My father sent me several issues from 1938 and 1939 of the philosophical
journal Mind. Unfortunately, it's not the 1950 issue where
Turing introduces the Turing test; none of these issues appears to have
a particularly famous paper in it. But I always read things where somebody
is saying "Oh, yeah, of course this was dealt with in that famous paper
in Mind in 1938" (as though you happened to have a bunch of
issues of Mind from 1938 at home. Well, now I do.
My father also found my old training manual from the Olympiyeda in 1995.
The big surprise was that it contained four postcards, complete with
stamps, which I'd written from Israel but they forgotten to mail. I'm
afraid the Israeli stamps aren't likely to be honored by the USPS; I
could add some U.S. stamps and mail the postcards now, or something.
Two of them are addressed to high school teachers of mine, one to my mother,
and one to a friend I haven't been in touch with in quite a while.
The pictures on the postcards are pretty eclectic -- a church in
Jerusalem, a painting celebrating peace, people skiing at Mount Hermon
(the mountain after which my high school was named), and a harbor in
Tel Aviv.
I also got a new Dover Publications catalog in the mail.
One of many comments
in a recent roundtable discussion showing the controversies about what it
means to discriminate. So everyone here has the idea that discrimination is
wrong, but people have vastly different concepts about what kinds of practices
are wrong.
Some people say that everyone has the right to derive new programs using
old programs written by others (and of course to distribute these new
programs). According to these people, whoever tries to stop the programmers
from doing this is doing something abusive (whether it's done by legal
means or not).
Other people say that nobody has the right to derive a new program or to
distribute it (always assuming that the original author has not consented,
because supposedly volenti non fit iniuria). According to these
people, whoever tries to force the programmers to be allowed to do this is
doing something abuse (whether it's done by legal means or not).
The interesting thing is that there are legal means to try for
each objective -- the GNU GPL, on the one hand, and Microsoft's licenses,
on the other hand. But legal doesn't mean that everyone will approve or
think that a tactic is ethical.
This particular debate was conducted between Brett Glass (an opponent of
the GPL) and some GPL supporters. Brett Glass observed that the Free
Software Foundation thinks that proprietary software is bad. (This is
pretty easy to establish; you can start with
"Why Software Should
Not Have Owners".) Glass disapproves of the FSF's use of the word
"proprietary" for various reasons; for purposes of this discussion, we
can say that the controversy is about software for which copyright is used
in the traditional way that the 1980s and 1990s software industry used it.
Stallman thinks that this use of copyright was and is immoral; Glass
thinks that it's perfectly moral. Stallman's
strategy to fight
against proprietary software was not to encourage copyright infringement,
but rather to try to make proprietary software obsolete:
GNU is not in the public domain. Everyone will be permitted to modify
and redistribute GNU, but no distributor will be allowed to restrict
its further redistribution. That is to say, proprietary modifications
will not be allowed. I want to make sure that all versions of GNU
remain free.
[...]
Many programmers are unhappy about the commercialization of system
software. It may enable them to make more money, but it requires them
to feel in conflict with other programmers in general rather than feel
as comrades. The fundamental act of friendship among programmers is
the sharing of programs; marketing arrangements now typically used
essentially forbid programmers to treat others as friends. The
purchaser of software must choose between friendship and obeying the
law. Naturally, many decide that friendship is more important. But
those who believe in law often do not feel at ease with either choice.
They become cynical and think that programming is just a way of making
money.
By working on and using GNU rather than proprietary programs, we can
be hospitable to everyone and obey the law. In addition, GNU serves as
an example to inspire and a banner to rally others to join us in
sharing. This can give us a feeling of harmony which is impossible if
we use software that is not free. For about half the programmers I
talk to, this is an important happiness that money cannot replace.
Stallman thought that free software developers could outcompete
proprietary vendors, by undercutting them in the marketplace with
volunteer labor and royalty-free distribution. In addition, his
license terms would provide an incentive for others not
to use copyright in the typical software industry style.
These are serious problems for Glass, who feels that the typical
industry practices ("marketing arrangements now typically used") are
moral and that fighting to drive them out of the market is a very
bad thing.
So Glass will talk about how the GPL discriminates against commercial
software vendors. And people who are talking to him will say, what
do you mean? Doesn't the GPL provide exactly the same terms to those
vendors as it provides to everyone else?
(Actually, it doesn't: 3(c) says "(This alternative is
allowed only for noncommercial distribution and only if you
received the program in object code or executable form with such
an offer, in accord with Subsection b above.)" But it's extremely
unusual for anybody to use the option in 3(c) at all, so it doesn't
seem like a big deal to people.)
But Glass counters that the terms the GPL offers are by design
only useful to people who aren't commercial software vendors! So such
people get the same offer, but it's an offer that was set up bearing in
mind that it would be an impossible offer for them to accept.
It's interesting to think about whether this should be called
discrimination. The easiest argument to make is that it is not
formal discrimination, because it does give the same treatment to
everyone. But it could be substantive discrimination, because it's
intended to favor the interests of one group (people who
want to publish programs which provide Stallman's Four Freedoms)
over another (people who want to publish programs which use
copyright in accordance with the "marketing arrangements now
typically used").
GPL supports don't tend to think of this discrimination as bad; in
Stallman's view, those who are trying to sell proprietary software
via typical marketing arrangements are doing something bad
already, and so creating inconveniences for them is hardly a
problem. In Glass's view, the same people are doing something
perfectly honest, by way of earning a living, and Stallman's
roadblocks are a terrible form of bigotry against them.
This discussion came up in the context of Craig Mundie's comments
that he wanted end-users to have "choice" between free and proprietary
software. This word is tricky: on the one hand it conjures up some
of the antitrust issues which have been raised against Microsoft
(and I will say nothing about the great old Windows Refund Day). On
the other hand it is a clever attack against those who say, as Stallman
does, that Microsoft by its perfectly legal use of copyright
is already doing something bad to the public. Thus Mundie appears as
the great defender of consumer choice -- saying that the free software
movement has its way, and Microsoft has its own way, and neither way
is better or worse than they other, they are just different.
That general message is one I think Brett Glass would endorse (as a
supporter of both free and nonfree software, in the senses used by
the FSF), but it's a clever trick, it seems to me, as a response to
a criticism that has moral overtones.
That is, if you criticize an institution and say that people should
behave differently than that institution does, or at least that it's
particularly virtuous to behave in a different way, the institution can
respond with the very broad-minded, open-minded, pluralist,
pro-diversity message "Well, there are lots of different ways of
doing things -- we just want to make sure that people have a choice".
And actually the institution may or may not care whether people have a
choice (I don't think Microsoft feels that it's important that
people can choose free software instead of Microsoft products, but I
do think Microsoft feels that it's OK). But now its critics
look bad -- "We don't want to ban your way of doing things,
but you seem to want to ban ours!".
And this tactic can be used whether or not critics actually think the
institution's behavior should be illegal, because there are lots of ways
to criticize something without calling for laws to ban it. (A few
people have wished that Declan McCullagh
would bear this possibility
in mind in his news reporting, although certainly plenty of the people
he reports on really are trying to ban things.) You can think
that something is obsolete and wish that it would fade away or that it
would reform itself or that its relevance would diminish; it doesn't
mean that the thing ought to be a crime. And there is clearly an
interpretation, if you read Stallman carefully, that proprietary software
is an unfortunate historical accident, and not exactly a vicious crime,
but really a big mistake, and if the programmers would only be
reconciled to their traditional cultural values, they could keep on
programming in a much brighter future...
That phrasing might sound arrogant to some people, but I'm
confident that Richard Stallman respects and honors the programmers
at Microsoft and wants them to have freedom along with everyone else,
and generally holds
marketing
strategists like Bill Gates responsible for what Microsoft has
been doing.
Back to the "make sure that people have a choice" argument: I think
this comes up a lot in environmental activism and also in criticism of
the content of mainstream television and movies. A company which has
been criticized for its products will say "We want to make sure that
customers have a choice". (As opposed to our critics, who do not
want customers to have a choice!)
It's easy to understand this complaint in the regulatory environment we
know and love or don't love, in that a lot of people are, in fact,
trying to get certain products banned at any given moment. But a result
of this environment is that a spokesman for some company will interpret
any criticism as a call for regulation, which is not always accurate.
Jerry Mander's book Four Arguments for the Elimination of
Television is fascinating, not just because of the "proposing to
eliminate a technology" angle. I mean, I agree with several
of his arguments (he actually has many more than four of them), but
I would hardly want to suggest that the elimination of television should
be effected through government regulation. (I did suggest in a high
school debate tournament that the FCC's long-time policies on spectrum
treated television broadcasters quite favorably, at the expense of
other possible spectrum users.) I think of TV as having fewer harms
and more redeeming qualities than drugs, which I think should be legal.
There again there is something of the same issue -- why do drug prohibitionists
own the "drugs are bad for you" territory and why are decriminalization
supporters so often expected to be found saying "Oh, drug X isn't
actually that bad for you"?
Well, I think I would not cry if drugs went away, or broadcast television
as we know it went away, but certainly I think of the things I can do
about either as very limited. But if I said (as Jerry Mander does)
broadly critical things about TV, people might feel threatened by this,
defensive -- "Are you saying TV should be banned?" "Are you saying we're
bad if we watch TV?" "Are you saying TV should go away entirely?" Mander
wouldn't be unhappy if TV went away entirely. It doesn't mean that he
knows a way to get there or has a political program around banning TV.
(I remember next to nothing from his book about political agendas,
whether they're present or absent.)
From my very limited experience of Jerry Mander in that one book, he
reminds me of Richard Stallman. (They are certainly very different; Mander
is not an enthusiast of computing, to put it mildly, and Stallman is so much
an enthusiast of computing that he has dedicated his life to preserving a
particular set of traditions and practices within the computing world.) They
seem like men of comparably high intelligence who are willing to make
really broad criticisms when they think something in the status quo is
harmful.
They both say that, if something looks bad, they're going to point out
why it looks bad, however prevalent it is, however many people are making
a living from it nowadays, and whatever else. I think there is a certain
sense of anachronism that you get when you read this kind of criticism,
as though Stallman and Mander really belong to a bygone era. One part of
this is the way in which they each defend something from the past (a
world of free software, a world of immediate experience) and criticize a
well-established trend (the software industry, the TV industry; and
extensive public experience as consumers, frequently highly satisfied
consumers, of each industry's products). So Stallman is saying that we
should go back to a world from the 1970s in computing (though transformed
in the light of subsequent experience and cultural changes) and Mander
is saying that we should go back to a world from even longer ago in
media (though also transformed in the light of subsequent experience and
cultural changes). In this way we can see each as a conservative, although
each is also a radical. But the other anachronism that I was thinking of
is that Stallman and Mander are not cynical.
(Of course, there is much more to Mander than his opposition to
television; he's kept working since the 1970s, and I know very little
about what he's been up to.)
In the passage I quoted above from the GNU Manifesto,
Stallman says that many programmers, faced with the dominance of
programming by the "marketing arrangements now typically used",
become cynical and think that programming is just a way of making
money.
Note that Stallman isn't saying that these programmers like the
industry or value what it has done. But he's saying that they grow
cynical and abandon their previous hopes about what programming was or
what it could accomplish or how it could be integrated with their other
values; we could say again that they become alienated.
Not only does Stallman not become cynical in this way, but it's clear
that he feels sorry for those who do, and wants to rescue them from
their cynicism (by reviving the free software community of old). And his
lack of cynicism is the other thing that feels funny these days; it's a
matter of taking things seriously, including values and social criticism.
So Stallman also feels that he is fighting against the greater darkness
of programmers' disallusionment and disaffectation with their practice
and with their communities. This is a big deal; this is a reason for him
to take really seriously the criticisms he lodges against the industry.
How do you dig out from under the "we just want people to have a choice"
argument if you really do object to what somebody is doing, and want it
to stop, and think of it as obsolete or counterproductive? I mean,
even people in the great wilds of Southern California may not be too
happy with car culture, but it doesn't mean that any one of them is
prepared to turn in his or her automobile.
A status quo is a tricky thing. Richard Stallman is careful to use only
measures that are legal, and only measures that he thinks are moral, to
try to change the status quo in software dramatically. Brett Glass
thinks that the status quo, in broad outline, is fine. They really
ultimately disagree about ends, about whether or not it is OK when people
use copyright law in the common software industry way, about whether
the status quo is seriously defective. And what could bridge that
difference?
High school and college debate, once upon a time, were fascinating
experiences.
While you're reading that Barlow (you are reading Barlow's
Declaration, aren't you?), look at
what
Paul Treanor said about Internet ideology:
Net-ism is wrong because it is coercively expansionist. There is no
inherent or inevitable technical or historical trend to a single
communication network. On the contrary: never before in history, have
so many separate networks been technically possible. Linking all
networks together is a conscious choice by some people, a choice then
imposed on others. The logic is identical to that of colonial
governments, which forced peasants into the agricultural market, by
imposing cash taxes. (To pay the tax, the peasants had to sell cash
crops such as sugar). This logic says in effect: 'no one is free to
stay outside the free market'. Today, not just governments, but
business, social movements, intellectuals and artists, all want to
impose the Net. This broad movement is obviously more than
profit-seeking (and a non-profit Net would also be wrong). It is an
ideological movement seeking ideological imposition. That imposition
itself, the universalism, the expansionism, their involuntary nature,
the basic unfreedom to exit - that is what makes liberal structures
wrong. That applies to the free market, and it applies inherently to
the Internet.
I don't think hyperliberals are all so fond of colonial taxes (I know
some people who would disagree), but "no one is free to stay outside
the free market" makes sense in liberal context. The free market
broadly conceived is considered a neutral context in which all kinds
of voluntary economic interactions exist, and in which different
kinds of interactions compete for mind share (much like the
"marketplace of ideas"; I wish I could think of all the different
writers who've commented on how interesting it is that a marketplace
is used as a metaphor for free speech). In that sense competition
and retail of goods are only some of a large number of possibilities
which might be present; in that sense people who decide to arrange
their economic affairs in a different way, like a commune, are not
opting out of the free market but only out of certain transactions.
Many members of the Internet community would argue that there is
no architecture, but only a tradition, which was not written down for
the first 25 years (or at least not by the IAB). However, in very
general terms, the community believes that the goal is connectivity,
the tool is the Internet Protocol, and the intelligence is end to end
rather than hidden in the network.
The current exponential growth of the network seems to show that
connectivity is its own reward, and is more valuable than any
individual application such as mail or the World-Wide Web. This
connectivity requires technical cooperation between service
providers, and flourishes in the increasingly liberal and competitive
commercial telecommunications environment.
The key to global connectivity is the inter-networking layer. The
key to exploiting this layer over diverse hardware providing global
connectivity is the "end to end argument".
[...] It is generally felt that in an ideal situation there should be
one, and only one, protocol at the Internet level. This allows for
uniform and relatively seamless operations in a competitive, multi-
vendor, multi-provider public network. There can of course be
multiple protocols to satisfy different requirements at other levels,
and there are many successful examples of large private networks with
multiple network layer protocols in use.
(Brian Carpenter, RFC 1958,
"Architectural Principles of the Internet", June
1996, section 2: "Is There an Internet Architecture?"; emphasis added)
Similarly:
Encouragement of cooperation between networks: Connectivity is its
own reward, therefore network providers are rewarded by
cooperation with each other.
(Internet Society
Guiding Principles)
And then of course
The nature of people and their use of networking technology provides a
strong natural drive towards universal interconnection. Because the
flow of information on the Net transcends national boundaries, any
restrictions within a single country may act to limit the freedom of
those in other countries as well.
The true value of the Internet is found in people, not in technology.
Since each new user increases the value of the Net for all, the
potential of the Net will only be reached when all who desire can
openly and freely use the Net.
(Nathaniel Borenstein et al., "One Planet, One Net: Principles
for the Internet Era", in CPSR's
One Planet, One Net Campaign)
Connectivity being its own reward is
too
generic for Nortel, but not because Nortel agrees with Paul Treanor, just
because connectivity being its own reward isn't exciting enough as a business
agenda.
