and your part in it!

Why everybody should care about open software and formats,
and why hackers need non-technical end users.

I don’t speak on behalf of Penguicon and I’m not claiming the views expressed here are representative of anyone else running it. That’s as it should be. Penguicon is all about 1. Fun, 2. More Fun, and 3. Keep Fun First. It’s not about ideology. But Penguicon has two incidental side benefits that get me excited and are very fun for me. One is spreading Free and Open Source Software to fans of science fiction, fantasy, games, anime, and comics, who aren’t technically skilled. The other is to use the political and social visions of science fiction to interest some of those hackers who are not yet interested in Hacktivism. I want to get them excited about how the fight for “knowledge goods”– not just code alone– benefits hackers, how non-engineer users benefit hackers, and how damage to the knowledge ecology harms innovators first like canaries in a coal mine. Specifically, I want to get more hackers interested in contributing to software for non-engineer users, and keeping non-engineer users around with volunteer tech support.

Penguicon’s past Guest of Honor, science fiction author and internet activist Cory Doctorow, gave a talk at the signing ceremony of his Fullbright ceremony chair. The full audio is online as the latest episode of his podcast. All of it was fascinating, but I felt compelled to transcribe this segment from the Q & A session that illustrated the distinction between hacktivists and other hackers.

The Free Software movement was a bunch of academic programmers, notably a very driven man named Richard Stallman at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab, who reacted to the first instance in which the code that they’d all shared and improved on together– in the kind of procrustean era of the IT revolution– was suddenly enclosed, and they were told that they could no longer share and improve on each other’s code. And so Stallman and his gang put together a license that said that “we’re releasing this code and this code comes with the condition that you can do anything with it, provided that you also allow anyone else to do anything with it, except for prohibiting other people from doing anything with it.”

It was like the punchline of a Star Trek episode almost, you know? Or the end of “Wargames”, you know, it’s “THERMONUCLEAR WAR: WOULD YOU LIKE TO PLAY A GAME?”

And the interesting thing about Stallman is that he articulated an ideology of Free Software, where he talked about fundamental freedoms. So he didn’t want to focus necessarily on code. He wanted to focus on what his objective was in freeing code. And his objective was to see to it that people could understand, improve upon, and communicate their improvements on, the tools that they use. And when you think about that, that’s as close a definition of self-determination in a technological era as you can imagine.

Now what came later was a more kind of utilitarian movement called Open Source. And Open Source said, “well, those freedoms are very nice, but your bit of wordplay in calling this Free Software because it gives you liberty has confused people and scared them off because they think it also has to be free and gratis — that they’ll never make any money off of it.” And so they created a kind of splinter movement that focuses on the economic value of knowledge sharing and code, and of producing commodity codebases.

I just heard a program last week where security researchers were talking about all the new virtualization features in the new AMD processors that allow you to simulate hundreds of computers in your computer at once. But of course if you have to install Windows on every one of those computers and buy a license for every one of them, your $500 computer would cost $15,000 in license fees. It’s just not feasible to do that kind of research anymore if you have proprietary code there.

And so that’s what they focused on.

The problem is that by focusing on the utilitarian benefits of code, and not the philosophical benefits of freedom, they’ve kind of painted themselves into a corner. With Trusted Computing, which is the new Microsoft initiative shared by Intel, AMD, and other chip vendors to allow programs to determine what computer they’re running on (make sure they’re not running on an emulator), and what other programs they’re talking to (make sure that they’re only talking to authorized programs and not your own program), it’s possible to ship Open Source code that you can’t modify or improve upon, or communicate your improvements to other people with.

And so you now have people producing what they call Open Source Digital Rights Management code, like Sun Microsystems with its Open Dream. Open Dream is essentially something that honors the license for GPL, but guts its intention.

And the GPL has responded by drafting a new version that guarantees those freedoms, and revisits the question of whether the code is the only thing that should be free, or whether keys should also be free. And the Open Source movement, having become so fixated on code, is finding itself coming to a real combative stance to the Free Software movement. And I think that’s something that bears a lot of watching in the next couple of months as that license moves towards completion.

Listening to this speech was a tipping point for me. I previously regarded the distinction between the Free Software Foundation and the Open Source Initiative as a trivial hairsplitting spat between identical twins. But Cory’s right about this issue, and it’s vitally important. I still think they have more in common with each other than with anyone else in the world, that they need to be allies, that it resembles a schism within Esperanto, and that a person can be in both camps. I consider all of them my friends. But on the issue of stressing a political and social movement to preserve free culture, I come from the angle of Brazilian Free Culture activists and the Swedish Pirate Party in addition to the free and open source programmers.

Where the Open Source Initiative gets it right is identifying the means to the end. Boycotting all software or technology that restricts freedom is a losing proposition. This could be called the “shivering in huts” strategy, and put its adherents at a severe disadvantage. Free Software was where it all began, but Open Source provided a strategy and method. Only a pragmatic and efficacious means can accomplish the goal of getting freedom. That framework is found in open development models and business models, which figure out how to motivate and reward producers of free software, and how to convince consumers to prefer products that give them freedom.

Earlier in the Q&A, Cory said:

It’s certainly true that there’s been no central unifying idea around all these different knowledge goods fights for a long time. James Boyle, I think, at the Duke Center for the Public Domain, has written about the need for an ecology movement for knowledge goods. You know, before the coining of the term “ecology”, I think it seemed to a lot of people that saving whales and fighting pollution and stopping the ozone layer from being depleted and, you know, all the other elements that make up what we think of today as “the ecology movement” were in fact separate issues and separate questions.

The current knowledge ecology is computers plus human culture. Sir Tim Berners Lee, the inventor of the world wide web, was correct when he recently said Web 2.0 was not different technology from the system he introduced, but he was wrong to discredit the term. Web 2.0 isn’t a technology, it’s a change in us. It’s a phenomenon of cultural behavior in our society. Many companies tried to launch Web 2.0-style sites years ago. Not enough users were ready to get into that headspace. Most humans were still in parasitic relationship to computers. Now, the knowledge ecology is running on computer cycles and human processing, in symbiosis. The intelligence behind almost every service Google offers is a massive number of humans. That is the greatest knowledge ecology, or “noosphere”, this planet has ever seen.

Whatever term emerges to describe a combination of Free Culture with FOSS Hacktivism will bring together all the elements of an environmental movement for the mechanisms of human civilization. We are its curators. FOSS, Creative Commons licenses, and transparent publicly accountable file formats and protocols are all healthy habitats of our knowledge ecology: the noosphere. The organisms include every example of art, science, and all of culture and technology. Whether an example is on the internet or not, today the internet is not just part of the culture. It is the culture. It’s a watershed of ideas and influence that flow downhill like tributaries into everything else.

I evangelize Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) to nurture the health of the knowledge ecology. Every person is a node in this ecology, whether they’re a hacker or not. It’s not just freedom to code that’s at stake. It’s the freedom to keep our high-tech civilization serving us. It’s the freedom to keep it from sliding into a dystopia of high-tech handcuffs. Unaccountable, non-transparent software and hardware in electronic voting machines is just one example.

For this the noosphere doesn’t just need hackers, it needs non-hacker users. It’s not enough to use FOSS on your own computers. That doesn’t make you safe. It’s the mass of non-hacker users who create huge network effects that form the noosphere.

• The more users of Windows, Internet Explorer, and Outlook: the more infected zombie computers are sending us all spam.
• The fewer users of open document formats: the fewer you can send your Open Office suite document to who can open it, and the more who are locked down into documents with access controlled by Microsoft. (Most importantly to our liberties: government records.)
• The more who buy Apple’s digital-rights-managed music format: the more we are all locked into iTunes and iPods as the music player industry competes with each other to see who can manufacture the most anti-competitive, most user-hostile device, to hold our purchases hostage, make the content industry fat cats get fatter, and surveil us.
• The fewer people who put content up on a particular filesharing protocol–
• The fewer of our friends using Jabber IM client–
• The fewer bloggers and podcasters publishing Atom subscription feeds–

The less valuable it is to all of us, and the more ascendant are the locked-down protocols and clients that put our computers in service of vested interests and artistic gatekeepers. The anti-curators.

And yet many hackers I know are indifferent to non-hacker users.

Well, that’s all right; I hold no ill-will to them. Not everyone has to care about the knowledge ecology that made possible the scientific age, and the modern age, and the hacking they enjoy. Not everyone has to contribute to civil rights by offering free Ubuntu tech support to their grandparents. I want it to be enjoyable for you. Do not allow what you do to become a duty that you don’t enjoy anymore. As long as you understand Hacktivism and Free Culture, and don’t get in the way with short-sighted self-serving tunnel vision, that’s enough for me. Others, my own Linux tech support volunteer and teachers, will be my heroes. We should wait for when tech support is convenient for them, thank them profusely, and give them generous tips in their Paypal accounts.

I also have something to say to non-hackers like me who do not have an engineering orientation, and also to those who are content with low levels of computer literacy. I hold no ill-will to those who prefer to remain in a relationship to the internet that is “read-only”, rather than “read-read”. It’s not your duty to be a curator, and if you don’t enjoy it you wouldn’t be good at it anyway. Create things offline, and the rest of us will record it and put it online so you’ll contribute to planetary culture. You can’t avoid feeding off it and feeding into it.

More important for the non-engineer user is whether you keep the info-habitat clean. Are you environmentally responsible in the knowledge ecology? Please, for digital hygiene and a computer that isn’t slowing to a crawl with viruses, use Firefox and Thunderbird for Windows. At least install Open Office for Windows even if you don’t create documents in it, so we can send you documents that Microsoft doesn’t own.

Most important for the non-engineer user is whether you’re a happy user, which is supposed to be the whole point for all of us. Don’t switch your operating system until and unless it makes you happy, and preferably not until you have a techie friend in case of the occasional error message. It would be nice to let me give you a free Live CD for Ubuntu (”Linux for Human Beings”). A Live CD loads GNU Linux temporarily from your CD drive without replacing Windows at all, so you can sample how easy and attractive Ubuntu is.

Hacktivists have made several prominent pieces of software for non-hackers beautiful, simple, functional, and commitment-free, and if you just look it over sometime, you are an even nicer person than you already were. You have nothing to lose.