The Global Software Industry in Transformation
With the name Galileo Galilei, we associate two of the most important cultural responses to the quandary of possessed physics. The first is an insistence upon freedom from censorship, that is “e pur si muove”, determination to prohibit the ownership of physics by an entity rich enough and powerful enough to define its physics as the only permissible physics, the only available physics for most ordinary people. And second, the first significant attempt in the history of the West to write scientific literature at the state of the art in a vernacular language, accessible to everyone. Galileo Galilei’s decision to publish in Italian is as important as his decision to risk confrontation with the Church, for what it says about the fundamental pillars of free science in the history of the West. Not merely, in other words, an insistence upon the freedom of ideas to work their will in skilled hands, but a determination that the ideas which motivate the world, which explain its behaviour, and which render it controllable, should be universally accessible to people regardless of their ability to acquire enough social surplus to have Latin. We have come, at the end of the 20th, and the beginning of the 21st centuries, to an equivalently important moment in the history of human civilisation. A moment at which the principle of the universalisation of free knowledge becomes, for technical reasons, universally fulfillable. Where it becomes, for technical reasons, possible for the first time in the history of human beings, to bring all useful and beautiful knowledge to everybody without regard to the ability to pay. … Ignorance and cultural deprivation are now preventable. What is the moral case for their continuance?
Wow - a full transcript of Eben Moglen’s latest speech, “The Global Software Industry in Transformation: After GPLv3”. Another excellent speech, and what’s notable about Eben’s speeches, to me, is that they are substantially different in their structure and examples and language every time.
I’d like to collect a bunch of the soundbite-worthy chunks, like the above and “Here, we made this. Would you like some? Take it.” as ready-made ingredients into some decent short film propaganda.
The The Global Software Industry in Transformation by David Crossland, except the quotations and unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.
July 1, 2007 |
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