rather than just ask a question.
The last time I was in Denali, where 1000 pound grizzly bears would walk right in front of me down the main shopping street in town, I felt the urge to carry some large-bore repeating rifle. Not that it's easy to stop a grizzly. But I understand that out in the boonies, it's different than it is in Oakland.
There's a crime scene with some teenager shot dead a short drive from where I live, almost any evening. And unfortunately there is no shortage of people who decide to find a dozen innocent folks, often kids, to snuff before they take their own lives or persuade a cop to do it for them.
What of my right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness when every nut-case seems to have been issued sufficient automatic weaponry to cut all that I love right out of this world?
I don't have firearms in my home, and my kid doesn't get more than a BB-gun to plink targets with, because I don't trust myself to be 100% sane for every moment of the rest of my life. People aren't built that way.
I learned that from my dad. He killed some Nazi soldiers and brought home a Luger, with the firing pin carefully removed and destroyed. So we had an authentic human trophy in the house, but not one that would fire. Dad was a reserve and was activated for both WWII and Korea. He had a Purple Heart, a bravery medal, and a panel chock full of campaign ribbons. But he wouldn't trust himself to be 100% sane for the rest of his days and keep a functional firearm at home.
Each society decides on the balance between liberty and protecting the weak from the strong. My problem with firearms is that they make you too strong for the safety of the people around you, and you are not capable of rationally wielding that strength throughout every moment of your life. People do break, and when they do, things happen for which every one of us should be sorry. So yes, I do believe the balance as it exists in the United States today is wrong. If you are not a subsistence hunter and you don't face ursus arctos and maritimus when you take out the garbage, I would indeed have you disable your weapons by leading the barrel, which is a more permanent means of disabling a firearm than just removing the firing pin.
In Jefferson's time, when individuals working together could fight off a regiment, individual ownership of firearms was an implicit limit on the power of the state. No longer can any number of people weigh their armor against that of a modern military, rather than pick at its edges dishonorably with IEDs. The Tree of Liberty today is renewed by the blood of journalists, not marksmen.
I grew up reading Heinlein, like so many of us, and was captured by the romantic image of the armed freeholder. R.A.H. didn't bother to preface his stories with any mention that he was a failure as a miner and too sickly for most of his life to survive without society's protection. For him, those stories were wish-fulfillment. Heinlein invented some aspects of modern warfare (his contribution to the Operations Room or CIC is most cited), further arming society against the individual and killing his own dream for good if it wasn't dead already.
Perhaps there are real freeholders protecting their rights with their guns somewhere, but mostly there are fat old guys with a 300-channel cable TV package and some freeholder fantasy going. Kids don't have to die for the sake of some old fart's toys.
It's damn past time that the anti-firearm folks got as much lobbying power as the NRA. There are enough of us. Count me in if you can make that work.
Thanks for the interview, folks!
Perens: I'd like to tell people what I'm up to this year.
At the moment, I'm CEO of a startup called Algoram. We make a power-efficient mobile software-defined-radio transceiver, which is to dual-licensed Open Hardware and commercial with some tricks that let us both be Open and preserve our revenue, and we're building dual-licensed Open Source and commercial software for digital radio communications. The radio can use any modulation on frequencies of 50 to 1000 MHz, although it's not made for spread-spectrum. Its major market will be commercial and municipal two-way radio, where they don't particularly want Open Source, but hams are experimenters and their Open Source development helps us.
A partner and I have funded the company out-of-pocket through getting our first product working. It's better to ask for venture funding when you already have something to sell.
I'm also operating my consulting firm to pay the bills. I work with law firms and companies that need help with Open Source. Sometimes they need policy and processes, some have been GPL violators who need a path to compliance. I am the bridge between law and engineering, explaining each side to the other, training engineers to identify legal problems in software and work with attorneys effectively, rewriting part of a customer's product to cure an infringement. I get to do good (by helping companies to comply with Free Software licenses) and pay the bills too.
I'm not doing the Free Software Evangelist job very much this year. Taking a break after working on this since about 1991 feels good. I haven't changed what I believe, but I won't be traveling much for Free Software conferences in 2014 and I've turned off a lot of writing and mailing-list participation. I will be back to that, but right now I'm focused on running a company and making something new.
"but mostly there are fat old guys with a 300-channel cable TV package"
That's a fine description of Eric S. Raymond.
If you post as Anonymous Coward, don't expect a reply.
Bruce, there's a reason why the gun is called The Great Equalizer.
Indeed, in the grand scheme, you are suggesting that we take guns out of the hands of the individual, and put them solely in the hands of the State; that sounds like a transfer of power from the Weak to the Strong...
Yes, they're also demeaned when they have to work crappy jobs just to get basic housing, food and clothes even though we are surrounded by automation and very productive workers.
What's the solution to that?
I'd like to direct your attention to this paper, viz:
A more salient point, also from that article:
Bruce, you are neither a scientist nor well-versed in statistics. As a well-regarded public figure, people listen to what you have to say.
Like a doctor, people will assume that since you're an expert in one field, you are an expert in other fields and can be trusted - they follow your advice and agree with your opinions. Your stance on gun ownership is founded on false information, and indirectly contributes to suffering and misery by promoting rampant crime.
I really wish people like you would restrict yourselves to topics on which you are an actual expert.
If OpenSSL had been dual-licensed AGPL3 and commercial, we would probably not have Heartbleed. There would have been money from its commercial users. Imagine companies like Intuit using OpenSSL and not giving much back to its maintenance at all! That was a mistake. IMO dual-licensing has a bad reputation because of MySQL, and also because some folks at Red Hat have promoted against it. We need to revisit it.
You wouldn't have had heartbleed because no one in their right mind would touch that retarded license.
...anything else unrelated to computers/networking in here?
I'm sure he has opinions about Coke vs. Pepsi, Football vs. Baseball, Brownies (chewy vs. cake, frosted vs. unfrosted), and so on. He's a thoughtful guy and they may even be interesting, but his expertise is in IT not beverages, sports, baked goods or politics.
I'm sure everyone has an opinion on gun rights but I don't see why we should read about it here.
I'm reminded of the Monty Python sketch - the on with the tungsten carbide drill.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
So says one of Slashdork's biggest trolls.
Didnyou seriously think people would read all that before commenting? It's Slashdot; we're lucky if they even read the title!
Data?
Yes, brilliant people are often "full of themselves".
Putting down brilliant people gives those with mediocre intellects something to do ...
I did ask another question about Open Source, which Bruce answered immediately in the comment thread. I discovered that he was against the private ownership of firearms via his personal site, and like I said, I thought that his position was mythical. I am sure that he also has opinions about those other matters, but he doesn't advertise them. I apologize for any inconvenience.
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
I'd love to know what he's talking about here, but he's probably just fallen for a lie about "automatic weapons".
Bonus points for referring to the number of murders by guns without asking how many of those were murders by legal guns, and without breaking it out into high-crime inner cities and areas more like the one he probably lives in.
so, so true. The right wing trash that are in power in this country are doing everything to dismantle any notion of we the people. They like their control and want others to suffer the indignities of being chained to their maoney-making system. Not only no, but hell, no. I have, now, sadly, refused to seek out medical care for myself and I really need it. I need shoulder sugery so badly and I'm constantly in pain. I refuse to pay the ridiculous, capitalist prices for the required surgery and subsequent therapy.
Healthcare is a basic human right. Full stop.
I think Obamacare will do one really big thing that truly scares the Republican Party. It will free up millions of smart people to be self-employed, who formerly stayed in the corporate world.
Insightful comment of the year!
> I think Obamacare will do one really big thing that truly scares the Republican Party. It will free up millions of smart people to be self-employed, who formerly stayed in the corporate world. There's a saying - spend a night in jail, you're a Democrat for life, pay quarterly taxes and you're a Republican.
<FrankCalliendoAsJohnMadden>
Bruce Perens is the greatest Bruce Perens in the history of Bruce Perens
</FrankCalliendoAsJohnMadden>
I'm self-employed, 40-something, etc. I can tell you from hanging around with a lot of other folks like myself - they tend to vote Republican and give to the Republicans. Democrats get most of their funding from big business, big labor, and of course Hollywood. This data is openly accessible on the internet for those who care.
Both parties are just puppets. The puppeteers may be different different for each one, but that doesn't change what The One Party really is.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Indeed, in the grand scheme, you are suggesting that we take guns out of the hands of the individual, and put them solely in the hands of the State; that sounds like a transfer of power from the Weak to the Strong...
Are you really under the delusion that your little rifle is in any way going to be a deterrent against the US military or police forces? You think your pea shooter is going to be much use against a tank or a drone? I'm actually generally a supporter of gun rights but I think this argument that we are somehow fending off the state is absurd. It has no meaningful deterrence effect against our political leaders. If you actually get to the point where you need to use a firearm in anger against the State then there effectively is no state because you are in a civil war. Is that really the world you want to live in?
Bruce - one of your key arguments (if not *the* key argument) is the self-check on sanity, which I'll paraphrase as "I don't trust myself to be sane enough to own a gun". First - the way you've phrased this is disingenuous. After all, we're not debating what you should do with regard to guns in your own personal life. We're debating what laws we're binding an entire society with. If rephrased in that context, a much more chilling variant emerges: "I don't trust my fellow citizens to be sane enough to be trusted with a gun". This is classic liberal condescension. Most of the liberal platform can be reduced to "People are crazy and stupid, therefore we have to control and regulate them like cattle".
More importantly: if you don't think you're sane enough to own a gun, you should really just have yourself committed to an institution that can keep you from harming others (but please, don't commit the rest of us similarly), because that hypothetical firearm is, statistically, one of the least of your worries. Do you trust yourself to drive a car? Cars are more dangerous that guns in *every* possible way, and account for far more tragic deaths. Will you one day wake up less than 100% sane and just freak out and mow down a bunch of kids on a sidewalk with your Prius? That's basically what your anti-gun argument sounds like, applied to cars.
Let's assume you bypass the car problem by saying you can't/don't/won't drive and think we should all be in self-driving mass transport running open source software. What about your kitchen knives? Violent rampages with kitchen knives are surprisingly common and effective against those who don't wear chainmail or body armor on a regular basis. Ok, no knives for you: you'll use McDonalds and/or a personal chef from now until Star Trek replicators are invented. Let's move on: what about anyone who does hobby tinkering with with electronics and chemistry? The Maker Movement? Basically anyone with that skillset and those tools could go crazy one day and bomb a major office building in their area because their girlfriend dumped them. Should we ban the chemistry or the electronics? Maybe ban neither, but don't allow any one person to study both disciplines?
Life is dangerous. Good tools are powerful. Power can be used for good or bad. People are mostly good, and by overwhelming statistical majority, powers wielded by individuals are used for good (the same can't be said for powers wielded by corporations or governments). Statistically, getting shot isn't worth worrying about. Banning guns is just another example of Security Theater. Drum up the news stories about a school shooting, enact a law, endanger everyone by taking away useful self-defense tools, all to prevent a highly-statistically-unlikely event (an actual violent shooting spree killing you). Here's another interesting statistic you should look into: who fires more shots, shoots and kills more people in your metro area? Law enforcement, or private citizens? How close is the margin? Now look at the numbers in a Concealed Carry state: how do the cops compare to the licensed citizens and the rest of the populace? Perhaps you should consider banning police officers from carrying weapons before you look at the rest of us...
I was curious. For all the complaining I've heard from Republicans about 'evil liberals who want to take our guns', I'd never encountered anyone who actually wanted to do that. It's possible that I need to get out more.
I could have emailed him directly I suppose, and I did just now, but you and I seem to disagree on what is an appropriate interview question. Others seemed to have covered the technical questions. I did ask another more topical question, but I think Bruce answered it directly in the comment thread. I apologize for any inconvenience, but note that it seems to have spawned quite a bit of discussion. I suppose I would have hoped for less attention on the subject, but it's too late now. Given the negative reactions from yourself, other commenters, and the slightly less than entirely polite response from Bruce, I may think twice the next time.
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
Damn shame that mentioning guns and healthcare completely derails a conversation about open source software.
Both parties are just puppets. The puppeteers may be different different for each one, but that doesn't change what The One Party really is.
After reading Slashdot for many years, I've noticed that whenever the Democrat/Republican argument is cast in favor of the Republicans in a post with unassailable logic, the invariable response is "well, both parties are the same."
That's because you want that to be true. You probably don't even notice instances where people bring up the same point when idiots say that democrats are so superior.
Anyone who doesn't think both parties are full of evil, worthless scumbags at this point is an idiot. The only difference is who their masters are; both want to violate our rights and the constitution, while pretending they want the opposite. No one can deny this.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
That's because you want that to be true. You probably don't even notice instances where people bring up the same point when idiots say that democrats are so superior.
You could very well be right. However, ever since I first noticed this behavior, I have actively looked for counter-examples. But, as you say, I could be blind to that.
Thanks, Bruce!
You miss the point. Bruce doesn't state that the self-employed are more or less likely to vote in any particular fashion. Bruce states that the explosion of small businesses will move money away from mega-corps, diminishing their budgets and the large donations that they can then make toward Republican elections. That is what they fear. I'm not sure that he's right but that seems to me to be what he's saying.
because I don't trust myself to be 100% sane for every moment of the rest of my life. People aren't built that way.
Citation needed.
I learned that from my dad.
Oh ok. Hey everyone, we have to give up our rights to defend ourselves and hunt because Bruce Peren's dad thinks no one can be 100% sane for their whole life. Sounds like too big of a risk... Glad we solved that one.
I'm not a gun-nut, don't own a gun, have very liberal views, and quite frankly don't even like to be near guns. But every single argument I've ever heard that is anti-gun is purely an emotional one, mostly the emotion of fear. Usually just plain "won't someone think of the children". Just once it would be nice to hear a rational one...
I'm curious what his stance is on most martial arts practitioners. I've been a student for almost ten years now. I could concievably handle any random stranger, or strangers, whom I happened to meet, at any given time.
Can I be trusted to use that power responsibly, every waking minute of my life? How does that differ from owning a firearm? What if it's a firearm I don't carry every waking minute of my life? After all, a firearm is limited by the amount of ammunition I carry. It's not like I can have it ready to go all the time, regardless of what I may or may not be wearing, carrying, or otherwise physically have available.
I've never seen the movement to HTTPS-only to be bad, but as this always envolves a certificate and therefore registration, I now think that there might be disadvantages connected with forced HTTPS. To some extent, this even resembles the russian blogger law. To run a website, one must have a certificate. To have a certificate, one must register himself. As I still want more websites (including this one) to switch to HTTPS I realize that enforced encryption can be seen as bad. I hope the IETF figures out a far more better CA system, which doesn't need registration, and allows people to set up an apache in their local network.
Hi AC
One would hope that a real scientific study would shed light on the situation. Unfortunately, this isn't it. It's a paper published by a Harvard student club and written by a gun industry lobbyist and a gun enthusiast. No balanced perspective that could lead to a real scientific paper here. The first refutation I found of the paper is certainly not peer reviewed and published in a scientific journal either, but makes a pretty good case that the statistics are cooked. It's here.
Please find a real scientific paper from a researcher without bias and then we can discuss it. This one doesn't quite meet the standard.
Bruce Perens.
"There is always going to be a conflict of interest between a company's needs and your needs as a user or customer. Who has control? It should be you, rather than the company that made the software or a government that tells them what to put in it as the U.S. Government did with RSA Security."
Why should I have any conflict of interest with my customers? I make software of type X that I enjoy making and am good at. My customers who want this type of software buy it from me or subscribed to some SaaS arrangement. Where is the conflict of interest? We have largely the same interest. I want to produce this software and keep them as my customers by satisfying their needs and desires for this type of software.
Why should my users control what I produced? I understand it far better than they do after all. Not to mention that I created it and should get some say in its continued existence, form and evolution. If the users could produce and control this software then they wouldn't need to buy it from me in the first place. They would just have done it themselves.
Governments telling producers what to put in their products is indeed a very large problem. But it is not solved by claiming the producer has no rights and that once a product is offered at all then the consumers should have control over it in contradistinction to its producers.
I'm pro-2nd Amendment, but at least I understand BP's arguments.
He's saying:
1, That ship has sailed; it's physically impossible for armed Americans to defeat state tyranny.
2. The everyday danger of guns is to great too keep pretending 1 is wrong.
Then ban carrying of concealed weapons, and allow private ownership of advanced heavy weaponry designed to take down armored vehicles and combat aircraft.
You shouldn't make political freedom to take arms against tyranny as an excuse to keep items which are not useful for that. By second amendment, of small arms you should be allowed to own and keep only military type assault rifles and heavier weapons, all of which should be under a lock, and key to the lock should always be under someone else's supervision away from your household, and that someone should have no other affiliation or loyalty to you, so that none can decide on their own impulse when to use a weapon. It can only be a group effort and group decision. If the time comes for guns to be used, every key keeper should decide if to allow the owner to arm. So, a kind of a wide consensus has to be reached first before a single gun is fired.
In the spirit of the 2nd, militia should NOT be able to take on a more massive infantry force, because presumably the people should always outnumber a heavily armed oppressor minority. OTOH the people should have means to neutralize weapons which do massive killing, like machine guns, artillery, air force and tanks, so adequate number of AA and AT weaponry, long range sniper rifles, as well as combat drones should be at people's disposal.
Oh, and one more thing: ultimate war weapon is knowledge and intelligence (primarily smarts, and then espionage). The knowledge of military tactics and strategy is essential and if people don't have their generals, and if people are not well trained in art and craft of war, possession of shiny hardware is just a waste of resources, they'd be annihilated in matter of days, or even hours.
Of course, all this if you are really serious about the foundation of the second amendment. If, on the contrary, you just feel important when you keep your gun with you, and don't want to bother with learning, and training, and exercise, just carry on as usual. Over time, you'll lose, and should lose, even what is left to you now. IMHO, what you have now is just a mockery, a pacifier, a bribe, so that you wouldn't demand what you really have right to - right to rise in arms against hypothetic tyranny of armed men, or tyranny of a clique which controls armed men.
Or, perhaps instead of keeping massive redundant army infrastructure to protect you from your national armed forces getting used against you, you should establish mechanisms of direct democratic control of the one you have, through public review of officers' conduct and public vote on their promotion, so that you ensure it is always on the side of the people and not on the side of anyone who may be against people - estranged governments or even their generals' juntas.
'm self-employed, 40-something, etc. I can tell you from hanging around with a lot of other folks like myself - they tend to vote Republican and give to the Republicans.
Wouldn't that confirm what BP is saying? Assuming that you harbor rational self-interest, isn't it true that you don't want additional competition in your industry? If that's the case, then why wouldn't you be scared of any legislation that makes it easier for millions of smart people to enter your industry as additional competition?
Chuuch. Preach. Tabernacle.
That's because you want that to be true. You probably don't even notice instances where people bring up the same point when idiots say that democrats are so superior.
You could very well be right. However, ever since I first noticed this behavior, I have actively looked for counter-examples. But, as you say, I could be blind to that.
I've also yet to find a single counter-example and I've actively looked. I notice this among my lefty friends on facebook, too. Point out something bad that Democrats do and "well, both parties do that". It's either "Republicans do bad things" or "both parties do bad things".
I'm non-parisan.
Do you have ESP?
He said "The Republican Party".
The bottom line is that "The Republican Party"'s main voting block is self-employed middle-aged men. More "self-employed middle-aged men" doesn't scare the Republicans at all - they stand to benefit the most.
Do you have ESP?
You miss the point. Bruce doesn't state that the self-employed are more or less likely to vote in any particular fashion. Bruce states that the explosion of small businesses will move money away from mega-corps, diminishing their budgets and the large donations that they can then make toward Republican elections. That is what they fear.
I'm not sure that he's right but that seems to me to be what he's saying.
LOL. I got that. This is going to hurt:
https://www.opensecrets.org/or...
This is large corporations donating to political campaigns. You have to get to #17 before you get to the first one that leans Republican.
Mega-corps give to Democrats. In return, they get "regulation" that helps keep them in business. Money moving away from mega-corps will help Republicans, not Democrats.
Do you have ESP?
Touché.
Chuuch. Preach. Tabernacle.
when every nut-case seems to have been issued sufficient automatic weaponry
This, along with the term "Assault Weapons" is what is used by those who are afraid of firearms and don't really understand what is going on. Assault Weapons is a term invented by the anti-gun crowd to describe any kind of firearm that looks scary. It is used synonymously with "automatic weapons," like Bruce just did. Unfortunately, it is used in ignorance. As smart as Bruce may be when it comes to computers and software, his statement about "automatic weaponry" just shows his ignorance of firearms.
The REAL term is "Assault Rifle," which is what the military uses to describe fully automatic firearms. i.e. pull the trigger once and spray a bunch of bullets.
The anti-gun group want's to ban "automatic weaponry." Well, this is where the ignorance comes in, automatic weaponry are ALREADY BANNED! Not many people, or nut-cases, have automatic weaponry. In most cases, only police agencies and the military have and use automatic weaponry. Automatic weaponry has not been used in mass shootings in decades! The most recent incident I can recall involving automatic weaponry is when a couple bank robbers led a big shootout with the police in Los Angeles, California many years ago. Both of the bank robbers were killed in their efforts. Both of them had bullet proof vests, which is why it became such a spectacle. The local police were out gunned and had to resort to going to local gun stores to purchase rifles more powerful than their standard issue stuff. Nothing like that has happened since.
I see it over and over again, those who fear and hate guns keep calling for a ban on assault, automatic, whatevers because "no on should have the ability to spray 500 bullets in a crowd of innocent people". Ignorance by those who can only repeat what they have been feed. Huge lies by the anti-gun "safety" organizations.
AR-15s, those scary looking black rifles, that have have extended magazines (THEY ARE NOT CLIPS!), hand guards, bayonet mounts, collapsible stocks are NOT automatic weapons, which is why they are not banned. They are SEMI-automatic. You have to pull the trigger each and every single time you fire a round, just like every other gun that has been made since muzzle loaders. SEMI-automatic are called that because of the way they feed the next round into the chamber. In other words, THEY DON'T HAVE BARRELS like "cowboy" guns do. Does not magically turn them into assault or automatic weapons.
And, by the way, you can easily get a pretty "hunting" rifles with a cherry wood stocks and a clip that has much more firepower than an AR-15.
Please, anti-gun people, get your facts straight before you start spouting anti-gun non-sense.
As for Australia and the UK, yes, the number of so called mass shootings (4 or more people being shot) have dropped, but the number of 3 or less people being shot and other violent crimes has escalated dramatically since those gun bans. Didn't make anyone safer. If anything, it just made the public more defenseless against those who will do violence and kill, regardless of what is banned. Now, they just violently assault more people, one at a time.
It is just like the irrational fear of flying. When a commercial airliner goes down and a lot of people die, it is tragic and a big deal. Doesn't change the fact that you are far more likely to die on the way to and from the airport than in the air! Flying is still one of the safest ways to travel.
Bruce, The UK has 1.3 million licensed shotguns and rifles for 63 million people. You talk about guns and the UK, then mention handguns. would you be ok with long gun (of some sort) ownership only?
Bruce, appreciate your open source work very much, however about 8 years ago you mentioned you billed at $300 a minute plus your wife has a good job. What is so great about Obamacare forcing insurance companies to deal with someone with your lavish (compared to average) income? Even if someone like you had to pay $20,000 or $30,000 a year out of pocket for medical issue, so what? that still leaves your family with far more money than most. Why do you feel its great to be able to mooch on the $30 an hour guy for insurance rates by force of law?
Richard Stallman's Free Software movement opposed software being copyrighted.
All of the FSF licenses lean heavily on copyrights. What a stupid thing to claim.
If the FSF opposed copyright, they would be trying to destroy it, not write licenses that rely on copyright.
Why is that Republicans have presided over some of the highest tax rates in history?
From Eisenhower’s 89% top rate to Reagan hundred of tax hikes. The GOP raises taxes more often, it is just that they give the richest of the rich massive loopholes so they pay 0%.
Tax loopholes is the reason the US is in debt.