Moglen on Social Justice and OSS

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.'"

Great presentation

[byolinux]

Especially when he points out that the best efforts of Microsoft can't produce browsers as good as the Free Software community.

More from Moglen

[Fiznarp]

Moglen also spoke recently at the Sakai conference in Atlanta. He is representing the Sakai Foundation in their fight against Blackboard's software patent.

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 Schedule [sakaiproject.org]

(Sakai [sakaiproject.org] is an initiative supported by several higher educational institutions to build an Open Source learning management system.)

Not even a token gesture toward software freedom?

[jbn-o]

How ironic that the /. headline mentions "OSS" (open source software) yet Prof. Moglen is General Counsel for the Free Software Foundation; an organization that not only predates the Open Source Initiative (which coined the term "open source") by over a decade but has a different philosophy [gnu.org] which sometimes reaches different conclusions about what software is acceptable than the open source philosophy does. For the open source movement, running non-free software is okay (not that an open source proponent would call it that; the open source movement exists in part to not talk about software freedom at all). For a free software proponent, non-free software is avoided except when writing a free replacement for a non-free program. The difference in reaction to non-free software [fsfeurope.org] is quite striking.

You can see how that plays out in this /. story: none of the formats this talk has been transcoded to can be played by all users with free software even though this could have been accomodated. Instead of including options free software users could use, we have a list of (what are for most users) non-free alternatives. MP3 is patent-encumbered in many countries, so citizens of those countries can't have free MP3 encoding or decoding software. The QuickTime container format can be free, but the codecs most often used with QuickTime are non-free. Flash can be played with free software but the free replacements aren't yet to the point of maturity where it can be used as a drop-in replacement (and even when the job is done, MP3 soundtracks on Flash video+audio files will pose a problem).

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.

freedom and resources

[argoff]

One problem. For the longest time, we have already had more than enough food to feed the world. The primary problem of getting food to the poor was never a cost or distribution problem, it was a political and freedom problem. The fact that we have entered the information age with free software has not changed this problem. While society has advanced greatly in the sciences over the last 150 years. Society has gained nearly nothing in the advancement of freedom and liberty. The US constitution was the cutting edge of that, but has not increased our liberties and powers for a long time.

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.

This is not what Moglen's talking about

[Geof]

This (from my transcription [geof.net]) is what he means by social justice:

There is no moral justification for charging more for bread that costs nothing than the starving can pay.

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:

the greatest problem of human inequality is the extraordinary difficulty in prising wealth away from the rich to give it to the poor, without employing levels of coercion or violence which are themselves utterly corrosive to social progress. . . . We cannot make meaningful redistribution fast enough to maintain momentum politically without applying levels of coercion or violence which will destroy what we are attempting.

An information economy based on free software, however, can be different:

We find ourselves now in a very different place. . . . It's a place where the primary infrastructure is produced by sharing. The primary technology of production is unowned. . . . We have begun proving the fabric of a twenty-first century society which is egalitarian in its nature, and which is structured to produce for the common benefit more effectively than it can produced for private exclusive proprietary benefit. . . . a world in which the resources of the wealthy came to us, not because we coerced them, not because we demanded, not because we taxed, but because we shared. Even with them, sharing worked better than suing or coercing.

Re:More Columbia Rubbish

[leereyno]

You might want to quit while you're ahead because your understanding of history is profoundly flawed.

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.

Re:More Columbia Rubbish

[vykor]

You mean Joshua Muravchik, neocon extraordinaire of the American Enterprise Institute? Why, that'd be like going to stormfront.org to learn about socialism. No bias there, no sir.

Re:Video Format

[Anonymous Coward]

Linux users can access Quicktime files just fine.
The file format has been openly specified since the 80s, and is supported in a bunch of players (including basically everything that supports .mp4 files, since they're practically the same format, just with some different atom types). It was the old sorenson codecs that used to give linux users problems, and hardly anyone uses them now, these days it's all h264/aac.

Transcription

[Geof]

If you want a non-proprietary format, I have transcribed [geof.net] Moglen's speech.