Digital Citizen

As the New York Times recently reported, Brazil is asking for free software. What’s not clear is that Brazil, like Peru, is not asking for open source. The headline and the quote inside the NYT article get it right. Seeing “open source” language is an attempt to horn in on the popularity of software freedom but without actually consistently delivering software freedom or pitching a message based on software freedom. This has happened before. A few years ago, Peruvian Congressman Villanueva was being lobbied by Microsoft about a free software in government bill the congressman was pushing in Congress. The congressman took a the Microsoft rep down a peg when the MS rep wanted to reframe the argument to focusing on “open source”; Villanueva corrected him and insisted on debating the issue around software freedom.

Microsoft wants to challenge “open source” because they know they can’t compete with software freedom. Microsoft is a proprietor and what they sell caters to people focusing on price and features — two values that matter a great deal to the open source movement. The open source movement was built to deny software freedom in exchange for values Open Source Initiative founders believed that their target audience—business—would respond to. So, goodbye software freedom, hello leveraging an unpaid workforce to help write software in exchange for a slightly more amenable license.

Soon, OpenOffice.org v2.0 will come out (beta versions are available now), but there’s a catch: some of its functionality is based on a Java runtime engine which is non-free software (Sun Microsystem’s JRE). This means that some of OO.org’s functionality is written in a programming language (Java) for which there is no free software replacement yet. Therefore, in order to run some parts of OO.org v2.0, users will need to install Sun’s non-free JRE or do without the functionality. Fortunately for most users, the bulk of OO.org’s most popular functions (word processing, drawing, presentation, spreadsheet, and equation editor) are not adversely affected.

But the message is clear: this is what happens when you stop caring about software freedom. Richard Stallman, founder of the free software community, warned us about this. He said that such a program would be “free but shackled” to a non-free program, and thus not useful in the free world where users run nothing but free software.

Frank Schönheit is a Sun employee cited in a Newsforge article on OO.o 2.0. He is quoted as saying that “functionality is what matters”, and he’s not lying. For software proprietors and for the audience the open source movement speaks to, adopting proprietary software in order to get some job done is a perfectly amenable thing to do. For free software advocates, writing a free software replacement is far more attractive.

Kevin Zeese offers a must-read (Counterpunch mirror) for any self-respecting progressive who is not just a Democratic Party hack pretending to be anti-war. Here’s a sample:

“Hopefully the peace movement also learned a lesson: Democrats need to be opposed for engaging in war just as pro-war Republicans need to be opposed. The anti-Vietnam War movement removed LBJ from office because of his support for the Vietnam War. Today, pro-war Democrats should be removed from office for supporting the Iraq War. We need to stand firm on our principles especially when it comes to the illegal war in Iraq that is destroying or damaging the lives of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, killing or maiming tens of thousands of Americans, torturing prisoners by rendition or in Guantanemo Bay, Afghanistan or Iraq, isolating the U.S. from the world and making us less safe from terrorism.

The anti-war movement is only one example. Labor, civil rights, civil liberties, anti-corporate globalization, fair taxes, women’s rights — indeed every progressive movement is taken for granted by the Democrats. Why? Because progressives let them.”

The question is whether progressives have the guts to stand up for their principles at election time, when it counts.

Election 2004: The Nation joins the Democratic Party sycophants and tells people to shun Nader’s campaign. Everyone knew his campaign wouldn’t get the votes he got in 2000 and would likely be a non-entity insofar as being an effective so-called “spoiler” (even without getting into the prejudice of the term “spoiler”). But many billable hours were spent trying to keep Nader off the ballot even in gerrymandered states that would have gone Democrat no matter what (like Illinois).

Now: The Nation is telling us curious things like:

“Perhaps being shamed publicly, and being pressured by the grassroots, will help Congressional Democrats get their act together. Toward that end, we’ve initiated a biweekly “Minority/Majority” feature that identifies—by name—Democrats who give succor to the GOP. (It also praises those who’ve helped the cause of Democrats becoming the majority party again.) If Democrats don’t define themselves as an effective opposition soon, they could end up being an ineffective one for a long time to come.”

Perhaps being shamed publicly about their lack of support for genuinely progressive candidates will get the Nation to support such candidates when they run. If Democrats can be “ineffective [...] for a long time to come” something is wrong with the system. They shouldn’t have so much power that they can stick around for “a long time” and remain “ineffective” yet stop other candidates with far more impressive public service records from being heard.

You can still catch reruns of the recent teach-in on C-SPAN. The teach-in was organized by some of the self-described anti-war groups. The teach-in dates back to the Vietnam war. There, the anti-war movement taught anyone who wanted to come in and learn effective strategies for opposing the Vietnam war. You’d find stimulating discussion which encouraged the audience to participate by contributing challenging questions and statements, the entire group was free to argue productively, and learn why the US went to Vietnam at all.

Very little of this has apparently survived to the current day.

I watched the teach-in live on C-SPAN Thursday night. I saw nobody ask challenging questions. I saw very little input from the audience, it was mostly a staged affair for the speakers. Nobody who spoke had anything to say about voting pro-war for Kerry (let alone distinguishing between those who could vote for Kerry to get Bush out of office and those who should have voted their consciences instead). Naomi Klein said that she blamed Kerry for his weak stance—not opposing the war—but where were the anti-war movement demands for Kerry? How can anyone blame Kerry for not taking the anti-war supporters seriously if they ask for nothing of him?

Nobody asked about practical recommendations for what one could do in the next day, during the next week, or during the next month to oppose the continuing occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq. I don’t know what recommendations those would be, but I’m not up there leading a teach-in either. Nobody challenged the lack of marches for so many months that the anti-war movement had made itself even more invisible in the eyes of the general public.

Nobody questioned the validity of the fervor to get the troops home by asking how to get the troops home. It was more like a meeting to agree to meet again in the indeterminate future. A lot of vague philosophy was shared, which can be okay so long as it is paired with something you can use.

It was also very civil, which seemed oddly inappropriate to me. I expected a heated (and thus, educational as well as interesting) exchange of views from a variety of positions within the anti-war movement. Instead, I got the anti-war movement version of the US presidential debates. Stilted, long-running, and little real input from anyone not on the panel.

Will members of the anti-war movement behave in line with their alleged ethics (by voting for anti-war candidates)? When the time comes for them to vote will they cave and vote Democratic Party instead? Will anti-war participants do what they can to dismiss voting as not a big deal (now they can afford to play this game because any election they care about is over a year away)?

Speaking of ignored elections, we’ve got one coming up. Ironically, people have more power during these elections because so few people vote in them. Will anyone from the anti-war movement champion voting for anti-war candidates? I doubt it. I’m betting that they’ll either ignore the election or cave and vote for pro-war Democrats.

Lance Selfa of the Socialist Worker writes another insightful piece on how “grassroots” organizations that support Democrats end up having their agenda handed to them by the Democratic Party. There are two places to get the article.

“United Auto Workers (UAW) President Walter Reuther, who once confessed that the UAW could have taken over the Michigan Democratic Party, but refrained from doing so because it wanted to keep the party’s middle-class and business supporters. So for years, labor remained the Democrats’ most loyal backers, but got little of its agenda—from national health care to repeal of the anti-union Taft-Hartley Act—considered.

No one can realistically compare today’s PDA with the CIO of the 1930s and ’40s. But that’s precisely the point. If the most powerful working-class movement in U.S. history couldn’t transform the Democratic Party, how can a few thousand liberal activists—whose preferred 2004 presidential candidates (Dennis Kucinich and Howard Dean) couldn’t win a Democratic primary—hope to?”

Some commercially distributed films are preserved. Studios that see no potential for profit in doing this work will (and have) let films disappear, rot never to be seen again. Copyright law protects their efforts—as long as the movie is under copyright, nobody may duplicate the movie without the permission of the copyright holder.

Interest in some movie stars is rejuvenated due to long-lasting movies. The revival of Louise Brooks’ professional movie career came from viewing and screening movies that had not been screened for 30 years. Some of her earlier movies were lost before preservation work could help save them.

How many more Louise Brooks movies might be enjoyed today if people had been free to make copies and preserve the work?

Much of what Hollywood studios argue for in copyright law is done in the name of supporting the actors. The Screen Actors Guild 90+% unemployment rate tells another story. And from a copyright perspective, how many other actors’ work would be saved if we had a more permissive copyright regime, one which allowed verbatim non-commercial copying and distribution of all published works?

Is it possible to assess how much damage is being done to our culture people by the heads of the MPAA?

The MPAA will soon make another round of lectures at colleges and film festivals as the upcoming “P2P” US Supreme Court case goes on and they’re sure to bring on the publicity as the time for another copyright term extension comes around. I encourage you to be there so that you can challenge copyright terms that conflict with what copyright is there to do and how long the term of copyright ought to be.

Gervase Markham asks “wouldn’t that be a great slogan for Firefox? “Firefox. Socially responsible browsing.” and Josh Aas, a Camino developer, responds that introducing some Free Software talk is something they “need to do a better job of”.

It would be a nice slogan for Firefox. But if the Mozilla Foundation has something to say about it, it won’t happen. The Mozilla Foundation is committed to the open source movement. The Open Source Initiative tries very hard to frame the debate in a way that pushes aside software freedom. I recommend reading the most insightful and respectful essay I’ve read on the difference between the two movements and why the differences matter.

I think it would be wonderful to see more programmers and more projects actively promote paying attention to software freedom and write some freedom talk. But instead I see many programmers become proponents of a message crafted to speak chiefly to business, a development methodology. The watered-down message of the open source movement is more widely circulated in the business press because it was built to be attractive to them—we can get hackers around the world working on our programs without paying them?

Faster development, fewer bugs, doing good development work for less money: these goals don’t address important ethical matters and they don’t necessarily give me the freedom to share and modify software. I have no problem with less buggy software which is developed faster and I want poor hackers to be able to hack and earn a living wage for it. There’s nothing wrong with running a business hacking software either, but the root problems for software development involve giving users rights, not catering to business all the time.

This past weekend, the second anniversary of the British and American invasion and occupation of Iraq, anti-war protests around the world went well. There was lots of participation and much discussion about the war but not in the corporate media which is hardly surprising (this lack of coverage being another instance of an unbroken line of remarkable misreporting or non-coverage of anti-war activities—coverage typically overstates violence or the there is no coverage at all). I am glad to see the marches and gatherings go on because they were sorely needed (there is widespread agreement that the anti-war movement had died or needed some kind of restart). But I’m not so sure that all the questions which needed to be asked were asked, and I would hate to see the same short-sighted disingenuous introspection that recently plagued the Democrats (after which Donna Brazile, Democratic Party organizer, declared in a forum broadcast by C-SPAN, that “the time for introspection is over”) will plague the anti-war movement as well. The anti-war movement should not be yet another front for the Democratic Party.

But if all the questions aren’t asked, education suffers. When debate is stifled, education suffers. One of the main functions of the anti-war movement ought to be to teach others how to value dissent and value working to dissolve the structural reinforcements which corporations in power over citizens (which inherently requires critiquing one’s own society).

Along that line, I think one question that needs to be asked is what the anti-war movement learned from backing a pro-war candidate for US president. Follow-up questions include: What was gained and what was lost? What were the expectations if Kerry had taken the presidency? Were they realistic? How did Kerry come to be the anti-war movement’s choice? Is it reasonable to prejudice the debate over the US presidency by framing one candidate as “viable” (thus inferring, if not outright stating, that his opponents are not viable)? Does this actually work to get you the kind of vibrant social debate you want?

I return to these questions often and with interest because Americans don’t participate in political matters except for presidential elections. During a presidential election, Americans are most likely to find ordinary people engaging in political discussion. Other times, not so much. This is sad and, to some degree, self-imposed because the midterm elections and local elections are quite important, yet we see little participation at the ballot box (far less than half of registered voters in the US vote in mid-term elections).

Then there’s the anti-war movement’s debate regarding when to bring soldiers home, despite the latest Harris poll indicating 59% of the US who want to bring the US soldiers home immediately. Why has the anti-war movement shifted away from their previous message (which was basically, “support the troops—bring them home now”)?

A friend of mine (who will soon get a blog) dismisses the interest as though there are other more compelling questions to ask instead, but I think he will be shown wrong when we return to these issues again in about a year and a half.

This is the time when it is most comfortable for those who did not get what they wanted from the 2004 US presidential election to recognize a flawed strategy for what it is. Relish this time, it will go away soon.

More recommended reading from Counterpunch: Alexander Cockburn’s article on how the Democrats and Republicans work together to further disenfranchise the entire country. Illinois residents and Democratic party supporters will want to take note of another vote Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) made:

“Near the end of February many Democrats in the House okayed a Republican bill to transfer large class action suits from state to federal courts. It’s the state courts that have awarded the big settlements against the tobacco and asbestos companies. Federal judges have consistently cut back the big awards. Transfer of the suits is a huge victory for the business lobby. Earlier in February the Senate passed the same bill 72 to 26. Among Democrats voting for a bill written by the Chamber of Commerce and National Association of Manufacturers were such supposed bright hopes as Obama of Illinois, Salazar of Colorado, Bayh of Indiana, along with possible aspirants for the 2008 nomination as Dodd of Connecticut.”

John Walsh on the “progressives” backing Democrats hits many issues the Left needs to discuss (but won’t). To this, I’d only add that the “anti-war” movement has a lot to answer for: No justification of voting pro-war (particularly for the majority who didn’t need to—I’ve expounded on this many times before), no marches of any national significance in many months, no criticism of same allowed in discussions (what Walsh describes with MoveOn.org is rampant amongst self-identified anti-war proponents). Sometimes you have to draw the line between those that support the agenda they claim and those that are just Democratic party partisan hacks.

Norman Solomon has a good point in showing how the anti-war message needs to be clearly championed among those that want to truly oppose this president. But Solomon has not consistently supported that message even in recent months. He too was one of the signatories of the Vote2StopBush.org campaign which meant supporting a pro-war candidate, not challenging his take on any issue, and not acknowledging that some people simply cannot vote to “stop Bush” due to the way votes are counted in the US electoral vote system. Given this, I’m not convinced that if Kerry had become US President that we’d see a much different war stance than we’re seeing right now. As you read Solomon’s article, and I hope you will, keep in mind what he put his name to when it counted.