Eben Moglen on the Global Software Industry Post-GPL3

Dan Shearer writes "Three days before GPLv3 was released, Eben Moglen delivered the annual lecture of The Scottish Society of Computers and Law in Edinburgh, Scotland giving his thoughts on 'The Global Software Industry in Transformation: After GPLv3.' The text transcription, audio and 384kbit video are up at archive.org. Eben looks back at the 'legislative action' achieved by the GPLv3 community over the last 18 months, and also from the 22nd century. A riveting presentation for all present."

Predicting the future

[benhocking]

In case you were wondering:

"Seen backward through the end of the 21st Century, our achievements will seem very primitive. They thought that it was something that they got a few tens of thousands of otherwise hierarchically disorganised people around the world to cooperate on a single act of limited purpose legislation, regulating the share of software," the 22nd Century will say. "How quaint." But it was the beginning of a joining-together of communities of affect in the global organisation of power, the beginning of affiliation rather than territorial location or political domination, as the source of legitimacy for legislation. It was the beginning of the idea that cooperative private agreement can substantially oust public law institutions without challenging the legitimacy of the Governments that participated in making the public law. And it provides an escape from the moral dilemma presented by the myth of endlessly acquisitive homo economicus, the little homunculus of economic dream, the independent entity with the exogenously derived preference schedule, competing with sharp elbows in the market against every other homunculus economicus seeking only the same narrow benefit off the same asocial schedule of what I need today.

I find him quite eloquent

[Geof]

Actually, I find him wonderfully eloquent and inspiring. Lawrence Lessig calls him "the truly inspired rhetorician of our age [lessig.org]". Here's one passage that struck me:

The monopoly isn't in any intellectual sense interesting, it isn't in any ethical sense tolerable, it isn't in any economic sense necessary, it's simply a thing that happened to happen, and that we will soon be finished making no longer there.

What a put-down. The slight complexity of the last two phrases ("happened to happen" and "we will soon be finished making no longer there") is deliberate. It makes you pay attention and drives the point home. Language like this draws you in: it makes you think, and because you have to work a little it makes you a participant. Frankly, you need to think and you need to participate because there is so much depth behind his words. There are so many ideas, so many necessarily unanswered questions, that I would even say - and I mean this as high praise - that at some point or at some level you need to disagree.