The good folks at Groklaw have transcribed a speech by Eben Moglen, counsel to the Free Software Foundation. It’s a long, fascinating speech that focuses mostly on the legal issues raised by SCO in their various lawsuits.
I’ve thought for some time that we are on engaged in a kind of societal revolution, and you can sense this in Moglen’s speech, in the issues and arguments he raises. The open source software movement threatens to overturn some deeply-held ideas about capitalism. As the struggle over software rights progresses, you can see shades of the American Revolution. Ordinary people are asserting their right to create and share knowledge freely, to not be bound to capitalist tyranny any more than American colonists felt they should be bound to the tyranny of King George.
The essential struggle is over freedom. Moglen makes the distinction that we’re talking here about free as in freedom, not free as in beer.
“The fundamental belief in fairness here is not that it is fair that things should be free. It is that it is fair that we should be free and that our thoughts should be free, that we should be able to know as much about the world in which we live as possible, and that we should be as little as possible captive to other people’s knowledge, beyond the appeal to our own understanding and initiative.”
For those who don’t know, there is a lawsuit – or series of lawsuits, really – brought by a software company name of SCO that asserts that the free distribution of Linux is driving them out of business. SCO asserts that Linux has benefitted from the inclusion of code that SCO owns and that Linux hd no right to appropriate without compensation. (I think that’s the gist of it. The nitty-gritty details are discussed at Groklaw.) Moglen says:
”[The Free Software Foundation] are, as it happens, driving out of business a firm called the Santa Cruz Operation [sic] – or SCO Ltd. That was not our intention. That’s a result of something called the creative destruction potential of capitalism, once upon a time identified by Joseph Schumpeter. We are doing a thing better at lower cost than it is presently being done by those people using other people’s money to do it. The result – celebrated everywhere that capitalism is actually believed in—is that existing firms are going to have to change their way of operation or leave the market. This is usually regarded as a positive outcome, associated with enormous welfare increases of which capitalism celebrates at every opportunity everywhere all the time in the hope that the few defects that capitalism may possess will be less prominently visible once that enormous benefit is carefully observed.”
This is one of the critical difficulties of capitalism as I see it. Not a fatal flaw, mind you, but a serious difficulty. The problem is inertia. People who have spent great effort and wealth to achieve a top position in the capitalist heirarchy have, quite understandably, an interest in maintaining that position. They have also developed attitudes and created structures which rely on the capitalist foundation. It’s really not terribly easy for someone to just say, “Ah, times have changed. Someone’s doing this thing better than we are. Better step aside.” That just seems too unrealistic for us to expect out of ordinary humans.
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