Freebooting

“ They lock things up. We make things free. They lock them up. We make them free. And we go on about this business, bit by bit by bit, and sooner or alter, the game is over.
I won't say a word about free culture because I know it's in safe hands.
But I will say something about bandwidth and about the spectrum, because this is the fundamental next terrain of the struggle for human rights.
We made free software. We can distribute over a network, only using stuff we made ourselves according to rules that ensure freedom.
We can protect the freedom of hardware. ”

“ Now, with programs moving over to the GPL, Morin was suddenly getting his tapes put together in half the time, turning a tidy profit in the process. Sensing a commercial opportunity, Morin rechristened his hobby as a business: Prime Time Freeware.
Such commercial exploitation was completely within the confines of the free software agenda. "When we speak of free software, we are referring to freedom, not price," advised Stallman in the GPL's preamble. By the late 1980s, Stallman had refined it to a more simple mnemonic: "Don't think free as in free beer; think free as in free speech." ”

“ Another variant: `soft boot', reinitialization of only part of a system, under control of other software still running: "If you're running the mess-dos emulator, control-alt-insert will cause a soft-boot of the emulator, while leaving the rest of the system running."
Opposed to this there is `hard boot', which connotes hostility towards or frustration with the machine being booted: "I'll have to hard-boot this losing Sun." "I recommend booting it hard." One often hard-boots by performing a power cycle. ”

“ However, if robots gain intelligence, sensitivity, and the ability to replicate, might not they be considered legal persons, hence slaves? Is mankind creating a new form of life to enthrall to its bidding? Is it immoral to subjugate an entity of one's own creation? (Modern jurisprudence, in contrast to ancient Roman law, does not permit a parent to enslave his child.) Questions of "machine rights" or "robot liberation" undoubtedly will arise in the future. And if the intelligence or sensitivity of robots ever exceeds that of humankind, ought we grant them "civil rights" superior to our own? ”

“ Either by those who see you as a threat, who then invoke the system of law we call patents, or by those who take advantage of the extraordinary expansion of control that the law of copyright now gives them over innovation. Either of these two changes through law will produce a world where your freedom has been taken away. And, If You Can't Fight For Your Freedom, You Don't Deserve It. ”

“ So, with that in mind then, what we have is a system in which a series of private parties who have used immense amounts of power over culture, over bandwidth, over communications, in the course of the 20th century are beginning to find themselves all simultaneously under threat from the free layer of the net. ”

“ Free hardware is the process of taking that free software and ensuring that the network within which it exists remains under the control of the people who own and use the hardware itself.
This seems very simple.
But it is not very simple because hardware is now the ground of contestation of the counterrevolution. The distributors of everything, those people who are sorry to hear that their expiration date on their legal regime has arrived, have a proposal. ”

“ Snub or no snub, both O'Reilly and Raymond say the term "open source" won over just enough summit-goers to qualify as a success. The attendees shared ideas and experiences and brainstormed on how to improve free software's image. Of key concern was how to point out the successes of free software, particularly in the realm of Internet infrastructure, as opposed to playing up the GNU/Linux challenge to Microsoft Windows. But like the earlier meeting at VA, the discussion soon turned to the problems associated with the term "free software." ”

“ Unregulated uses, regulated uses that were fair use, and the quintessential copyright world. Three categories.
Enter the Internet. Every act is a copy, which means all of these unregulated uses disappear. Presumptively, everything you do on your machine on the network is a regulated use. And now it forces us into this tiny little category of arguing about, "What about the fair uses? What about the fair uses?". I will say the word: To hell with the fair uses. What about the unregulated uses we had of culture before this massive expansion of control? ”

“ It's because we don't have the right. Somebody has prohibited us from serving the public. So what's going to happen when users encounter these gaps in free software? Well, if they have been persuaded by the open source movement that these freedoms are good because they lead to more-powerful reliable software, they're likely to say, `You didn't deliver what you promised. This software's not more powerful. ”

“ The cupidity of the freebooters was not abated by the danger of their situation. They made the most earnest endeavors to preserve their spoil, and some of the poorer ones even resorted to murder to gain the wealth of their richer comrades. The dispersion of the flotilla favored this, and six conspiring Frenchmen hid behind the rocks and attacked and killed five Englishmen who were known to possess much treasure. ”

“ Sure, PCs were more powerful, but in commoditizing the PC marketplace with its chips, Intel had created a situation in which proprietary software vendors now held the power. For every new user won over to the free software cause via Linux, hundreds, perhaps thousands, were booting up Microsoft Windows for the first time. ”

“ We will protect our way of making software against those ways of making unfreedom. We will say only that the right to tinker has to be protected against hardware that resists it. I think that is both legitimately the scope of a free software license in everybody’s view, and also sufficient for the purpose. ”

“ If that means giving Internet users the right to generate a hundred copies of an article, image, song, or book and then email the copies to a hundred strangers, so be it. "It's clear that private occasional redistribution must be permitted, because only a police state can stop that," Stallman says. "It's antisocial to come between people and their friends. Napster has convinced me that we also need to permit, must permit, even noncommercial redistribution to the public for the fun of it. Because so many people want to do that and find it so useful." ”

“ When the FreeBSD people finally get their equipment up and running, Stallman simply steps forward, starts speaking, and steamrolls over every other voice in the room.
"Most of the time when people consider the question of what rules society should have for using software, the people considering it are from software companies, and they consider the question from a self-serving perspective," says Stallman, opening his speech. "What rules can we impose on everybody else so they have to pay us lots of money? ”

“ When an audience member asks if, in shunning proprietary software, free software proponents lose the ability to keep up with the latest technological advancements, Stallman answers the question in terms of his own personal beliefs. "I think that freedom is more important than mere technical advance," he says. "I would always choose a less advanced free program rather than a more advanced nonfree program, because I won't give up my freedom for something like that. ”

“ We have battles about culture, we have battles about software, we have battles about bandwidth. But we have come far enough that the tools of those confrontations now favor us. Time’s on our side. And the building of the infrastructure for 21st century freedom that we need is an infrastructure we can build. ”

“ Working on "step two" means driving home the issue that freedom, not acceptance, is the root issue of the free software movement. Those who hope to reform the proprietary software industry from the inside are on a fool's errand. "Change from the inside is risky," Stallman stays. "Unless you're working at the level of a Gorbachev, you're going to be neutralized."
Hands pop up. Stallman points to a member of the golf shirt-wearing contingent. "Without patents, how would you suggest dealing with commercial espionage?" ”

“ The relationship between the authorities and the freebooters is often of so equivocal a character, that foreign naval officers in their crusade against pirates may have failed at times to make the proper discrimination. ”

“ So, we find ourselves now watching the question of property problematized by the very same bozos who want to use that conception of property to interfere with the technologies of freedom, who want to see our attempt to build a network that self‐assembles in a prosumer basis where software is thing we make and share, rather than something we consume, who want to interfere with that structure for reasons of support of an ideology which is already perishing on all the fronts more or less simultaneously. ”

“ Because in digital media, when you give people knowledge, you can’t force them to take advertising, because digital media are filterable – that’s the beauty of them.
So we live in a political economy in which the commitment to the freedom of the software is the beginning of a commitment to freedom of autonomy at the end points – that would mean you, you’re an end point. You’re a productive end point, as well as a consuming end point, but you’re an end point, unless you’re a network operator, in which case, please leave now. ”

“ After all, it was well and good to talk about selling someone the 24 hour right to a video, or the right to move music onto an iPod, but not the right to move music from the iPod onto another device, but how the Hell could you do that once you'd given them the file? In order to do that, to make this work, you needed to figure out how to stop computers from running certain programs and inspecting certain files and processes. For example, you could encrypt the file, and then require the user to run a program that only unlocked the file under certain circumstances. ”

“ So... now we're going to watch some excerpts from his Freedom to Connect speech, and as you'll see, Aaron actually says it better than I could. So, over to you, Aaron.
SWARTZ: There's a battle going on right now, a battle to define everything that happens on the Internet in terms of traditional things that the law understands. Is sharing a video on BitTorrent like shoplifting from a movie store? Or is it like loaning a videotape to a friend? Is reloading a webpage over and over again like a peaceful virtual sit-in, or a violent smashing of shop windows? ”

“ Large portions of the Mac OS X operating system are also open source, including WebKit, the core of Safari, the Mac OS X web browser.
The open source and free software movements have now built free alternatives for just about every major type of computer application, from word processing to video games. And for a time it seemed like Stallman’s dream had come true: one could truly continue to use computers without having laws restrict one’s freedom—it was possible “to get along without any software that is not free.” ”

“ Unfreedom is nasty. That’s what we think, OK? We think unfreedom is nasty. We think that technology can be used to help freedom and to inhibit unfreedom, but we don’t think it’s magic wand.
I will grant you the problem, OK? There’s no question about it. Dictatorship in the 21st century needs Mr. Gates, just like Disney needs Mr. Gates. A monopoly of technology is a very strong assistance, but don’t think of it as a big country/little country problem. ”

“ Still, the underlying logic of Stallman's argument-that open source advocates emphasize the utilitarian advantages of free software over the political advantages-remains uncontested. Rather than stress the political significance of free software programs, open source advocates have chosen to stress the engineering integrity of the hacker development model. Citing the power of peer review, the open source argument paints programs such as GNU/Linux or FreeBSD as better built, better inspected and, by extension, more trushworthy to the average user. ”

“ Microsoft's Shared Source program recognizes that there are many benefits to the openness, community involvement, and innovation of the Open Source model. But the most important component of that model, the one that makes all of the others work, is freedom. By attacking the one license that is specifically designed to fend off their customer and developer lock-in strategy, they hope to get the benefits of Free Software without sharing those benefits with those who participate in creating them. ”

“ So I can believe that people who advocate for limiting general purpose computers will find receptive audience for their positions. But just as we saw with the copyright wars, banning certain instructions, or protocols, or messages, will be wholly ineffective as a means of prevention and remedy; and as we saw in the copyright wars, all attempts at controlling PCs will converge on rootkits; all attempts at controlling the Internet will converge on surveillance and censorship, which is why all this stuff matters. ”

“ You lied to me.' But if they have come to agree with the free software movement, that the freedom is important in itself, then they will say, `How dare those people stop me from having this feature and my freedom too.' And with that kind of response, we may survive the hits that we're going to take as these patents explode. ”