Freeing the Mind: Free Software and the end of proprietary culture
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| ←Wikisource:Speeches | Freeing the Mind: Free Software and the end of proprietary culture by in the year 2007 |
Xavier's Auditorium, St Joseph College, Bangalore, 2007-06-03, 16:00
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[Vijoo Krishnan:]
Let us welcome Professor Eben Moglen. I would like to request Mishi Choudhary also from the Software Freedom Law Center to come over to the dais. We have amidst us Kiran Chandra from the Free Software Foundation, I request him to come over to the dais. On behalf of the free software enthusiasts, and the Free Software Movement Karnataka I would firstly like to extend a hearty welcome to Professor Moglen. Professor Moglen, Mishi Choudhary and Kiran Chandra, I request [Unintelligible] to give a bouquet to Professor Moglen and welcome him. Thank you, [Unintelligible] , I now request [Unintelligible] to hand a bouquet to Mishi Choudhary. I request Praveen who has been actively involved with the FSF activities here to welcome Kiran Chandra, FSF India. Then, I think… On behalf of the free software movement I would like to welcome each one of you who have come here for today’s program. It’s unfortunately a case of the guest reaching well ahead of time and the audience still…
I think we will start off. For those who have been involved with the free software movement, those who are part of the… who have been enthusiasts, free software enthusiasts, Professor Moglen is a well known name, and many of us have met him, heard him when he has come here for the GPLv3 conference last year. Professor Moglen was working – is working, rather – is professor of law in Columbia Law School. He has been involved with the free software foundation for quite a long time. He was actively involved with the drafting of the GPLv3 and also, at present, he’s the founder-director of the Software Freedom Law Center. I think I won’t take much time and you are all here to listen to Professor Moglen, he will speak at length on this topic: “Freeing the Mind: Free Software and the end of proprietary culture”, and, at the end of which, there will be a question and answer session. I request Professor Moglen to come over and take over from me. Thank you.
[Eben Moglen:]
So let me start without more preface, by talking about what it was that the law of computer software came up against at the end of the 20th century.
This business of sharing software, that wasn’t a revolutionary idea in the beginning. In fact, in the beginning, it wasn’t even an idea at all; computer software was shared from the beginning of computer software. It wasn’t that we started in need of a revolution. It was that we began in a condition of innocence in which everything that we now struggle for was in the first place taken for granted. The knowledge about how to use a computer was in the beginning like the knowledge of how to use a lathe, or a drill, or a hammer. It was the common knowledge of skilled workmen. It is true that at that stage – the early history of the digital technology culture – the number of skilled workmen who shared information about how to use the tool called the digital computer was a very small number. There were a few thousand, then there were a few tens of thousands of people in the world for whom that knowledge was important. But they shared all the knowledge that there was. There were not even trade secrets, in the beginnings of the industry that we now called computer software. There were a few engineers in the world who used these machines in non-military ways. And every non-military user of the machines knew essentially what everybody else knew too.
By the time I began working as a computer programmer in the early 1970s, there were some secrets. That is to say, there were people who had computer programs that they didn’t fully share with everybody else. Those computer programs performed specific jobs that businesses believed gave them an advantage. Even in the early 1970s, the most sophisticated of the financial institutions in the world had secret software. Process software governing the manufacturing of particular sophisticated products – chemical products and electrical products – product production software, numerical control for machines that made other machines, such software was sometimes kept secret. Again, because it gave a specific competitive advantage to the business in which that software had been generated. But there was no one anywhere in the world who thought that software, standing by itself, was a product. A thing to be sold and therefore to be kept secret in relevant part, because if you didn’t keep it secret, you wouldn’t have a product to keep selling. Nobody had considered that as a business model when I began programming computers. Indeed, for most of a generation after I started programming, nobody would. It was an accident that computer software became a product.
And so I want to begin my remarks by pointing out that what we are doing when we talk about freeing software is not committing the act of revolution. We’re not even committing the act of substantially changing what most of us think of as the beginning into the middle or the end, we’re simply reversing a mistake, a contingent accident, something that happened to happen in the history of technology. I insist on that because, although later on I am going to be speaking as a revolutionary, I’m not speaking as a revolutionary when I talk about free software. And this is an interesting, important, maybe even dispositive fact.
The reason that everybody thought that software could be a product, in let us say, 1990 or 1995, was an accident in the way the computer industry developed. It was an accident largely having to do with the effect on the IBM corporation, of anti-trust enforcement by the United States government after 1969. But even the explanation of that accident carries the historian in me back a 100 years or so. Because, really, what I am trying to get at for you is how proprietary culture came to be in the first place.
The single most patented inventor in the history of the United States – the thing that in the American mind personifies the idea of the inventor, the genius, the unique innovative personality – the most patented inventor in the history of the United States is a collective known as Thomas Alva Edison. It wasn’t actually, you understand, Thomas Edison who invented the Edison inventions, it was the collective that worked at the Edison laboratories, they were employed engineers, the boss got all the patents in his name, and became the most patented inventor in the history of the United States. But we are, after all, talking about a community inventing things, and the community called Thomas Alva Edison invented things that made proprietary culture possible.
The phonograph and the moving picture.
The phonograph – the recording of sound, the durable recording of sound – turned music into a product. Never before in the history of the world had music been a product; music was either an act of social communion, or it was a service. Most of the time it was an act of social communion – people played so people could dance. Music was part of the life of a community, it was how a community expressed being together. But, from an economic point of view, music was a service rendered in a market for services; he who pays the piper calls the tune. What’s a wedding without musicians?
The service called music, the act of making people feel that they are together, by playing music for them in return for money – this is an act of making community, this service called music – became, thanks to the collective Thomas Alva Edison, a product, embedded in an object which could be transformed so as to durably persist across long distances and spaces of time. Music could be where the musician wasn’t, which allowed somebody else to arbitrage the desire for community by moving music made where it was cheap, to a place where community would pay heavily for it, which produced a market, which protected, as property, the idea of music as a thing. It also patented the phonograph. But that’s a second order consequence of the idea of the thing as a product in the first place.
Indeed, the patent system of the 19th century in America – the one that made the collective called Thomas Alva Edison, the idea of an invention – that patent system is a further reflection of the 19th century tendency to turn knowledge into products. A 20th century tendency with runaway capacity, because of the other Edisonian invention, the motion picture. Unlike the phonograph, the motion picture was not about taking an existing form of social service and turning it into a product. This was a new way to make community, by showing people something which allowed them as a group to participate in a shared imaginative experience. I would not suggest that this was a patentable invention, this is the thing called “theater”, also an expression of community, also purchasable as a service – think, I suppose, here of Hamlet and the players – a way to share and experience to make community through imagination, but now made portable. The act of creating a shared imaginative experience for a community became a product – the motion picture. And everywhere around the world, people began to share imaginative experience in darkened rooms together, experiencing a form of community built around the product that was the shared imaginative experience. From an economic point of view, I needn’t repeat what the analysis would offer. It moved drama from where it could be produced cheaply – that would be Bombay and Los Angeles, roughly speaking – to places where community needed to share imaginative experience and would pay for it.
But there was a second and crucial aspect to this creation of proprietary culture – it enabled more products to exist. The motion picture, as you all are very well aware, is the salesman’s friend. In the combined experience of the shared imaginative experience in the dark room, all feeling together the shared fantasy of something, we pass as primates into a very receptive state, for the forming of affiliative bonds to bright shiny little objects. Whether those are cigarettes, or whisky, or automobiles, or diamonds, we find ourselves seeking the products that the motion picture offers to us as part of that shared communal activity of learning what we want.
Now, I don’t want to hinge only on the motion picture as an engine of want creation in the 21st century. But anybody who lives on planet Earth at the present day knows what the descendant invention Television did in the creation of needs for products in the world. So that in a short period of time, amounting to less than a generation and a half, a man in Georgia in the United States was able to turn the temporary consumption of a rather spicily flavoured carbonated drink into “being together”. And all the world became a place where everybody wanted to share a Coke. In other words, proprietary culture grew out of a particular form of technological deployment, centered around the concept of making experiences of community into property in the form of products that could be alienated and consumed at a distance. And this system was self-reinforcing, because once that technology was deployed, it created what we would now call a platform for deployment of many more products. And the 20th century became, of all the periods in the history of human beings, the century of the product.
It is over.
So, why is it over, this century of the product? Because with the same ironic relentlessness that brought the ruling class of the world to the century of the product, the engine of invention has continued running. And the inventiveness of humans transformed the product back into a service. The short career of computer software in going from service to product to service again, resulted from the fact that software was in a way the last of the 20th century’s inventions – it went the whole course briefly up and down again, as a little vignette, transforming in the smallest possible time all the forces back into their raw materials. So the story I am telling you is one in which, if you like to think in the terms of scale, the small scale illustration of the large scale historical process now wearing away at proprietary culture is the brief history of unfree software. That’s the structure of what I’m talking about. Just in case you were wondering.
But I’m still going to try to get there via the historian’s route, that is, forward from the beginning, rather than backward from the end. The product driven century that was the 20th century, the American century, the one in which the American empire came to dominate the globe with the economy of its products, the 20th century demanded larger and larger entities operating at higher and higher levels of efficiency. It became clear that there were two fundamental industries in the world, both of them fed by steel. One was automobiles and the other was war. Both consumed gasoline, and petroleum became the single central defining commodity of the moment. Petroleum produced in the end steel and made it move. And out of that petrochemical stew, that was steel plus gunpowder, we found our way to world empires concerned with the possession of oil reserves. And it became characteristic of the greatest empire in the history of the planet that it used automobile executives as its Secretaries of War, now called Defense. And whether it was Charley Wilson of General Motors or Robert McNamara of Ford, the process of moving the American war machine around the planet was essentially a process to be governed by an efficiency expert who had run an automobile company. And what had he learned there? Data is everything.
The 20th century management revolution in the United States, which with the products went around the world, was a revolution in management information. The doctrine that McNamara and his bright whiz kid boys – whether at Ford or at the Pentagon – best embodied was the doctrine that the enlightened manager has more data and analyzes it more thoroughly. And so the very economic processes of product formation and distribution in the great American century cried out for data. And the manufacturers of time clocks and telephones responded. IBM and AT&T built more and more and more data handling machinery. AT&T to consume it internally to enable the telephone network to embrace the whole economy, and IBM to allow those industrial institutions to understand better who they were and what they did. The consequence was the development of expensive digital analytic technology which grew out of the Second World War and which by the early 1960s as McNamara moved from Ford to the Pentagon bringing Cobol with him.
The forces that moved the American economy – and therefore the world economy – forward became dependant upon high quality digital processing hardware, and the manufacturers of that hardware used software to differentiate their products. Nobody could speak in useful terms, not really, of the performance related aspects of hardware engineering in the era of magnetic core. Everything operated with what we would now consider painful slowness. The earliest computer I ever owned and not the first, was an IBM 1401 with magnetic core memory, 4K, but I had an extra 4K embodied in a thing twice the size of a refrigerator, consisting of copper wires with small toroidal magnets at the intersection points of each of the wires in the warp. Can you imagine, then, the idea of billboards explaining the performance of my core as against Honeywell core?
Nobody could have stood for it – it was the software that did the work, that differentiated the products: Did IBM software do a better job than Honeywell software? But nobody hid the software, you couldn’t do it. Users had to have it, they had to see it. They had to go through it. And when there was something wrong, they were the ones who found it, and they were the ones who suggested how to fix it. User innovation was the life blood of this industry, because it was where products had always come from.
So software was the embodied technical knowledge about how to use highly sophisticated tools, resident in the hands of the engineers who made the products, that made the century, that produced the culture. This is the house that Jack built. Now I am going to change its foundation.
The grave problem at IBM in the 1970s – I saw it, I lived through it, those who were there too will also remember it – the grave problem of IBM in the palmiest days of the monopoly was how to avoid inventing hardware that would eat the product line. I worked on experimental hardware at IBM in the late 1970s and early 1980s that was very good hardware. Stunningly fast, innovatively architected, capable of things that nothing less than the $12 million computer would do and capable of being produced for $10,000, which is why we knew, even as we wrote the software for it, that IBM wasn’t going to build and sell them. There was no point in eliminating $12 million machines with $10,000 machines if you were a hardware monopoly.
Of course, the hardware monopoly didn’t last. And the result was that products got better very fast. On the day I went to work at IBM Santa Teresa laboratory in the summer of 1979, 330 professional mainframe programmers worked in a laboratory containing more than 20 370/168s or equivalent mainframes – one of 12 largest data centers inside IBM, one of the 20 largest data centres in the world. There were hectares of IBM 3330 and 3350 disk drives, things with 8 inch platters that you lifted out of the end of a long stretched arm. Hectares of those drives. I have a spreadsheet from the day I joined given to me as part of my “Welcome to the laboratory, see what wonders we make here” presentation, and I wrinkled it out of an old box some years ago for something I was writing. In the first week of July, 1979 that laboratory had a stunning total disk drive capacity of 29Gigabytes. And we thought that that was just beyond amazement. 29 GB, as you all know, now is 9.8mm high, 2.5 inches wide, and costs approximately $30, bought through the net.
In other words, the hardware engineers in the generation after the collapse of hardware monopoly did wonders. They changed, the scale of the performance of their products by orders of magnitude. We have rocket ships that run on air, that travel three quarters of speed of light without breaking a sweat. We have hardware we can hardly imagine, it’s so good. And the software we put on that is not much better than the software we wrote in the 1970s, arguably – if you are using Microsoft software – substantially worse. It’s hard to explain the complete and total divergence of the quality course of hardware and software on the theory that the people who make hardware are really, really smart and the people who make software are really, really stupid. Because the people who make software are obviously not really, really stupid, there just aren’t many brains on the planet allowed to make the software most people use. Which results in a very untenable structure for the production of software, as a result of which quality is low. These are simple engineering propositions, but the economics of it wasn’t simple.
Largely because although IBM itself set in motion the demonopolization of the hardware industry. How did that happen? Well, that happened because, after 16 years of bruising economically and legally destructive anti-trust litigations with the United States Government and European Union, IBM created a tiny little break-all-the-rules project to build a cheap personal computer out of in-stock available parts, and succeeded wildly. I remember as a kid lawyer working at IBM in the summer of 1983, when a large insurance company in Hartford, for the first time asked to buy 12000 IBM PC’s in a single order. And the guys who served that account, one of the 100 largest accounts at IBM, didn’t want to fill the order. Because they thought that selling 12000 personal computers was beneath contempt. They needed that company to buy more 3084 cubes and they didn’t want to waste any time moving 12000 units of something that looked to them like a typewriter. So, part of the reason that the whole thing happened was that the very people who sold the hardware didn’t understand what it was they were selling and didn’t understand that the time had actually come when a cheap product was going to eat the product line.
All that great hardware that had been made back in the days of corporate strength, that had gone on the shelf because it would have destroy too much profitable existing market – there wasn’t anybody who understood that about the IBM PC and they let it happen. And not only did it happen, but it happened in a way which allowed hardware manufacturers around the world to go crazy making it slightly better. And it allowed Intel to do the work of trying to eat an IBM lunch, for the first time, by improving the chips and reshifting the value inside. And everything would have been just great, except that the IBM lawyers bent over backward not to remonopolize the industry, and they allowed the software owner to own the software.
Next thing you knew, you had a wildly profitable system going on in which the dominant software contributer was a guy who made no hardware. He had no product except the secret of his source code. And so we were well on our way to the moment crystallized by Microsoft CTO Craig Mundie in a speech in Brazil in the summer of 2004, in which Mr. Mundie memorably said, “The one great principle of the software industry is: Never show anybody the source code to anything”. This was an inevitable economic consequence of the one thing that had happened, which was: they made no hardware, all they had was software, the software was the source code, the source code was the recipe for the product, the product – like Coke – had to be a secret in order to be a product, therefore the source code had to be a secret, therefore, when you get right down it, the software it had to be bad. This was not an escapable conclusion. It is remarkably difficult, as all of you who have built any software know, it is remarkably difficult to make software with your eyes closed. If you’re not allowed to see it, it you’re not allowed to build it, if you’re not allowed to debug it, if you’re not allowed to your hands dirty in it, it’s really, really hard to do.
I tried to estimate, two years ago, what proportion of the people who work on Windows, actually have the authority to build Windows. I can’t answer the question because I don’t have access to trade secret information, but I can set a reasonable upper bound. It is certain that no more than 2% of the people who work on Windows can build Windows. That means 98% of the people who work on the product can’t build the product. That means, as far as I’m concerned, that it’s extremely surprising that it runs at all, and they probably deserve a great deal of credit that it does, because it’s really, really hard to build software when you can’t actually build the software you’re working on, and everything has to be done under the assumption that you know what’s going on before you turn the key and run the smoke test. This also tends to explain why the software is so terrible the moment it comes out the door. Because there are a remarkable number of joints that have been tested but never actually worked on by anybody whose eyes weren’t welded shut during the course of the work.
This process of turning software into a product was a misbegotten idea from the beginning, but it acquired $400 billion worth of business around the world. It taxed everybody. It turned the guy who thought it up into the richest man on the planet. And it therefore became religious doctrine that everything about it was right, and that it was responsible for innovation. This is a grand historical irony only to those of us who care about software, which is a very tiny proportion of humanity. To the rest it will never even be history, it’s too small a detail for most people to understand. Yet it’s our lives. And because it’s our lives we can also explain what it has to do with what happens to the rest of the human race for the next 100 years.
Because, of course, when software is a product, then the network consists of a lot of places where products hide themselves, protect themselves, secure the benefit of their owners rather than the benefit of their users. Software begins to do things like enabling other people to make money at the expense of its own users. For example, if you have security problems, you create a security industry to cover the holes you don’t actually patch, right? You create an opportunity if you create spam by having poorly designed mail readers, for telecommunications companies to make large profits selling bandwidth wholesale to spammers. And some large telecommunications providers will then make a lot of money selling wholesale bandwidth to spammers and everybody will regard it as a regrettable institution, but one that they certainly wouldn’t want to do anything to interrupt the profitability of, and so on. In other words, low quality and poor service to the user become profit centers to somebody else. And profit centers had a vast level of success.
This would be only bad news to business, were it not for the fact that the net came to contain all those other products that we depend on for our sense of community. Music, remember, when we last saw it, was being trapped in a can. Music was scratches on a vinyl surface, music was analogue data etched on physical objects that allowed arbitrage of the need for community, but then digitization happened to music.
At this moment an astonishing thing happened. Music leapt off the CD. It ceased to be oxidized aluminum foil bumps inside a glassine sandwich, and became everybody’s music, again. A guy in Japan – actually an immense collective calling itself Akio Morita or Sony – put music inside your head, with headphones. That music became your music, the private soundtrack to your life. The idea that somebody else owned your music became increasingly difficult to understand. A generation which grew up only with portable music didn’t really grasp what people were talking about when they talked about who owned the record, much less the recording contract. And that was before it all went digital.
Now, there really was no physical substance left to music anymore, no thing, no object, no imprisonment, it was just people getting together and experiencing the sense of community around music. Somebody brought it, not necessarily in a violin case, maybe in an iPod, but everybody went back to sharing and you didn’t have to be in the same place. Music became a way that people at a distance could relate to one another without the intermediary of a product, or a radio with an advertisement in it, or a television set, or a music video. Just music.
And video started to come out of the can, too, leapt off the DVD. Why? Because a kid in Norway figured out how a DVD worked. I made a joke in a California courtroom about that kid’s lawsuit with the movie industries. And next thing I know, the kid in Norway has been arrested. His father had been arrested too. All their computers and cell phones had been taken away from them. The Norwegian Government, at the behest of the Disney Corporation, spent almost 3 years trying to make a crime out of understanding how DVDs worked. They didn’t quite get there. But that wasn’t Jon Johansen’s fault. He could’ve been a felon many times over by then, if it all had broken the other way.
Culture defended itself with law. Culture defended itself with the idea of property. Culture defended its right to be a product, and it’s slowly, slowly failing. Bruce Lehman, former Commissioner of the patent and trade mark office in United States and one of the authors of the Digital Millennium Copyrights Act, said five weeks ago at a conference in Canada that the DMCA had failed. That the Clinton administration’s policy of ensuring incumbency in the culture businesses, through the use of technical measures backed by law, had proven to be a failed experiment. “We are now entering”, Bruce Lehman, of all people, said, on tape, in Canada, “we are now entering”, he said, “the post copyright period for music.” I thought that was pretty nice, I said that in 1999. But I was glad that by 2007 that even Bruce Lehman agreed with me.
The post copyright period for music. So what is happening? The network is becoming ours, not theirs. The software that runs it belongs to all of us. Nobody exclusively controls it, nobody can tell us what to do with it. We made rules that allow us to share software. Everybody ignored us ’cause we were geeks and it didn’t count. But with that software that nobody could tell us how to use or what to do with, we did culture over. We did rip, mix, burn and then Mr. Jobs stole our rip, mix, burn but we didn’t care because it wasn’t our property. He was free to take it under the BSD license. He can also take the phrase, so he did, “rip, mix, burn”, he said. And everybody loved him and they loved his iPod; it’s OK with me. But the real effort was the effort to free the code. That’s what made all of that possible.
Google comes into existence. Well, we made that possible, too. Google without free software is unimaginable. The 21st century without Google is unimaginable. Hence, transitively and perfectly accurately, the 21st century is unimaginable without free software. We’d better understand that, because they’re beginning to and we should take credit. Credit is due to us, we made it happen. But with it comes a responsibility to understand what happens next.
We made the 21st century. We made it in the sense that we gave proof of its concepts and we produced running code that operates it. Here’s the proof of concept. In the 21st century, it’s not people who make things, it’s not factories who make things, it’s communities that makes things.
The fundamental unit of economic production in the 21st century is a community, consisting partly of what we call producers, and partly of what we call users, and partly of what we call students. That is to say, people who already make the thing, people who already use the thing, and people who would like to understand the thing better; those are the people who produce in the 21st century. Agility matters, modifiability matters, the ability to reduce costs by taking advantage of everybody else’s improvements matters. At the end of the day, making a thing your users can’t understand, can’t fix, can’t improve and therefore can’t fall in love with is not a good way to to be a manufacturer of anything. People who make stuff as simple as underwear and socks now want to have community about it. They want you to come to their website, they want you to read their blog, they want you to feel part of their company. Because in the end it’s community which produces value, not having the mills or the cotton or the workers, only.
So what we got, when we started to free the network, was proof of the concept that community is what makes, because we make by community and we produce the central raw material of the 21st century. So we gave the proof of concept – community is what makes value. And we produced running code. That’s to say, we produced an actual running example of how to generate more communities using our stuff. When I started working for Richard Stallman in 1993, there were probably 6 to 8 people in the United States and maybe 10 to 12 people in the world making a living out of free software. IBM’s investment in free software manufacture, promotion and distribution last year was measurably in excess of $2 billion, HP’s investment was measurably in excess of $700 million.
In other words, we’re beginning to talk about the possibility that people now think that there’s, you know, somewhere in the neighborhood of $80 billion or $100 billions a year around the world in an economy consisting of free software, a thing which had an economy embracing maybe 12 or 15 people a decade and a half ago. That’s a story about the 21st century economy. Those who pay attention to it tend to find it rivetingly interesting, because 9 order of magnitude growth over short periods of time is an unusual event in economic history. In fact, it’s an unusual event in the history of the universe.
This is an inflationary universe scenario in an odd kind, right? Wait a minute, what happened? A $100 billion came out of nowhere over the course of a decade and a half, without any substantial capital investments, based on the work of a few dozen people? Well that’s running code. Right? That’s the actual ability to produce results based on concept in verifiable fashion. Microsoft has gotten a little larger in the past 15 years too. But had Microsoft grown 9 orders of magnitude in the last 15 years it would extend past Pluto now and there would be no hope for the human race. We grew much faster than they did and the cosmos is damn lucky that it’s true. That’s what we proved with the running code. We also proved it’s really hard to own or control bitstreams if the people who make and use computers don’t want you to. We also proved that it’s really difficult to tell 12-year-olds what to do, in the global economy, and the 12-year-olds can do stuff in the global economy all by themselves if you let them. Those two were valuable lessons which came to have an important role in subsequent cultural history.
Alright, so now I’m ready to conclude. Here’s what happens. Free software frees the executable layer of the network. With the executable layer of the network, it produces devices that are controlled primarily by their users and which their users use to create community. The One Laptop Per Child laptop is a pretty good example of a kind of device that a free software might produce. It’s small, easy to operate, extremely rugged against the various ways in which human beings use machines, non-toxic, easy to take apart, simple enough for a child to take apart and understand, capable of being powered by nothing more than the pull of a string, human muscles, creating a communications network that can embrace a village or a continent. And what happens with that hardware? We begin to share pictures, music and video together. We begin to create the sense of being one. We create the sense that a child in Tierra del Fuego and a child in Norway and a child in Myanmar can be working simultaneously on something together. They can be shooting documentary film together. They can be making music together. They can be writing literature together. They can be making software together. We create a platform for community which replaces products with an actual sense of being together.
This could not actually happen so fully as to make industries go away, could it? Well, let me give an example. There was, after all, another collective at the opening of the 20th century. It was called Eastman Kodak. It produced a product called the Brownie camera, which made a thing called snapshot photographs. Snapshot photographs were a way for people to be together. And eventually, Kodak ceased to be a company which sold cameras primarily, and became primarily a company that sold memory. I don’t mean digital memory I mean your memory, the memory of the wonderful times you shared by taking pictures using Kodak film – analog memory. That was the razor blade, the razor was the camera, it was cheap, you gave it away. It was the memory that cost money, like the ink in an inkjet printer, oops, I shouldn’t have said that. So the Kodak company went through the whole long history of photography and then fell off a cliff when it went digital. No more complex analog chemical memory, thank you very much, we have silicon.
And Flickr became bigger than Kodak. But Flickr doesn’t actually do anything with pictures. Flickr simply permits human beings to interact with one another around pictures. Flickr, in other words, provides the service of creating community. People provide the pictures. Now let’s talk about the thing called YouTube. Well, I haven’t anything to say about YouTube because YouTube is just Flickr with moving photographs, that is to say, human beings relating to one another through video which human beings provide, but it’s not the video which is the product, it’s the community.
So, throughout the entire network, what happens at the opening of the 21st century is a system of staged collisions, like dominoes falling, in which, outwards from this executable zone of free software in the network, cultural ownership patterns fall. And cultural patterns of the resurrection of community through services provided in the network by software come to replace them. Google, Flickr, YouTube, Reddit, Slashdot, Digg. And we begin to constitute the new cultural landmarks of the 21st century. They are services provided by free software, whose goal it is to enable community which produces more content, more free software, more new ways of relating to one another through the network using the very same technologies. In other words, the mill that ground salt in the 20th century, the structure that produced products, one after the other, is now running backwards. It is eating products and producing services that enable community.
This is good news. This is a happy event. This is nice for almost everybody, unless your middle name is “capitalism”, this is exactly what you have been hoping for, for the longest time. But there are a few incumbents left, right? There are a few disapproving souls. They consist of Microsoft and Disney and Verizon and Deutsche Telekom and even Rupert Murdoch or two, or three, or four. However many Rupert Murdochs there may be. In other words, the people who benefited from the structure that was the product and proprietary culture. Oh, and then there are some governments that benefit too from unfreedom of culture. They too manufacture products: consent, obedience, war, bombs. They get those products by the creation of anti-community, by the construction of difference, by the announcement of the extinction at the boundary between self and other. They are troubled deeply by the freedom that produces this wash across borders, that eliminates the lines among legislators, that moves from government to people the power to agree or disagree.
The most powerful intelligence service on Earth in 2020 will not be the KGB, and it won’t be the CIA, and it won’t work for the Chinese government except to the extent that Google already works for the Chinese government, because the most powerful intelligence service in 2020 will be Google. And we’re going to have to deal with that. Not necessarily in a hostile way, we all love them to death and everyday we use them. But we are going to have to ask what it means, that we succeeded in turning products into services but we succeeded to the extent that those services became part of our identity. That our very way of constructing ourselves is now embedded in a net made by free software. There isn’t any end of history, you understand. I have no Hegelian point to offer you. I am not leaving us a synthesis in a happy resolution of all things. The end of proprietary culture is in sight. Free software is an engine that makes it happen. But free software is one aspect of the long struggle for human freedom. Not a very powerful aspect in the history of the struggle for freedom, because it only arose yesterday. When the long history of the struggle for freedom in our lifetimes is written, after we are gone, free software may seem a little bit important, as it was for a few crucial years at the end of the 20th century, when free software enabled the transformation of society that moved us into what became the 21st century’s crucial stage.
But we still have more to worry about. A great deal more. Because, after all, free software is just software trying to assist freedom. And freedom is still a contested subject. Freedom is still an issue, freedom is still a concern, freedom still has enemies. The triumph for free software – I’ll give you very good odds, that’s nearly a certainty. The triumph for freedom? It’s still too soon to tell.
Thank you very much.
[Applause]
I’m happy to take questions if anybody can find any to ask after such an outrageously disordered lecture.
[Audience member 1:]
[Unintelligible]
[Eben Moglen:]
You might want to start over so that people can hear, I’m willing to repeat questions but you should hear them in their own words.
[Audience member 1:]
Thanks. So that is very much like, you know, when you start using a Google product and you don’t pay for it when it is free, uncashed, you very much have a feeling for it, you feel as if it were developed for you and you’ve got [Unintelligible] That’s very much right. That is what I wanted to ask you [Unintelligible] Imagine that from the prospect of a developer who has designed a particular product, [Unintelligible] itself [Unintelligible] He is not giving it for free, he is going to earn it in the form of ads. That’s a different issue. So, though the software is free for the user here the person who is giving the software is not giving it for free, he’s earning in some other means. Imagine a software which has to be given to people, the developer or the giver, can not earn through these means. [Unintelligible] standard software between [Unintelligible] That situation [Unintelligible] a person [Unintelligible] , he has got something and he has to earn a living off of it. How is he going to do that?
[Eben Moglen:]
See, we really should now know – again in the same sense, that proof of concept and running code is our favorite form of analysis in the world of free software – we really should know by now that we’re not a threat to the welfare of developers. The data really should be in on that, right? So we employ a vast number of people now. Ask yourself this question, just so you can calibrate your concern: Which do you think is higher, the number of people in the world who are paid to write Microsoft software, or the number of people in the world who are paid to write free software?
[Audience member 1:]
The group of people who are paid to write free software would be more.
[Eben Moglen:]
So, wouldn’t that tend to suggest that this confusion of free and free and the worry about what does the consumer pay for it, and how does the developer get a revenue stream back, we basically should be able by now to see that that’s not really a worry.
[Audience member 1:]
That’s fine if you’re a normal developer, but if you’re a Bill Gates, that is not true. If you think you can really innovate something, why should you give it for free? Because we just see [Unintelligible]
[Eben Moglen:]
I don’t think you do give it for free. Mr. Gates, if he ever had any particular idea about making software, and I don’t associate any particular idea about making software with Mr. Gates, he’s never, in my experience, actually made any. I can’t think of anything out there in the world that actually he wrote. I know a lot of stuff he bought, and I know a lot of stuff he sold, but I don’t actually know anything he wrote. But even if I did, of course we never said that he should be compelled to do anything in particular with what he wrote, we said “We’ve got a community of people who prefer to share. And the way we do things is, we get paid for what we do. But we also fulfill our contracts for the work we do by using stuff that other people have used and sharing in turn. So what we get paid for is the value we add, not value we conscripted, OK? Mr. Gates doesn’t have to participate in such a community, nobody ever thought of forcing him to participate in such a community, we never took a step towards making the way he makes software illegal, we just said “We can do better for less”, we said “We can outcompete you”, we said “We will do to you what you have done to so many people before you – we will make better products and we will dispose of them in ways which will make people not very eager to deal with your business”. Surely we have a right to do that. So I think that in fact we’re now at a stage where we ought to conclude that this is OK. We’re safe. Developers are going to work. There’re every reason to suppose that smart people are going to be better paid working for us than working for Mr. Gates. Now, here’s why. Mr. Gates’ only interest in a programmer is how many hours of work contribute to how many dollars of production of Microsoft’s software at the other end. Mr. Gates can compete you against guys in Redmond, and at the moment you win the job, because you will work for a lot less than the guys in Redmond. So the guys in Redmond are sitting there, very angry about you, because you’re taking away their job. Mr. Gates is hoping that there’s somebody in Hubei who will be able to take away your job from you by the time you’re 45, and if not, maybe at any rate there’s somebody else around here who will compete to take away your job. In other words, in Mr. Gates’ world, there are about to be a lot more programmers in the world, and their pay is about to go down. And you’re about to compete with each one of them at every step of the way. So if we actually lived in the proprietary software industry through the 21th century, I think developers would be in a lot of trouble.
In a world of free software, however, the author of free software is able to capture pretty much a straight proportion of the value that she or he adds to the program. I don’t mean that that proportion is very high, but it’s pretty hard to get to decline. Andrew Tridgell is tough to replace in the Samba project, so is Jeremy Allison. You can’t just hire an Indian programmer or a Chinese programmer or a Burmese programmer to replace Tridgell or Allison, not because they’re geniuses, not because they’re white, not because they live in Australia or California, but because they’re part of the community and nobody would throw them out. And the people who employ them, whether it is IBM or Google or Hewlett-Packard, employ them because they are leaders in the community. The money that they get, they get in part for programming, and in part because the community that they live in has value to people, and people want to pay them to keep that community up. So if you want to make a really good living as a developer in the 21st century, my advice is, don’t go to work as a salary programmer for Microsoft, or Honeywell, or, for that matter, Wipro or Infosys, because their only concern is whether they can buy your hours more cheaply somewhere else. Go to work for people for whom your role in the community you have formed has economic value, and which will pay you what they think is fair in view of what they get out of the community, for your role in holding a community together. And consider this: I know at IBM more than 40 people who work on the C compiler called GCC. I know another 10 or 12 at Hewlett-Packard, I know – if I put altogether all the people I know who are paid to work on GCC around the world – probably 5 or 6 dozen. The first version of GCC was written by Stallman, himself. So I see about 6 dozen people doing a work that one person used to do, and all of them getting paid for it. I also see volunteers, I see people learning, I see kids who are full of enthusiasm for compiler technology hacking on GCC all the time to see if they can make it better, and every once in a while to get a patch in. In other words, I see a real functioning community, consisting of people with all different levels of economic need and all different levels of economic remuneration. In fact, the way I see it, in the kernel, in GCC, in Samba, in many of my clients, could best be described in a single phrase: “From each according to his ability”, and it works pretty well. I think you’re barking up the wrong tree, I think it’s an old question, I think the new data would help you to feel confident in the old answer.
[Audience member 2:]
[Unintelligible]
[Eben Moglen:]
See, I think that the ecology is even more complex than that. I think you can fundamentally say that there’s a good chance that by the end of 2007, we’ll have to think about Sun Microsystems as the commercial arm of the Free Software Movement.
Imagine what happens if a company which at present is struggling to make hardware at a very high level of sophistication, but which at the moment has enormous value built up in software, puts all that software under GPL3, and the Java infrastructures under GPL3. Imagine for a moment that we come later this year to see the OpenSolaris becomes GPL’d Solaris, GNU/Solaris becomes fundamentally the software platform of Sun Microsystems. I think you’d have to say that the Free Software Movement in business, right? I think you’d have to say that what we experience now is a range of entities, motivated differently, but sharing some fundamental social-political insights which they use in different ways. The Free Software Foundation’s an advocacy organization, responsible for a philosophic insight that enables everything else to happen, responsible for licenses, that is, some legal arrangements that have an enormous structuring effect, holding a large proportion of software copyrights of valuable assets needed to be kept in trust freely for a long period of time, but not fundamentally in charge of the direction technically of the software.
As I’ve suggested, we may live to see Sun Microsystems as free software in business. The Software Freedom Law Center is essentially the justice department of the Free Software Republic, right? I have some lawyers whose job it is to chase down malefactors, people violating licenses and breaking the rule of sharing; I’ve got some people busy legislating, trying to help the organizations that are new software projects build stronger projects, have better organization, do a better job vetting their code; I’ve got diplomatic service, government relations, right? All of those are functions enabling a shared idea to have many different social purposes. And you’re right, then there are the machines tool locales: Freshmeat, SourceForge, right? Savannah, whole ranges of platforms for the making, and conservation, and analysis and teaching of software. Then there’s Ubuntu/Canonical; that might be a commercial military rocket hidden inside a civilian Chevrolet, right? That might be Mark Shuttleworth planning to make his 3rd, 4th and 5th billion dollars out of what was yesterday a community of non-profit software developers. And I suspect that if he did in fact pull off a commercialization at that level, most people in our community would think that was just great and be very happy for him and delighted to see it occur. In other words, I think that we’ve got a lot of different directions contained within this persuasion now, some of it is movement, some of it is business, some of it is law, some of it is architecture, some of it is engineering. And, in fact, it’s the Free Republic – what I call the Free World. And doesn’t it really have a Ministry of Culture called Creative Commons? And doesn’t it really have a Ministry of Information called the Wikipedia? And aren’t we really in one way or another still trying to build something that might be the political program I was trying to sketch with a free hand in the thing I called The dotCommunist Manifesto]? And aren’t the ODF wars really about the possession of our common data and how governments are going to relate to the Free Republic and what our data preservation and maintenance standards are going to be? In other words, I think all these pieces work together functionally, I don’t think they converge to a point, I don’t think they merge to make an entity. I don’t think that their diversity represents a problem that we need to solve. I think it’s an inevitable consequence of social maturation. We don’t want an army. We don’t want a post office. We don’t want an internal revenue authority. We don’t need to control territory. We probably don’t even want a seat in the United Nations. But we’re the free world and we’re a big, complex, diverse place, and there’s room in it for citizens doing a whole lot of different things, and we’re going to have a long, complex, and interesting history as the free world together.
[Audience member 3:]
Hi, I’m [Unintelligible] . My question to you is based on your keynote speech on Wizards of OS. In the Wizards of OS keynote speech you had a mention of the open spectrum. How is the open spectrum going to transform our end of the proprietary culture?
[Eben Moglen:]
Look, we have a fundamental difficulty, which is that we need everybody to be able to communicate equally, regardless of their ability to pay. The ability to communicate at distance, in the 21st century, is exactly identical to the ability to learn. What we need is to make it possible for all the minds on Earth to commune with whatever knowledge or culture they want, wherever they want to, whoever they are, whatever their ability to pay; we can do that. It’s not impossible. The problems that we face are primarily political rather than technical. The electromagnetic spectrum is common property of human kind, everybody says that, every government on Earth agrees to that. Some use government agencies as rather ham-fisted trustees of the public’s rights. Some sell off the public’s rights in what purport to be fair auctions arrived at by community concession. But whatever they do in practice, in theory they all acknowledge one basic truth, which is this is our common home, the electromagnetic spectrum. Properly used, it can afford all of us everything we need, all the time, everywhere, using hardware cheap enough that everybody can afford it. I remind you that in the places where we live, in our respective societies, there are few people poor enough that they cannot afford a cell phone; if it is offered to them, they will take it. There are, of course, the subsistence portion of humanity, which will not become owners of a product for telecommunications, but that by no means implies that they have no speck in the spectrum, either. They, too, can learn, because they can hear, listen, understand, remember and speak. We can make it possible for everyone on Earth to have access to anything of beauty or utility that they want, need, or can shape a wish for. We can do this in a way which is within the reach of the whole of human society, within a single generation. We’re not stopped by technical details, we really do pretty much know how to do this. To be sure, in the end, it is still likely that the rich will get a better deal, they will have better communication, faster, more agile, with less possibility of delay, although probably not much less possibility of breakage. But we can build a robust and useful network under the whole of the human race. That’s free spectrum, that’s what it’s about, that’s what it should be for. It should be there the way the drinking water infrastructure should be there, the way fundamental immunization should be there. But it’s cheaper, much cheaper. It’s not that this is the most valuable thing for human beings, it’s not that it’s the first thing you would do for people if you had a choice. But it’s among the very cheapest things you can do, and it has a very powerful effect in ending ignorance. So, free spectrum is, for me, the revolution to decouple the ability to communicate from the ability to pay. It is politically a more difficult problem than the problem of ending un-free software, or un-free culture, because, as I said before, there’s one Microsoft, there are a few Disney, but there’s a lot of Deutsche Telekom and Verizon and France Télécom and Rupert Murdoch. There’s a lot in the way. The things that are in the way are wealth and power, not failure to understand or inability to do. We will get there, we will get there. Free software is an inherent part of the process of getting there, because without free software, we can’t have free telecommunications. Good, cheap hardware that everybody can hack is an essential part of the process, because without that we won’t be allowed to build the hardware infrastructure for the mesh we’re going to need. So all the work that we’re doing now is prologue to that work. I have been thinking about this a long time – I don’t say “Do it my way because I have” – I just say I’ve been thinking about this a long time. I’ve had about 20 years to try and figure out how I want to do it, and I think it can be done. All around the world I see people who want to do it too. I think we’re going to manage. But it’s going to be very, very, very difficult, we’re going to have to have good luck. And one of the thing that we can do now is we can defeat the software monopoly smartly, decisively, effectively, because we’re going to need to make some powerful people afraid of us if we’re gonna get this done.
[Audience member 4:]
I have a very basic question. Me, as an Indian or as a unit of the industry, what is expected out of me to be a part of this idea [Unintelligible] ?
[Eben Moglen:]
I’m sorry?
[Audience member 4:]
Me, as a part of this industry, the software development industry – I believe I am probably the smallest unit of this industry – what is expected out of me to be a part of this ideological concept?
[Eben Moglen:]
Well, I don’t see what the question amounts to, but maybe it’s because I don’t understand the conflicts. We all make knowledge, and we all try and give it to people who need it. I prefer not to even think about working on code I can’t share, because my life is short and I’d like to share the stuff I write. I can’t imagine writing legal history that I wasn’t allowed to share, or thinking about the world of 21st century politics, without being able to talk about it with you. I assume that if we do things we love, we’ll do them for as many people as we can, and we’ll try to find a way to make our livings not around depriving people, but around furnishing things to people. My belief is that we’re all smart enough to do that. My belief is that the challenge of doing our work, whether it is technical work or legal work or political work, the challenge of doing our work in a way that gives us enough money to live, and also makes it possible for us to share with other people is the challenge we ought to rise to. If we only solve the part about how to make enough money, or we only solve the part about how to make enough freedom, we’re not really solving the whole problem. When I teach people how to be lawyers in the United States, I’m trying to teach them how to do the work of finding a meaningful form of making justice that pays you enough to live in the style that you want to live in. I’m not teaching them just how to make justice or just how to make money – I’m teaching them the craft of a lawyer which is to make money by making justice. The same is true with respect to our work as technicians, we should be finding a way to make technical knowledge that also makes freedom. I think it’s within reach for almost all of us.
[Audience member 5:]
I have a question. When, in a world where software is service, like you talked about Google, how far do you think the lack of privacy is a threat to freedom?
[Eben Moglen:]
Well, we first have to figure out what the word privacy means now, what we care about and why. We have to figure out what it is that this conception privacy is supposed to mean when we’re all through. And then we have to figure out what we, collectively, mean to do about it. About my idea of privacy, there are services provided by Google which don’t meet my idea of privacy. And I can’t imagine receiving my mail there. But nobody has ever told me I had to receive my mail at Google. It’s an opt-in interface. You bring them data, of yours, voluntarily, and you get pretty amazing new services connected with your data, in return for allowing them to keep any inference they can make by mining your data. If you think that’s a fair bargain, you’re free to accept. If you think it’s not a fair bargain, you’re free to decline. I have no problem with the bargain, most of the time I decline it, some of the time I accept it. Often I accept it with a vanilla wafer instead of a cookie, right? We have to manage our own idea about what constitutes privacy and autonomy in the 21st century. In order to do that we have to have accurate information. We have to know what people do, we have to have enough transparency to understand what they do, and we have to teach children about how to think about these issues as fundamental issues of ethics and morality in a technological society. I personally spend a lot of time on this, I teach privacy, I think about it, I write about it, I talk about it, I try to lawyer for it. But it is growing very difficult, because the net is pulling us together in ways that human beings have never been together before. And what we have thought of as “privacy”, meaning exclusive control over our identity, is being shattered into a million pieces. And those pieces are flying in different directions, and even studying how it works is difficult, and most people don’t do it. So the consequence is that what we have called privacy is dying before our eyes, and being replaced by something which is a mere facsimile. It’s not Google’s fault that this is true, it’s not Microsoft’s fault that this is true, it’s not the Free Software Foundation’s fault that this is true, and you can’t blame it on the Internet, because the Internet is just all of us. But we have built a society which is transforming who we are, and like most other forms of ecological disaster, that happens to us mostly while we refuse to open our eyes to the evidence that it is going on. We’re going to have to get very serious about this, very soon. I keep waiting, it keeps not happening.
[Audience member 6:]
Good afternoon. Your anecdotes about [Unintelligible]
[Eben Moglen:]
There’s just too much noise, can you come closer so at least I’ll be able to hear you?
[Audience member 6:]
Good afternoon. [Unintelligible] Your anecdotes of adoption of free software, say, from the state of Kerala here in India, and elsewhere, like French Parliament. But [Unintelligible] the rate at which it’s being adopted and [Unintelligible] mean, we don’t share much about it, other, it’s some places that’s moving forward and then [Unintelligible] Free Software, like in Peru, like in [Unintelligible] by FSF beneath to protect Free Software to places far and wide?
[Eben Moglen:]
Well, Let me say, first of all, that my own view about this is that software is its own most effective ambassador. When Mark Shuttleworth released the first, or perhaps the second of the releases of Ubuntu, he engaged in a massive effort to ship CDs around the planet. Every Internet café south of the equator, every university on the African continent, every computer store in Africa and South America, he shipped hundreds of thousands of CDs to places where he believed people congregated, where the CDs could be copied, where people could hand Ubuntu around, and he tried to produce a distribution which people would actually be able to install on their computers, either as LiveCDs or as hard-drive installs, that would really work. I think that’s the single most important effort now going on. That is to say, I think the way to get the software out there is to get the software out there. Mr. Stallman always thought that the software plus the words were the ideology, and so as you recall, he worked very hard at pushing the software, and he worked very hard at telling people which words to use about it, because he believed that the software plus the words were the political idea. I don’t know whether he’s right about that, I’m still agnostic about how important the incantations are, but I’m not agnostic about the importance of the software. I rarely run into people who don’t use the software who understand deeply why it’s so important. And I almost never run into somebody who really does use the software, all the time, whose daily life is lived with it, who doesn’t perfectly well understand why it’s a matter of great political importance. In other words, my belief really is that the political battle lies in getting people to use the software and to depend on it, both public users and private users. Now there’re the good news, because the goods are very free, or very cheap, and very, very, very effective. In other words, it’s just a matter of time. The push back on the other side is ferocious. It consists of everything, from bribery to legitimate commercial competition. It consists of measures that are criminal, and measures that are merely commercially aggressive. There’re a lot being done to maintain the market for proprietary software, of course it’s going to win, from time to time, in places, or even everywhere all at once. But it isn’t going to win permanently everywhere all at once, because those of us who care about freedom and who admire what we have all done together are going to continue to use it and to spread it. So, here’s an example of the sort of thing that Mr. Stallman would say depends very much on your time horizon. What’s being done on the 6-month basis is being done by local groups of movement stalwarts around the globe, some of them in countries and in cities and in regions where currently the work is very favorable, and some in places where it looks almost hopeless, like, for example, in the United States. But, the work done by the local advocates – trying to convince local government officials to take a look, trying to convince school boards or educational institutions to use and so on – that work is secondary in my view, not in importance ethically or in importance politically, but in the long term analysis, that work is secondary to the mere technical force of the software spreading itself. I’ll tell you why I think this.
People argued very hard in the mid-to-late 1990s about how to make business adopt free software. Eric Raymond and Tim O’Reilly and some other people said – rather like Mr. Stallman in this context – “It’s the words, change the name, stop calling it ‘free software’, call it ‘open source’, then business will use it”. Mr. Stallman, well, I don’t have to tell you what he said, ’cause you all remember, so I won’t bother. But it was loud, and rude, and people were annoyed by it. And I don’t know who had the value of that argument because it seems to me in retrospect they were both mistaken. It didn’t matter whether you called it open source or you called it free software, business didn’t use it because of what it was called. You couldn’t make them use it by calling it something else. The only thing you could do is step out of the way and let them begin using it, which they did, and the more they used it the more they wanted to use it, and the more they used it and wanted to use it, the more risk there was that eventually the boss was going to find out that they were using it. And eventually, all at once, the boss found out that they were using it. And around the whole of the financial industries, in the early part of this century, I saw managers, CTO’s and general counsels and management executive committees getting together with real shock and dismay, “What should we do about having an open source policy?”, the general counsel would say. “Well, it’s very risky”, says the deputy general counsel. “Well”, says the CIO, “I have to tell you, we’re already using it every single day to run every single e-mail server, and name server in the place, your printers will stop working, you won’t be able to get the checks mailed next month. Don’t you think your open source policy had better be ‘Keep on using it’?”. And indeed that became the policy, “Keep on using it”, and maybe even contribute to it, and maybe even get more of it. So, I think that, from my point of view, the story of where we’re winning and where we’re losing in the race to get governments to use is the random aspect of history, the what-happens-to-happen. You know that I would never argue that what-happens-to-happen can’t be important in the long run, it can. But most of the time it isn’t. What-happens-to-happen happens to happen. Munich will use the software, or it won’t, this decade. They’ll use it next decade. Austin will convert completely, or it won’t. ODF will be adopted in Massachusetts or the governor will be bribed. These things are what they are. In the long run, we’re going to win. In the medium run, we’re going to win. In the short run, if we do it right, we’re going to win. I would prefer to do it the short way because we’ve got other stuff on our agenda, and we can’t wait for the rest of the century for Mr. Gates and Mr. Ballmer and all of their successors to quit, resign or surrender. It would better to wrap this up cleaner and sooner. Here are, in my view, the things we can do to wrap it up cleaner and sooner. We can fight the ODF wars everywhere all the time. The Windows franchise is un-saveable now, because neither the server-side nor the client-side of the operating system can be built in competition with us using the software engineering techniques Microsoft now uses. The Office franchise is safe if ODF disappears. On the contrary, if ODF remains a strong contender, the international standard, if governments continue to mandate its use for publically-generated documents, if ODF wins at that level, the Office franchise at Microsoft will also go extinct. I don’t know whether that will happen in 2010 or 2009 or 2012, but we won’t have to wait ’til 2015, because not all the money they have in the world can prop up the Office franchise, once programs that cost zero will do the same thing that Office will do. So the two great cash cows in the Microsoft world, the Windows franchise and the Office franchise can be beaten this year. Help people use free software, desktops and laptops. Each one teach one. Make people see that it can work, proof of concept plus running code. Start by converting people over 60 years old. Every time people see people over 60 years old running free software, it helps them warm their hearts, or freeze their backside off depending which side of the war they’re on. Everybody assumes that 12-year-olds can do it, it’s when the 62-year-olds can do it, that people really get freaked out. So, help people use free software, starting with the older friends you have, people almost as old as me and moving downwards, right? Fight the ODF wars, make government use ODF for open document format, make them keep public records in formats we can all use, hack and understand. If you do those two things for 5 years, Microsoft will not seem like a problem to you at the end of it.
[Audience member 7:]
Hello. What are your views about intellectual property rights, working with free software, because I’ve lately heard a few open source products which come with IP issues but [Unintelligible] source. [Unintelligible] , but I can’t, I don’t think they can solve it for it with IP [Unintelligible] [Unintelligible] [Unintelligible] going on beyond in 21st century with free software some day?
[Eben Moglen:]
Well, what is it that that question amounts to? What decision are we actually facing?
[Audience member 7:]
You see, the [Unintelligible] concept of intellectual property, what I understand, is people, sometimes gave a lot of time and investment and money trying to come up with a product, may not be in software but in biotech or anywhere you put it. So, by the idea of [Unintelligible] they are trying to take hold the return of what they have invested in many years. The amount taken in return may not maybe too huge, we may not appreciate, but the whole concept of IP is generally based on that.
[Eben Moglen:]
I see, but again I’m sort of left wondering what problem it is I’m trying to solve. It doesn’t occur to me when I wake up in the morning that I hope some time in the next 20 years I’ll find a way to monetize my investment in freedom. Somewhere along the way I decided that the reason I’m investing in freedom is not because it ought to give me a reasonable rate of monetary return in the end. Somewhere along the way I decided that I was living the life I wanted to lead in which working for freedom was a part of what I wanted to do, which doesn’t mean that I don’t care about money. But I think it means that I came to see the thing I do as not an investment, that’s supposed to pay out in the same way that it would pay out if I were my own servant. If I were a slave working for myself, and the question were, had I earned my keep, did I produce the calories necessary to keep me alive. I think what actually happens when I teach, is that I get my reward on the spot. Later I get paid, because the university wants me to show up again next term, and isn’t sure whether the high I get from teaching will last all the way through the summer. Right? The work I do is its reward. When I wrote APL interpreters, that work was my reward too. Yeah, IBM paid me decently. I got my education off IBM’s buck, right? They paid for me to go to law school, they paid for me to get a PhD in history, not because they needed me to have that but because I hacked on the APL interpreter and they were glad I did. But I worked 16-hour days all the time I was a student on every vacation that I had, because I loved it. Because you couldn’t have stopped me from working there if you had taken the money away from me. At that time in my life I considered that work meaningful. What frightens me about people I know, whether they are lawyers or programmers, is that the work they do is not meaningful to them. Only the money counts. This is not a good way to wind up. Yet from the point of view of the theorist of investment and return, it’s the only way you can wind up. You can’t wind up any better than the rate of return on your investment in your own production; this seems shameful to me. I hope it isn’t true. I think it isn’t true. In all my life as a teacher, I have never come to the belief that my students were going to be limited in their lifes to the worth of what they produced, seen by the hard-eyed buyer at the other end. I don’t know what justice is worth in money. So I don’t worry too much about what the rate of return is I’m making it. I think we’re fooling ourselves about this. I think that we’re imagining that we compete to prove the value of our ideas by finding out how much other people will pay for them. You don’t want me to ask you for money now, do you? You don’t want me to have come here to give this talk for the money, do you? It’s kind of nice, isn’t it, that you’re not paying me, and I’m not paying you to listen? It’s kind of nice that we don’t have to ask whether it’s more valuable to you to have a speaker or more valuable to me to have an audience. For all I know, considered that way, I might be out of luck and have to pay everybody here for having put up with me. What actually happened, what actually happened was that for just a few minutes, until I bored people and their feet started shuffling, for a few minutes we were together. And it mattered to us that we were together. And we got something out of being together, that was worth more to us than being apart. Justice is like that, software is like that, music is like that. Don’t let them screw it up by asking what the rate of return on it is. It just won’t work. Thanks a lot.
[Applause]
[Vijoo Krishnan:]
Thank you, Professor Moglen, because… Now I request Mr. Jaykumar to propose a vote of thanks
[Jaykumar.H.S.:]
Friends, we have listened to a wonderful session by Professor Eben Moglen. On behalf of Free Software Movement of Karnataka, I thank Professor Eben Moglen for having come all the way from US and presented us with one of the best speeches. And I also thank Miss Mishi Choudhary for having coordinated with us to make this seminary a great success. And I also thank [Unintelligible] Kiran Chandra who is, who represents Free Software Foundation of India, and also instrumental in spreading the Free Software Movement in Andhra Pradesh and I thank him for his support and his presence. Finally, I thank all the participants who have gathered here in good numbers, for making this program a good success. Thank you.
[Applause]
