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Moglen on Social Justice and OSS
Posted by
CmdrTaco
on Sun Dec 10, 2006 11:22 AM
from the something-weighty-with-your-sunday-morning dept.
from the something-weighty-with-your-sunday-morning dept.
NewsCloud writes "What does Firefox have to do with social justice? How will the one laptop per child project discourage genocide? How soon will Microsoft collapse? Watch Eben Moglen's inspiring keynote from the 2006 Plone Conference (Archive.org: mp3 or qt; or YouTube). The video presentation is ordinary, so the mp3 is an equally good format. 'If we know that what we are trying to accomplish is the spread of justice and social equality through the universalization of access to knowledge; If we know that what we are trying to do is build an economy of sharing which will rival the economies of ownership at every point where they directly compete; If we know that we are doing this as an alternative to coercive redistribution, that we have a third way in our hands for dealing with long and deep problems of human injustice; If we are conscious of what we have and know what we are trying to accomplish, when this is the moment for the first time in lifetimes, we can get it done.'"
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Great presentation (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Except for the 'Social Justice' theme... (Score:5, Insightful)
Every time he said 'Social Justice' he fed the perception that Free Software is a communist plot.
Only among those who are already predisposed to do so. Social justice != communism. Moglen can't prevent you from bringing your biases to the table, but he can hope that you will judge his presentation on its merits, and not on the values you attach to words he is using.
yp.
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It's gotten so bad... (Score:3, Insightful)
Here in the Great U.S. and A. we're seeing a l
Why I have an allergic reaction to 'social justice (Score:4, Insightful)
The term seems to suggest that if A has sufficiently greater wealth than B, the situation is 'socially unjust', without considering the actions that led to the situation. If the disparity of wealth is due to A having worked harder to produce his wealth, it would be the antithesis of justice to 'correct' the imbalance by coercive force.
It's good that you use scare quotes there, because politically-connected people using their connections to gain advantage in the market is not what I call "capitalism"; it's more like "mercantilism". But consider this: The nations with the poorest citizens are precisely those where coercive force dominates economic transactions; those where the lowest economic classes do the best are where force (and the threat thereof) is kept to a minimum.We did an experiment last century, where we divided a country between capitalism and socialism. In order to maintain the experiment, the subjects in the socialist part of the experiment had to be confined by a wall, manned by guards with orders to kill anyone who tried to get out. But, hey, as long as all the inmates are equally poor, it's 'Social Justice', right?
The 'poor' under the definition of 'poverty' in the US of A would be considered wealthy in any country on the planet a century ago. By embracing 'social justice', you can feel smug about spreading misery equally.I am a proponent of Free Software precisely because it's about freedom. The pursuit of 'social justice' by coercive force is incompatible with freedom.
BTW, wasn't Moglen wearing a NICE suit? I don't suppose Starvin' Marvin can afford a fancy lawyer suit like that.
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Re:Why I have an allergic reaction to 'social just (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:It's gotten so bad... (Score:4, Insightful)
I agree. And I believe we have also hit a low point as a society when "free market" is also a dirty word. Free market has never meant a lawless market, but people like you still describe it as if it is a den of thieves. The free market is a place were people can come to exchange goods and services without the threat of coercion by force, it is a place were government will enforce equitable contracts made willingly and in good faith with the use of force. Ideally, it is also a place were the exchange of goods and services take place without regard to biases individuals might have against other individuals or perceived groups. Historically, free markets have been places were individuals have been able to come in order to better themselves through hard work and reputations for honesty. A free market is not incompatible with a concept social justice. The "free" in free market is free as in freedom.
The next time someone tells you that the top 5 percent of Americans are paying 50 percent of the taxes, remember, it's because they're making 90 percent of the money.
The rich pay a higher percentage of their income in taxes than do any other so called group. What you just said is a lie, pure and simple. A lie meant to divide people. A lie meant to assuage the guilt of the poor for taking more than they are worth from others. A lie meant to enslave the middle class. A lie that is so obviously false that you should be ashamed of yourself for spreading it.
Oh you meant to say wealth, sure you did. But wealth is not income, wealth is a made up number. Wealth is me looking at your house and saying that I bet someone would pay a lot for it. Wealth is not income, wealth does not always generate income. But when wealth does generate income it is already taxed at very high rates. So, you say that 40% is too little, that taking nearly half of people's income is too little? How much is too much?
I have been keenly aware of the false numbers that you and your kind have been spreading on the Internet. People are overtaxed and overworked and you would justify their continued oppression by spreading false rumors and lies. The rich and the middle class pay more than their fair share while the poor pay nothing or very little.
Yes, there is an inequity in this country and it is this: That the political class would prey upon the weak to better themselves. That the political class would scare people into giving them more power and control over other people's lives. That the political class would conspire between the two parties and act as one single unified political machine seeking to enrich their co-conspirators at the expense of the poor, rich and middle classes alike.
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Re:Except for the 'Social Justice' theme... (Score:4, Insightful)
That is only because some people are easily fed "trigger" words or phrases and easily trained to react a certain way whenever they are used. Reasonable people understand that social justice does not equal Communism. During the Cold War and even today these easily trained people are more than willing to turn on their friends, neighbors, and even family because of this fallacious sense of pseudo patriotism.
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I can't. That's not the best browser, that's a maybe a more technically compliant browser than some, but it's not the best.
Because everything else is a RAM hog (Score:3, Insightful)
What if I want Firefox for an architecture with a small amount of RAM? What other web browser runs on plenty of handheld devices?
Economy of sharing to compete? (Score:4, Insightful)
The "one laptop per child" mentality is great at giving people the information that they need in order to succeed, but it will not make them succeed. It will ensure that everyone starts the race at the same point, but it will not make everyone a winner.
Re:Economy of sharing-an example (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Economy of sharing-an example (Score:5, Insightful)
Humans have spent millions of years sharing, and just a few thousand owning. Sharing is what got us, as a species, so rich that we could afford to lock up resources, whether it cost anyone anything for others to use them or not.
Owning can speed up the pace of innovation by several orders of magnitude, but it can also slow it down. You don't need DMCA, DRM, and other insane intellectual property rights to do that. The medieval guilds in Europe, for instance, also slowed down the pace of innovation by a couple of centuries, and they did it using trade secrecy rules that worked just as well (or badly, depending on your point of view).
But the important thing is that sharing and owning are NOT mutually exclusive. Buddha had it right: it's the balance that's important. Microsoft shouldn't be allowed to own the ones and the zeroes, but sharing everything absolutely equally doesn't work well outside of a monastery either. The balance point, for me, is where you have the most innovation that benefits the most people and allows compensation to flow to the creators, not everybody except the creators.
One thing that's always brought up about "sharing economies" is the tragedy of the commons. That's where resources held in common and owned by nobody get trashed because nobody takes care of them. Our current environmental problems fall into this category. But the thing to remember there is that sharing only becomes a tragedy when it's a free-for-all. In that case, sure, it's a rip-off for whoever is the biggest thug. We don't have to let that happen. If the commons is adequately regulated, it can be used by everyone AND retain all its value, like a well-run city park.
Moglen has articulated the value in the new / old way of sharing, and brought so many separate things into one vision, it's like looking into a prism and seeing glorious rainbows. Love it.
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Economy of sharing-an example (Score:4, Interesting)
The problem with all these analogies is that software is not analogous to physical things. Software is more analogous to the design of the barn. If I decide that it would make more sense to have a barn with two doors rather than one door, it doesn't hurt me in any way for every other barn to have two doors.
Open source relies on the following:
1. Software is near free to duplicate but comparatively expensive to design.
2. Software is individual. My current needs are different than your current needs. Thus, even with the same base, both of us need to do additional work.
3. Needs change. Thus, the needs that I have tomorrow may match the needs that you have today. Therefore, giving you my work today may save me work tomorrow.
4. Bugs happen. If you find a bug and fix it for me, that saves me work. This is especially true of security bugs.
Where open source falls down (relative to closed source) is that it lacks a good way for non-programmers to pool resources in large groups. Look at MS Windows XP (WinXP) for example. WinXP apparently costs about $25 per user to develop (using an average cost of $50 per user and a profit margin of 50%). Assuming 400,000,000 users, that's $10 billion to develop WinXP (given Win2000 and Win98SE). Using a cost per developer of $200,000 per year, that's 50,000 developer years.
Open source does well in areas where the software is used by technical people. For example, traditionally (albeit increasingly less so), web servers have been operated by professionals. As a result, it has made sense for those professionals to use a web server that they could modify (Apache). Office suites have traditionally been used by non-technical people. As such, most office suites do not allow modification, only extension (through macros and more modernly, VBScript).
Barn raisings worked because in small communities, it's possible to get everyone to work together (people who don't go to raise your barn don't get your help with their barn). However, that's a bad model for trying to convince a business. It lacks guarantees (me doing work for you today does not bind you to do work for me tomorrow). To convince a profit minded boss, you have to demonstrate that open source reduces costs.
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Re:Economy of sharing to compete? (Score:4, Insightful)
The 'economy of ownership' is the one where people say 'This stuff is mine! Give me money or you can't use it, even if it costs me nothing for you to have it.
The 'economy of sharing' is where people say 'This stuff can't, or shouldn't be owned at all. If anyone wants to use it, they can and if anyone wants to help improve it, bonus!'
The commons notoriously has problems with things like overgrazing and overfishing, and the notion of sharing what you produce has problems if it costs you something to share. With digital goods shared on the internet, neither of those are a problem. Software doesn't wear out, and it doesn't cost me anything if two people share my work over a website or p2p network. The fixed costs associated with creating free software in the first place do have to be covered, but that hasn't been a problem so far.
The internet works with a different set of economic rules from the traditional economy. Stuff like Linux and Apache are economic equivalent of bumblebees. They shouldn't work under the old rules, yet they do.
And because of that, the ethical rules should change too, but they haven't, yet. In a world where Ubuntu and OpenBSD can be made without having policemen to stop them being copied, why should we employ policemen and jails to prevent Windows or OSX being copied? Jailing people is violent and evil, m'kay, and should only ever be used as a last resort. The primary justification for employing copyright protections in the first place was just to produce copyrighted works - if the works are now getting made without those protections, then there's no excuse for attacking and threatening people just to make an equivalent work that might compete with it...
Umm, I think that's Moglen's point, more or less. I'm still waiting for the *cough*quicktime*cough* movie to download...
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Re:Economy of sharing to compete? (Score:4, Insightful)
As you can see: We are giving for completely uneconomic reasons all the time. Does that make us bad people?
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Re:Economy of sharing to compete? (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, but you see, the ability to do this, i.e. to practice charity, which is the moral way of life, is in many ways dependent upon having the resources to give, which in turn is dependant upon a healthy free market economy. Obviously, you can be just as moral without any resources, but there is dramatically more that you can do for others if you do have resources. I think that Open Source is largely a result of this spirit. However, it is a result, not a cause, and I think it has exactly NOTHING to do with most the ideals mentioned, such as Justice. Justice has more to do with the free market. Charity is about rising above justice.
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Re:Economy of sharing to compete? (Score:4, Insightful)
If that were true, then how come the world's major religions ( Islam, Christianity, Buddhism, and Judaism ) asked people to practice charity hundreds or thousands of years before the development of modern free markets?
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Information is a stra
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Until 1477, that is. After that copyright was viable because owning a printing press was a huge investion, and it had to pay off. Ok. Some very rich people might have had a printing press purely for fun, and some revolutionaries were having them for completely different reasons. But in general people owning a printing press had somehow to conduct a business with it, and thus they were vulnerable as soon as they put their products to the public
Re:Economy of sharing to compete? (Score:5, Insightful)
You're wrong. You are describing a communist system, where wealth is distributed evenly, rather than according to how much each person is worth.
That's not open-source. To me, there is a huge difference with open-source: It is specifically about acknowledging how much something is worth, giving credit where it's due, and respecting the wishes of the authors. Thus, if you build something on top of what I have built, and I have shared it, all I ask is that you share it too. There is nothing in open-source that says that if you build something from scratch, you absolutely must open-source it. Only if you use parts of what other people did. Frankly, I think that's a reasonable request.
What it means is that it's more efficient than traditional innovation, because it means not having to re-invent the wheel. All we ask is that you open your code, too. You're perfectly free to not use what someone else did, but it would be re-doing a lot of work, so I don't recommend it.
You're only obligated if you are using something someone else did. Again, how is this not reasonable? If you're going to go and sell some code you wrote, but it includes a bunch of code I wrote, and I stated originally that I'd prefer you to share your code if you use it, then you're not inherently obliged to, you're obliged to according to the license agreement that you chose to comply with.
Absolutely. However, the hope is that it will, in total, create more winners. Or at least even out the distribution of winners over the globe. Right now there is a serious imbalance in the world that is making it a very unhealthy place to live. We can't just keep giving money to developing countries, hoping that they'll invest it properly and fix all their economic problems. Instead, this is an attempt to help them help themselves, a much better approach IMHO.
Anyways, notice that the OLPC project isn't exactly a charity. It is an effort to create a machine that is useful, but made in such a way that the target demographic can actually afford it. This is perfectly moral from a capitalist perspective. (Yes it is a non-profit organization, but as far as I'm concerned that doesn't change anything. They are still selling the machines, not giving them away.)
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Re: (Score:2)
Anyhow. They're selling machines, at an overall low cost (though th
Interesting, but a little too high brow for me (Score:3, Insightful)
The blogger's summary said the speech evoked "memories for me of Martin Luther King's speeches". Ummm
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I think it's worth keeping in mind that the speech we all listened to was an invited keynote address at the Plone Conference in Seattle. [plone.org] His audience was a bunch of free-software experts (Plone [wikipedia.org] is a FLOSS content management system). Making his talk 'more general and accessible' would have bored the audience. The intention of the talk was to remind some free-software developers of the 'why' of free sof
Video Format (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
And no, DivX/XviD aren't
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
"MPEG-4/MP3" and "H.264/AAC" are still proprietary formats. What I'm upset about is that this video hasn't been made available in an Ogg container with Theora and Vorbis streams.
Transcription (Score:5, Informative)
If you want a non-proprietary format, I have transcribed [geof.net] Moglen's speech.
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Widespread internet access could cause genocide (Score:4, Funny)
Well, there's your problem: (Score:4, Funny)
Stop looking at people's MySpace pages!
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Delusional (Score:4, Insightful)
re: Salvation through education (Score:5, Insightful)
That said, however, I think the more people who can get around the controlled press with these devices, and blog and create their own content, the better off the world is. It's salvation...no.
Genocide? (Score:5, Insightful)
A bunch of laptops to some starving, poor, thirsty people who live in terror of their government or paramilitary groups the government can't control are going to do a whole freaking lot.
Please.
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Oh, and the potshot "that the government of the United States chooses to ignore" is complete bullshit. The world (as am I) is already mad enough at the US for intervening where it should not have, why would the rest of the w
Eben Moglen as a lawyer (Score:2)
in much simpler to understand terms... (Score:2)
With that in mind:
"Consumer choice rules"
And when the choice is not acceptable to the consumer, they put on their producer hat and make it for themselves and to share.
That's OSS!!
The essence why Richard Stallman wrote the GPL in the first place.
He was unhappy what rights his employer, at the time, was claiming of his work.
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More from Moglen (Score:2, Informative)
He gave a keynote Wednesday morning and then appeared during lunch for a debate of sorts with Matthew Small, VP and General Counsel for Blackboard, Inc. It's quite entertaining, IMHO, especially if you have strong feelings about software patents.
You can listen to the podcasts here (look at the Wednesday schedule, day 2 for download links):
Conference Sch [sakaiproject.org]
Social Justice? (Score:4, Interesting)
That is not what I see when people speak of "Social Justice". I see them attempting to have an even distribution of wealth, by using the government as the enforcer of what is socially just.
It does not seem fair. Those who sacrifice, save and work hard should be rewarded. Those who do not, should not.
On a global scale, often, when I see the struggling indigenous people of wherever, they have placed restraints on their economy or their economy is a structured (ie planned) economy that has inefficiencies in it. These types of economies look like the economies proposed by those seeking "Social Justice".
This is just a Sunday morning rant. As always, I could be wrong
This is not what Moglen's talking about (Score:5, Informative)
This (from my transcription [geof.net]) is what he means by social justice:
His vision has no government or other enforcer. It is realized due to a restructuring of economic production around products based on software which is free. Here is how he describes past efforts to achieve social justice:
An information economy based on free software, however, can be different:
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Not even a token gesture toward software freedom? (Score:3, Informative)
You can see how that plays out in this
The solution has been around for some time and works well: add Ogg Vorbis audio files and Ogg Theora+Vorbis video+audio files. These files can be played on all platforms and there are implementations which are free software for everyone.
No, that's not all I'm saying. (Score:3, Interesting)
I appreciate it when open source minded hackers deliver free software to people, and I am grateful when open source advocates stand with the free software community pushing for no software patents and no DRM. We need more social solidarity to make better lives for ourselves, and I'm grateful that
Reasonable expectations (Score:2)
I'm all in favor of the OLPC project. It's a great project, but it shouldn't be seen as a world savior either. OLPC is a project that will make a few Westerners feel good and will help a few thousand (or tens of thousands) people acquire the basics of computing, provided that they are in the right conditions to start with.
But OLPC is not going to convince warring tribes that they should start loving their neighbors. It's not going to resolve hatreds and conflicts that have been raging for decades, if not l
freedom and resources (Score:3, Informative)
Notice that how even though Linux is free, that the place that it is used the most is silicon valley - more than any other place in the world. A free market Mecca. Not Africa, not China, not India. That's because it's not about costs, but about freedom. And free markets are not about markets, but about freedom too and people taking advantage of it to create wealth and prosperity where none existed before.
Contrary to what he said, the free market still has limits, but now the limit in supply and demand centers around services and not around content controls. The information age is doing for services what the industrial revolution did for production.
stop the socialism (Score:3, Insightful)
The self-importance is awe inspiring (Score:4, Insightful)
Open Source (or Free, or whatever the f*ck) software is fanstastic, but Jesus, can we have a little perspective please?
Software as an input to production of other goods (Score:3, Interesting)
I think you're misunderstanding what he's saying about software as the "primary underlying commodity" of the 21st century. He's not suggesting that the third world should be developing software. Rather, he's saying that software is now an input to economic development in general. If a poor country is producing textiles, for example, they will need software in order to manage orders, inventory, designs, and so on.
The parallel with steel in the 20th century is that you need steel to make cars. If you do
Access to what? (Score:3, Insightful)
Too much of what you find on the Internet is garbage. From the web page equivalents of open mike poetry nights at the local coffee house, to vacuumheads like 9/11 or moon landing conspiracy theorists, there's a lot of rubbish.
Will the network spread truth and liberty, or will the lies just spread faster? Is it a tool of freedom, or a global generator of intelletual smog?
Here's how you save the world:
1. Global education with a solid core of scientific method, basic logic and critical thinking skills.
2. Free access to all known forms off birth control.
3. Bust up the organized religions. Seriously, we have GOT to wean humanity off that shit. It's like every problem in the world can be traced back to some religious text or another.
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Talking to people (in the ivory towers no less) I have learned that Marx wrote many many things that to
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If you actually wish to understand the history of Marxism I suggest you read a book Joshua Muravchik titled "Heaven on Earth: The Rise and Fall of Socialism" ISBN # 1893554457. Amazon has used copies listed at around $12 after shipping.
Listening to leftist academics talk about Marxism is like going to stormfront.org to learn about Naziism.