In pursuit of power
p2pnet news view Freedom | P2P:- “There are, says Crosbie Fitch, ‘always those in pursuit of power who will corrupt the meaning of freedom toward that end’,” p2pnet posted on Thursday.
“I am dismayed to read an example of this corruption in a comment by Thomas Lord as blogged by Michel Bauwens in Why We Need Free Network Services, and not just Copyleft,” he stated in Digital Productions, adding »»»
I agree that copyleft is not enough, but what is deficient about it is not its inability to give the individual more power to control the software they use and the computers it’s run on, but its inability to restore the public’s freedom from copyright and patent completely. To completely restore the public’s liberty requires more than a copyleft license, it requires abolition. It requires that those privileges of copyright and patent are abolished.
- If you don’t want someone else to be able to make copies of your work then don’t give it to them.
- If you want to control the software that you use or the computer upon which it is run then run it on your own computer.
You don’t need, and shouldn’t have, “any unnatural power to control someone else or stipulate what they can or cannot do with their own property,” Crosbie added.
The Affero General Public License comes up in Crosbie’s post. It’s, “often abbreviated as Affero GPL and AGPL (and sometimes informally called the Affero license)” and, “refers to two distinct, though historically related, free software licenses,” says the Wikipedia.
In a p2pnet Reader’s Write, “Hi Crosbie,” says Thomas Lord, “whom you accuse of corruption (or of corrupting the idea of freedom).”
He continues »»»
My comment on the O’Reilly Radar blog is an argument that for a wide range of popular network services, there is no technical need for users not to have server control and therefore we should design systems that give users server control in these areas. That’s a pretty simple proposition, really. As an example, it is a useful feature of a document management system to host the documents on a web server and for that server to provide, for example, an in-browser word processor for changing the documents. What if the user wants to modify the word processor? What if the user wants to change the program that manages the database of documents? When we design the server software we have a technical choice: we can design it in such a way that users can freely control the server (for their own documents) or we can design it in such a way that control of the server is given to a third party. These are different choices about how the program is structured and I argued that we should, where we can, choose to write programs in ways that give users server control.
I mention licensing and copyright in my comment simply to point out that licensing tricks like “copyleft” can not, in and of themselves, give users that kind of server control. If the server I write is copyleft (even Affero GPL) but is technically designed to separate users from server control, the user’s software freedom is still lost. You seem to be responding as if I had argued in support of Affero GPL when, in fact, I argued that copyleft schemes of any sort don’t help – we need to write the software differently.
That said, there is a good question of whether or not Affero GPL’s restrictions represent a loss of freedom. I understand your argument to be along the lines that since Affero requires someone running a server to provide a link to the source that, therefore, Affero restricts the “natural” freedoms of that user. As you put it, Affero GPL arguably attempts to gain power over third parties by forcing a constraint on how they run their own servers with their own copies of the program. Is that a reasonable summary?
I think that that is a superficially attractive but ultimately flawed argument:
Affero balances two competing freedoms. Sometimes people’s freedoms come into conflict (as in the old “your right to swing your fist ends where my nose begins”). Affero constrains one “natural liberty”: users operating servers must preserve (in good working order) a feature that offers downloads of complete source. Affero protects and preserves a second liberty: the freedom of users running clients to that server to “take their business elsewhere” by installing and running a separate, perhaps modified version of the same server program on a server of their own choice.
We make similar trade offs all of the time and have made them for as long as their has been copyright. For example, a BSD or MIT style public license on source code allows anyone to share the program, but forbids removing the copyright notices that give credit to the copyright owners and convey the license. Your right to share the program (”swing your fist”) ends where my right to not have my work attributed to others (”my nose”) begins.
The particular demands of Affero, that a user’s right not to be “locked in” to a particular service provider be preserved, is simply realistic. No server operator is particularly harmed, other than in purely abstract ways, by having to preserve the link to source. On the other hand, taking away a user’s right not to be locked in encourages very real, material threats such as subjecting users to irresistible surveillance by server operators.
It’s that kind of “reality check” that I think your analysis is missing: the reality of material problems such as surveillance, or inability to fix server-side bugs vs. the mild inconvenience of providing a link to download server source code (with freedom to modify it and run it elsewhere).
I think that if you want to take your arguments to their conclusion, you will have to go down a slippery slope and first eliminate copyright and patents entirely (which you sound as though you might favor) and then ultimately do away entirely with the rule of law. At the bottom of that slope you will have no freedoms whatsoever but only such power as you can muster. If history is any indication that means that you will be statistically most likely to become a full-out slave. Presumably, that is not your goal.
Freedom, since the dawn of history, has always been a civic construct and a construct that necessarily has to strike balances – fist/nose. Restrictions and regulations are not the opposite of freedom they are they framework within which freedom may or may not arise. Different systems of restrictions and regulations create different regimes of freedoms so we must as societies pick and choose, and strike our balances.
All of that said, I would say that I’m not sure that Affero GPL is terribly important in the long run. Much more important is how we organize markets on which server-cycles are bought and sold and how we technically structure the (free) software designed to run on those servers. Affero may, in the long run, prove to be a huge convenience but it does not in and of itself secure freedom for users (freedom from surveillance, freedom to fix bugs, etc.). Time will tell. I see no harm in using and, indeed, plan to use Affero GPL for some of the programs I write.
“I like the trade-offs it makes,” Thomas adds.
on Thursday – Copyleft isn’t about power over others, June 12, 2009
Digital Productions – Copyleft Is Not Enough, June 11, 2009
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