Free as in ?
If you have a good idea, that is going to make people's lives better, and maybe even change the world, should you be able to patent it, so that you can make money out of anyone else using it? Or should you give it away for free?
This is the basic question that lies behind the whole debate about 'intellectual property', which according to one side is the worst threat to human freedom and innovation since the Spanish Inquisition, and according to the other is the sole safeguard of enterprise and technological advance.
Some cases are much more simple to decide than others. If you have a new idea about God, or about how to live a truly human life, you had better give it away and not expect to make anything from it. This is one way you can tell that the Gospel of Jesus is true, while Scientology or the teachings of Shree Baghwan Ragneesh are the work of charlatans.
If you write a novel, it's reasonable to be able to publish it and have people pay to read it, so that you get some reward for the ideas-work of creating it. Other people shouldn't be able to profit from your work by selling pirated editions: that was the whole point of copyright law. But copyright was supposed to expire after a certain length of time, either from publication or from the author's death: why should descendants, or other commercial interests who may have bought or otherwise claimed a copyright, continue to benefit from the intellectual work of the author?
If you write a song, you can't stop someone else from singing it, but if they earn money from their singing, then surely you should get some sort of commission from them.
Here, the key issues are about the amount of work that goes into the intellectual creation, and whether another person using them is making money from them. If a company puts years and large amounts of cash into research and development, then it expects a return: though the profits in some cases, notably the major drugs companies, seem obscene when weighed alongside the suffering of patients with diseases like HIV/AIDS in the Two-Thirds World, who are too poor to have access to those life-saving discoveries.
Somewhere between these instances, comes the matter of software. It is summed up by the difference between, on the one hand, the world's biggest corporation, Microsoft, with its stranglehold monopoly on the world of personal computing, and on the other the Free Software Foundation which is the brainchild of Richard M. Stallman, or RMS as he is commonly known in Geekworld. RMS had his early experiences of computers in the hacker culture of MIT in the early 1970s, where there was a strong ethos of camaraderie and sharing. If someone found a new hack for some piece of software, a bit of code that would fix a bug or just generally improve it, he (it was, I think, invariably he at that time) would be happy to make it available to all his colleagues, just as they would share their fixes with him. RMS perceived it as betrayal, when his colleagues started to restrict their work and sell it to companies who made a proprietary 'secret' of it. He has become a (some would say) fanatical advocate for Free Software, claiming that it is an issue of timeless values such as freedom, justice and fair play. So strong are his views, that he even distances himself from the open source software movement which is related but not coterminous.
Microsoft argues that quality computer software, in the complex computer world of today, is only possible where there is strong centralised research and development, and the secrecy and strict licensing conditions that are necessary to turn a profit from it. This argument is largely confounded by the success of RMS's own GNU Project (GNU = GNU's Not Unix) and Linux, which have been the work of outstandingly talented individuals, but also of whole teams of hackers working together on the projects for nothing but the sheer fun and intellectual challenge of it. (I've long thought that this is a challenging model for Christians, who have tended to stay with the centralised and top-down way of doing things that the Church has preferred for centuries, rather than the collaborative, grass-roots style of the early Church.)
A notable recent legal challenge has been brought against Linux, on the grounds that it includes some code 'stolen' from a proprietary part of Unix that is owned by the plaintiff. It now appears that it will be almost impossible for them to prove this. But indeed, how could it be proved, unless thousands of lines of Linux code were identical to thousands of lines of the proprietary code, even down to the programmer's comments? And what if only hundreds of lines were identical? Or only dozens? At what point could you prove copying, rather than simply arriving at the same ways of solving the same problem in the program?
Computer language is not that different from any other kind of language; and there are only so many ways you can say: "The sun rose over Ragleth Hill." You can't copyright the basic building blocks of language or thought - so when do any of these things become 'intellectual property'?
If I describe my love as a yellow, yellow daffodil, I can't claim it as an original thought. (Of course, when I write a whole song about it, I may expect you to pay me royalties if you earn money from singing it.) No more should anyone be able to buy up patents on, or extend copyrights of, works or ideas that have once been in the public domain or which are part of those essential building-blocks of culture. You could not copyright the words, "Mirror, mirror on the wall; who is the fairest of them all?" - yet Disney have virtually stolen some of those key works of the Brothers Grimm, and made their film versions seem 'definitive' in the popular culture. The copyright of some of those films would normally expire, 70 years after they were made; yet the Disney Corporation are among the key players in the attempt to extend the length and scope of copyright and intellectual property laws, in order to keep their profits rolling in.
So RMS's crusade for free software is much more than just a geek's quixotic fantasy: it has implications for many fields of human creative endeavour, other than just that of writing software.
See Free As In Freedom by Sam Williams
This is the basic question that lies behind the whole debate about 'intellectual property', which according to one side is the worst threat to human freedom and innovation since the Spanish Inquisition, and according to the other is the sole safeguard of enterprise and technological advance.
Some cases are much more simple to decide than others. If you have a new idea about God, or about how to live a truly human life, you had better give it away and not expect to make anything from it. This is one way you can tell that the Gospel of Jesus is true, while Scientology or the teachings of Shree Baghwan Ragneesh are the work of charlatans.
If you write a novel, it's reasonable to be able to publish it and have people pay to read it, so that you get some reward for the ideas-work of creating it. Other people shouldn't be able to profit from your work by selling pirated editions: that was the whole point of copyright law. But copyright was supposed to expire after a certain length of time, either from publication or from the author's death: why should descendants, or other commercial interests who may have bought or otherwise claimed a copyright, continue to benefit from the intellectual work of the author?
If you write a song, you can't stop someone else from singing it, but if they earn money from their singing, then surely you should get some sort of commission from them.
Here, the key issues are about the amount of work that goes into the intellectual creation, and whether another person using them is making money from them. If a company puts years and large amounts of cash into research and development, then it expects a return: though the profits in some cases, notably the major drugs companies, seem obscene when weighed alongside the suffering of patients with diseases like HIV/AIDS in the Two-Thirds World, who are too poor to have access to those life-saving discoveries.
Somewhere between these instances, comes the matter of software. It is summed up by the difference between, on the one hand, the world's biggest corporation, Microsoft, with its stranglehold monopoly on the world of personal computing, and on the other the Free Software Foundation which is the brainchild of Richard M. Stallman, or RMS as he is commonly known in Geekworld. RMS had his early experiences of computers in the hacker culture of MIT in the early 1970s, where there was a strong ethos of camaraderie and sharing. If someone found a new hack for some piece of software, a bit of code that would fix a bug or just generally improve it, he (it was, I think, invariably he at that time) would be happy to make it available to all his colleagues, just as they would share their fixes with him. RMS perceived it as betrayal, when his colleagues started to restrict their work and sell it to companies who made a proprietary 'secret' of it. He has become a (some would say) fanatical advocate for Free Software, claiming that it is an issue of timeless values such as freedom, justice and fair play. So strong are his views, that he even distances himself from the open source software movement which is related but not coterminous.
Microsoft argues that quality computer software, in the complex computer world of today, is only possible where there is strong centralised research and development, and the secrecy and strict licensing conditions that are necessary to turn a profit from it. This argument is largely confounded by the success of RMS's own GNU Project (GNU = GNU's Not Unix) and Linux, which have been the work of outstandingly talented individuals, but also of whole teams of hackers working together on the projects for nothing but the sheer fun and intellectual challenge of it. (I've long thought that this is a challenging model for Christians, who have tended to stay with the centralised and top-down way of doing things that the Church has preferred for centuries, rather than the collaborative, grass-roots style of the early Church.)
A notable recent legal challenge has been brought against Linux, on the grounds that it includes some code 'stolen' from a proprietary part of Unix that is owned by the plaintiff. It now appears that it will be almost impossible for them to prove this. But indeed, how could it be proved, unless thousands of lines of Linux code were identical to thousands of lines of the proprietary code, even down to the programmer's comments? And what if only hundreds of lines were identical? Or only dozens? At what point could you prove copying, rather than simply arriving at the same ways of solving the same problem in the program?
Computer language is not that different from any other kind of language; and there are only so many ways you can say: "The sun rose over Ragleth Hill." You can't copyright the basic building blocks of language or thought - so when do any of these things become 'intellectual property'?
If I describe my love as a yellow, yellow daffodil, I can't claim it as an original thought. (Of course, when I write a whole song about it, I may expect you to pay me royalties if you earn money from singing it.) No more should anyone be able to buy up patents on, or extend copyrights of, works or ideas that have once been in the public domain or which are part of those essential building-blocks of culture. You could not copyright the words, "Mirror, mirror on the wall; who is the fairest of them all?" - yet Disney have virtually stolen some of those key works of the Brothers Grimm, and made their film versions seem 'definitive' in the popular culture. The copyright of some of those films would normally expire, 70 years after they were made; yet the Disney Corporation are among the key players in the attempt to extend the length and scope of copyright and intellectual property laws, in order to keep their profits rolling in.
So RMS's crusade for free software is much more than just a geek's quixotic fantasy: it has implications for many fields of human creative endeavour, other than just that of writing software.
See Free As In Freedom by Sam Williams
posted by Tony at 10/27/2004 07:33:00 pm
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