Eben Moglen of the Software Freedom Law Center recently gave the keynote address at the LibrePlanet conference hosted by the Free Software Foundation. He speaks about the current state of Free Software, what some of the challenges will be going forward, and what is needed for stage 2, as he thinks of it. In the course of his speech, he also speaks about patents, Microsoft, the growing value of patent pools to protect the community's interests, and about Oracle and MySQL, and why the community needs corporate allies, suggesting a more nuanced and strategic view of who are the community's allies and why: We need to
think about the grand strategy of our continued forceful campaigning
for free as in freedom.
But we also need to be extremely aware of the extent to which we can
now capitalize upon the achievements we have already set up
and the alliances with forces not necessarily concerned with freedom
that our technological sophistication has brought to them. He calls them friends in unexpected places, and he discusses strategic possibilities, particularly with respects to dealing with Microsoft and the noxious patent system. We will need these allies, he says, that we are gaining, and here's why:
Microsoft will continue to attempt to get paid for what we do, by
forcing people -- or quasi-forcing people through intimidatory conduct
-- to take patent licenses to run our software....If we are to quell this
nuisance we can only do so in cooperation with others who see clearly
that this is a threat to the welfare of their customers....
We try to know what is going on, and we try and respond to it as
effectively as we can, and we try to build coalitions with industrial
parties outside the limits of the free world, narrowly construed, in
order to protect the free world's interests.
He ends talking about privacy, and he sees a need to provide federated services and a free, compelling replacement for Facebook and then explain to people why they need such replacements. A member of Groklaw, brooker, has done an unofficial transcript of the video. Enjoy! There are a few places where the audio was unclear, and we've left those without guessing. But if your ears are better than ours, and you can decipher the words, please let me know. We aim for perfection, while recognizing our limitations.
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Keynote Address by Eben Moglen, SFLC, at LibrePlanet 2010, delivered on July 31, 2010
[The first several seconds of the video consist of Eben Moglen saying
thank you's, greetings and acknowledging old friends, with a statement
that "It's good to be home."]
0:30
The state of Free Software -- a subject I've had occasion to talk about
from time to time and in places like Cambridge -- is the subject this
afternoon, and I'm pleased to be able to say that the state of Free
Software is now unprecedentedly strong.
We are, in my judgment, past the point of inflection, in a journey we
have all been taking now for longer than I care to think about. We
have become indispensable. That was our goal from the beginning, to
be indispensable. The purpose of being indispensable is to make freedom inexpungible,
and I think we are now at the point where we can say that in practical
terms that all that's been achieved. It is really no longer possible
to do Information Technology in the global environment and on large
scale without us.
1:41
It is not feasible because the goal of software engineering, when
Richard and John and I and lots of other young people started fooling
around with computers a quarter of a century or more ago, the purpose
of software engineering was described in a single phrase: "Write once,
run everywhere." That was the goal. That was the objective of software
engineering as a discipline in our youth, and up until this point,
nobody has achieved it except us. We have achieved it.
It took us really a remarkably short time to achieve that goal in view
of the fact that everybody thought we either didn't exist at all or
couldn't possibly be for real. [laughter]
But now, the only place you can go -- if what you want to do is write
code that will run on everything from the smallest device you can
carry in your pocket to the largest cluster of devices you can use -- the only place you can go, if you want to achieve that "write once,
run everywhere" across all the orders of magnitude in scale that
digital computation now embraces, the only place you can go is to
us. We provide the one place where everybody can look for the ability
to get something up that works -- not just works a little bit, but works with extraordinary solidity,
reliability and effectiveness; not just works with extraordinary
solidity, reliability and effectiveness, but does so at unit cost
zero, if you are a sophisticated engineer.
3:39
The ability to run everywhere, in everything, reliably, dependably,
with high quality code at unit price zero is not an achievable goal
for the richest, most deeply funded monopoly in the history of the
world, which is still, fundamentally not even trying [laughter] and which has just announced a "back to the drawing board" complete
reset of the software it intends to use on mobile devices -- which means
an essential return to "let's go back to scratch and start again" -- the
consequence of which is not going to be "write once, run
everywhere."
We are, in other words, now the technology leadership at what was seen
a generation ago as the hardest possible problem in computer
technology.
We are also free, as in freedom.
[loud applause]
4:50
What this means is that a social and political idea which, without
Richard, would have perished is now directly tied to technology that
nobody can do without, if they are seriously attempting to build
things for 21st Century use.
5:10
Freedom will from here out be endangered. Freedom will be attacked,
freedom will be undermined, freedom will be evaded in various ways --
some of them clever some of them stupid [laughter] -- but from here on
out, the relationship between technological sophistication, agility,
reliability, adaptability and low cost, means that freedom has
acquired an extraordinary set of unintentional allies.
They may not care about freedom at all, but they no longer have a
choice but to further freedom's interests. This represents, as I said,
the point of inflection in our long campaign.
Now, we begin to defend the achievement. Now we begin to play downhill
against parties who have the harder sell in attempting unfree.
Now we begin to become the default choice. And the process of limiting
freedom becomes the problem of how to not choose the thing which works
really well everywhere, and is extremely cheap, reliable, and simple
and [unclear].
6:38
That's an extraordinary change in circumstances, and we deserve a moment
in which to contemplate how far that place is from Richard's original
starting point.
We need to recognize the nature of the communal achievement. That
should both give us confidence and energize us for the nature of the
challenges that remain, which are serious in every respect.
We need to talk about the nature of those challenges. We need to
think about the grand strategy of our continued forceful campaigning
for free as in freedom.
But we also need to be extremely aware of the extent to which we can
now capitalize upon the achievements we have already set up
and the alliances with forces not necessarily concerned with freedom
that our technological sophistication has brought to them.
7:46
To begin with that, it is entirely clear, as Richard suggested for the
better part of a decade and a half before most people started to
believe it, it is entirely clear that the patent system's relationship to software
technology is pathological, dangerous, and potentially fraught with
opportunities to defeat us and our goals.
When Richard began to say this about the patent system in relation to
software, the parties who have lots of patents that read on software
technology did not believe.
Some were polite, some were overtly dismissive, and some refused even
to get into dialogue with people who were so foolish as to believe
that the patent system was not only dangerous to freedom, but crushing
innovation in software.
8:50
That is no longer true. Many parties continue to regard their own
patents as given to them by God [laughter] as a force for virtue.
[laughter]
But soon the parties who take this position with respect for their own
patents, have largely come to regard everybody else's patents as the
work of the devil. [laughter]
They experience continuous difficulty in achieving obviously socially
positive goals, as well as their own home-based concern, which is the
making of money and the keeping of the money that they make.
They experience constant difficulty in relation to everything they
want to do, caused by bad patents given to other people by the devil.
[laughter]
9:44
The difficulty in sorting out, therefore, the good patents they
possess, given to them by God, from the bad patents that everybody
else possesses, given by the devil to everybody else
has become a task for which they recognize that they are not
precisely suited. [laughter]
Even if, as sometimes happens, they are enabled by the ordinary
routine of rotation in office to possess the job at the top of the
patent office, this still does not end their need for some relief from
the pathological behavior of the patent system, as it affects them
through the patents given by the devil to everybody else.
10:27
They now begin to use substantial amounts of resource -- more money
than we, collectively, will ever possess put together throughout our
entire lives -- much political influence we do not yet directly possess,
a great deal of industrial diplomacy, and a good deal of lawyering,
for which I have at least the admiration that there is lots and lots
of it, and sometimes it's very good.
They now put all of that in the center of the table in order to
defend...well...OUR software from its patent attack, primarily by a
party which used to make a heap of money, allegedly making
software, and which is now absolutely determined to get paid lots and
lots for software it does not make, because the software it DOES make
is no longer very good.
11:34
But it is not merely a question of what happens as Microsoft goes
through the spiral of failure in which it is now caught.
It is also the extent to which the trolls and the other parties
placed on the battlefield by this incautious desire to get a lot of
patents, only to discover that everybody else's patents are what the
whalers used to call loose second lines.
You remember in Moby Dick -- you throw harpoons at the whale and some of
them miss, and then men in the water attached to lines zipping around,
taking a guy's leg or arm or head off, because they're now simply
unintended consequences of the physics you were attempting to use to
kill your whale.
The patent system is now full of loose second lines, whizzing around,
and being sold to people whose sole usage of them is the making of trouble, the causing of bad consequences.
There is much more going on than is
publicly known, because, by and large, when large wealthy
organizations get bitten by patent trolls or by rent-seeking, failing
monopolists, they don't go to the newspapers and talk about them, they
don't post on Slashdot. They pay for peace and quiet, and they try and
keep it peaceful and quiet.
And it becomes very difficult to get anybody to confirm being mugged.
But I will tell you that in private they discuss it, when they can.
And they complain about it bitterly. And the consequences of their
unhappiness with other people's patents given to them by the devil, now in the hands of the demons and the trolls, their unhappiness
is very intense. Of course, it is difficult to get everybody together
in one big patent pool.
13:50
But we already have what Richard and I tried for years to
conceptualize ways to bring into existence, namely patent pools to
defend some free software projects.
Those pools are, from our point of view, inadequate. Their coverage is
not broad enough to sustain all of freedom. Their coverage is not even
broad enough to sustain all the Free Software of greatest commercial
value, *but* their coverage is broadening.
14:25
The nature of the access to the party's claims within those pools may
not be operable for us, and we continue constantly to discuss and to
negotiate how to make those pools optimally effective in helping us to
do what we need to do to protect us from the patent mess. But they are
beginning to have significant effect in mitigating the problem in the
margins, and they will grow with time and become more significant to
us as we become more significant to them.
15:06
It is also true that the misbehavior of patent holders has given us
friends in unexpected places.
This was clear as early as the negotiations over GPLv3 in 2006 and
2007. When parties who began with the belief that they did not want
what FSF wanted for the license, and who were motivated to disagree,
sometimes vehemently, about details of the proposals concerning the
license, discovered through the duration of the process that the very
clients that patent protection we were trying to create, the very
forms of resistance to patent misbehavior that we were trying to embed
in the license, were becoming increasingly necessary to them.
16:06
GPLv3's appeal to developers has been broad and significant because
developers appreciated the benefits of the license as a whole.
GPLv3's appeal in quarters where Free Software is now used by rich
businesses to make money for themselves has turned out to be much
greater than those companies thought the appeal would be, in very
substantial part because they recognize the benefit of patent safety
that we are providing within the commons established by GPLv3.
16:45
This is, of course, not the same as the adoption of our goals, or even
the participation in the movement for freedom, but it means that the
environment in which we operate has now got strategic possibilities
for us that it didn't used to have.
The patent system is still, I think, the nightmare at the front of
where we are.
If we make a list of the bad things going on, the patent system is
directly responsible for, or significantly advances the threats that
most concern us.
We are also, I regret to say, increasingly aware that in order to
quell the various forms of aggression against us in the use of
patents, we will need the allies we are gaining.
17:48
Microsoft will continue to attempt to get paid for what we do, by
forcing people -- or quasi-forcing people through intimidatory conduct
-- to take patent licenses to run our software.
In order to quell that nuisance, which is a very serious
nuisance, because if parties who want to use our software
commercially can't secure freedom zero without paying tribute in
Redmond, then they don't get freedom zero. They get something less.
18:29
And they buy that from a party that has no right to interfere with
their freedom, but who insists that their freedom is only a
privilege in light of what is called intellectual property
interests in the propaganda for unfreedom. If we are to quell this
nuisance we can only do so in cooperation with others who see clearly
that this is a threat to the welfare of their customers.
18:59
The customers we are talking about are the biggest businesses in the
world. They make a lot of money. They buy a lot of information
technology. They buy that information technology from all the largest
suppliers in the world. They buy from IBM, they buy from Hewlett
Packard, they buy from Cisco, they buy from Oracle, they buy from
Microsoft.
There is only one party in that club routinely demanding that they pay
to use other people's software. And if we can pull together a
coalition about that, we can change the situation. Maybe not
completely, but quite drastically.
From day to day, from week to week, from month to month, that's a large
part of what SFLC needs to do, and does. We try to be a part of that
conversation everywhere on earth.
We try to know what is going on, and we try and respond to it as
effectively as we can, and we try to build coalitions with industrial
parties outside the limits of the free world, narrowly construed, in
order to protect the free world's interests.
That activity will continue for years to come.
We also recognize that there are complicated motions afoot within
those large IT companies around the world.
They have become aware of the free world's activity as contributing to
what they think of as the commoditization of everything they don't
make.
20:42
The commoditization of everything they don't make is an enormous
economic value to all of those IT giants, because their business
increasingly in a VERY competitive world, where profit margins on most
physical things are very small -- their business is the provision of
service, advice, knowledge, how-to-do. And in the business of
providing know-how and service to add value to objects and software,
the commoditization of everything you don't make, lowers your costs
and increases your effectiveness in serving your customers.
This has been an enormous advantage to us, because what THEY call
commoditization, we call freedom to redistribute. And commoditization
has therefore been the word under which business went into securing
for us assistance to the furthering of freedoms two and three.
21:52
It's of course, not exactly the commitment to the freedoms, but it's a
commitment to the reduction of friction affecting freedoms two and
three. It's a commitment to undertaking to make freedoms two and three
easier to have and easier to spread.
Of course, once you have commoditized successfully most of what you
don't make, there is a tendency in all the businesses to sit back and
think it's over.
You can feel, if you deal with them about free world concerns all the
time as I do, you can feel the way in which the particularly intense
enthusiasm for the free world's products has begun to end.
They know now, exactly what the commoditization of everything they
don't make by the free world can do for them, and they're delighted
to see it being done, but the manufacturing of innovative strategies
has begun to flag.
23:07
Their business model doesn't require them to do more than they have
done; it requires them now to keep what they have done rolling in the
way that they have learned they can roll. We do face a challenge in managing the process by which their
enthusiasm is harnessed. Their engineers remain enthusiastic -- they are
us. The business units that deal directly with the engineers who are
citizens of the free world remain enthusiastic.
The laboratories and the post-laboratory structures which deal with the
Free Software manufacturing inside the giants remain stalwart for
us.
Of course they serve their own business purposes first, but everything
that isn't their business purposes is ours.
It's beyond that level, where the strategy of corporations is made by
software strategists and business executives at the higher end of the
org charts, where -- while I think it would be fair, not unduly
critical -- to call "taking for granted" is beginning to occur.
24:25
We need to deal with taking for granted. It is in this context that
I want to say a word about a matter that was controversial at the end
of last year,
which was the acquisition of Sun Microsystems by Oracle, a subject
which caused a great deal of discussion, thoughtful and passionate
both, as it should have done.
We, in the free world, have in general not looked to Oracle for
pro-freedom activities. [laughter]
We have tended to assume indeed that there was a basic conflict
between the way in which Mr. Ellison runs his business and our general
outlook on how people and their computers should sort together.
The purchase of Sun Microsystems by Oracle came -- for reasons which I
think are contingent rather than essential -- came to revolve around
the conversation about MySQL.
And so, this would be a good time to talk about MySQL just for a moment.
As a example of how we have come to a moment of inflection. MySQL is
the most installed database on earth. Indeed, as a business executive
very close to that transaction with a good deal of history in the
field said to me in a private conversation,
"Every sophisticated, technically sophisticated, 15-year-old on earth
knows how to use MySQL." [laughter]
That same business executive said to me in that same conversation,"Oracle
has 375 thousand customers, and they make a ton of money from them, but
that's the only 375 thousand customers they're ever going to have.
And there is no where on earth that you can go," this gentleman said,
"to learn how to use Oracle...for free."
This then, is the future of Oracle -- MySQL.
26:47
I'm not sure that if that gentleman had been Larry Ellison, he would
have said exactly the same thing. If that gentleman were Larry
Ellison, he would have said, "About the only, really first-class piece
of software that Microsoft makes right now, is SQL Server.
What makes SQL Server first-class software is that it scales from
small to big. It can be used to compete with us at Oracle, and it can
be used in a mom and pop shop. Therefore, I need to do something about
it. Because my business is doing something about everything that could
possibly threaten the predominance of Oracle."
"Therefore," I think Mr. Ellison would have said, if he had been able
and willing to say exactly what he thought -- he's usually able, he's
usually willing -- but there are rules. [laughter]
I think Mr. Ellison would have said, had he been called upon to say something in December,
"Therefore, I am going to take MySQL, and I am going to file all the
edges on it as sharp as they can be filed. I'm going to make that a
dagger of superlative sharpness, and I'm going to plunge it into the
heart of SQLServer."
That was the purpose of MySQL as part of the acquisition of Sun
Microsystems, and that's still its purpose.
From our point of view, if all this was was a combat between free and
non-free software, it wouldn't matter. But it isn't.
It's the attempt to turn the most installed database on Earth, a piece
of free software, into something which can destroy one of the only
pieces of software engineering for which Microsoft can justifiably
pride itself, and is therefore an excellent example of the unusual way in which our
strategic possibilities have been immensely extended by the peculiar
relationship between businesses solely concerned with business and
the freedom movement solely concerned with freedom.
This is an alliance of convenience now, obviously. I won't say that
because we are people of ill-will. I say that because business is
business, and it will do as it usually does, amorally follow its
interest.
29:39
We are in a period now in which the exploration of our common
interests will pay enormous dividends for them, in the quantities of
money that they make, but they will also give us enormous political
and social effort that we would use to make freedom further
inexpungible.
Meantime, we face another set of problems, which have little to do
with the patents given by the devil to the trolls and little to do
with the fickleness and profit-seeking of businesses.
30:22
We face a problem -- which I know Richard intends to talk about at some
length later this afternoon -- we face a problem in the destruction of
privacy. And real threat to the integrity of human personality in
which un-free software is a very important, necessary component.
Worse yet, we face a problem that destruction of privacy and threat to
the integrity of human personality in which Free Software is an
important component. That's because Free Software is free for people
to use, privately modified and not restricted.
31:06
And in the world of network services, free software can be part of how
the net is used in inappropriate, freedom-defeating or
privacy-destroying ways.
We face a challenge, which is technical, social, and intellectual. The
challenge is to explain to people clearly, insistently and with good
effect the relationship between privacy and software freedom.
We face a challenge which is to go beyond the language of software
freedom to the questions that have always deeply concerned us - that
I've been thinking about for decades, and Richard's been thinking
about for decades, and John's been thinking about for decades -- how do
we use the freedom of free software to make more political and social
liberty and to protect it against deterioration by forces that have
other values?
We now need to explain very clearly how that relationship between
privacy, the integrity of human personality, and software freedom
works.
32:23
We've got to teach a lot of things to a lot of people, and first we
have to figure out some difficult things for ourselves, because, while we all have an unfocused or not-quite-perfectly
articulated view of the relationship between privacy, human autonomy,
and the freedom of Free Software, we now need to make it precise.
32:40
I have already said in public a couple of times that not only do we
need to make it precise, we need to extantiate it in software. We need
to build a stack that can be used on commodity hardware to help
people run federated services, rather than centralized services in the
net.
We need to create an environment which is capable of challenging
peoples' assumption that centralized network services are necessary to
the lives they live from day to day.
The important thing to keep in mind about free software is that
Richard was so far ahead of his time in seeing the problems and
conceiving a solution that he invented the Free Software movement
before most of the world was suffering from software unfreedom.
33:43
That meant that we didn't have to persuade most people that they
didn't need software freedom. We needed to tell them there was such a
thing as software freedom and where it could be found.
In confronting problems like the effect of Facebook, or other spying
inside social communication mass systems, we face a problem of convincing people that they need a solution to a
problem they don't yet perceive.
If you look at Slashdot conversations about the freedom loss in the
last few decades, you see how many people, technically sophisticated
Netizens like us, believe that there is no difficulty -- and not only
do they believe there is no difficulty, they are far more sure that
nobody else perceives a difficulty at all.
34:40
Why would anybody want this stuff you're talking about? We must have
really good answers to that question. Now some of those answers will
be practical, thanks to the efforts of [David Sugar?], untiring as they have
been, we are now getting close to the point where we will actually be
able to say to people, "You want this thing because it will also be
able to make free phone calls for you to everybody you know
forever."
We will be able to say, and it will allow you to join together with
your Chinese friends, and your Iranian friends and other friends to climb
over the walls that their societies are building around them.
We will be able to offer people a broad variety of additional reasons
why you should move from Facebook to freedom.
We must also provide them a very sophisticated set of services to
which people have become used, and on which they are now dependent.
And we will have to provide those services competitively as quality
and ease of use in every way, if we are to convince them to take
advantage of what we will have to offer, even after we have done our
best to make it.
36:02
This is a very potent challenge, and it calls upon us to do ALL the
things we do well -- not just make software. It calls upon us to teach
and explain and evangelize and initiate in a whole new level if we
are actually going to show people why they need to get out of the
holes into which they are being led in little quantities of sugar,
disposed of in small and carefully monitored and surveilled lumps.
36:31
This is not a trivial activity. We could say, and probably we should,
that it's as hard as everything we've already done. But it's not
harder, and we've already done what we've already done. So we can do
this too.
36:50
What we are entering in upon then is our maturity. It isn't that GNU
is finished. GNU, fortunately, is renewed all the time and is becoming
renewable.
In the same way that there was a moment a few years back when I talked
to Leon, and I realized that there were a bunch of young hackers in
their late teens who were getting into apps and that's going to ahave
an enormous effect in renewing what was there. We are gonna have a
flood of people towards GNU, and that's going to make an immense
difference.
It's going to happen everywhere. But Mr. Jobs is investing heavily in
LLVM solely so he can stop using GCC, lest the patents somehow leak across the GPLv3 barrier, and we become able to use his claims.
Nobody has ever tried before, to build a multi-platform C
compiler solely in order to undermine freedom. [laughter]
A hardware manufacturer or two has done something here and there -- we had a
little bit of BSD interest in non-copyleft compilation -- but here's the
man whose selfishness surpasses any recorded selfishness.
[laughter/applause]
38:26
It's unfortunate. But writing software is what we do best. And
catching GCC with LLVM isn't going to be easy. [?] you know, there's lots
to do.
38:48
GPLv3 and the GCC runtime exceptions, on which my colleagues Bradley
Kuhn and Karen Sandler worked so hard for quite a long time after
GPLv3 was over, along with Brad and other FSF troops who also assisted
in that effort, but GCC is now, both from its licensing and on its
technical basis, capable of new leaps forward.
And we need to make sure that it continues so. We all have to undercut
selfishness in a variety of places, but we're a mature movement. The
entire world needs us. There isn't any way to do as well as we do what
we do, that nobody else ever really got around to doing, ever.
39:32
The monopoly is faltering. Users around the world have realized there
is an alternative. And as governments in the United States begin to be
very strapped for cash to do anything over the next two years, they're
going to come to us in a major way.
So we are now in a new phase. I think of it as stage two. And stage
two is going to be very interesting indeed. It's not about "we're done",
it's not about "we've won the war, it's over", and everybody
demobilizes to go home. There's no big party like at the end of every
Star Wars epic ever made. [laughter]
You know, the alarm rings and you go to the office like we
always do. But we go with a new spring in our step. We go with new
confidence.
40:33
They will never beat us. We will always be here. We know what our work
is, better than they know what their work is, because our goal doesn't
have to be modified from quarter to quarter when the securities
analysts stop in for a talk.
40:52
We do the same thing we always do. We make as much freedom as we can,
and we give it to as many people as we can reach. But we can make more
freedom because the Net is a very good place now, and we can give it
to more people because billions of people are coming.
41:09
And what do we need? A USB key you can boot from, a box the size of a
wall-wart that fits in a plug in the wall, a phone, a coat-hanger or
two, a [?].
Some very big people are still going to learn that freedom has a lot
more tricks in its bag. You're going to make the tricks, I'm going to keep
them from crushing the tricks until they are ready, and we are all
gonna play some pretty good music together.
I look forward to the next couple of decades very much. Thank you.
[applause]
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