Transcript of Eben Moglen's Harvard Speech 357
An anonymous reader writes "Groklaw has a transcript of Eben Moglen's Harvard Speech + Q&A up. Good Stuff. During the Q&A he made a good point to think about: 'We stand for free speech. We're the free speech movement of the moment. And that we have to insist upon, all the time, uncompromisingly. My dear friend, Mr. Stallman, has caused a certain amount of resistance in life by going around saying, "It's free software, it's not open source". He has a reason. This is the reason. We need to keep reminding people that what's at stake here is free speech. We need to keep reminding people that what we're doing is trying to keep the freedom of ideas in the 21st century, in a world where there are guys with little paste-it labels with price tags on it who would stick it on every idea on earth if it would make value for the shareholders. And what we have to do is to continue to reinforce the recognition that free speech in a technological society means technological free speech. I think we can do that. I think that's a deliverable message.'"
FSF's General Counsel (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Who? (Score:5, Informative)
Groklaw
SCO
(Richard) Stallman
With apologies, these names should ring a bell to anyone who occasionally visits
I'm feeling lucky [columbia.edu]
Eben Moglen resume (Score:5, Informative)
1994-, Professor of Law and Legal History, Columbia Law School.(current)
1987-94, Associate Professor of Law, Columbia Law School.
1986-87, Law Clerk to Justice Thurgood Marshall, United States Supreme Court.
1985-86, Law Clerk to Judge Edward Weinfeld, United States District Court, Southern District of New York.
1984, Associate, Cravath Swaine & Moore, New York.
1983, IBM Corporation, Armonk, New York, Associate Corporation Counsel
1979-84, IBM Corporation, San Jose, California, Programmer/Analyst, Programming Language Research & Development
Selected Publications
Anarchism Triumphant: Free Software and the Death of Copyright, First Monday (August, 1999)
The Invisible Barbecue, 97 Colum. L. Rev. 945 (1997).
Jewishness and the American Constitutional Tradition: The Cases of Brandeis and Frankfurter (Book Review), 89 Colum. L. Rev. 959 (1989).
Taking the Fifth: Reconsidering the History of the Privilege Against Self-Incrimination, 92 Mich. L. Rev. 1086 (1994).
Re:Two alternatives (Score:3, Informative)
It is already on groklaw for a while.
Jeroen
Re:Who? (Score:3, Informative)
Eben Moglen is lead counsel for the Electronic Frontier Foundation [eff.org] and a professor [columbia.edu] at Columbia Law School in New York City . He's a proponent of freedom on-line, a friend (or at least acquaintence) of Lawrence Lessig, and someone who works actively as a lawyer to promote open software and copyright issues on the web.
I had him as a professor for three of my classes while I was there, and he's a lightening rod for controversy. He often interacts with professor Jane Ginsburg, who takes an opposite view of copyright (and teaches copyright at Columbia; she's also the daughter of Justice Ginsburg on the Supreme Court).
Re:Who? (Score:5, Informative)
The Free Software Foundation
His Bio is Here [columbia.edu]
He was responding to the talk given by our buddy Darl McBride Text here [groklaw.net]
My favorite Quote (Score:5, Informative)
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
Transcript is good (Score:4, Informative)
Moglen is a treat to watch and hear; in an era of dismal public speakers he's a reminder that people once went to Court and campaign gatherings just to hear English rhetoric as a fine art.
Another great quote... (Score:5, Informative)
... and one relevant to a much-debated topic here on slashdot.
Moglen makes a very lucid explanation of why the apparently-more-free BSD license is less valuable to people who believe in freedom. He characterizes the the world of free software as a "self-healing commons", that cannot be appropriated, or destroyed, and points out that a BSD-style commons is much more vulnerable to being "proprietized".
The really interesting parts of his talk, though, were the bits about open hardware and radio spectrum, and their implications on technological free speech, and of course his extensive and detailed explanation of why he thinks the free software battle is essentially already won.
Even if you don't agree with him, Eben Moglen is a persuasive speaker with very deep and powerful ideas. Very well worth reading/listening to.
Re:Who? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Confusing the issue (Score:5, Informative)
I'm not saying that their methods were not in line with their goals (though I always had reservations about the goals themselves). Name makes a difference in the image. Which is exactly the point that Eben is making in his speech when he advocates not forgetting the "Free" part.
Re:Confusing the issue (Score:3, Informative)
Obviously the transcriber has missed the point if Free doen't have the uppercase F.
Re:Mirror of the webcast? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Can outsiders attend these lectures? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Who? (Score:3, Informative)
And this is before I've read it and before I knew who he was. What exactly do you expect here? A paragraph explaining that Eben Moglen was the legal counsel for EFF doesn't tell me anything about this article.
-N
Re:Mirror of the webcast? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Free as in "profit is evil", re: Stallman (Score:5, Informative)
It's very strange that you can't back this claim up, especially as Stallman and the FSF have made money by selling GNU software.
In fact, you can order GNU software directly from the FSF [fsf.org] right now.
In fact, why not read what the FSF have to say on the matter straight from their own website:
Re:Differences (Score:0, Informative)
Free Software is a bit more nebulous a term, but as I understand it, it refers to software for which the intellectual property rights (copyright and so forth) have been deliberately weakened so that others may modify it, create derivative works from it, and in some cases even redistribute it, without fear of legal reprisal.
Re:Free as in "profit is evil", re: Stallman (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Differences (Score:3, Informative)
The software comes with source code. People and businesses are allowed to re-sell and re-distribute it.
The redistributors/resellers must ensure that the software's source code be free for the users to obtain (subject to recovering media and shipping costs) and read. This includes any modifications to the software.
The end users must be given the same freedoms and conditions by the distributor as the distributor was given by the original author (e.g. must be given the source code + modifications, must be allowed to re-distribute and modify)
Synopsis: All end users must be allowed to be resellers/redistributors and developers, including of redistributed or modified versions.
Open SourceThe software comes with source code. People and businesses are allowed to re-sell and re-distribute it.
The redistributors/resellers may make the software's source code available, or they may keep it closed. The same with modifications.
The end users may be prohibited by the redistributor from taking the same freedoms given the redistributor by the original programmer (e.g. the end users might or might not get source, might or might not be allowed to modify or re-distribute)
Synopsis: End users may or may not be allowed to be resellers and/or redistributors and/or developers, including of redistributed or modified versions.
real history of term "open source" (Score:5, Informative)
According to "Rebel Code - Linux and the Open Source Revolution" by Glyn Moody (chap. 10), the term "Open Source" was coined in Winter/Spring 1998 (February 3rd?). Eric Raymond initiated the search for a term for this "free software" coming out, and later "open source" was decided upon. It seems they were looking for something less ambigious and more business-friendly than "free software". The term itself was originally suggested by Christine Peterson of the Foresight Institute.
regarding Stallman (quoting from the book)
"Richard Stallman always viewed this shift [from terms like 'free software' to 'open source'] with alarm. 'The open source movement is Eric Raymond's attempt to redirect the free software movement away from a focus on freedom,' he says. 'He does not agree that freedom to share software is an ethical/social issue. So he decided to try to replace the term 'free software' with another term, one that would in no way call to mind that way of framing the issue."
So it seems that, historically, there is something of a difference between "open source" and "free software"
The FSF on "open source" and "free software". (Score:3, Informative)
The FSF has written an essay to clarify this point [gnu.org]. I think it is one of their most underrated essays. This essay has been published by the FSF for years now and is also in RMS' book of selected essays "Free Software, Free Society: The Selected Essays of Richard M. Stallman [gnu.org]". Please notice how different this essay is from what the Open Source Initiative says about the free software movement (in case you don't already know, the OSI reduces the free software movement, from which it sprang, to "ideological tub-thumping").
Enligthening Q/A (Score:5, Informative)
Moglen: Ah, the software. .
Q: That's the kind of stuff I think I was more getting at with my question. So you have somebody who creates something useful but it has a zero distribution cost, and it's useful in a way that's not, not useful like celebrity, though I'm not sure, I don't think that's useful in some ways, but it's useful in the different sense that it takes a long time to create well.
Moglen: See, the programmers I worked with all my life thought of themselves as artisans, and it was very hard to unionize them. They thought that they were individual creators. Software writers at the moment have begun to lose that feeling, as the world proletarianizes them much more severely than it used to. They're beginning to notice that they're workers, and not only that, but if you pay attention to the Presidential campaign currently going on around us, they are becoming aware of the fact that they are workers whose jobs are movable in international trade.
We are actually doing more to sustain the livelihood of programmers than the proprietary people are. Mr. Gates has only so many jobs, and he will move them to where the programming is cheapest. Just you watch. We, on the other hand, are enabling people to gain technical knowledge which they can customize and market in the world where they live. We are making people programmers, right? And we are giving them a base upon which to perform their service activity at every level in the economy, from small to large.
[1:15]
There is programming work for fourteen-year-olds in the world now because they have the whole of GNU upon which to erect whatever it is that somebody in their neighbourhood wants to buy, and we are making enough value for the IBM corporation that it's worth putting billions of dollars behind.
If I were an employee of the IBM corporation right this moment, I would consider my job more secure where it is because of free software than if free software disappeared from the face of the earth, and I don't think most of the people who work at IBM would disagree with me.
Of all the people who participate in the economy of zero marginal cost, I think the programmers can see most clearly where their benefits lie, and if you just wait for a few more tens of thousands of programming jobs to go from here to Bangalore, they'll see it even more clearly.
Re:Free as in "profit is evil", re: Stallman (Score:3, Informative)
The Stationers' Company acted as warehouse for censorship and prior restraint. (This was the subject of Aeropagitica, John Milton's paean to the idea of a free press). After the Revolution in 1688, the idea of Big Brother deciding what could and could not be printed proved pretty damn horrifying to everyone, so "copyright" by 1695 had pretty much ceases to exist. Result? Cheap books from Scotland were wrecking the English printers' market share. The response was a modern copyright law, designed to encourage the dissemination of books (authors had no rights at all once their works had been bought and published!) and allowed the printer who had bought the book from the author a monopoly on printing it, in order to encourage them to make books widely available (since there was no fear of piracy)
Re:Confusing the issue (Score:3, Informative)
Even today you "membership" in the Free Software Movement depends on your acceptance of a particular political ideology.
No, it doesn't. I do agree that the PERCEPTION that this is the case did hold free software back quite a bit, and that a new term was needed to get around that. But that perception was a misconception.
PJ was told McBride asked to speak at Harvard (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Playing devil's advocate here (Score:3, Informative)
Clue: communism is about social ownership of CAPITAL, the -means of production-. Not bicycles, but the factories that manufacture them.