[Fsf-friends] COMMENT: Left looks at free software only very slowly....

[Frederick Noronha]

Would someone send this across to the CPI(M) government in West Bengal
that seems to prefer Microsoft? FN

>From ravis@sarai.net Mon Jun 17 01:23:20 2002

The issue of free software seems to have strangely passed the left in this
country by.. This review came out in New Left Review (it was also posted in
nettime), what was strange (but not surprising) was that NLR took so long
to come to terms with such issues. For a long time the aging and (old-new)
Left in the West  looked at free software advocates as either as muddled
libertarians, or confused anarchists. In that context this review of a
biography of Richard Stallman is a welcome departure.

Stallman, as some Delhi-based list readers will remember, spoke at Sarai on
February of this year.

New Left Review 15, May-June 2002
URL: http://www.newleftreview.net/NLR24907.shtml

JULIAN STALLABRASS
DIGITAL COMMONS

The following passage appears very rarely in the copyright notice of a
printed book:

Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under
the terms of the GNU Free Documentation Licence, Version 1.1 or any later
version published by the Free Software Foundation.

It is to be found on the opening page of a new biography of the
free-software programmer and activist, Richard Stallman, and (as the
epilogue recounts) the unusual arrangement under which it is published is
due to his stern insistence. The notice means what it says: anyone is free
to copy, change and disseminate the book, provided they obey a set of
rules, of which the most important are (a) that they must reproduce
invariant portions of the text, protecting the recognition of its author,
and (b) that any modified or copied text be subject to the same GFD
licence. Furthermore, from June 2002, Sam Williams plans to publish the
biography on the web site www.faifzilla.org, where readers
can help to improve the work, or create a personalized version . . . We
realize there are many technical details in this story that may benefit
from additional or refined information. As this book is released under the
GFDL, we are accepting patches just like we would with any free software
program. Accepted changes will be posted electronically and will eventually
be incorporated into future printed versions of this work.

As the book makes plain, Stallman is an extraordinary figure -- a 
programmer of surpassing skill, capable of matching the output of entire
commercial teams with his spare, elegant code; and a tireless, principled
and uncompromising activist who initiated and fostered the notion of a
data commons. Stallman not only developed the conceptual details of what
has become known as 'copyleft' (it is sometimes indicated with a
reversed (c) symbol), creating public-ownership licences that cover
software and documents, but he also laboured to produce the fundamental
elements of a free-software operating system a no-cost alternative to
Windows, Mac OS and the rest, which anyone could download and improve. It
was Stallman who, in the eighties, initiated and led work on a
free-software version of Unix, which he dubbed GNU (a typically recursive
programmer's joke, this, the initials standing for GNU's Not Unix). The
extraordinary ambition to realize such a system was finally achieved using
elements of GNU alongside a kernel written as a stop-gap, originally by
Linus Torvalds, and developed into the Linux system; which, thanks to the
efforts of thousands of collaborators internationally, has become a threat
to Microsoft's monopoly.

With his waist-length hair, flowing beard, brown polyester trousers and
ill-matched T-shirts, Stallman himself is quite a contrast to Seattle's
Digital Godfather. Born in 1953 he was, according to his mother, devouring
calculus textbooks by the age of seven. Educated in New York's state
schools, supplemented by Saturday sessions at the Columbia Honours'
Programme, he initially led the isolated existence of a mathematical
wunderkind, reading science fiction and MAD magazine, alienated from the
1960s protest movements. Studying mathematics at Harvard, he found his way
to the Artificial Intelligence laboratory at MIT, and moved there for his
postgraduate work. (Though officially independent of the Institute now,
Stallman still operates out of 545 Tech Square.)

It was at the AI lab that Stallman came into his own. There he found a 
tight-knit, highly collaborative group of dedicated hackers who exchanged
information freely, working within egalitarian and informal structures.
Openness was central to their ethos, and was defended vigorously and
practicallyby breaking into offices where terminals had been left idle
behind locked doors, for instance. Stallman even fought against the use of
passwords.

In the 1970s these programmers would freely exchange and tailor
pre-compiled source codes, improving and customizing them to suit their
requirements. From the turn of the 1980s, as the use of computers spread
and software became a valuable commodity, companies copyrighted their
programs and withdrew the source codes from the public domain. For
programmers like Stallman, this was an assault on what they most cared
about, as material that they had worked on for years was snatched from
their graspan act analogous to the enclosure of common land. Stallman
swiftly arrived at a strong position opposing this development: he would
not use software that he was not allowed to alter or give to others.

Computer codes were not scarce in the way that material goods were.
Stallman likened them to recipes: to prevent people from swapping them, or
tinkering with them to suit their tastes, was authoritarian, morally wrong,
and a pollution of once open and collaborative social relations.

Stallman argues that while companies address the issue of software control
only from the point of view of maximizing profits, the community of hackers
has a quite different perspective: "What kind of rules make possible a  
good -- society that is good for the people in it?". The idea of free
software is not that programmers should make no money from their efforts
indeed, fortunes have been made but that it is wrong that the commercial
software market is set up solely to make as much money as possible for the
companies that employ them.

Free software has a number of advantages. It allows communities of users to
alter code so that it evolves to become economical and bugless, and adapts
to rapidly changing technologies. It allows those with specialist needs
to restructure codes to meet their requirements. 

Given that programs have to run in conjunction with each other, it is
important for those who work on them to be able to examine existing code,
particularly that of operating systems indeed, many think that one of the
ways in which Microsoft has maintained its dominance has been because its
programmers working on, say, Office have privileged access to Windows
code. Above all, free software allows access on the basis of need rather
than ability to pay. These considerations, together with a revulsion at
the greed and cynicism of the software giants, have attracted many people
to the project. Effective communities offering advice and information have
grown up to support users and programmers.

The free exchange of software has led some commentators to compare the
online gift economy with the ceremony of potlatch, in which people bestow
extravagant presents, or even sacrifice goods, to raise their prestige. Yet
there is a fundamental distinction between the two, since the copying and
distribution of software is almost cost-free at least if one excludes the
large initial outlay for a computer and networking facilities. If a
programmer gives away the program that they have written, the expenditure
involved is the time taken to write it any number of people can have a copy
without the inventor being materially poorer.

An ideological tussle has broken out in this field between idealists,
represented by Stallman, who want software to be really free, and the
pragmatists, who would rather not frighten the corporations. The term
'free', Eric Raymond argues in his book The Cathedral and the Bazaar,
is associated with hostility to intellectual property rights even with
communism. Instead, he prefers the "open source" approach, which would 
replace such sour thoughts with "pragmatic tales, sweet to managers' and
investors=92 ears, of higher reliability and lower cost and better
 features".

For Raymond, the system in which open-source software such as Linux is
produced approximates to the ideal free-market condition, in which selfish
agents maximize their own utility and thereby create a spontaneous,
self-correcting order: programmers compete to make the most efficient code,
and "the social milieu selects ruthlessly for competence". While
programmers may appear to be selflessly offering the gift of their work,
their altruism masks the self-interested pursuit of prestige in the hacker
community.

In complete contrast, others have extolled the "communism" of such an
arrangement. Although free software is not explicitly mentioned, it does
seem to be behind the argument of Hardt and Negri's Empire that the new
mode of computer-mediated production makes "cooperation completely
immanent to the labour activity itself". People need each other to
create value, but these others are no longer necessarily provided by
capital and its organizational powers. Rather, it is communities that
produce and, as they do so, reproduce and redefine themselves; the outcome
is no less than "the potential for a kind of spontaneous and elementary
communism". 

As Richard Barbrook pointed out in his controversial nettime posting,
'Cyber Communism', the situation is certainly one that Marx would have
found familiar: the forces of production have come into conflict with
the existing relations of production. The free-software economy
combines elements associated with both communism and the free market, for
goods are free, communities of developers altruistically support users,
and openness and collaboration are essential to the continued functioning
of the system.

Money can be made but need not be, and the whole is protected and sustained
by a hacked capitalist legal tool copyright.

The result is a widening digital commons: Stallman's General Public
Licence uses copyright or left to lock software into communal
ownership. Since all derivative versions must themselves be
'copylefted' (even those that carry only a tiny fragment of the original
code) the commons grows, and free software spreads like a virus or, in
the comment of a rattled Microsoft executive, like cancer. 

Elsewhere, a Microsoft vice-president has complained that the introduction
of GPLs "fundamentally undermines the independent commercial-software
sector because it effectively makes it impossible to distribute software
on a basis where recipients pay for the product rather than just the
distribution costs".

Asked about his wider political convictions, Stallman replies:
I hesitate to exaggerate the importance of this little puddle of freedom
... Because the more well-known and conventional areas of working for
freedom and a better society are tremendously important. I wouldn't say
that free software is as important as they are. It's the responsibility I
undertook, because it dropped in my lap and I saw a way I could do
something about it. But, for example, to end police brutality, to end the
war on drugs, to end the kinds of racism we still have, to help everyone
have a comfortable life, to protect the rights of people who do abortions,
to protect us from theocracy, these are tremendously important issues, far
more important than what I do. I just wish I knew how to do something about
them."

In fact, a look at Stallman's homepage, www.stallman.org, shows that he
is trying to mobilize public opinion over a wide range of political
issues.

Beyond the "puddle", though, Stallman's ideas do have wider resonance. As
music, films, images and texts have become digitized, lifted from their
material substrata of plastic or paper, many of the considerations that
apply to free software come to bear on them. The issue again is not just
about copying but altering. In NLR 13, Sven Letticken eloquently
described the advantages of intellectual 'theft'. Online, the
challenges to copyright are considerable, as people swap files using
peer-to-peer programs that sidestep centralized surveillance and
control. This free exchange of cultural goods is pursued not simply for
consumption but to provide material for active alteration most clearly so
in music, where the sampling and mixing of diverse sources is common, but
also in video, with "fan cuts" of TV shows and films. Sometimes such
appropriations are undertaken with subversive intent for instance, in the
copying of official websites for satirical purposes, such as those
sponsored by the group RTMark, at www.rtmark.com. In the world of on-line
art, attempts to claim exclusive ownership of works or sites have often
been met with the practical political act of hacking and illicit copying.

Stallman himself distinguishes between what he calls functional works
(software tools, manuals and reference guides, for example), scientific and
historical works, and works of art; in his view, all should be freely
copied and distributed, but the latter two should only be modifiable if
their authors assent. Stallman, whose defence of free software is in
essence a moral one, has no doubt that free distribution should apply
equally to cultural goods: "The number of people who find Napster useful 
... tells me that the right to distribute copies not only on a
neighbour-to-neighbour basis, but to the public at large, is essential and
therefore may not be taken away".

In a now well-known formulation, Stallman says of free software: "Don't
think free as in free beer; think free as in free speech." Yet in fact
much free software is actually costless, or very nearly so; likewise,
swapped files containing music, pictures or video are extremely cheap to
download.

While to do so is often illegal under current copyright law, it is unclear
whether the law could actually be enforced any more successfully in this
area than it was over copying music to cassette tapes.

Many of the advantages that work in favour of free software also apply to
other goods particularly, but not solely, those in digital form. The
argument about the efficiency that results from rapid peer review is of
considerable importance. At www.foresight.org, K. Eric Drexler's
pioneering essay on the potential of hypertext points up the fact that
conversation on paper develops slowly (certainly in academic circles), due
to the time needed for review, resubmission, publication and distribution,
and the same is true of any riposte that may be published. What is more,
the final result remains unchangeable, and isolated from the comments it
has provoked. Hypertext allows for rapid revision, collapses the
time-scale involved in getting a response and can link all related texts
together.

Free copying, linking and alteration are essential to this process. With
cultural works, the right to alter is a free speech issue, as becomes clear
when artists are sued for tampering with images of Barbie, using company
logos or even invoking company names. Corporations not only want to give
their brands and images powerful cultural currency, but also to control
their further use. To be unable to play with the image of Mickey Mouse or
Ronald McDonald due to the threat of litigation is a fundamental form of
cultural censorship. Equally, the copying and alteration of online art
works by other artists has been very important to the development of much
Net art theft being seen as a form of flattery.

The "copyleft" issue has major implications for the Left
itself. Consider the example of NLR. Its on-line policy is to make all
current political interventions, and a selection of articles from each
issue, freely available at www.newleftreview.org, while electronic access
to the entire contents of the journal is available only to subscribers. At
the same time, the journal is protected by copyright and raises the money
that it needs to be published at all from subscriptions, bookshop sales
and reprint rights.

Under the copyleft agreement, distribution of NLR material would be freely
granted to all those who had a desire or need for it. Those who could
afford the convenient and attractive packaging of the material that the
physical magazine offers would still buy it, but those who needed the
material without being able to afford the packaging would not be denied.

Furthermore, documents could be annotated, updated, and placed alongside
critiques (this can take place with convenience and speed on the Web, but
need not be confined to the virtual sphere). As with free software, the
ambition would be to foster a widening commons of writing and other
cultural material, a sphere in which access is determined primarily by need
and not price. In cases like this, would not the gamble offered by copyleft
be that widening access, and the goodwill that it creates, increases rather
than reduces income?

Until nanobots labour over physical manufactured goods, free beer will not
be on offer - though the artist and programmer Joshua Portway has remarked
that Christ's miracle with the loaves and fishes produced the first
open-source sandwich. Yet free speech and a free culture protected by the
very mechanisms put in place to restrict ownership and maximize profits can
be. The 'left' in copyleft should be taken seriously, as a matter of
expediency and principle. In this way, Stallman's small puddle of freedom
may become connected to an ocean

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