Richard Stallman’s GNU Manifesto Turns Thirty – The New Yorker

Posted on 2015-10-04 by arjaybe

With the recent revelations about the misuse of closed software, this celebration of Free Software is timely and welcome. The linked New Yorker article focuses on Richard Stallman, an idealist who has lived by his principles in the face of vicious opposition and ridicule. It would have been much easier, and more profitable, to abandon them, as demonstrated by those who continue to denigrate him. Free Software survives and thrives today largely because of his perseverance, and that of thousands of people inspired by his example.

The GNU Manifesto Turns Thirty

Stallman was uneasy over the increasing encroachment of proprietary software. He’d seen evidence of it in his own lab, when he found himself unable to adapt a new Xerox printer with a program he’d created to alert users to paper jams, and he believed that he had an obligation to protect and nurture the hacker ethos he’d experienced at M.I.T., which valued intellectual curiosity, esprit de corps, and fun over profit. In late 1983, he posted to two newsgroup discussion forums an idea to create an alternative to Unix. “If I get donations of money, I may be able to hire a few people full or part time,” he wrote. “The salary won’t be high, but I’m looking for people for whom knowing they are helping humanity is as important as money.”

Stallman expanded and formalized his ideas in the GNU Manifesto, which he published in the March, 1985, issue of Dr. Dobb’s Journal of Software Tools, thirty years ago this month. “So that I can continue to use computers without dishonor,” he wrote, “I have decided to put together a sufficient body of free software so that I will be able to get along without any software that is not free. I have resigned from the AI Lab to deny MIT any legal excuse to prevent me from giving GNU away.” The nearly forty-five-hundred-word text called for collaborators to help build a freely shareable Unix-like operating system, and set forth an innovative method to insure its legal protection.

Source: Richard Stallman’s GNU Manifesto Turns Thirty – The New Yorker

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Volkswagen Uses DMCA and Closed Software to Cheat

Posted on 2015-09-27 by arjaybe

exhaust-pipe

By now we’ve all heard of the shameful way Volkswagen has cheated all of us in their manipulation of pollution test results. The software in its emission control system could detect when it was being tested, and change the car’s operations to produce better results. This was not an accident. It was not a mistake borne of ignorance. Officials at VW were warned by Bosch, the maker of the devices, and by their own engineers that misuse of the system would lead to false readings. Their cynical cheating is now bringing harm to their investors, who saw an immediate thirty percent drop in their share values; harm to their customers, who saw the value of their vehicles fall; harm to the rest of us by covert pollution.

How did Volkswagen use the DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) to help them in this fraud? The DMCA is meant to protect “intellectual property” by making it illegal to circumvent the restrictions placed on it. If a company only wants you to be able to watch their movie, say, in certain parts of the world on approved devices, they put a lock on it and use the DMCA to force you to comply. In their ignorance, the lawmakers extended this protection to software, and VW used the DMCA to keep people from seeing what they were doing. If people had been able to analyze the code, this crime might not have happened. Requests from the Environmental Protection Agency and the Electronic Frontier Foundation to exempt this kind of software were rejected. Ironically, the DMCA also makes it impossible to examine the code of software used to circumvent the programming in cars’ computers. See my previous posts referencing the DMCA here, here, here and here.

How does closed, proprietary software make the situation worse? If the code in control systems in our cars, homes, offices, factories, nuclear power plants and voting machines is not open for inspection, then we’re left to blindly trust those who employ those systems. We simply have to trust that they will do the right thing and protect our interests. Volkswagen has shown that to be a misplaced trust. As Eben Moglen of the Software Freedom Law Center says, “Proprietary software is an unsafe building material.”

If this debacle forces lawmakers to reconsider making this software open for inspection, then maybe some good will come of it. If not, then there will continue to be abuses like this, only we should expect them to be better concealed.

rjb

edit:  Here’s a thoughtful article by Bradley M. Kuhn of the Software Freedom Conservancy, discussing the issue as it affects Free Software, and how Free Software might have affected the situation.

How Would Software Freedom Have Helped With VW?

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Further Update on Happy Birthday Copyright

Posted on 2015-09-23 by arjaybe
Christine Mai-Duc / Los Angeles Times

Christine Mai-Duc / Los Angeles Times

A US judge (George King) has ruled that Warner/Chappell, which acquired the copyright to Happy Birthday in 1988, only bought rights to specific arrangements of the melody, not to the actual song. Warner/Chappell got the rights when it bought another company, which was the successor to yet another company, which got the rights from sisters Mildred and Patty Hill, who wrote the song Good Morning to All in 1893. That song was meant to be sung in class by school children, and the melody was later combined with the Happy Birthday lyrics that we know today. If you’re as confused as I am, then you’re getting a glimpse at the mess which is current copyright law.

This judgement applies only to the US, and only to part of the song. Other parts of the song and other renditions of it may still be encumbered, so think twice before posting your birthday party on Youtube if it contains any part of the Happy Birthday song. Read the linked articles for more clarificatioon.

Here are my first and second posts on this topic.

Here are links to the story at NPR, BBC, the LA Times and the Hollywood Reporter.

A small step in the right direction, since this song might finally be kinda, sorta, partially in the public domain at last.

rjb

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