[IP] 'A lawyer who is also idealist - how refreshing'
Begin forwarded message:
From: Brian Randell <Brian.Randell@xxxxxxxxx>
Date: March 30, 2006 3:10:43 PM EST
To: dave@xxxxxxxxxx
Subject: 'A lawyer who is also idealist - how refreshing'
Hi Dave:
The Technology section of today's (UK) Guardian newspaper contains an
interesting full-page interview with Eblen Moglen.
'A lawyer who is also idealist - how refreshing'
The legal guardian of the free software movement explains why,
after 12 years, the time is right to release version 3 of its
constitution for public comment
Glyn Moody
Thursday March 30, 2006
The Guardian
At least 10% more programming effort is being poured into software
released under the General Public Licence (GPL) - the legal
underpinning of three-quarters of all free software such as the
Linux operating system - than the combined output of all the
programmers in Microsoft.
So says Eben Moglen, who has been analysing the coding hours per
week people have done. And he should know: this hacker lawyer has
for the past 12 years been official guardian of the GPL, and is
overseeing the important process of crafting version 3 of what
amounts to a constitution for the world of free software.
. . .
[He was] a defence lawyer to Phil Zimmermann, whose Pretty Good
Privacy encryption program had incurred the wrath of the US
government, which was trying to keep such tools out of the hands of
ordinary users, in what came to be known as the crypto wars.
That brought him to the attention of Richard Stallman, the founder
of the Free Software Foundation and author of the original GPL.
Moglen recalls: "I wrote him an email in which I said I use Emacs
[a powerful editor and hacker tool written by Stallman] every day;
it'll be a long time before you exhaust your entitlement to free
legal help from me." Stallman, for his part, notes: "a lawyer who
is also idealist is a refreshing combination."
The pair began thinking about revising the GPL almost immediately:
Moglen says their discussions fill a large proportion of the 16,000
email messages they have exchanged. He explains why it is only
now, after 12 years, that they have released a draft (http://
gplv3.fsf.org) for public comment.
"I believed there would be a strategic advantage in releasing the
GPL for discussion at a time when its most committed adversaries
had other things on their mind. To have Microsoft busy getting a
release of Windows together and engaging in heaps of positive
publicity about itself seemed better than bringing a licence out at
a time when they would not pay any substantial price for engaging
in a lot of name-calling."
But the main trigger was "the immense embedded revolution around
free software going on", he says. "Embedded" software runs devices
such as mobile phones or MP3 players - devices where users aren't
aware there is an operating system, let alone that it is likely to
be GNU/Linux. "You have companies who we don't even think of as
very big companies, who have 40 million units in the field with
free software inside," says Moglen. "We're talking about a scale of
commercial use and of a presence in people's lives that is
overwhelming."
From a practical viewpoint, it was important to make sure that
version 3 worked well for embedded devices - an area not envisaged
when version 2 was drawn up in 1991. But Moglen emphasises that the
principal reason embedded devices needed to be addressed was that
they will have profound implications for users' rights - an issue
at the heart of the licence. "One feeds directly into the other,"
Moglen says. "You're going to live in a world of devices, [and]
you're going to have problems protecting users' rights in the
devices."
. . .
Some companies, notably those who sell music and films, want to
control users' computers and entertainment devices through digital
rights management (DRM) although Stallman prefers to call it
digital restrictions management. The new version of the GPL licence
says that creators of programs and embedded devices are free to add
DRM to systems that use software released under the GPL (like GNU/
Linux) - but on one condition: that users can change the underlying
software.
"GPL 3 is like GPL 2," Moglen says. "It wants you to be able to use
free software in combination with non-free software, providing you
do so in ways that don't obscure the user's rights in the free
software parts." In practice, this means users must always have the
freedom to circumvent DRM schemes by modifying the accompanying GPL
software. If they can't, they lose a vital freedom that Stallman's
licence guarantees: to be able to change a program in any way they
choose.
Manufacturers of embedded systems have a strong incentive to play
along. As Moglen points out: "What they want is a very robust,
highly debugged, completely stable, omni-competent, zero dollars
per unit software platform for agile manufacture of devices in the
future." Only one meets all those requirements: GNU/Linux.
. . .
Full article at:
http://technology.guardian.co.uk/weekly/story/0,,1742104,00.html
--
School of Computing Science, University of Newcastle, Newcastle upon
Tyne,
NE1 7RU, UK
EMAIL = Brian.Randell@xxxxxxxxx PHONE = +44 191 222 7923
FAX = +44 191 222 8232 URL = http://www.cs.ncl.ac.uk/~brian.randell/
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