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To: "Nathan Newman" <nathan.newman at yale.edu> cc: (bcc: DANIEL DAVIES) bcc: DANIEL DAVIES Subject: Open Source v. MS - American Prospect article
>Hi all,
>I mentioned to folks earlier that I had an article on the history and role
>of government promoting open source software appearing in THE AMERICAN
>PROSPECT. I am including a quick release on it with URLs. There is also
a
>roundtable on the issues involved, where they put me in with two
>libertarians (Eric Raymond and a REASON magazine guy) along with a
corporate
>technology lawyer, so if folks have any thoughts for the next round of
>comments I have to submit by Monday, it would be appreciated.
>Thanks -- Nathan Newman
I thought this was a very good article, and have been longing to let off some spleen about Raymond's particular whiny brand of libertarianism for a while, so here goes:
First, his actual contribution to the round-table is bloody awful to read -- for those sensible souls who can't be bothered to read it, it can be summarised "Me, me, I'm great, blah, blah, everyone else is a moron, especially the government, blah, blah". ( check out http://www.prospect.org/controversy/open_source/raymond-e-1.html if you don't believe me).
All written in horribly overblown sub-Ayn Rand prose (actual excerpt: "Morally, there is a chasm between mutual voluntary cooperation and the involuntary, one-size-fits-all pseudo-cooperation enforced at the point of government guns. "
Also, there are people in the "open-source" community (more on that term later) who regard Raymond as a bit too keen to build up his own achievements.
In any case, more substantive comments:
1. [On Lessig's point that without "open access" regulation, telecoms
carriers would never have allowed the internet to happen], Raymond says "
>>The obvious counter to the first argument is that AT&T was itself a
creature of regulation, and that two public-policy wrongs of this kind very
seldom make a right. <<"
This is not the fantastic knock-down argument that Raymond believes it to be. First, he asserts without proving that the breakup of Bell was in fact a public-policy "wrong" in this sense. He doesn't prove it because he can't -- the telecoms system was broken up exactly because it engaged in the kind of behaviour that the open-access regulation prevented. A quick glance at AOL reveals what the Internet would have been like if there had been no open access.
Raymond certainly does know that Linux would have been impossible if a judge hadn't ruled that Bell Labs couldn't keep Unix as a proprietary system, under the self-same AT&T regulation. I wonder why he didn't bring that one up?
2. Next up, we have the wonderful sentence: "Morally, there is a chasm between mutual voluntary cooperation and the involuntary, one-size-fits-all pseudo-cooperation enforced at the point of government guns. "
Raymond seems to be under the belief that patents and copyrights are enforced by someone other than the government, and that intellectual property law isn't really regulation. The government doesn't have the option of not promoting either kind of software -- failure to act promotes proprietary software. It would be nice to hear a few small words about the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and UCITA's effective ban on reverse engineering from such a self-professed "libertarian". Or are laws which protect someone's right to make money not really laws?
It's not actually clear to me which point of Lessig's Raymond is actually arguing against here, I'm not sure it's clear to him either, that Lessig's main point is about network ownership rather than software. If he really believes that network owners have a right to exclude who they like from their networks, it might be fun to ask him his views on the rights of the owners of lunch counters.
3. Immediately after this, Raymond gives us an inordinately self-serving account of what "we in the open-source community" believe. He summarises a hugely complicated internal controversy as "basically everyone agrees with me". On an issue where views are as split as that of broadband access regulation, it is pretty poor of him to claim that "We in the open-source community are clear about this, even if Mr. Lessig is not. More power for politicians, bureaucrats and regulators will only hinder our work as it has in the past, and is no part of our design. "
His characterisation of the various licenses which meet his "Open-Source Definition" (which is itself regarded as suspect by Stallman and his supporters) is misleading, and it is he rather than Lawrence Lessig who is ignoring inconvenient facts. Of the four open source licenses (what is the fourth; I can only think of GPL, BSD and PAL), it is true that only GPL requires derivative works to be free software. However, all of them prevent anyone from closing the source *of the licenced work itself*, and it is this claim which Lessig makes. His jibe that the GPL has never been tested in court is probably to be taken as an indication of the bitterness of the Raymond/Stallman feud rather than anything else.
4. Raymond continually portrays the government as a monolithic agency, acting with machine-like efficiency to carry out its will. He uses evidence that it isn't as evidence that it is -- this is the only way I can interpret his bizarre analysis of the way in which the Appropriate Use Policy was subverted. Nathan did not "so regret" the opening up of the Internet, and did not endorse the Appropriate Use Policy, so Raymond shouldn't try to claim that he did.
5. A finishing classic Raymondism: "We, the people who built the Internet and are making today's open-source revolution, have received a comprehensive education over the last twenty-five years in the results of government "help." It has taught us to trust technology and free markets and our own competence, not the well- (or ill-) intentioned interventions of politicians and pundits. "
I take it that Tim Berners-Lee can be taken to be included in Raymond's "We, the people who built the Internet", and he does not share this view.
Comments on Jeff A. Taylor ----------------------------
What the hell is this guy doing so far out of his depth? If he thinks that AOL's marketing strategy has anything to do with "open source", as he claims to, then he's not understood the issues.
In advocating removal of common carrier regs, Taylor tells us; "Anyone looking for a rational price structure, whereby consumers only have to pay for the services they want, [...]", which shows that he hasn't understood AOL's marketing strategy, either.
Then we get:
"Instead of imposing must-open regs on cable, let's drop them from the phone guys. Their DSL lines could be as closed as hell. A few may choose that. The smart ones will realize they need national and local ISPs to put human face on their horrid customer relations and also solve the technical problems they are helpless with"
Which is truly brain-dead, except for anyone who actually wants monopolisation of the ISP industry.
At least he mentions the DMCA and the *actual* state of government involvement in software, which puts him one point in front of Raymond.
[on the government purchasing open source software] "The available evidence -- boondoggles at the Internal Revenue Service, Federal Aviation Administration, Customs, reams of General Accounting Office reports etc. -- shows that the federal government is poorly equipped to evaluate software on the most basic of levels, i.e., does it work? "
Straightforward government bashing, and pretty moronic at that. The available evidence about pretty much any organisation larger than a small right-wing think tank suggests that *nobody* is any good at evaluating software products
Although his final conclusion: "Better to focus on making the law at least not hostile to open source. " is probably sensible.
Comments on Jonathan Band --------------------------
What a sensible chap.
Comments on Nathan Newman -------------------------
Raymond is right about one thing -- need more detail on what is meant by "public policy promoting standards". If this means ANSI, it already exists, and isn't likely to do enough. If it means having public consortia drafting standards from scratch, Raymond is (rightly) going to throw the example of ADA in your face. I'm not sure what the happy medium is, because I clearly haven't given this as much thought as you have. The open vs. proprietary standards question is very important though -- I'd suggest some sort of law which would refuse to enforce copyright on binaries of programs which neither a) were compatible with relevant existing standards nor b) provided enough openness (probably the whole source) to allow others to make them compatible.
cheers
dd
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