When all you have is the GPL, all problems look like license issues
OS News kvetcher-in-chief Thom Holwerda writes “Richard Stallman was Right All Along”:
I, too, disregarded Stallman as way too extreme. Free software to combat controlling and spying governments? Evil corporations out to take over the world? Software as a tool to monitor private communication channels? Right.
But here we are, at the start of 2012. Obama signed the NDAA for 2012, making it possible for American citizens to be detained indefinitely without any form of trial or due process, only because they are terrorist suspects. At the same time, we have SOPA, which, if passed, would enact a system in which websites can be taken off the web, again without any form of trial or due process, while also enabling the monitoring of internet traffic. Combine this with how the authorities labelled the Occupy movements—namely, as terrorists—and you can see where this is going.
Now, politically I’m largely in agreement with Holwerda, in that I don’t like the 2012 NDAA counter-terrorism provisions, nor do I support SOPA or its PROTECT-IP counterpart. But how, you may wonder, does free software protect us from SOPA and the NDAA? Holwerda’s armed with another quote to tell us:
“Freedom in the future will require us to have the capacity to monitor our devices and set meaningful policy on them, to examine and terminate the processes that run on them, to maintain them as honest servants to our will, and not as traitors and spies working for criminals, thugs, and control freaks,” Doctorow warns, “And we haven’t lost yet, but we have to win the copyright wars to keep the Internet and the PC free and open. Because these are the materiel in the wars that are to come, we won’t be able to fight on without them.”
Stallman and Doctorow. All we need now is Eric Raymond and it’ll be a triple slam. Except… that’s still no answer, is it? Here’s a better answer: it doesn’t.
Well, let me backtrack on that. Applications on our devices have access to our information and it’s unquestionably important that those applications not be bad actors. Source code access is one way to ensure that.
But what is that information? Web searches, mail stored on IMAP servers, instant messages, our journals and replies on Facebook, our geotagged status updates on Twitter, our photo uploads on Instagram, and our accounts on dozens of web forums across the virtual world. All of us have information which is not exclusively in our control that we nonetheless want to remain private. As we move into the age of ubiquitous computing, it seems quite plausible that all of our data will be replicated across multiple servers.1 Such information will not be any better protected if you use a 100% Stallman-approved computing device.
To some degree, controlling access to our own information, to make sure we share just what want to share, just with who we want to share it with, is an engineering problem. But it’s also about social policy. If I’m storing data on your server and someone else wants to look at it, is it my call or yours, both or neither? Should an internet service provider have special obligations the way a phone company does (i.e., Verizon cannot legally choose not to connect you to AT&T phones)? Copyright protects the very article you’re reading right now, just as it protects video rips of The Hurt Locker; isn’t there a balance somewhere between “no use is fair” and “all use is fair”?
Americans, especially those of a libertarian bent,2 get twitchy at suggestions of “social policy problems.” It sounds like a call for government regulation and we started out by talking about how bad government regulation is and my God man listen to yourself. Fine. Sorry. And I trust if you feel that way, you don’t have any interest in “net neutrality,” ’cause that sure ain’t gonna come from the unregulated free market.3
Like it or not, sometimes the best alternative to bad regulation is not abolishing regulation, it’s constructing better regulation. If we want to stop the next SOPA, and the one after that, and the one after that, it’s going to require political action, and ultimately, a sound policy framework.
I’m happy that free software exists. (I’m also happy that commercial, closed-source software exists, but that’s a different issue.) And Richard Stallman is right to the degree that he reminds us, however annoyingly, that freedom requires vigilance. But not all problems are engineering problems. And “free software” will not keep the Internet—or society—free.
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In fact, how many people reading this now store many of their important documents on Dropbox and use a cloud backup solution? ↩
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Which anywhere but the United States is pretty much all of us. I hope countries with actual fascist and communist parties find our use of those words when blathering about Bush and Obama more charmingly naïve than disturbingly sad. ↩
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Naturally, ESR argues otherwise, on the premise that all we need to guarantee net neutrality is more unlicensed spectrum. And Android phones. Write your own punchline. ↩
