Eben Moglen Lecture at MAMA/CARNet, Croatia
Since this was marked for deletion due to unknown copyright holders, I’m republishing it here. Be warned the copyright holder is unknown!
Video of Talk at http://mod.carnet.hr/hr/carnet/drustvo_znanja/eben_moglen.wmv
[Organizer talks in Croatian translation follows] Let me introduce you our lecturer tonight. This is the first in a row of lectures that Multimedia institute and Croatian academic and research network-CARNet organize within “Open society and free exchange of information†project. We had some kind of trial lecture this year at the CARNet User Conference when we had Rishab Aiyer Ghosh.
The lectures that we’ve prepared will be mainly addressing the wide range of social issues concerning a development of new technologies and so-called information society in past few decades.
Our guest tonight is a professor Eben Moglen. He is a professor of history and history of law at the Columbia University in New York. He is also a law consultant at the Free Software Foundation and together with Richard Stallman is involved in GNU GPL maintenance.
This lecture tonight will last about an hour or a bit less and than we’ll have a microphone so please feel free to ask any question. Once again, thank you for coming.
Professor Eben Moglen… [Silence in audio as mike is turned off] Yes. Sorry. Thank You.
I want to talk to you this evening about a change that is occurring simultaneously all over the world. In the transition from the economy of the 20th century to the economy of the 21st.
We have grown accustomed for the past 150 to 200 years with the possibility that improvements in the economy of human society, production and distribution of goods, could occur at costs to freedom. As the concentration of power was affected by the concentration of economy in ways harmful to human liberty. And we have been in each our own societies contesting to deserve both the fruits of economic progress and the effects of civil freedom at the same time. In too many of our societies economic progress occurred in ways that were deliberately or involuntarily harmful to freedom. Ways which meant that the exercise of individual rights and the individual capacity for personal development were negatively affected by the mechanisms of economic progress.
3.54
We now find ourselves at the opening of a new era in human history, and for the first time at least some of us hope that we are experiencing the possibility that power for economic progress and power for civil freedom can occur together. The mechanism by which this occurs is a transition to an economy which contains for the first time in human history a dominant category of goods that have no material existence. Of which the basic property is once one person has them everyone may have them. These are the goods which in the twenty first century we known as bit streams information goods. They are a moderately large category embracing all human knowledge, science, music, art, useful information of daily existence, train schedules, maps, information of about one anther’s social activities, language, learning. In other words we come into a time in the 21st century in which human learning has the property that it can be infinitely shared. Once one person knows something, everyone everyone can know that same something at no additional cost. This characteristic of the 21st century economy, the presence of a dominant category of goods with zero marginal cost, poses both moral and practical questions to the society in which we now begin to live.
5.50
The moral question posed by the growth of the bit stream economy in very simple. If everyone can have goods at the same price that anyone can have those goods what is the moral justification for excluding anybody from anything. If you could feed everyone in Croatia by baking one loaf of bread and pressing a button. What would be the moral case for not pressing the button, and for requiring some people to pay more for bread than they can afford to pay. Ignorance which we may define as the deprivation of information goods. Ignorance in the 21st century is a preventable condition. Aesthetic deprivation which we may define as deprivation of bit streams representing the beautiful and the attractive. Aesthetic deprivation in the 21st century is a preventable condition. We have now enough bread and roses. And the moral question which we face is why does Rupert Murdoch have most of the bread and all the roses and we have still those who have none. The solution to the moral problem of the 21st century is to share.
7.40
And thanks to the technology of the 20th century that’s an implementable practical solution. The 21st century politics achieves freedom, the extermination of ignorance, and the end of aesthetic deprivation not by Utopian measures, but by eminently practical measures. For the first time since the onset of the struggle for human freedom in the long history of the European people the politics that we embrace is a politics not of utopia but a politics of practicality. It is in this context that we belong to the movement for freedom of thought. Not a movement to achieve new socialist man a species never before observed and perhaps incapable of production. But a movement to achieve for others what we already for ourselves using tools that are already in being. The principle of 21st century revolutionary politics is called proof of concept plus running code. It is in short the practical process which has given birth to the Free Software Movement. To demonstrate the possibilities of something to enact the prototype of something is already to have demonstrated the feasibility of universal application. And it is this characteristic of the self-organization on the largest scale of what can be achieved through individual effort on the individual scale. Which transforms the politics of revolution from the search for the impractical to the spreading of the already existing. This then is the subject of our form of globalization.
10.00
The generalization of proof of concept plus running code. This principle of the 21st century economy meets at the present time, another model of the 21st century economy in which a few people own everything. You see the possibilities that this too is practicable in the 21st century. Neighboring politics across the narrow Adriatic demonstrates that one man with enough television stations can control everything. And so our politics becomes a politics of depriving anyone of the monopoly of communications, the bottleneck of knowledge, the monopoly of technical information or art. This is the condition in which we find ourselves renewing the historic struggle a freedom in a new and fascinating form.
11:07My goal this evening is to talk in a brief way about a few of the characteristics of that struggle and the nature of globalization process that we are driving now. To begin with then we should recognize the importance of software. It is not merely what we spend our lives with much of us, either writing or distributing it. Software is also the economic infrastructure of the 21st century. We now live in a world where geography is largely about the topography of networks. Less about how far are New York and Zagreb from one another than about the return time of packet travel between my server and your client. The globe in other words is several hundred of milliseconds wide in the 21st century. And the structure of production and distribution to market takes milliseconds. Not hundreds of years to spread the inventions of individuals from one location to another. Software mediates that process. We live in a world of pipes and switches. Pipes that move packets from A to B with no change in substance or content. And switches which determine what packets go where, who gets them, under what conditions, at what price. The switches which control the network are general purpose digital computers and software controls them. 21st century politics in relation to the new economy then has one basic question, who controls the switches? The manufacturers of proprietary software have an answer to that question. We do, we control the switches. Windows, doors, pipes its all the same belongs to us.
To this the free software movement has an answer, everybody controls the switches. Everybody may learn, everybody may experiment, everybody may share. From the sharing of switching capacity, or more importantly from the sharing of information about switching capacity, arises all the other phenomenon of 21st century freedom. The free software movement then is not only about making software something to which freedom applies, that is to say guaranteeing the freedom to study, to improve, to modify and to share. The free software movement is about freeing the network itself to perform its tasks, of distributing the goods from which no one will be denied, in a fashion which reinforces freedom.
Let us take an example. Music in the era after Thomas Edison changed its nature completely. Before Thomas Edison music was a social phenomenon people made music together. After Thomas Edison music was like vegetables in a can, the can could be moved, sold, opened and consumed. And people who could be regarded as musicians and audience, became producers and consumers of music. But producing, and even more distributing music at the opening of the 21st century begins to resemble music of the past. A thing made by people for sharing, distributing music in the 21st century is child’s play, and it is the children who do it. The sharing the music has become a conflict of power, between those who seek to own and those who seek to share. As you will notice the conflict is very much in favor of those who seek to share. Quite suddenly the industry of music in a can meets the resumption of social life. And music becomes once again a social, rather than a primarily industrial phenomenon. This process is possible because of free software. I don’t mean that every structure for sharing music is based on free software.
We have seen models of unfree software for sharing of music in the past several years. Napster for example was one, what we are learning in the music wars in North America, and what we is being learnt now in the music wars elsewhere in the world, is that unfree software for sharing. Opposes to the owners a face which it is easy for the owners to overcome.
17:06
If the software that shares music is unfree software made for profit, its technical characteristics will enforce control that in the long run the owners of music in a can, can employ to defeat sharing, and this was the lesson of the Napster cases. If you have a central directory of who has which music to share, if you sell the eyeballs and the eardrum of the sharer to the advertisers.
Then you will pose a legal surface against which ownership may direct its fire. Let the process of sharing be native to the net, let it use bandwidth in a collective way, let it avoid the production of centralized indexes, let it be bit-torrent in a word. And the process of ownership seeking to control technology becomes well-neigh insupportable. This is a brief model, proof of concept and running code for the revolution against the ownership of culture, and it depends precisely in its technical and legal essence on the arrangements for the freedom of software itself. Again I propose as central guiding principle, the network is the domain of freedom in the 21st century. Control of the network is control of switches, control of switches is control of software, when you make software free, the freedom of the network and of the network society follows as of course. Hence the deep importance not of open source, not of you may read this program, but of free software. Of the one additional element that my friend, my client, my teacher Richard Stallman has offered to the world. It is Free as in Freedom, you know. Free as in Freedom, we know Richard. Thank you very much.
19:32 From that idea, that social and political liberty follows from the freedom to share code, large social consequences now visibly follow. Consequences for political theory as well as consequences for political practice. I want to draw for you a few more of the implications that have become clear to us over the past 15 or 20 years as we built this movement and began to participate in it together. In the first place then, I want to point to the presence to a style of organization that follows from the freedom to software. As we share the network we share productive capacity at levels which were previously not imaginable in human economic enterprise. If you want to make free software, if you want to collaborate with people elsewhere in your society and elsewhere in the world. You need some basic tools. Machine tools for the production of software, like machine tools for the production of railroad trains, steel, coal, automobiles. The machine tools for the production of free software can be defined fairly easily. You need a website where people can exchange information and people and circulate patches. You need downloading capacity, bug reporting, news, media of software production. And so around the web we have located places where there are machine tools for the production of free software called one sourceforge. Look a little bit inside sourceforge. At the present moment there are roughly 90,000 projects proceeding at sourceforge. They embody the effort of somewhat more than 470,000 people. That is a large enough collection of human being that you can take a look at them, you can survey them, you can find out who they are and what they do. And my colleague Rishab Ghosh who Tom has brought here to Zagreb to educate you more thoroughly than I can do. Has done some of that research. What do we know about those human being who comprise the sourceforge factory of freedom. Well, the average sourceforge contributor is a professional in the information technology industries. With more than 10 years seniority in work, very experienced and thoughtful people. He, regrettably almost always he, is spending an average between 10 and 11 hours a week on his chosen project or projects. 470,000 people 10 hours a week. A little less than 5 million hours a week programming. So how does that compare to the proprietary software manufacturer of the the early 21st century. Last year I did a little study trying to create unit of software effort which I called one Microsoft. So I asked myself of the people who work inside the universe inside of Mr. Gates let us subtract those who sell, those who protect, those who count beans, let us remove all those people who don’t actually make software and look at what is left. And on the basis of that inquiry I come to the conclusion that sourceforge itself just one machine tool location in the net. Sourceforge itself now constitutes a little bit less than two Microsoft’s. At current growth rates, by the end of this decade sourceforge alone accounts for 6 Microsoft’s of programming effort.
24:03
The 21st century economy in other words contains levels of economic power, levels of creative energy that dwarf the largest and best funded corporate enterprises of the the 21st century comfortably. Producing goods with value beyond that producible by those largest and best funded enterprises with almost no capital inputs. Solely taking advantage of human creativity seeking an outlet. Why does this work? Let us go back to those 470,000 programmers at sourceforge. Lets ask them why they do what they do. Survey evidence tells us quite unambiguously the following, the first and most important answer given, why do you do what you do here at sourceforge is “to have fun”. The second most important answer given is to improve my skills and my technical knowledge. The third most important answer given is to increase the quality of the technical experience available to me, to my colleagues and co-workers, and to my community. An order of magnitude less important 26th on the list is to confront the Microsoft monopoly. To be clear then, the productive capacity of the 21st century economy lies in the human minds desire for knowledge and the strain of creative energy seeking an outlet. We are dwarfing the largest and most powerful of industrial and post industrial corporations using individuals desire to create and share, to have fun. Homo Faber meets Homo Ludens and from the encounter between play and work emerges the technology which assures freedom. This is a profound and ironic discovery, its worth contemplating for a moment, just in itself for what it teaches us. The great problem presented by the industrial economy was a problem characterized as alienation. By authors whose views we no longer regard as progressive or forward looking, at least some of us don’t. But they were right, the industrial economy was an economy of alienation, of the subtraction of what was created from the worker who created it. The 21st century economy is an economy of sharing without alienation, not the subtraction of what is made from the worker who produced it, but the addition of what is made by everybody to the workers who made everything else. In this process of the amplification of creativity, free software again plays a special and unique role. Free software is the greatest technical library in human experience. I say this because free software is the one form of human knowledge in which it is possible to go from complete naivety, from an absence of knowledge to the state of the art, in an important economic and intellectual field, to learn everything that is known about how to make computers do, everything that computers can do. Solely by reading and studying material which is freely available to anybody who wants it, anywhere the Internet exists or where there is a cdrom drive. That is in the developing and the transitional societies as well as in the developed societies. Almost everywhere, almost all the time. Free software universalizes the most important technical knowledge characteristic of the opening of the 21st century, in a form available everywhere to everyone. This is not the last such project, merely the first. But in many respects, the most important. Out of the universalization of that knowledge, free software creates a human development project. Which is in itself a structure for societal improvement. The 21st century economy rewards knowledge, moves jobs to where knowledge is, in my society this year about the only thing discussed in the political campaign was the movement of jobs from American to non-American locations. Everything else was merely all terrorism all the time. That discussion, the discussion of outsourcing might reasonably have been defined instead as the American discovery that other people in the world were smart. Getting educated, doing thinking work that used to be reserved for the expensively educated white collar population of the dominant global society. No longer.
30:35
Globalization is a process of moving wealth to knowledge, and we are in the process of moving knowledge to everybody who wants it. This is a powerful effect in the global world at the opening of the 21st century attributable to our activity in the redistribution of the roots of knowledge. By the time another generation has gone by, it will be seen that this effect in the transmission of the capacity to share was the single most important force in the redistribution of wealth in the world. Along with this characteristic of Free Software as a human development project, is the production of free software as national development, if you buy proprietary software for hard currency in a developing society computation capacity enters the economy and money leaves it, knowledge however remains with those who produce the software. Windows teaches people how to be users. Users, we employ that word in English to discuss the people who take drugs. Windows like tobacco, sugar, or heroine is a habit forming commodity with a particular historic role in world trade. Free Software is not an addictive commodity. It doesn’t produce slight improvements in immediate sensational welfare in return for permanent distributions of wealth. On the contrary Free Software produces lasting redistribution’s of wealth and knowledge in a form which leaves productive capacity where learning occurs. My colleagues on the other side of this great debate have been traveling around the world from headquarters in Redmond telling people in various developing societies for the last 5 years better be careful of free software, it will destroy your local software industry. Hmm.. Which local software industry, oh.. you know the one of using Windows. Yes, well but how much wealth does that leave where the software industry supposedly is. Governments as well as individuals have begun to figure out. The balance of trade involved in the production of proprietary software for the use of governments and people. Instead we now find ourselves watching as governments recognize that free software and its capacity to transfer knowledge into a developing economy represents the most effective form for joining the 21st century high technology economy.
Once again I am not stating a Utopian proposition. Ask the eighth largest economy on earth Brazil. The Brazilian government having realized the truth of the 21st century political economy now turns itself into a creative commons GPL society in which the investment in knowledge goods made by the government is made under licenses which enforce the rule of share and share alike. The result is not only to leave the value that local creativity brings about in the local economy it permits the free and frictionless accumulation of knowledge arrived at by others also in the economy, amplifying economic growth at every stage by the improvement in local human capital and local productivity. This is also globalization in the world trade system. Note the increasing frictional heating of the entities in the transnational legal system responsible for the regulation of the flow of knowledge. WIPO becomes a domain of increasing tension. As developing economies recurrently ask that WIPO consider the new forms of non-proprietary production in software, in pharmaceuticals and in culture only to be met by a returning emphasis and forceful assertion mostly by the United States government that WIPO is only for the consideration of stronger intellectual property rules, never for the consideration of weakening of such rules. The imperial effort comes to be to impose a regime of more ownership even as the developing economies insist upon the value of less ownership. This then becomes the primary transnational dialog at the opening of the 21st century, for whom are the benefits of knowledge. The developing economies now find that they assert the importance of the moral question in the 21st century not on the basis of an impossible demand for the global reallocation of physical goods, which they know will be withstood by force. But for the reallocation of intellectual goods, involving the opportunity for individual intellectual betterment and creation, a conflict they can win. We have made that possible and we propose to continue, ours is a revolution of the enforcement of sharing not by coercion, but by imitation. Here this is good, we made it, would you like some? Take it. Freely. As an invitation to the possibility of the massive reversal of political authority it is better than the Napoleonic wars. We don’t say Free Software is where the blue army stands. We say here we made this, would you like some, take it, freely.
37:50Never before in the history of progressive politics was such an uncomplicated invitation to participate in the actual. Made the entering wedge for the revolution of human authority. Yet that’s whats happening now in our globalization. So the critical question is what legally and practically can we do, to advance that struggle for freedom. We can make good software, we can give it away, we can produce music and art and share it. We can produce useful knowledge about the world and make it available to those who need it, who want it, who will do something else with it. And our proposition is Share and Share Alike. Here we made this, would you like some. This then is oddly both the practical and the moral answer to the 21st century problem posed by the transition to the post industrial economy. Our globalization, our global revolution, for some here this will probably reflect an idea once more commonly aloud than it is now. An idea of self management. We are after all self-managing a global revolution. And it works, and it works. But we have to defend it, it isn’t without threat. It challenges ideas fundamental to what we have been pleased to call the free market that is a market not quite free. And to the principle of the free market, we bring the principle of free software not as idea in alienation but as a gift. The free market micro-economist has a very straight forward proposition, he draws you two lines on the blackboard and he says “in a competitive market, price asymptotically reaches marginal cost. Yes, we say. And the marginal cost of bit streams is zero. Aaa, the economist says. There must be something wrong in these calculations, and he proceeds to cover himself in chalk dust. But his mathematics was correct, his lines on the graph were right, the theory is complete, and the answer it provides however difficult for him to grasp is the right answer. Many goods in the 21st century in a free market have a zero price.
41:21
Well then there must be something wrong with the idea of the competitive market. Lets eliminate the competitive market, lets have property rules. The president of the, pardon me, the chairman, oh pardon me, the head of the American central bank Alan Greenspan is often to be found explaining to our markets, that governments should be very much out of the business of interfering with the freedom of markets. Governments should have its hands completely out of the business of ruling the markets, governments should restrict itself to its natural activities, such for example as protecting intellectual property. But we say, that is an interference in the freedom of free markets. Mmm.. there must be something wrong in our calculations, pardon us while we cover ourselves with chalk dust yet again. No, there is nothing wrong with your calculations, you believe in free markets mostly, we believe in free markets really. And in those free markets, knowledge is not commodity, music is not a criminal imprisoned in a can. And people will have enough bread and roses after all. This is globalization, the spread of free markets. Who opposes it, the free market theorists, or rather I should say the free market theorists working at Microsoft or for Mr. Murdoch or Mr. Berlusconi. Free markets to a point, that is once freedom begins to go too far it might be dangerous. This has been the problem for 250 years. Freedom going too far is dangerous. Mustn’t mustn’t tinker with freedom, soon there will be guillotine soon there will be terror, soon there will be blood running in the streets. No we say, not this time. This time there will be music and everybody shares.43:35
So that’s the puzzle, that’s the puzzle. How to get from the world of proof of concept and running code, to a world of free markets, free software and self-management. How? not so hard, we do it with email, we do it with Bit Torrent, we do it with the infrastructure that the 20th century built for the 21st century to ride on, and it works. Everybody here knows that it works. So does the International Business Machines corporation. So does Hewlett Packard, so does DeucheBank. The interesting thing about where we now are in the movement to free software, free markets, and free sharing, is that capitalism is there with us step by step. The IBM corporations expenditure in supporting the promotion and distribution of free software this year will be more than 2 billion dollars. Note that I said that in the promotion and distribution of free software, not in its production. Though of course IBM will produce a lot of free software, but whats important to the IBM corporation is how much free software it doesn’t have to produce. How much is produced for it in an economy of sharing. Its support for our activities is the support of a free market company for a free market that works for it as well as it works for us. Last weeks announcement that the IBM corporation was getting out of the PC business was widely misunderstood and many people said to me, does that mean that IBM doesn’t support Linux anymore? Oh no, I said, it means that’s what their business now really is. Making stuff isn’t very important anymore. IBM spent a lot of money making the port of the Linux operating system kernel to the S390 macro computer, the mainframe version of the port of the Linux OS was very important for IBM. Because there was a lot of hardware around the world that wasn’t doing anything very much, and IBM found that by moving the free software kernel to that hardware it could give it a new lease on life.
46:21
Major full page advertisements in the big city newspapers of North America, in which IBM said to the corporate MIS managers, have you an S390 in your basement, take it out, it makes a great web server when its running Linux and Apache. So they spent millions of dollars preparing to move the operating system kernel, to the S390 macro computer, and then they turned around and donated the copyright on all of that work. Millions of dollars of work to the Free Software Foundation. I negotiated with IBM’s chief lawyer for free software matters, a structure for the movement of copyrights from IBM to the free world. Owning the software isn’t important anymore. We don’t need to own it, we just want somebody to keep it safe. Here, Free Software Foundation will you keep this safe for us? Here, we made it, would you like some? Let’s share. Now this on the theory of the industrial free market should never happen, IBM should think to itself, we paid for this, we bought this, our workers made this, we own it. We will exclude those who don’t pay us for it. But that’s not the 21st century for IBM anymore than its the 21st century for you and me. And again I want to point out, this is not an experiment, this is not a hot house flower. This is not IBM growing a few vegetables to see whether it would work. This is billions of dollars being bet, this is the future of the business being defined, the 21st century information technology industry will be an industry IBM says by its behavior, in which the ownership of software is far less important than the stewardship of software. An ecology like the forest to be managed, to be preserved, to be carefully shared, so that it is in growth rather than in destruction so that it is added to, rather than used up.
48:48
And we because we all know that those goods have zero marginal cost, don’t face the problem of the manager of fisheries or other commons, we don’t have to be concerned that it will be used up, that too many people will be taking it. The more the better. The more minds, the more businesses, the more sharing the better for all. The globalized economy in other words is an economy in which the largest of industrial competitors with some exceptions have recognized the importance of our theory of free markets, as an important modification of the 20th century understanding of the term. We’re glad, but it is not what we did it for, that’s just why they are along for the ride. We did it for another reason, our reason, was freedom. Freedom of expression, freedom of learning, freedom to posses our own minds in our own way. And to share with one another what we have learned about the world in a form that can never be controlled or destroyed. We have our goal, its an old one. You can find it in the Minnesang Die Gedanken Sind Frei is our goal. Ideas are free, nobody owns them, nobody possesses them to the exclusion of anybody else, that’s our goal. It’s been our goal a long time. We have been chasing this goal for the better part of a thousand years. European history is largely about the pursuit of that goal. We have tried it generation after generation, we suffered temporary triumph and permanent disaster. We have watched again and again as the dream of freedom, came almost to fruition only to fall back into the reality of power. But now we have another way, we exist in a world in which the globe has shrunk to the space between my mind and yours. Here, I made this, would you like it? take it. Milliseconds are all that stand between us, and in that world, the pursuit of the freedom of ideas, the pursuit of the freedom of expression, and the freedom society is very close.
51:24
There are four things that we need. Free Software, Free Hardware, Free Culture and Free Spectrum. So let us look at them very briefly and then I am done. Free Software, I need say no more than I have said. We must have the right to understand, to improve, to modify, to reuse, and to share the executable layer that makes our network free. Free hardware, this is essentially a conservative idea, we need computers that belong to us, and not to the people whose data passes through them. This was easy a moment ago, everybodies machinery worked like that. But the movie industry and the music magnates and the other people who put culture in the little metal can, they need to own the devices. The physical hardware substance of the planet, because they want to build a system of pipes that do not leak. They want to be able to run water through the Sahara so securely that nobody can drink until they pay. If there is even a little hole in the pipe, if there is any thirsty person with his lips against the pipe, drawing water from it, without paying them civilization for them is over, or so they say. Left to their own devices they would make us pay for every song and every picture, every story, every kiss. Left to their own devices, but they are not going to be left to their own devices. We have their devices, and we’re gonna keep them free. So there’s a struggle with the makers of things, to prevent those things from working for other people, than we ourselves. This is known as the struggle over trusted computing, which means computers you can’t trust. A temporary movement, mind you, one I think we will win comparatively easily. But until we win, we are not secure in what we hold.
Free culture. No, I don’t need to tell you, we all participate in it all the time. Let the music out of the can. Hip-hop taught us something about music, before the technology was there to make good on it. The 20th century made plasticity, the recombination of works of creativity, one into another, into a third, borrowed, blue, ironically shared, old, new, all together. That’s the characteristic of the forms of culture at the end on the 20th century, they presage the technology of sharing itself. We make new out of old, we reuse, we whistle and we sing, and we sample, and we belong to one another’s dreams in a new way. The culture of the future is the culture of sharing in its own most direct form. Aaa says the owner of everything, but will you have enough Arnold Schwarzenegger movies? Yes, we say, we think we will have enough Arnold Schwarzenegger movies. Without the God king, without the peasants with their feet wet in the fields, what Karl Wittfogel called hydraulic despotism, it is easy to show that you will have a hard time producing pyramids. And indeed we haven’t been producing many pyramids for the last 3000 years. It is not doing us too much harm. Nonetheless Egypt is Egypt, but we are and we have enough culture without the pyramids. Some aspects of 20th century culture were monuments to ownership. They were little more than monuments to ownership and we don’t need quite as many of them anymore as we once had. Will you have enough Arnold Schwarzenegger movies without trusted computing? Yes, we think so, we think we will have enough. Thank you very much for asking. Here, we made this, would you like some. Its appropriated video art, take it, its for sharing.
Free spectrum, all of this is very nice, but everybody must be able to get to what there is. We posses the infrastructure of universal human communications. That globe that is milliseconds wide, held together by radio waves. No government on earth is arrogant enough but to admit that the spectrum belongs to everyone. Its in trust, for us, the governments have always said. Some of them said, therefore the state will own. Others of them have said, therefore the state will give to a favored few, what belongs to everyone. No, Thank You. We say now, we would rather have it for ourselves please. We don’t you to manage it, we can self-manage it, Thank you. Lets have it back. and so we must. And this is probably the most important and the most difficult part of our globalization struggle for freedom of thought. To free the spectrum back to those to whom it unquestionably belongs. To permit the process of self management and self-organization. To come to fruition in the electromagnetic spectrum circling the world. This is hard, as a lawyer I see its hardness, as I saw the hardness of Free Software 20 years ago. I know that to destroy and reconstruct the spectrum regulation of the world is difficult. It will take lots of work, and lots of creativity and lots of effort. But are all on about it together now, and we’re going to succeed in the end. So those are our four great problems. Free Software, check. Free Hardware, check. Free Culture, under construction. Free Spectrum, come back tomorrow, we are thinking now, quiet please.
58:34
This is pretty good. Nobody has been executed yet. Nobody has been put in jail, not a single life has been lost, to the oppressiveness of too much power aggregated in the business of making a revolution. To be sure, there are children starving and people in jail, there are guys being tortured. But we are not doing it in the interest of revolution, we just haven’t finished the work of making of freedom yet. We are not engaged in a Utopian struggle for that which no one has ever seen. We are engaged in a practical activity. Proof of concept, and running code. Here, we made this, would you like some, take it. And there we are, at the opening of the 21st century engaged in the long standing struggle for freedom, in a world which has shrunk, so small that you can see the end from here.
Die Gedanken Sind Frei. My thoughts freely flower, I think as I please, and this gives me power, no hunter can trap them, no scholar can map them. No man can deny. Die Gedanken Sind Frei.
We have been singing it a long time, now it comes to the point where we can look across that new world of ours. Billions of people, milliseconds wide, and we can all sing it together, all at once down one pipe and share. This is the last and final stage of that long struggle for the human freedom of thought. And the difference is, this time we win. Thank you very much.(Applause) [Organizer in Croatian, translation follows] So, anyone who wants to ask a question, please…
Q) Good Evening, I work in the Software Industry and we see and here a lot about Free Software in the software industry. I want to hear your opinion on why there isn’t as much talk about free content in for example the music industry. Why don’t musicians have this overwhelming urge to create free content and distribute it as creators of software do. Thank You.
A) Well, so we have two questions, I think before us. One of which has to do with what musicians want and the other has to do with what musicians believe that they can get. What we call musicians in this context, tends to mean those very few who are allowed at all to make a living from music. The characteristic of oligopolist distribution of music in our societies is that in order to reduce output and raise price. The canners of music condemn most musicians to a life of silence. In my society most musicians drive taxi cabs, and wait on tables, and sweep floors. Because the rule is, there must be a small enough amount of music, that its price can be high enough to make a profit. If you ask those musicians, who have no opportunity to work as musicians, would they rather be heard and share, or would they rather fall silent for a lifetime. The answer is, they would rather share. If you ask those musicians who are fortunate enough to hang on by the skin of their teeth to the possibility of a life making music and living off it. They are very afraid of what might happen if sharing becomes universal. But it depends a lot on which kinds of music they make. In the United States, where what we tend to miscall classical music, that is serious music in the European historic style. Classical musicians in the United States were almost uniformly great supporters of Napster. Because they fear that without sharing among children their music will die. That generation that was raised to care about and interest itself in such music and to support it is dying off. And where the tradition of state support of that music is much thinner than it is in Europe. Sharing is a way of making music live, that would otherwise perish altogether. When you say then that there is a level of unwillingness to make free content in the music trades, much more than in the software trades. I agree with you and I identify false consciousness, the fear that it can’t be made to work as an important made to work as an important part of the story. I also point out to you, that those whom we call musicians are a tiny fraction of the musicians who could exist in a world of sharing. The 20th century process of musical production recording and distribution was a very high cost process. The costs have fallen drastically in the past 10 or 15 years, and they will fall even more drastically in future. There are people in this room who share with me and others around the world the ambition to eliminate all the proprietary pieces of the studio. All the software bottlenecks that continue to make the production of software more expensive than it needs to be. As the price of production falls, and the process of distribution becomes child’s play. You will see far more free content and far more music than anybody has ever imagined. Let me give an example from an allied art. Will you agree with me, in the 21st century, there will be almost no such thing as the unpublished poet. We are moving into a golden age of poetry, in which every poem finds its way to the web. In the 20th century there was damn near no such thing as a published poet. As the publishers discovered that there wasn’t any money in publishing poetry. Now poetry functions there as proof of concept and running code. There will be more free content just you watch. Then there is this to say about programming. Its an incremental collaborative activity. You do a few lines, I do a few lines, she does a few lines, and together we get it to work. Music for all its intrinsically collaborative qualities, and it has many, has not that characteristic of being infinitely divisible and parallelizable. Music is a sequence of notes in time, and they have to happen in relation to one another quite precisely. For this reason both poetry which is an oral form and programming are first to show the possibilities of free production, music a more regimented and carefully sequenced activity follows after. But don’t worry its coming, you can feel it coming. In fact, on the net, you can hear it coming.
Q) Hai?? Also working in the software industry, music industry and doing some research on the topic. First of all I would like to make a just comment, as you say. Four hundred thousand people are doing something for a fun. So you could call the free software industry as the entertainment industry, which is also good because they spending the free time to do something, but also looking on the free hardware, and example of the pipe through the Sahara desert, I think if these people were doing this software for fun, maybe will do something for the starving and hungry people who would be. Of course they would be doing it directly, but I didn’t get your explanation of the free hardware. I looking it on the, as the users of the free available resources of some infrastructure. Not as a free hardware, because it doesn’t free. Hardware cannot be free.Hardware cannot be free, because it has non-zero marginal cost to produce. But hardware can be very very cheap. One of the characteristics of the world in which we have lived for the past 10 or 15 years is that we lived in a world, in which the number of personal computers in the developed economies, mine, some to the North of here. They could actually saturate. My university for example, a wealthy university to be sure, but still a non-profit university. Not an enormously wealthy business, my university replaces personal computers constantly. My laws faculty decided to replace a large number of computers recently and some of the secretarial workers said, jee can we buy those old computers and take them home? The university studied the question and said no, that would be too expensive for us to keep track of. We prefer just to throw them away. All over the developed economies. There is hardware being thrown away, and the purpose of Microsoft as seen by Intel was to make that happen. Bad slow, over-complicated software necessitated the constant re-improvement of hardware.
69:42Engineering of hardware has been an extraordinary activity, I went to work at the IBM Santa Teresa laboratory as a designer of computer programming languages in the summer of 1979. When I arrived at the Santa Teresa laboratory. There were 330 people working there, among the largest clusters of programming effort in the IBM corporation. I fished out the hardware inventory sheet of the laboratory recently, for something I was writing, I had kept it all these years. When I arrived at the lab in July of 1979, there were 23 7168 mainframes, acres of 3330’s and 3350’s Winchester disk drives. The total amount of disk capacity in the laboratory on the day I joined was 29 Gigabytes. I can buy an 80 Gigabyte hard drive for my laptop for a hundred dollars nowadays. Look at what the box builders have done. They have given us rocket ships that move at three quarters the speed of light and cost a few hundred bucks. Software is worse, software is worse than it was in 1979. In many respects, reliability, usability. So, what we have actually now approaches from my point of view free hardware. As I understand, you will say, you are a rich guy living in a rich society, in a rich neighborhood. It looks like there is free hardware. I say, if you take all those boxes out of the landfills. If you take all those circuit boards out of the trash. We got quite a lot of hardware around the world, and it is all good for something.
[Questioner interrupts] I agree with you, but then again you have the labor cost, transaction cost. And interaction costs, which is not related to the costs of the goods.
Yeah, as of course we have also many socialized activities in the society. Let me, let me say something.
[Questioner interrupts] for example if you compare the hours, how many you mention of working, and then do you know the hours was done free lets say spend in US on demystifying American politics against the world, and things like that.
OK, so we are now in agreement that the question of hardware is a different question. And I posed it to you solely in the context of preventing a counter revolution in silicon, right. All I said was, power will attempt to reassert itself in control of hardware, and in this sense, we need hardware that is free as in freedom. Not hardware that is free as in beer, but we will have hardware that is very cheap and very good and very fast and very available.
[Questioner continues] Again for the classic user. Microsoft office packet is very cheap and usable.
Hmmm… that is another question.
[Questioner continues] So I think we could discuss a lot. And also when you mention the hip-hop, maybe in advanced states how long they they exist. But we have this kind of folklore dance in Europe for thousands of years, as the also kind it and share alike and blah blah blah.
I agree with you.
73:45
Q) OK. I have some [inaudible]. So the first question is you talked about the standard units of software effort being one Microsoft, I want to ask you if any attempt has been made on calculating the entire software effort of all proprietary software companies. That is question number one. Question number two was, most people here I think are sympathetic to the free software movement. I think, I invited my whole office here today, and I don’t see anybody. And so in a sense free software movement is open to the criticism as being very isolated, from the rest of the world. And what I see is that free software is a great idea for goods that have zero marginal cost. But the goods that don’t have zero marginal cost will still be redistributed according to where the money goes. And money is still very very much centrally controlled, as you know and you mentioned Mr. Alan Greenspan in that. So my second question was, are there being any attempts being made of ideas being used in production of free software to be moved into more material economic fields, and the third question was not a question but a comment. And in a sense criticism, but a well intended one, is that, repetition as a rhetorical tool is a very effective tool, but it has been used in these parts of the world to un????, lets put it that way. So if I were not already converted and you know this is a very constructive criticism, it would for me be a minus in your credibility. However rhyming is a very nice rhetorical tool, so thank you.
A) Alright, so I appreciate both the critical and the approving aspects of the comment, and it leaves me comparatively little to say. With respect to the question of the isolation of free software, the 20th century was a age of advertising, was an age of mass communications directed at creation of wants that the productive system could then satisfy. And that’s created the natural social consequence that people know what is advertised to them, and they see the world largely in the form in which advertising constitutes it. In that sense we have been very isolated, what advertising was discovering at the end of the 20th century, and is busily discovering even more, at the beginning of the 21st, is the importance of face to face word of mouth. Viral advertising, this is our medium, and we are employing it. It took us a while to figure out how. Here, we made this, oh I know. Forgive me another repetition. Here, we made this, take it. But how to take it. Part of our difficulty was that we had a distribution mechanism that worked at the level of the CPU. Here I installed all this stuff, maybe you could run it. Look at what happens once the live CD enters the structure of the digital economy. Now we can hand somebody a little flat thing, that costs us nothing to make, and say try it this way. You wont screw anything up, you wont have to reformat your hard drive. And suddenly people become aware that it is actually addressed to them. Our friends in the monopoly were very helpful in this respect, making bad software with low security has assisted us to be much be less elitist very quickly. Firefox is having the kind of beginning which no free software program ever had before. Because Internet Explorer has screwed up more lives, than anybody can count right now, and the migration from browser to browser has become something which even the pro-Microsoft institution takes for granted its going to have to do. And then you begin to experience what I know people are experiencing here and I certainly see in the States. Which is once you have moved somebody from IE to Firefox for security reasons, and from Word to Open Office for economic reasons. It then turns out that they are living in a free software environment, and you come along one day, and remove the operating system and put a new one underneath and they don’t even notice that its happened. So that the gradient of fear of technological change, which was the real guarantor of the monopolies market power is being overcome. I think that we are about to change that sense in your co-workers and others that free software is something for other people.
[Questioner interrupts] I already installed Firefox everywhere.
And this is happening in hundreds of thousands of workplaces simultaneously, 10 million downloads of Firefox in the first month after release is an enormous demonstration that the line between free and non-free is beginning to bend in the workplace in new ways. Now, I want to take your point about the rhetoric seriously, I am very conscious of that. One of the reasons that I am here is to improve my ability to communicate in whats left of a place I once knew when it was a different place with different rules and other names. And I find myself aware that in talking about this, I am not addressing a world of brotherhood and unity anymore. It’s too bad, brotherhood and unity are good ideas, I like them, we should have more of them if you can find it. The question is how to talk about it without making people feel uncomfortable. And I am with you for the difficulties that that involves. The only thing that I will say in response to your point about repetition is, we do have this human tendency not to understand something which is right in front of us, until we’ve lived with it for a while. Until we’ve seen it and heard it and thought about it many times, and then it begins to sink in. I see and believe what you say, and yet I think to myself, just one more time. Let me try and communicate using simple words, what are in fact simple ideas, very difficult to understand, and that’s where I find myself.
[Questioner interrupts] I just wanted to bring the point back to, if the models used in the free software production have been at least theorized.
Thank You. I think that the distinction between zero marginal cost economics and non-zero marginal cost economics, is a hard distinction. I don’t anticipate that anarchism will turn out to be different in the 21st century when it comes to tables, shoes, chairs, clothing, property rules continue to operate as they did before with respect to things for which use is rivalrous. If cannot wear my suit, and you at the same time, then we are going to have to find a standard of value for its exchange. I have my suspicions of the property system in the real world, as perhaps you do too. But we are not talking about that, we are talking about the extraordinary change in which that economy which was always there is now balanced off against one that wasn’t there before. And so we are living in a world of an intrinsically mixed economy. Anarchist and self-managing over here, and given to the same rules of competition and exclusion over here. That roles continued existence imposes an intellectual problem for the economists. That they are mostly failing, its a challenge to consistency of ideas. If you believe that about the real world, what would you say over here? And I am in favor of maintaining that distinction clearly in order to force the necessary changes in economic thought.
Q) I guess that most people here who are not using GPL software ???. This might be the right moment to ask about the GPL. GPL is changing to version 3 I suppose and I would like to hear your comment about it.
Yes. So, we have a peculiar problem in this regard. If I say to you the GPL needs to change, people will think, is there a hole, is there a problem, is the floor going to fall in, is it that the building has gotten too old and without renovation it will fall over? Its not like that. But two things are true. First of all the GPl was written by English speaking North Americans who were concerned with creating something that at that time of its creation, was largely, almost entirely restricted to the United States. One generation later, we are doing business everywhere in the world, billions, tens of billions, hundreds of billions of dollars of value. Have come into creation in a global economy, and we are still doing business on single copyright license, based upon US legal drafting. We have a globalization effort to undertake in that regard, it is not like anybody else’s copyright law problem. The movie industry, the music industry, they are not going to use one license everywhere on earth. They are gonna employ Croatian lawyers and Serbian lawyers and German lawyers and English lawyers and every place they do business, they will have a license adapted to local use, we can’t. Our content moves around across borders perfectly freely. We must believe in the harmonious operation of international copyright law. But we are threading that system, in order to create the hack which is sharing, and we must do that more completely and more globally than anybody was thinking about in 1991. The second thing we must do is take account of the technical changes in the computer industry itself. Copyright law has a quantum of meaning, a unit called the work. And the work is what copyright law knows. Programmers have a quantum of enterprise, what is it, the routine, the object, the program, the module, the fashions of programming have changed a great deal in the last 20 years alone. As you can see from the constant questions about dynamic linking, SOAP, objects in network execution and so on. We have a good deal of rethinking to do, about that uneasy relationship between the quantum of legal meaning and the quantum of technological effort. And there are some changes to the license which must take account of that difference in technical condition. I suspect that when GPL3 is presented to the world for its discussion and evaluation, that people will say, jee its pretty much the same, you didn’t change very much, did you. And we will say, well yeah, but you have to pay attention to the details, OK. Its very important, there is immense stuff in those few changes, and I expect to spend about a year in a large global seminar on advanced free software licensing with everybody on earth who cares. And just think about how many people on earth now care. In 1991 the question was, could hackers read this, would hackers understand, would Tycoon sign that little thing down at that bottom? We’re in a different place now. In order for GPL3 to be acceptable, I have to like it, Richard has to like it, Linus has to like it, but so do the Kazakhstan developers association, Nokia, IBM, Hewlett Packard, Motorola, DeucheBank. Quite a few people have come to be stake holders of the license. There is an American professor at Harvard Business school, Shahone Mahony who has been working on Free Software economics. Shahone and I were having lunch some months ago, and she said to me “Have you given any thought to the market capitalization of GPL is?”, I said well, you tell me. She said, well I don’t know. “I think its about a hundred and fifty billion dollars.” That is to say, the businesses whose direct value, the assets of whose businesses depend on the GPL itself. Now, we are going to have quite a negotiation, with all those stakeholders over what the changes are that need to be made, and how they need to be made. Its not an easy conversation, even though its not a radical revision of the license. I expect then, to see a few highly important, highly significant changes which have to be carefully thought about and carefully discussed. And which will fall into two main categories. Reflections of globalization and reflection of changes in the technical environment. How fast and how soon we can do all that remains to be seen, I have some ideas, but there is a lot to talk about. And there is a lot to organize and we are not ready to begin just yet.
88:08Q) I’d like to ask, What about the software development, for the businesses that are being developed by large corporations such as Oracle or Sun, some informational systems that cost a lot of money. What about that, should that be under GPL license.
Well the SAP DB is as you may know under GPL. One of the most interesting things about the commercial software industry is that we begin to enter a world in which number one consolidates the market, number two tries harder, and number three has an incentive to think about going free. Because number three has an incentive to seek the large community of additional development assistance that comes from going free. The situation with respect to the largest commercial proprietary software developers now, is a quite uneasy one. Imagine that you are a software executive a strategist for one of largest IT companies on earth. Your concern is with that value chain in that stack. Do we do better or worse, if the OS is commoditized, almost everybody with one exception has decided we do better with a commoditized OS. Which portions of the application layer, would we be better off in our business knowing its more or less uniform everywhere, subject to customization and modification in the consumers interest, at the consumers place of business, given the high level of quality already available in the commodity infrastructure. Most of the largest IT firms on earth now regard a major portion of the application stack as best when commoditized. Then they wish to add their layer atop. I have lots of conversations with the senior strategists for software in those large firms. And our conversation is always about, well how high up the stack does it go, if you are the DB2 product manager at IBM, you think everything below DB2 should be commoditized, but DB2, that’s the beginning of the proprietary layer. If you are the WebSphere product manager, you think, commodity database engine would be just fine. But WebSphere, that the beginning of the proprietary layer. So I talk to the strategists and they say, how high up do you think it goes Eben? Where is the break? And I say, all the way to the top, you don’t need to own software. Just keep letting the software level rise, it will float your boat. Now that works at IBM, it wouldn’t work at Oracle. The water rises to a certain point, and it gets above Mr. Ellison’s nose, and that’s a problem for him.
So part of the answer to your question is, look at the global software industry right now. Merger and consolidation has in part the task of making people big enough to keep the heads above the water level as its rises. Oracle is an interesting example. Mr. Ellison is not going into the broad software business, he has to keep the engine above water. At the moment, he is doing that by purchasing his competitors and charging taxes to their customers. Peoplesoft is a terrific deal for Mr. Ellison. He spends ten billion dollars, and he basically tells, everybody who uses PeopleSoft software, now you have to convert to Oracle, I’ll give you two years to make the shift. My friends in the industry observing this forecast that he can charge approximately 40 to 50 billion dollars to PeopleSoft’s customers, for the required shift to Oracle. So he makes 4 or 5 to one on his investment. But in end, it leaves him confronting the possibility that he may wake up one morning, and find that IBM has GPLed DB2, and if that happens he is cooked. It wont matter how much he charged in the mean time. I want to say another thing, I woke up this morning and I looked at business pages, and I saw. Oh, Symantec buys Veritas maybe. You know backup capacity at the application level layer will now be owned by one guy instead of another. How much is this worth? Billions. How many people work at Veritas? 6700, how many of them actually make software? very very few. The proprietary software industry is the industry of selling software, it has lots of sales people. It has not that many programmers, this is the interesting point. Our levels of effort begin to dwarf their levels of effort overall. I don’t know how many Microsoft’s is the total global software industry, but its not a thousand, it is more than a hundred and less than a thousand maybe. We will be one hundred Microsoft’s by the middle of the 21st century, I don’t doubt for an instant. Making software, will be by the middle of this century an activity mostly performed by people we call students, doing something that we call learning. The activity of selling software will be the activity of editing, of combining, of putting things together, and making them work better together. That’s an industry with a future, but it is not an industry of primary production. And that I think is where the proprietary software industry as a whole is now going. The exception is Microsoft, which demands that software be a product in itself, and that will fail, and the largest and most powerful believer in that theory will be destroyed.
[Organizer Speaks] Our time is pretty much out, I am sure that we can close as formal discussion, and maybe move on to an informal discussion. Once again thank you Professor Moglen.[Applause] Thank you all. Thank you very very much.
[Organizer Speaks] And just a brief announcement in Croatian. [continues speaking in Croatian, translation follows] Within a month we continue with new lectures, we’ll host Lawrence Lessig on January 14. The lecture will be addressing the adjustment of Creative Commons license system to Croatian legal system.Once again, thank you for coming and have a pleasant evening.
The Eben Moglen Lecture at MAMA/CARNet, Croatia by David Crossland, except the quotations and unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.
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