I had some very vivid and powerful dreams. I wish I had a place to record dreams whose details I don't want to publish here.
As it is, I basically just don't write down anything I don't publish nowadays, unless it's a poem or a very brief notation in a notebook.
I forgot to mention the other thing I saw as I was walking home on Folsom: Petopia closed, locked, shuttered (more or less), and with a NO TRESPASSING sign in the window. It looks a lot less cute this way than it did before.
As I've said, it's not that I had a great investment in the success of these businesses, or even thought that they were particularly sound, but it still makes me sad to see failed startups (actually, I don't know whether Petopia is out of business or just moved or something), because all of these startups were somebody's dream and somebody's job. And silly some of them may have been, and impractical, but someone believed in them.
Yikes. Next year's CTYers will have been *born* after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Time flies when you're having fun.(Tien Chiu)
I spent a long time arguing various points on the fsb list. A productive thing that I did was to write a cellular automaton program in Python, because I wanted to give a hypothetical example of a computer program for a copyright argument. So I wrote this program, sent it to the list, and proceeded to discuss various implications of my copyright in it.
The fact is that there are things you are allowed to do with copyrighted works without infringing the copyright; if you are not infringing the copyright, the question of fair use does not even arise.(Kragen Sitaker, in support of one of my points)
I was emphasizing that, once people had legally obtained copies of my program, they could legally run it without my permission, and even if I specifically told them not to. The copyright limits the ability to make copies but (we claim) does not limit the right to use, study, transfer, or do various other things with existing copies.
The rights of copyright holders -- the legal restrictions on the behavior of others with respect to copyrighted works -- are carefully enumerated, and are at once very broad and very narrow: they can reach many different acts which involve duplication, public broadcasting, or public exhibition, but they almost never reach any of the many other things people routinely do with copyrighted works. There are also a lot of restrictions on the scope of copyright, in an attempt to reduce some of the harm copyright does to scholarship, criticism, parody, and research. I have to admit that many of these exceptions mitigated a lot of the potentially severe harms, in the most common cases. But their existence means that they need to be defended: copyright is not "ownership" and is far from a general right to require permission for any use.
This is more of a controversy in software than it is in something like book publishing: when do book publishers ever try to prevent you from lending, reselling, criticizing, studying, pulping, or writing marginal notes and annotations on their books? (Well, they do with advance review copies and galleys, but often with little legal foundation.) When do they try to stop you from writing other books inspired by the originals, or using information you learned from them? (Well, using fictional characters or places or certain other narrative elements from a work of fiction may get you in trouble. But using facts you learned from an encyclopedia never will.) They try to stop unauthorized duplication; by and large, it ends there.
Software publishers have gotten enthusiastic about the idea that they can impose conditions on your use of their programs. This is strange, as far as some of us are concerned, partly because they rely on the same copyright law book publishers do (with certain differences, most of which appear to give more rights to consumers), and yet somehow many people accept the idea that you normally acquire one kind of work subject to a "license" which limits your use of it in many ways, and the other kind without any sort of license at all. It's a puzzling situation.
There is now a lot of debate among lawyers and people who hang out with lawyers about whether or not "shrinkwrap" or "clickwrap" licenses are valid -- that is, if you buy a copy of a program and you take it home and you open it up and you see this big long END USER LICENSE AGREEMENT -- YOU MUST READ AND ACCEPT THIS BEFORE USING THE PROGRAM IF YOU DO NOT AGREE TO THIS LICENSE YOU HAVE NO RIGHT TO USE THE PROGRAM...
Well, if you see such a thing, is it any different from my old hypothetical "by reading this sentence, you agree..." or the story about the sign on the building "by driving past this building, you agree..."? Is there any reason you should have to follow it? Obviously plain old copyright law forbids you to make illegal copies, but these license agreements tend to go way beyond that. So if you don't plan to make illegal copies, but you do want to make some other use which is supposedly regulated by this license agreement, is that OK?
The view I'm most sympathetic to is that these license agreements are most often simply false statements, placed in a box and sold to you. So you get this box and inside there's a piece of paper that says "END USER MATHEMATICS AGREEMENT -- THE EXPONENTIAL FUNCTION IS NO LONGER ITS OWN DERIVATIVE". Does this situation mean that the exponential function is no longer its own derivative? No, it means that some person managed to get a piece of paper in the box that makes the false claim that the exponential function is not its own derivative. But it's wrong. If you disagree with the agreement, it doesn't affect your right to use what you bought. (To make an extreme argument, using the non-lawyer misconception that any contract is just as enforceable as any other, what if the agreement says that, by using the program, you agree to accept Jesus Christ as your personal savior? I'm pretty sure some programmer in this wide world has attempted such a thing.)
So this view continues to the effect that, if you do not agree to the license, you still have a right to use the copy of the program, because you bought it, so the license is just wrong, and it's trying to intimidate you because it was written by a lawyer and you weren't, nyah nyah nyah. Such is the view of D. J. Bernstein in the short article I've linked to about.
I went and bought a few small items of clothing. It was frustrating to hang around the belt and tie racks: for some reason, clothing made of animals, except of course fur, is still considered higher-quality and higher-status than clothing made of plants or petroleum. So you see all these belts which are advertising "GENUINE LEATHER" or "100% GENUINE LEATHER" or "ALL LEATHER" or some such thing. And all these ties say "100% SILK" or "73% SILK 27% RAYON" or "IMPORTED SILK" or something.
And then you look around for some clothing that isn't made out of animals, maybe, and "maybe" is the best you get, because the clothing that's made out of synthetics, or mostly, considers this something to be ashamed of, so instead of the convenient tag legend "ALL MAN-MADE MATERIALS" (which I've seen just a few times in my life), you get things like "IMPORTED FABRICS" or "MIXTURE" (which might in fact make the article unkosher, but says nothing about whether there are animal byproducts in it) or "GENUINE" or "QUALITY" or something. But they just stay totally silent about what the thing is actually made of, lest they should admit that it's actually synthetic!
(I admit that I've managed to buy ties which advertised their contents, but it still seems clear that silk ties are thought of as the best and other ties are embarrassed.)
Does anybody remember the passage in Laura Ingalls Wilder about how great it was that somebody had given machine-made clothing as a gift? Everyone had only hand-made clothing, and the machine-made clothing was this wonderful novelty.
You see the brand name "Anatomotor" on some medical equipment and you immediately think that it must mean "Duck Motor" because "motor" is a Latin root and the Latin "anato-" means "duck". So, you'd expect that an anatomotor is something that moves ducks around, or something that ducks use to move themselves around.
But why would this medical equipment have to do with ducks?
Then you realize that there is also a pair of Greek roots "ana-tomo-" which has to do with anatomy (literally, with cutting things up). You silently chastise the creator of this brand name for mixing Latin and Greek roots, to the detriment of easy translation.
Yesterday I said here that Eric Raymond was a good example of a particular type of thinking about process vs. product, in the free software world.
Today he sent this message to me and the fsb list:
Seth, allow me to make a suggestion.The best way to fight "shared source" is to point out that under Microsoft's license terms, it appears that any developer that looks at Microsoft's code makes his company subject to an IP-theft lawsuit if they ever develop software that competes with or resembles a Microsoft product.
Make them fear "shared source". *That* will work. Don't even mention the GPL. Allow your listeners to notice on their own how much nastier the Microsoft trap is than the scare scenarios Microsoft is floating about the GPL.
When doing open-source advocacy for a business audience, remember this:
1) Your worst enemy is your own idealism.
2) Your best friends are fear, greed, and the desire for dominance.I say that your own idealism is your worst enemy because it will lead you to talk about things that won't help -- to argue from your moral position rather than from the audience's business issues.
On the other hand, if you can learn to push the fear/greed/dominance buttons you will win. And keep winning. This may seem like an ugly way to win, but ask yourself what it is you really want -- to feel virtuous but argue ineffectively, or to win the argument and change behavior.
I rest my case. :-)
Contact: Seth David Schoen
