Subject: "It is Time to Talk about Free Software"

From: "Nadav Har'El" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 19 Oct 2002 01:17:49 +0200

I don't know how many of you are familiar with the group "oekonux"
(http://www.oekonux.org/). This strange name comes from German, and is
a contraction of "oekonomie" and "Linux", so it's easy to guess that
they are a (mostly-German) discussion group about the economic and social
implications of Linux and of free software in general.

One of the interesting things about those people is that rather than just
saying what they think on this subject, they actually research the relevance
of old economic theory (with Marx apprently their favorite ;)) to free
software.

One of those guys wrote a short essay http://guzinp.tripod.com/ about
typical stuff that that group talks about (he even uses the weird term
they invented, "self-unfolding", that supposedly sounds better in German.

It's not the most interesting essay that I ever read but there are several
interesting ideas in that essay that I wonder how many of you have thought
about.

One of them is

   "The greatest irony of the Cold War was the Net. While struggling
    against Stalinist communism, the US military unwittingly supplied the
    creation of cyber-communism."

Whether or not you agree that free software is akeen to "cyber-communism",
you have to agree that this is indeed quite an irony because free software
is more similar, both in practice and in spirit, to something that should
have been invented in the USSR than to something that should have been
invented in the 60s in the USA.

Another interesting point is that

   "Gift cultures are adaptations not to scarcity but to abundance."

But one really thought-provoking (at least for me) passage was (especially
the last paragraph):

  "So far, everything seems ok. Perhaps we want to believe in the revolution
   by assuming that information would relieve people of boring, dangerous,
   and monotonous work. It would provide more leisure. It would allow people
   to explore their own potential. This is the utopian reading of the
   information revolution. On the other hand, the future may not be like that
   and things may not be so happy-puppy! Lets look at a dystopic version of
   the future.

   "Free Software Movement will create very powerful software applications.
   Those powerful software programs will control the machines. As machines
   become more and more intelligent, people will let machines make more of
   their decisions for them, because machine-made decisions will bring better
   results than man-made ones. The decisions necessary to keep the system
   running will be so complex that human beings will be incapable of making
   them intelligently. We will start to loose our control over those
   intelligent machines even the elites. At that stage the machines will be
   in effective control. People will not be able to just turn off the machines,
   because they will be so dependent on them. So, turning them off will mean
   suicide. Or; due to improved techniques the digerati will have greater
   control over the masses.

   "Because human work will no longer be necessary the masses will be
   superfluous, a useless burden on the system. These engineered human beings
   will believe that they are happy in such a society, but they will be never
   free, since all of them will have been reduced to the status of domestic
   animals. This, maybe unrealistic for today but is a possible dystopic
   future projection, seems very hard in order to realize. But, we should be
   well prepared for red alarm!"

This is indeed frightening: Imagine a world where everything is done by
machines (e.g., you don't even need human waiters because you order food
from a display on the table and a robot brings it to you) and so the only
jobs really needed are researchers and programmers. But if all research and
programs are free, fewer people will need to do them (because, as anybody
who works in commercial programming knows, much of your job involves writing
things that other people have already done before), and most of the people
will be jobless, and in effect totally useless to society - they couldn't
get any less "free" than that.

Wow ;) Maybe I found the reason for the Synthesis I've been looking
for (refer to my Hegelian post from a couple of months ago ;))

-- 
Nadav Har'El                        |     Friday, Oct 18 2002, 13 Heshvan 5763
[email-masked]             |-----------------------------------------
Phone: +972-53-245868, ICQ 13349191 |A messy desk is a sign of a messy mind.
http://nadav.harel.org.il           |An empty desk is a sign of an empty mind.

---

From: Dan Kenigsberg <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 19 Oct 2002 03:06:00 +0200

> invented in the 60s in the USA.

Hell no! Free software and the Net are decentralized, uncensureable, accepts
everyone - but favours the more resourcefull, full of choices and competetion,
and voluntary - one may leave when pleases.

Is it anyway similar to a nation where every dicision (like annual milk quota)
was brought to the Kremlin, where there all media is closely controlled, where
saying "Marx was a theoretician with no touch of reality" was probably a mortal
sin, where if you were born a Tatar or Chechen (or Jew) you were at the mercy of
the government, where you had to get permission to take a long distance train or
to change jobs, where there was a single producer for every comodity, and no one
could leave.

Conclusion - there is no irony here. The structure of the Internet is a manifetation of the the American ideals - freedom of speech and association, minimum
regulation, individualism, competetion, choice, inequality towards those who
cannot afford the bandwidth, and the (sometimes baseless) belief that (1) people
do what's best for them personally (2) if they are let to do that, the "general
good" will enjoy.

It is no coincidence that the Internet was conceived in the USA, rather than the
USSR (and still opressed in communist china). They wouldn't let the Beatles in,
let alone the Net!

>    and things may not be so happy-puppy! Lets look at a dystopic version of

I don't see how's that relevant to *free* software, rather than to software
itself. In fact, I don't see in what way this description adds over
"1984" and "The Terminator".

---

From: Gilad Ben-Yossef <[email-masked]>
Date: 19 Oct 2002 09:49:13 +0200

> do what's best for them personally (2) if they are let to do that, the "general

I agree completly and then some - but I also think I understand how
someone can make the mistake: The ideals that the Internet embodies
are the *original* American ideals, as shared by the founding fathers of
the USA and by the people that settled the 'new world' as it was called
and the west, not the USA as we know it today.

Or to put it in as RMS puts it - since when does helping your neighbour
is comminism? helping your neighbour *is* (part of) the original
American ideal set. Of course, today things are very different. Helping
your neighbours is bad because it 'steals' revenue from Disney and
Microsoft, because it might scare the goverment and because it helps the
crack delaers or so we're told.

The irony here, if any, is that the state of the states (forgive the bad
pun) is such that people no longer recognise the ideals of enlighted
self interest and cooperation out of free will that it was based on when
it is presented to them in Free Software and instead consider it more
kin to Comminism, which at least in implmentation was all but those.

Of course, the state of Israel is much worse - we never even held those
high idles in the first place. Here a person is considered some kind of
goverment pet, suitable for paying taxes and dying in wars and not
really the cause of the existence of the state as anyone who was with me
in our latest Knesset excursion must have realised when he saw a member
of the Knesset lashes out against a citizen which has traveled a long
way on his own expense just to try to get his goverment do The Right
Thing(tm). Never mind that whole affair was based on a 'mistaken
identity', the sight of a Knesset member yelling on the top of his voice
at a citizen filled my heart with disgust.

EOR (End Of Rant... :-)

Gilad.

-- 
Gilad Ben-Yossef <[email-masked]>
http://benyossef.com

 "Geeks rock bands cool name #8192: RAID against the machine"

---

From: "Nadav Har'El" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 19 Oct 2002 10:39:27 +0200

> "1984" and "The Terminator".

The relvance to *free* software is that once it's written it sort
of has a "life of its own" because nobody is fighting its spread (like
Microsoft, RIAA, the police, etc., are fighting the spread of commercial
software). Commercial software cannot reign over humans - because humans
built a strong (legal) safty net to make sure they profit from its spread.

Commercial software could reign over humans too, but only if the humans
lose (in a war with the machines? :)) the ability too keep it commercial
and in essence it becomes free.

Also, Very few humans are needed in to make free software, and that guy's
point is that the rest of the humans will become despensible.
For example, There are probably N (N>10) companies who paid humans to write
a C compiler for the i386 platform. If a free compiler (like gcc) was
prevalent, all these people would be superfluous and would need to find other
jobs. But what if no other work existed but programming? :)

Anyway, I'm not saying that I stopped believing in free software :)
It's just that it's an interesting point.

-- 
Nadav Har'El                        |   Saturday, Oct 19 2002, 13 Heshvan 5763
[email-masked]             |-----------------------------------------
Phone: +972-53-245868, ICQ 13349191 |Hardware, n.: The parts of a computer
http://nadav.harel.org.il           |system that can be kicked.

---

From: Shlomi Fish <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 19 Oct 2002 11:47:09 +0200 (IST)

> jobs. But what if no other work existed but programming? :)

I don't see how free software can eliminate the majority of programmers
out there. Most software in the world is in-house, embedded or such that
accompanies hardware. Even if commercial software died, there would still
be a lot of need for programmers who write such software.

See:

http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/magic-cauldron/ar01s03.html

for details.

Regards,

	Shlomi Fish

> Anyway,I'm not saying that I stopped believing in free software :)
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----------------------------------------------------------------------
Shlomi Fish        [email-masked]
Home Page:         http://t2.technion.ac.il/~shlomif/
Home E-mail:       [email-masked]

"Let's suppose you have a table with 2^n cups..."
"Wait a second - is n a natural number?"

---

From: "Nadav Har'El" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 19 Oct 2002 13:07:32 +0200

> be a lot of need for programmers who write such software.

Imagine that a supberb, free, robot-control software existed. Do you think
robot companies will write their own robot-control software from scratch
and not build on the existing free software?

A similar thing is happening now in the OS market, for example. In 80's
and 90's, every company who made computers also sold their own operating
system. Some of them were based on AT&T's Unix source code (but most of
these companies branched the code and worked hard on their own secret code)
but some weren't (VMS, VM, OS/2, Mac, etc.). "Appliance" makers also wrote
their own stripped-down OSs from scratch.

These days, nobody will repeat these efforts. Somebody making a new type of
computer will try to run an existing OS (Linux, Windows, etc.), somebody
making a new appliance will build it on Linux or BSD (see Tivo, many of the
internet appliances out there, etc.) and some companies are even switching
to free software instead of their home-brew OSs (IBM using Linux, Macintosh
using something derived from BSD, etc.)

This obviously doesn't prove that the number of programmers needed will
lower - it might actually mean the number will go up because of the increased
potential for creativity and increased use of computers because of cheaper
software. This is why the author of that essay called it a "dystopian"
(pessimistic) view.

-- 
Nadav Har'El                        |   Saturday, Oct 19 2002, 13 Heshvan 5763
[email-masked]             |-----------------------------------------
Phone: +972-53-245868, ICQ 13349191 |A computer program does what you tell it
http://nadav.harel.org.il           |to do, not what you want it to do.

---

From: Gilad Ben-Yossef <[email-masked]>
Date: 19 Oct 2002 15:43:12 +0200

> and not build on the existing free software?

Imagine that a superb, free (as in speech) and cheap (thought goverment
subsidy) bread existed. Do you think Erez komorovsky would make
different bread and not just resell the regular one?

The answers to both questions is: 'of course they would'.

Free Software is about commodotizing of software. Up till now software
has a been a 'luxury' product like Caviar or Champane. Natural
proccesses turn software into a commodity, but being a commodity *does
not* get you less of the product, on the other way around - it gets you
more, cheaper and more diversefied.

Again and again we forget that software writing is only a 20 years old
proffesion, so it seems to us that the natrual proccesses it undergoes
through as it matures from an art and vood craft into a proffesional
activity is something new, but it ain't. A couple of odd decades ago
building bridges and houses must've been just like software is now.
Anyone that built something would keep the plans and method completly
secret. But building matured, people realised that 90% of building do
not harbour anything *really* new and we also learnt that without peer
review you get very lousy buildings and bridges (PalKal, anyone?). 

Free Software is the natural proccess through which the software
profession matures and lets go of the illusion that we are all terribly
special magicians and gains through this relaibility and availability of
the technology to the masses. 

This is why Free Software is not good or bad. It simply is. It's a
natural force. This is also why Microsoft and Oracle and Sun etc are
irrelevent - they will turn to Free Software (FSDO Free Software) or
will disapear. This is also why we are invincible. You can wave you
hands in anger towards the sky when dark clouds gather but it won't do
you any good. Unless you prepare for the storm all you're going to do is
get very wet.

> software. This is why the author of that essay called it a "dystopian"

Actually if you want to go dystopian on us there is a much more
interesting scenario: The Signularity. See
http://www.ugcs.caltech.edu/~phoenix/vinge/vinge-sing.html for example.

Gilad.