To the living we owe respect, but to the dead we owe only the truth.Voltaire

Some years ago at Roger Ebert’s “Ebertfest” (formerly Roger Ebert’s Overlooked Movie festival) I reminded Dodd’s predecessor Jack Valenti (2 MPAA bosses before Dodd) of this history in the Pine Lounge at the Illini Union in Urbana, Illinois. Valenti lectured us on how horrible “piracy” is (really, copyright infringement, not killing people on boats).

I was first in line at the mic and said why Hollywood is where it is located now. I also pointed out a better way to seek license compliance: do this how the FSF does it — private talks first with reasonable offers aimed at seeking compliance not court dates, and public mentions for the non-compliant. This is an approach that doesn’t include jailing and threats of jailing, namecalling, pushing for laws that forgo civil liberties, or suing children. Others came to the mic and added more challenging points and questions for Valenti, pointing out how his perception of fair use didn’t match that of the courts or US law, and how his organization and its members are basically encouraging that which Valenti decries.

An Ebertfest later, I learned that we made quite an impression on Ebert. Ebert held another lecture in the Pine Lounge with a different lecturer. I knew someone who went to that lecture and he told me that Ebert introduced the speaker that year by warning the audience that some people gave some objectionable feedback to his previous guest. Ebert was reportedly unpleased by the audience response at the Valenti lecture.

Ebert might have merely been expressing that he knows what side his bread is buttered on, but Valenti was lying. The alleged harm unrestricted copying and distribution caused MPAA members was (and is) a myth — while he was giving that talk at any audience that would have him (I later saw Valenti on C-SPAN giving the same spiel to another audience at a California university) MPAA members were collectively making more money year after year. It turns out that MPAA member studios have been collectively setting profit records and the MPAA costs these studios more money than Americans cost them via illicit sharing with BitTorrent. No doubt, the “piracy” cry is merely a foot-in-the-door to help the MPAA pass anti-sharing laws that impinge on our civil liberties without effective debate. Any money spent on MPAA dues is merely the cost of doing business with the US Congress; this is what it takes to get control over the public via international trade agreements and laws like the DMCA, SOPA, and now CISPA.

Valenti would go on to call those who copied Hollywood’s movies terrorists when he said “We’re fighting our own terrorist war“, another inelegant bit of speech trying to conflate 12-year-olds copying a movie with those who kill people. Also, not likely to persuade the “terrorists” parents of his perspective. Not too surprisingly really, as this is the same man who told the US Congress on April 12, 1982, “I say to you that the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone.”.

On October 6, 2011, one day after Steve Jobs died, Richard Stallman (rms) posted his reaction to Jobs’ death:

Steve Jobs, the pioneer of the computer as a jail made cool, designed to sever fools from their freedom, has died.

As Chicago Mayor Harold Washington said of the corrupt former Mayor Daley, “I’m not glad he’s dead, but I’m glad he’s gone.” Nobody deserves to have to die – not Jobs, not Mr. Bill, not even people guilty of bigger evils than theirs. But we all deserve the end of Jobs’ malign influence on people’s computing.

Unfortunately, that influence continues despite his absence. We can only hope his successors, as they attempt to carry on his legacy, will be less effective.Richard Stallman, October 6, 2011

My thoughts

I find Stallman’s reaction to be very well written: clear, respectful, concise, but most importantly it has its priorities straight:

• Nobody deserves to have to die. No matter what people do, the dead cannot learn and become better people. Stallman’s words brought to my mind the death penalty, not because it applies here (Jobs died as a result of his pancreatic cancer) but because America has many states which do kill “people guilty of bigger evils than theirs” and Stallman’s phrasing somehow reminded me of recent state-sponsored murders (a topic which strikes me as far more important than Jobs’ death).
• Everyone deserves software freedom. Whether Apple was building proprietary derivatives from FLOSS, supporting patent pools that threaten FLOSS users (Apple contributes patents to MPEG-LA which spreads FUD about Theora and VP8, Apple wants to patent spyware), trying to dissuade people from controlling their own computers (see also FUD), or setting up services aimed at locking users in (iTunes service has many titles with DRM): Jobs’ life work was proprietary computing. A less effective proprietor means a chance that more users will enjoy software freedom.

I feel compelled to consider death as Peter Tosh said: (but Tosh was talking about matters far more important than consumer electronics)

Let the dead bury the dead now
And who is to be fed, be fed
I ain’t got no time to waste on you, no, no
I am a livin’ man, I’ve got work to do, right nowPeter Tosh, “Burial”

I think it’s unfortunate Jobs died, but the US kills a lot of people who lived lives filled with struggle. We don’t know their names, we are encouraged by corporate media to think of them as collateral damage and not-quite-people. Jobs’ life was too short but I think it’s safe to assume he wanted for nothing and got as much treatment for his cancer as anyone can.

Reactions to rms’ post

Of all the disagreements with rms’ post I’ve read, none were written well. The best of the lot is Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols’ criticism, to which this post is mostly a response.

Regarding Vaughan-Nichols’ grandmother’s aphorism If you don’t have anything good to say, then don’t say anything at all.: Apparently she was a fan of censorship (though her rule seems to apply only selectively as Vaughan-Nichols apparently feels quite free to violate the rule by criticizing rms). I am not a fan of censorship. One of the followups to Vaughan-Nichols’ article mentions Voltaire’s quote which is far better:

To the living we owe respect, but to the dead we owe only the truth.

It’s more important to put Jobs’ life work in its proper place; Stallman did that far better and more concisely than anyone else I’ve seen.

Vaughan-Nichols says I’m glad to say that the vast majority of open-source developers don’t agree with Stallman’s myopic views: Stallman was never and is not now an open-source developer. His movement is the free software movement which is older, philosophically different, and at heart a social movement. Stallman talks about this distinction at every talk he gives as well as writing about it in multiple essays. Vaughan-Nichols isn’t alone in trying to co-opt Stallman into the open source movement but no matter how many people do it, it’s still wrong.

Vaughan-Nichols favorably compares Jobs to Walt Disney and Henry Ford: Disney is widely known for proprietary derivatives of works in the public domain. The Disney corporation is known for following suit by backing copyright extension efforts to disallow the public from doing to Disney’s movies what Disney did with the Brothers Grimm stories. Apple is currently switching compilers from GCC (licensed under the GNU GPL) to LLVM (licensed under a permissive FLOSS license). If Bradley Kuhn of “Free as in Freedom” is correct—Apple will be making their own proprietary LLVM derivative when that compiler gets to a point where it’s more useful. Apple’s entire compiler switch to LLVM is part of a larger strategy to get away from GPL’d programs. This strategy probably has roots in Apple’s GPL hatred after NeXT got caught committing copyright infringement illicitly distributing their GCC derivative years ago. Apple would later make copyright infringement against free software a habit with their app store (1, 2).

I don’t recall what Jobs did that would make him comparable to Henry Ford. The article Vaughan-Nichols links to compares Jobs and Disney. One of those points is “Disney knew about land grabs” well so did Ford—Fordlândia—Ford’s billion-dollar Brazilian rubber plantation where he could more efficiently exploit the natives through what Greg Grandin described as a combination of intense paternalism and intense surveillance. Intense surveillance is one thing that would fit Apple as proprietary software gives any proprietor an opportunity to closely track what their users do. But Ford was a nastier man than people commonly credit: he mistreated his workers and he sympathized with nazis, nazi sympathizing is something I don’t associate with Jobs. As for Ford’s chief invention, the assembly line, I can’t imagine how Jobs’ computers or his animation company are an apt comparison. The assembly-line was far more culture-changing than anything Jobs’ companies ever made.

Lots of people are poor at critical thought when they’re feeling sad. It should be an adults responsibility to see things as they really are and keep perspective, not maintain an atmosphere where people are too afraid to speak freely (like how Apple treats app store users by keeping so many things out of that store). The limits Apple and proprietary software impose will adversely affect people far longer than any malaise brought on by Jobs’ death. As people get some more time to let this pass they’ll be more willing to part with their indignation. In so doing perhaps they’ll re-read Stallman’s words and come to see how reasonable, well-worded, and appropriately respectful Stallman’s assessment was while simultaneously keeping his eye on the prize: all users deserve software freedom.

Related Links

• Labor issues at Apple and Apple’s suppliers
  • Apple’s Rotten Core mistreated workers from Apple’s own employees to the workers of upstream suppliers with “aggressive anti-union strategy”.
  • Blood on the Trackpads discusses Mike Daisey’s monologue “The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs” wherein Daisey poses as an investor, travels to the “Special Economic Zone” of Shenzhen, China, and gains access to Foxconn workers who are eager to share their stories. One story was about an “employee [who] mangled his hand in a factory accident and was fired instead of compensated” and another where “[s]everal workers speak of an employee who died after working a 32-hour shift”. Sadly for human rights sake, not everything Daisey said was an exaggeration. It is telling that many Westerners are so concerned with Daisey’s exaggerations than with the suffering of Chinese laborers.
  • Three Strikes Against Apple about Apple’s response circa the time of the multiple Foxconn suicides of 2011.

The FSF asks people to use more free software (naming specific programs such as The GIMP), but some of Rodriguez’s alternatives are against FSF’s ethics and therefore cannot be done. If anyone has suggestions for the FSF, don’t forget to send the suggestions to FSF Executive Director John Sullivan johns@fsf.org as well. He has solicited your thoughts on what the FSF should do.

On recommending Fedora GNU/Linux: The FSF defines guidelines for free system distributions but Fedora GNU/Linux does not qualify. The FSF lists completely free OSes which qualify. As I write this there are 9 such systems (including one based on Fedora — BLAG Linux and GNU).

On starting a free tablet system, perhaps based in Android: Richard Stallman, head and founder of the FSF, recently wrote an essay for the Guardian which describes that Android is not really free software. I believe anything based on Linus Torvalds’ fork of the Linux kernel is non-free in the same way because Torvalds includes proprietary software in his fork of Linux. In his essay, Stallman includes a valuable explanation of a principle free software activists take seriously: the power of doing without; where can free software activists (including himself and the FSF) do without features in the pursuit of freedom:

Important firmware or drivers are generally proprietary also. These handle the phone network radio, Wi-Fi, bluetooth, GPS, 3D graphics, the camera, the speaker, and in some cases the microphone too. On some models, a few of these drivers are free, and there are some that you can do without – but you can’t do without the microphone or the phone network radio.Richard Stallman, September 19, 2011

Reading e-books: In one of the followups to his post, Rodriguez said he desired to read recently-published e-books. One can certainly do with reading a paper copy of the book instead. In the US there is an added incentive for readers to prefer a paper book over some e-books: right of first sale is all too easily taken away from people via DRM. Ask George Hoteling about this with regard to audio tracks, for instance (more on this from EFF). The same is true for any electronic media, it doesn’t matter whether we’re talking about a book, audio track, movie, or anything else. When people give in to DRM the fight against DRM is made that much more difficult because their money ends up being used to fight against them.

One does oneself a disservice by calling people names (“PETA nuts”, “Green Peace crazies”) without facts to back up what one is saying. Such language is certainly not forbidden, this is a practical concession to readers who are eager to dismiss what one says. Sadly, people give one another permission to use name-calling as an excuse to ignore what you’re really trying to say (think of the conversational consequences to Godwin’s Law); some readers will not choose to ask for details to justify the language. Instead you should ask the FSF why they don’t “create a store of their own” and go from there. Perhaps there is a recent recording of an FSF representative giving a talk where an audience member asks this question. I don’t represent the FSF but I’d bet their answer is remarkably practical and focused, something like: starting such a store is for billionaire multinationals which can sustain the unprofitable early years. Furthermore, stores in no clear way address the reality that the suppliers can simply opt-out of selling through an ostensibly DRM-free FSF store. I think that in time more people will come to see how defending the interests of proprietors was and is unwise but this realization will take time and more disasters.

Fortunately for DRM objectors, every DRM story is ultimately a loser for the DRM proponent. What the customer loser is minor enough (music tracks, a few books, and the like) where people can learn the lesson the hard way without risking something truly important like their health and civil liberties. As DRM enters health equipment (like heart monitors) and adversely affects our civil liberties, we may have to learn these lessons regardless of our wishes.

By what measures do you judge the success of the FSF’s public advocacy campaigns, and how do you think they have been doing?

As he says, “it’s all fair game. Please share your thoughts, impressions, and criticisms with me at <johns@fsf.org>”.

Update 2011-05-06: John Sullivan reiterated his invitation to tell him what you think the FSF should do noting he’ll be starting a closer read of the letters I’ve received so far and that about 75 of you have responded so far, which should keep me busy for a while. But I would love to have more. Thanks!.

In May 2010 Apple distributed copies of a computer version of the classic board game Go through its App Store. This GNU Go variant is licensed under the GNU General Public License version 2 (GNU GPL) which does not allow additional restrictions to be added to the license. Apple’s App Store imposes additional restrictions on the applications distributed through the App Store, restrictions which are incompatible with the GNU GPL. Hence the incompatibility Apple introduced when it drafted the rules for its App Store.

Apple reviews every program it distributes through its App Store so Apple knowingly distributed this Go program in violation of the GNU GPL. This constitutes copyright infringement.

Apple has all the permission they need to distribute GPLed software through their App Store. The GPL ensures this; Apple could even distribute GPLed programs commercially charging users for downloading copies of GPLed programs.

The Free Software Foundation, GNU Go’s copyright holder, pointed this out to Apple in their usual way aiming for compliance not litigation:

In most ways, this is a typical enforcement action for the FSF: we want to resolve this situation as amicably as possible. We have not sued Apple, nor have we sent them any legal demand that they remove the programs from the App Store. The upstream developers for this port are also violating the GPL, and we are discussing this with them too. We are raising the issue with Apple as well since Apple is the one that distributes this software to the public; legally, both parties have the responsibility to comply with the GPL.

The only thing we’re doing differently is making this announcement. Apple has a proven track record of blocking or disappearing programs from the App Store without explanation. So we want to provide everyone with these details about the case before that happens, and prevent any wild speculation.

Free Software Foundation’s License Compliance Engineer Brett Smith

Instead of changing the App Store rules to get themselves into compliance with the GPL, Apple decided to stop distributing GNU Go. This choice deprived Apple’s users of GNU Go.

The latest chapter: VLC

Now Apple is at it again: this time with VideoLAN Client (VLC)—a versatile media player one can use to watch all sorts of movies. VLC is quite famous in free software because it is so easy to use and because it plays so many different media formats.

Someone made a version of VLC for Apple’s iOS (the operating system Apple ships on the Apple iPad). The programmers submitted their variant of VLC to Apple’s App Store and Apple chose to distribute the program. Apple never changed the conditions which prohibit them from distributing GPL-covered programs, so they are again infringing the copyright of a free software developer.

This time one of the VLC copyright holders, Rémi Denis-Courmont who is also one of VLC’s primary developers, complained to Apple:

VLC media player is free software licensed solely under the terms of the… GNU General Public License (a.k.a. GPL). Those terms are contradicted by the products usage rules of the AppStore through which Apple delivers applications to users of its mobile devices.Rémi Denis-Courmont

and the FSF concurs:

The GPL gives Apple permission to distribute this software through the App Store. All they would have to do is follow the license’s conditions to help keep the software free. Instead, Apple has decided that they prefer to impose Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) and proprietary legal terms on all programs in the App Store, and they’d rather kick out GPLed software than change their own rules. Their obstinance prevents you from having this great software on Apple devices—not the GPL or the people enforcing it.

Apple continues to use more DRM in their products: they just announced that a Mac App Store will be coming soon to their laptops and desktops, and you can bet it will have the same draconian restrictions as today’s App Store. Meanwhile, people enforcing the GPL like Rémi are fighting against DRM, so that everyone can be in full control of their own computers. We’re thankful to him for taking a stand. If you want to show your support, too, it’s easy: just steer clear of Apple’s DRM-infested App Store.

Free Software Foundation’s License Compliance Engineer Brett Smith

Anyone failing to comply with programmers who license their work to freely share and modify comes off looking very bad because they step on the efforts of people who are trying to treat people nicely. Therefore Apple comes off looking very bad every time they deny their users free software for non-compliance with copyright.

Update (2010-11-23): Brett Smith posted FSF analysis of Apple’s terms and conditions to the VLC-devel mailing list (local copy). Karen Sandler and Bradley Kuhn also go into this issue on their show “Free as in Freedom” (Ogg Vorbis recording, local copy). As I pointed out elsewhere, Apple’s changed terms and conditions still don’t allow them to distribute GPL’d works; Apple is still disallowing themselves from distributing GPL’d works.

Update (2011-01-07): Rémi Denis-Courmont writes to Planet VideoLAN:

At last, Apple has removed VLC media player from its application store. Thus the incompatibility between the GNU General Public License and the AppStore terms of use is resolved – the hard way. I am not going to pity the owners of iDevices, and not even the MobileVLC developers who doubtless wasted a lot of their time. This end should not have come to a surprise to anyone.

Having this freedom is not about skill; having freedom of speech doesn’t make anyone a great writer. Freedom means permission to take control over your computer by using software that is free to be shared and improved as you wish. Software freedom is a necessary component for people to live as equals in society.

Today we celebrate software freedom by encouraging all computer users to install and run more free software on their computers so they too can be free. Since 1983 the free software movement has made a conscious political and ethical choice to pursue software freedom for themselves and all other computer users by writing and using computer software that is licensed to share and modify.

• More about software freedom
• Free Software Foundation—the home of the free software movement
• SoftwareFreedomDay.org

For some time when I tell others that I draw a sharp distinction between “free software” and “open source”, I point out that I agree with the FSF’s take on the matter. I’ve been told that the differences between “free software” and “open source” pale in comparison to the similarities. I’ve seen and pointed out practical implications of this philosophical difference as I watch open source enthusiasts take on proprietary software for their own personal use while I flatly reject proprietary software for my computers, a radical difference to be sure.

The situation with The LaTeX Project Public License is another significant difference that directly affects me and my users: This license has been around a while and is used to license some fonts I find interesting (including Kurier and Iwona). The LaTeX Project Public License is a free software license since it grants users the freedoms of free software yet not an OSI-approved license. Fortunately Wikipedia is careful to make this distinction.

Update 2010-08-29: Thanks to eagle-eyed Nathan Owens for finding a typo above!

Apple imposes numerous restrictions on program use and distribution on all programs distributed via the Apple App Store. These restrictions are incompatible with the GPL; if one cannot simultaneously comply with all of the GPL’s terms and other relevant terms one cannot distribute their program based on GPL-covered code at all (paraphrasing section 7 of GPL version 2 and section 12 of GPL version 3). This makes Apple a copyright infringer. The developers who ported GNU Go to work with the iPhone are infringing the GPL as well, but Apple is the higher profile distributor here and Apple has a commercial interest in attracting more users to the iPhone.

The FSF isn’t starting the discussion with their legal guns drawn like so many copyright holders represented by the Business Software Alliance, Motion Picture Association, and Recording Industry Association of America do. The FSF takes the high road by initially seeking compliance with their license rather than initially suing. In fact, the only unusual note in this situation is that the FSF informed people about this infringement publicly so soon (typically they privately inform the parties involved about the relevant license terms).

The FSF has a history of taking the high road with copyright infringers. This is another example of how the FSF shows us how to behave by demonstrating the right behavior.

But doesn’t the FSF stand to benefit by taking an infringer to court and making an example of them? No. Take it from Eben Moglen, long-time GPL enforcer and president of the Software Freedom Law Center in his essays on enforcing the GPL:

If I had used the courts to enforce the GPL years ago, Microsoft’s whispering would now be falling on deaf ears. Just this month I have been working on a couple of moderately sticky situations. “Look,” I say, “at how many people all over the world are pressuring me to enforce the GPL in court, just to prove I can. I really need to make an example of someone. Would you like to volunteer?”

Someday someone will. But that someone’s customers are going to go elsewhere, talented technologists who don’t want their own reputations associated with such an enterprise will quit, and bad publicity will smother them. And that’s all before we even walk into court. The first person who tries it will certainly wish he hadn’t. Our way of doing law has been as unusual as our way of doing software, but that’s just the point. Free software matters because it turns out that the different way is the right way after all.Eben Moglen

It’s important to note some differences between how the FSF handles copyright infringement and what the FSF does in their everyday work from other famous copyright infringement litigators:

• Not jumping into litigation lightly. The FSF tried to work with Cisco for 5 years but new copyright infringement issues came to the FSF’s attention faster than Cisco would resolve old infringement issues.
• The FSF was initially silent about the issue. No press release, nothing aimed at embarrassment as far as I can tell; the FSF knows that you can often gain compliance with an inquiry about the issue and some advice on how to comply with the license. The FSF aims to fix practical problems and they have a strong record to point to should anyone question their sincerity. The FSF knows they have the courts to fall back on, but why take that long and expensive route when being nice will do the job?
• No threats of suing Cisco into insolvency. Unlike the RIAA and MPAA which seek maximum penalties against poor individuals regardless of the actual value of the alleged infringement, the FSF first seeks license compliance in their copyright infringement cases. And Cisco is a multinational corporation worth billions of dollars, not a person!
• The FSF builds on strengths by licensing to share. This means the FSF is helping distribute copyrighted works that don’t promote a culture of separation and helplessness like proprietary software distributors do. Anyone who infringes copyright of works intended to be shared and improved immediately gains sympathy because infringers are working against building a better world and treating nice people harshly.
• Get your facts straight before you litigate. Don’t risk coming off as a jerk by treating serious litigation frivolously and suing the wrong people as the RIAA has done.

A few years ago at Roger Ebert’s “Ebertfest”, a movie festival in Urbana, Illinois, I was proud to tell Jack Valenti, former head of the Motion Picture Association of America, and the assembled crowd that copyright infringement can be handled differently; one can work with alleged infringers to help build a mass of public support ready to stand by the copyright holder instead of the alleged infringer. I specifically noted how the FSF and other free software advocates handle allegations of infringement because nothing is stronger than a working example (“running code” as Eben Moglen points out). I don’t think these points were lost on the late Valenti or on the crowd; the public is increasingly aware of ordinary people being pushed into insolvency by RIAA/MPAA lawsuits. Fueling public anger, some of those lawsuits are filed without regard to the facts on the ground.

I’m still proud of the FSF’s behavior. I hope you will join me in helping the FSF by becoming a member and by running more free software.

Kurppa framed the issue in terms of the open source movement: a splinter movement founded in 1998 which maintains that developmental efficiency (chiefly to benefit business) is most critical because that’s when other programmers are able to help improve software. This movement specifically eschews the philosophy of the older free software movement. The free software movement is a social movement started in 1983 which campaigns for increased social solidarity by granting and protecting specific freedoms for all computer users—running, sharing, and modifying published computer software. The Free Software Foundation has published articles (1, 2) which describe the differences between these two movements including how the open source movement’s philosophy ironically leads to short- and long-term practical disadvantages. I highly recommend reading both essays for a more complete understanding of the ethical argument free software makes and how the open source philosophy falls short.

Kurppa tried to get more recent code from the project’s maintainers and was rejected. Kurppa wrote, “So, I thought.. There’s an author not sharing his code.”. This is where Kurppa first went wrong. Kurppa wrote that this project was sharing their code but they choose to do so only for release versions. They released their code all at once with each release version and never released developer code.

Kurppa revealed the crux of the real issue later on: “To me this sounds like that the the development isn’t as efficient as it could be and this means that the software is not as good as it could be, if only some things were done in a different way.”.

This view is a direct result of the open source philosophy. The ramifications of that philosophy are best understood when considering the differences between that philosophy and the older free software movement’s philosophy. Had Kurppa looked at this situation in terms of a user’s software freedom, developmental efficiency would be prioritized lower as a detail.

It may be inconvenient to not have access to the latest source code straight from the maintainer’s computer but (it’s reasonable to guess that) nobody is being denied their software freedom here. The critical issue, the issue to get upset over, is whether a user’s software freedoms are being respected. We don’t know exactly what program Kurppa is talking about so we can’t be sure that user’s freedoms are being respected. Sadly some programs with proprietary software in them are distributed under the GNU GPL (for example, Linus Torvalds’ variant of the Linux kernel contains proprietary software which allows Linux to communicate with various hardware. Other variants of Linux such as the kernel-libre project distribute a truly free Linux kernel). Such programs are a ruse for users seeking to use their computers in freedom. Fortunately this is not a widespread problem; most GPL’d programs respect user’s software freedoms so it is highly likely that the program Kurppa is talking about does too.

There are no obligations to share a program using a particular methodology, to share source code to programs one doesn’t distribute, or to accept someone’s patches into a program. It’s convenient and nice to distribute developmental versions of programs and to integrate patches from others so many hackers can help improve the program. But these are niceties, not requirements. The ethical obligations to distribute software that respects users freedoms are at the heart of the free software movement. Focusing on software freedom helps keep our priorities straight when considering the consequences of using and sharing computer software.