Ars Technica is bending over backwards not to make The Big Accusation, namely “if you skip the ads you are stealing”. And yet they still try to guilt trip you saying “well gosh, our business is on the line here, y’know?”.

I don’t know where Al Gore is, but there is a highly Inconvenient Truth here. And it is this: publishers are working from the assumption that the viewer has implicitly agreed to make them money without ever agreeing to it. This is why the Ars Technica article has to do that weird dance around the issue where they’re not calling you a cheat, but then they are, but then they’re not etc. Because if they did just come out and say it, they couldn’t look themselves in the mirror, because they have more self respect than certain muppets.

Ars Technica couldn’t live with themselves if they actually came out and said: Dear viewer, when we built this site we made the assumption that you would help us pay for it by looking at our ads. We never ran this by you, but we take it for granted that you have accepted this deal. Now we expect you to honor it.

There are others who are not so “modest”, like the entertainment industry claiming billions in damages based on sales they would have had if the people who downloaded stuff had paid for it. Here again, the assumption is that the consumer agreed to pay for something, and then refused. So who’s being cheated? The publisher!

But the viewer agreed to no such thing.

So why did this come about? Well, in the early 90s television was privatized. There had been cable tv for a number of years already, but in 1992 the channel TV2, the first commercial tv station to broadcast nationally, alongside the state broadcaster NRK, was launched. Effectively, television was let go from under the control of the rather insular NRK and freed to be driven by commercial profit. Naturally, TV2 in short order proceeded to import all of the popular culture, chiefly American, that has informed our lives. Another characteristic of TV2, quite unlike NRK — the absolute sterility of any form of even mild intellectualism. (Aside from NRK which may have as much as 2-3 weekly hours of programming suited to the more discerning viewer, provided the topic is up your street.)

Another big development in the mid and late 90s, of course — wide access to the internet. Here again is a brand new medium with immense amounts of information and culture “beamed” right into our homes.

I feel it was these two developments that formed the impetus behind this fashion within the education system. All of a sudden students would be writing essays using web pages for sources that, believe it or not, were just incorrect. Oh noes, something has to be done! And so it began. The internet is not trustworthy. You can’t believe everything you read. The deeper reasoning behind this is the question of motive. More important than what they are saying; why are they saying it? Back in my junior high days we received the dumbed down version (as, actually, with everything in junior high). The question was framed in terms of sources. This source is reliable, because it’s Encyclopedia Britannica. This source is not, because it’s a web page, or I heard it on tv. Never mind who gets to decide what is reliable and why.

Of course, the truth, as your astute self would have figured out by now, is that nothing is in and of itself trustworthy. It’s not just when you go online that you find garbage. There’s just as much garbage in books, in what your teachers tell you, in what your parents tell you, and above all in what your peers tell you. You need to be critical of all this stuff, not just of those crazy people on the internet.

I’m inadvertently rehashing Jürgen’s argument here. I read his entry and didn’t give it any more thought, but perhaps my subconsciousness has been chewing on it ever since? Thanks, Jürgen.

Naturally, some people are just malicious, but that is not the main problem. Even if you do have a piece of insight that you honestly believe is beneficial to someone, there are still a lot of things that can go wrong:

1. You’re plain mistaken.
2. It works for you, but it doesn’t work for everyone.
3. Even though you have the right idea, you fail to communicate it effectively.

The last one is particularly unfortunate. How many times has someone told you that they’ve just this discovered this new thing and it’s everything they needed, and then you say “but I told you that already a long time ago!”. Well, I guess you didn’t tell me in the words that I needed to hear in order to absorb the information, or in order to be convinced.

Parental advice, of course, is susceptible to the same flaw as those self help books. I’m sure you’ve seen some of those around, the basic premise is always the same — some person has figured out how to do something and wants to tell everyone. The problem is that just because it worked for him, doesn’t mean it will work for you. Especially when you hear it from a secondary source (a relative comes up and says “I read this amazing book, it changed my life, all you have to do is..”). But it’s not science. At best it “sorta works a lot of the time, kind of”.

So over time you develop a filter. “This person is not worth listening to on these topics, this book is written by someone who has no idea what he’s talking about, this website is usually reliable on these issues”. Now everything depends on that filter of yours. You may find one day that you bought into some utter nonsense, or that you discarded good insight.

If you have reservations about the implications of copyright reform, go watch this talk, he gets all these questions from the audience.

The soundbite from Falkvinge’s talk for all you 24hour news media addicts:

Copyright, while written into law that it’s supposed to be for the benefit of the author, never was. It was for the benefit of the distributors.

And yet we pay so little attention to the climate on the inside. Isn’t that a paradox?

When you go into a factory and look at some of their big machinery, they have these gauges on them that show you all sorts of information about the conditions in various critical parts of the system. It’s fairly important to know that the temperature is such, the pressure is in some acceptable range, the concentration of some chemical doesn’t exceed this; either because the machinery itself can’t handle it (eg. nuclear reactor), or because the product on the inside will get ruined if you don’t keep these factors under control.

We do this for our products, but we don’t do it for ourselves. It’s plain to see that the climate in our rooms is more important to our well being than the weather outside, since that’s where we spend most of our time. And yet there’s no weather forecast for this. We don’t know anything about the climate in our homes. We complain about the climate in certain parts of the world, “oh that place is horrible to live in”, and just the same there are buildings with an internal climate that is just as unbearable.

And then we talk about education, and health, and productivity. Does anyone see a problem here? Do you think you can be productive at your job if you’re standing in the rain, freezing your ass off? No one would expect that from you. And yet you go into the office, where it’s too hot, the air is stale because the ventilation stinks, it’s noisy, there’s so much ambient light that you have to squint to look at the monitor, the chair doesn’t have proper support for your back, and the desk is so small your elbows are hanging off the edge of it (less common now with lcd monitors). And this isn’t supposed to affect your productivity at all, right?

I cannot begin to quantify the number of days or half days that were ruined for me because the inside climate was bad. I used to hate summer that brought a large number of sunny days while I was sitting in school. Half the time when the sun was up it was either in my eyes or producing glare on the blackboard, either of which meant I had to sit there squinting. Even if the curtains were drawn the sun obviously moves on an axis, so soon enough they wouldn’t be in the right place anymore.

And then people say things like “boy, kids are so frail these days. They don’t get enough exercise.” Yes, that’s part of it, no doubt. The other part is spending their days in rooms with a bad climate and non-existent ergonomics. And I know, because I was getting enough exercise, and that didn’t magically eliminate the problems of climate.

***

So where do we start? We need to figure out what kind of climate we’re living in. When someone is getting a headache from spending 2 hours in a room with so much ambient light that they can’t comfortably see, we need to go from “there’s something wrong with you” to “this climate sucks, let’s fix it”. The first step towards fixing is knowing what the problem is. Right now we don’t know a damn thing. The only thing we have is thermometers. Imagine if the workers at a nuclear power plant only had one of those hand held thermometers and the guy was trying to “hold it close enough” to the opening so he could get a decent reading on it. That’s where we are now.

We need to figure out what the relevant environmental factors are and how to measure them. Don’t expect to have an ideal climate out of that, it could turn out to be expensive. But how do we know what it’s going to cost since we know nothing? Step one is to be able to measure properties of the climate that impact us. Step two is to figure out how various people are affected by these properties, and which. Step three is to connect these two bits of information to the extent we are able and willing to make the effort.

Climate control right now is an art. There are people who have figured out how to tune the climate, “do a little bit of this. Okay, a little more. There, good.” But it’s an art, inexact and experience based, full of “maybe this will help”. We need to make it not a science, but a commodity. Just as you know that the temperature in your refrigerator is supposed to be between 0 and 4 degrees, we should be able to say the same about our home climate. “My ambient light is x on average, y at peak, I need to fix it.” And then teach it in schools, right along with “you should eat this, not that”. It’s just as important.

1. New companies emerge all the time.
2. No companies ever close.
3. Consumers always buy the cheaper and better products.
4. No products ever become obsoleted and force the company to go out of business.

Sounds perfectly reasonable, doesn’t it?

When a new company opens in a town and provides a thousand new jobs, there’s noone protesting that this is unfair, we didn’t do anything to deserve this, that you can’t just suddenly create new jobs out of nothing, there aren’t people complaining that it’s not right, we didn’t get jobs at the new company. No, people accept it with great fanfare. Great, the economy is growing, our town will prosper! People will have more money, there’ll be less unemployment, we’ll be able to afford a higher standard of living.

And yet when, after 40 years, the company goes out of business or moves their production to a cheaper location, people say this is outrageous, 1000 jobs will be lost! There’s anger and pandemonium, how can they do this to us, we were loyal to the company for 40 years. People appeal to some sort of higher ethical body; you can’t take our livelihood away, what are we going to do with ourselves? And the town itself, which never had much industry, and really just had that one company that employed everyone in town, starts to regress. People move out in search of jobs, young people leave and don’t come back, noone moves in because there’s no local economy.

It’s a sensitive topic. Losing your livelihood is one of the more challenging life situations. But before you start screaming that it’s those damn crooked politicians and those greedy executives that have stolen your life, take a moment to think about why you had that job in the first place. In fact, let’s start with the basics: what does it mean to have a job?

It means that you are producing a product or offering a service that someone is willing to buy. It does not mean any of these things:

1. Someone is being nice to you.
2. You deserve this.
3. You’re going to keep your job because you’ve been loyal to the company.

If you actually believed any of that then you were under a complete misapprehension. Sure, sentimental concerns do come into it sometimes, like the boss’s son getting a summer job because he’s family. But in the long run, the only thing that matters is the economic reality.

If you think that’s a raw deal, think about this. Most artists aren’t wealthy, in fact most artists are struggling to get enough work to live on. A painter may think that he deserves to live a decent life as a painter, but if noone is willing to buy his work, well he’s not going to. Is that unfair? No, it isn’t, because if he’s not producing anything of value, why should anyone have to pay to keep him in business? So if a painter can’t do the job he wants to, why should it be any different for you making shoes, or catching fish, or whatever it is you do?

There used to be people working in elevators who would press the buttons. We don’t need them anymore. Shepherds aren’t in great demand either. Neither are telegraph operators. These professions have all be superseded and they’re not coming back. Many others still exist, but have been moved to where production is cheaper, like textiles.

It’s always a turbulent transition, you can be sure of that. We don’t have hunters anymore, we have domesticated animals now, no need to chase them in the woods. Think about how many hunters were out of work when this happened. But what should they have done, lynch the guy who came up with the idea of keeping animals on the property? Compared to the hunters’ relatively narrow interests (although there were many of them), domestic animals were very beneficial to the village. For one thing, you didn’t wonder where dinner was coming from, the animals were right there. So should the villagers have discarded this new idea just to make sure the hunters could keep their jobs?

I’ve got news for you. The very same thing you’re protesting against, your job being taken away, you’re doing the same thing to people everyday. That’s right, you’re not so innocent yourself. Have you ever bought a car from a different automaker, because it was cheaper? Did you ever buy peaches from Spain instead of domestic apples? Well, I’m sure it must have been a very gruelling decision for you, right? I mean to think that you could be putting car makers and farmers out of business because you’re not buying their products, that’s a tough one to swallow.

And what did you get out of it? You could afford to buy more things, because the new products were cheaper. And they didn’t break as quick, so you could use them longer. And they had some functions that the old products didn’t have, which made you happy. And just as this was happening, the old companies that couldn’t stay competitive were going out of business one by one, people were losing their jobs. But hey, you got a pretty good deal out of it, didn’t you?

Here’s what it comes down to. You’re not entitled to your job. You’ll only have it for as long as people are willing to buy your product. And even if you’ve had it for 40 years, that doesn’t mean the global market won’t make it obsolete tomorrow. There was a demand for your product, now there isn’t. You didn’t do anything to deserve getting it, and you didn’t do anything to deserve losing it.

Vendor: Good morning, is this Harry, the CTO*, I’m speaking to?
Client: Yes, how may I help you?
Vendor: Hey Harry, this is Steve from Microsoft. I would like to talk to you about Windows Vista.
Client: What’s that?
Vendor: Why, it’s the brand new version of our Windows operating system.
Client: Oh, that.
Vendor: I was wondering if I could interest you in our product.
Client: You know what, I don’t think so, we are a very security sensitive company, and..
Vendor: But that’s precisely the reason I’m calling, I would like to tell you how you can enhance your security with Windows Vista. You see, we’ve built the operating system with security in mind and it’s the state of the art in operating systems.
Client: Hey, that sounds pretty exciting. So how does this work now, you ship us the source code and…
Vendor: No no, we don’t distribute the source code.
Client: You don’t?!?
Vendor: No, you see it’s a trade secret. (my precious etc)
Client: You’re kidding, right?
Vendor: No, really.
Client: So how do we know that it’s actually secure if we can’t see for ourselves? How do we know there isn’t anything malicious in it?
Vendor: Well you’ll just have to trust us.
*Harry hangs up*
Vendor: Hello? Harry?
*CTO – the highest placed person who makes technical decisions in a company.

How did it go? Did you get it? It was kind of a long thing, huh? Ok, stop racking your brains, I’ll give you the answer: no source code, no security.

Here’s how that works. It’s simple economics, so try to keep up. If they give you the source code, then they put their cards on the table. You can see what the code does, and if it’s doing something stupid (security hole) or nasty (like sending your data to back to the vendor), then you’ll be able to check for this. Now you may say “I don’t know how to check”, and that’s okay. But just by giving you the source code the vendor knows that you can see everything the code is doing. And if you find something nasty in there, they know you’ll never trust them again. So it doesn’t really matter if *you* don’t know how to check, because there are others who do, and sooner or later someone will find the nasty code if it’s in there. Thus, if the vendor gives you the source code, then he’ll be a lot more careful about what’s in there, because he’s risking losing your trust and your business forever. That will keep him honest.

Is there then anything surprising about finding out that Microsoft is putting in backdoors in Windows? No, because how would you know it’s there? You don’t have the source code! In case you were wondering, the words “security” and “backdoor” are mutually exclusive.

So what have we learned today? Is there somehow we could summarize all this in just one sentence? There is: If you want security, ask for the source code. If you can’t get the source code, you know that the vendor isn’t taking security seriously.

I recall pondering the real purpose of the project, asking what is going to be achieved with these laptops. The OLPC project had a very good answer to this. They said the laptops will promote learning in areas where school books are a luxury. Furthermore, the laptop itself is completely tweakable, you press a special key and the source code of the current program pops up. This will promote learning through tweaking and experimentation, so that eventually an industry can be built on these foundations, in regions where little industry exists today and where perhaps the potential for one (in terms of natural resources) is bleak. A beautiful dream, one that could change the world in big ways.

Now Negroponte has changed his tune. Visionary that he is, he failed to convince the clients of the value of free software. So now he’s humming “forget open source, it’s all about the kids!” while preparing to run Windows on the laptop. There is a new smoke screen being constructed:

Negroponte says that the organization is working to ensure that Sugar can run smoothly on Windows.

Riiiight, running Sugar on Windows. Tell me, what exactly is the value of running Windows with an all free software stack? It’s completely useless, that’s what. The whole value of Windows is as a platform, not merely as an operating system. People buy Windows to run Windows applications, not for Windows itself. Or are we actually buying that Egyptian officials are eager to purchase Windows licenses in order to run the free software suite?

Congratulations, Negroponte, you’ve just become a licensed Windows vendor. The kids will no doubt have fun clicking on the Start menu and playing Solitaire. There is a great deal to learn from that, just nothing about the operating system or the applications, you know, actual learning.

OLPC in its original form was about empowering the users, with Windows that capability is entirely destroyed. The fact you cannot mix learning with trade secrets should be blindly obvious to anyone. Open souce is important, but it’s especially important when you want people to learn something.

Furthermore, learning doesn’t happen in isolation. It’s accelerated when it happens in a community of ideas and impulses that flow freely. Resigning OLPC president gets it when he says:

“What comes part and parcel with open source is a culture, and it’s the culture that I’m interested in,” he says. “It’s a culture of expression and critique, sharing, collaboration, appropriation.” And this culture can and should spill into classrooms, he says.

War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives.

A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small “inside” group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes.

Who wrote this? Why, only the highly decorated general Smedley D. Butler, in 1935.

Yeap, that’s right, folks. The plot in Inside Man wasn’t made up. It was a real plot about a fictional person, crafted on the histories of real people.

Here’s another truth ringer:

Like all the members of the military profession, I never had a thought of my own until I left the service.

But of course. Who in their right mind would go kill people at the risk of getting killed just so that a few rich men can get richer?

These are questions which have no prior answer, because we’ve only just been faced with them for the first time (or for that matter, only now been willing to consider them). There are many questions like this which have no answer (yet), but which nevertheless raise a certain instinctive feeling in us that makes us prone to lean to one side. This icky feeling is a fear within us that “something bad will happen” if this new thing is allowed to happen, without knowing what we really are scared of.

Many such questions have received answers in the past. For example the question of whether a brother and sister should be allowed to marry has been settled on the basis that children of such parents are born with serious deformities. Therefore we have a rational answer, not merely a fear.

What not to do: alternative A

Do not take your unarticulated fear to draw the conclusion that your instinct must be correct, and therefore suggest banning or condemning the practice. This is a purely emotional response with no rational justification.

Do not further aim to strengthen your argument by associating yourself with a large group of people who share your unarticulated fear and has decided to “do something about it”. The ignorance of a thousand is no more equivalent to wisdom than the fact that the sun is the center of our solar system was discovered by popular opinion.

Those who would rather pretend that certain new possibilities were never discovered will desire to ban these, so that we can go back to believing these things are not possible. And if it is banned, no one will be doing it, so we can live in this illusion we’ve created for ourselves.

What to do: alternative B

Resign yourself to the fact that certain questions have no answer at the moment, and that at any given time there will always be such questions. Your pretty little head will resist this, because this makes certain things undecidable. But it is nevertheless the quickest path to happiness, as you will soon see.

What to do: alternative C

Pursue the answer intellectually, and aggressively. Read up on the science that is happening in this field and the discourse that is taking place between interested parties. Once you go in depth you will begin to understand not just the issue, but also your own fear and what it really is you’re worried about. This will then prevent you from choosing the emotional answer of alternative A, because you will no longer be able to convince yourself that a rational answer is optional.

The final, undisputed answer to certain questions may not come for a long time, not even in the span of your lifetime. But with every step that you veer closer to the truth you will have a better idea of what it’s likely to be. Until the truth is actually discovered, you will regularly find yourself faced with alternative B.

Both licensing models have been around for a very long time. I don’t know which predates which, but it really doesn’t matter. The spirit behind both licenses is very similar: free software is good. But they realize this idea in different ways.

In the GPL license you have the four freedoms: to run the software, to have the source code, to distribute the software, to distribute your modifications to the software. What this implies is that when you obtain the software, you have the *obligation* to ensure that these four things hold true for the next person you give it to. After all, someone had to go to the trouble of preserving these rights for *you*, so you have to do the same for the next guy.

The BSD license is different, because it gives *you* the right to distribute the software, but it does not oblige you to make sure that the next guy has any such right. Well, that’s not really a problem, the next guy can ignore you and get the software from the same source that you did (if that source is still available). But if you change it and you give it to him, you can forbid him from passing it on.

So who is right? Well, the BSD camp is. The BSD is no doubt a freer license, it gives you the right to decide what rights to bundle with the software. That is much closer to the absolute meaning of “freedom” than the GPL. Alas, it’s not “completely” free, because you can’t remove the name of the software’s author and replace it with “Leonardo da Vinci”.

What the GPL terms “freedom” is actually fairly subversive, because it *forces* you to do certain things. Most people who are forced to do something call that a “restriction” rather than a “freedom”. It’s true that you have certain freedoms when you get the software, but if you want to pass it on you have restrictions, so they could just as well call it the four freedoms and the four restrictions.

Therefore, if we take the philosophical ideal of freedom to heart, even though both of these licenses promote free software, none of them represent freedom, and the GPL is far less free than the BSD.

Harmless restrictions

Suppose you’re a parent and you give your kid a candy bar and say this is for you and your brother, you can have half of it, and when he comes home give him the other half. Do you think that is going to happen just as you instructed? How confident are you?

Well, your intentions were good. You tried to ensure fairness. But we humans are scheming devils, aren’t we? So our philosophy is a bit of an idealization, we just don’t live up to it.

Is there some way we can find a measure of freedom that is good enough? The fact is that we live with a lot of implicit restrictions without worrying too much about them. If you tell your kid you’re free to wear anything you want, eat anything you want, be anywhere you want, and do anything you want, except you can’t burn the house down most kids would find that a very satisfying degree of freedom, despite the restriction. They would probably say well I wasn’t going to do that anyway, all my toys would go up in smoke.

So what can we do about sustainability?

Freedom in its pure form is a wonderful thing, but it’s not inherently sustainable. You can take something and compare it up against freedom and tell if it’s free, but you can’t use freedom to enforce freedom. That would be absurd.

The GPL model is sustainable. It offers freedom, but with the pragmatic twist that there needs to be some kind of force to keep the freedom in place. In that sense it could even be said to be more free, because the *accumulated* freedom over all people involved is higher than when one person has all the freedom and everyone else has none.

GPL freedom is isomorphic. If OpenOffice needs a way to open jpeg files, and the gimp already has code for this, OpenOffice can just take it. Then two years later if OpenOffice reads jpegs much faster, the gimp can take the modified code from OpenOffice and use it. Both parties have the same degree of freedom, and no freedom is lost along the way, the process is “lossless”.

BSD freedom, on the other hand, is “lossy”. If I get BSD code I have a lot of freedom, but the next guy doesn’t. It’s fairly well known that there is BSD code in Windows. And obviously, whatever Microsoft did with that code, they have no obligation to release their changes. So the code *was* free at one point, but it didn’t *remain* free. Furthermore, even if they didn’t change it one bit, if the original author is no longer around, Microsoft is still sitting on BSD code that is free for *them*, but it’s no longer free for anyone else.

So what can we conclude from all this? Both license models make software free, but only GPL software is sustainably free. The BSD gives greater freedom, the GPL gives more freedom. Choose which one you value more.

For a more in-depth discussion see this essay, not only for itself, but also the many many references it contains to other relevant texts.