[kilowatt]

Wow. I was one year old when this was published.

Stallman's combination of sort-of-maddeningly-precise nerdspeak and revolutionary zeal has always made me cock my head and listen--if not to every word, then at least to some of his more apt analogies:

  "I think it is important to say that information is different from material
  objects like cars and loaves of bread because people can copy it and share it
  on their own and, if nobody attempts to stop them, they can change it and make
  it better for themselves. That is a useful thing for people to do. This isn't
  true of loaves of bread. If you have one loaf of bread and you want another,
  you can't just put your loaf of bread into a bread copier. You can't make
  another one except by going through all the steps that were used to make the
  first one. It therefore is irrelevant whether people are permitted to copy
  it—it's impossible."

This idea, if a bit utopian, feels like it has a very fundamental truth about the future at its core. To me. And this was 1986. I'm not sure that someone born 50+ years ago who doesn't think about this stuff as much as Stallman feels it in their gut like I do. My grandfather, who lived through the Great Depression, might reject it as utter nonsense.

That quote also reminded me of Paul Graham talking about how "files move around like smells" at his PyCon keynote this year. He was responding to a semi-panicked question about "how will we make money if we can't charge for copies of software?!":

  "If you imagined that we lived like on the moon, and everything--you know, we
  had to get like air in pipes, and paid for the air, right? People could charge
  for smells. People could charge for good smells, right? And so it would seem
  reasonable for smells to be property. But now, you walk by restaurant, and you
  smell this delicious smell, you get this like free boost--for nothing! And
  like, I think the record labels are like these people who are from the moon,
  right? And they used to be able to sell these things because the only way you
  could get them was through their channel. But now, files move around like smells.
  And it's not convenient to charge for them. Ultimately this stuff is
  pragmatic. I realize that doesn't sound very principled, but historically it
  seems to be the way things work."

That whole back and forth is transcribed at https://gist.github.com/3549855 (And see the press catch up on some of these ideas, too: http://www.fastcompany.com/1842581/why-millennials-dont-want... )

[dalke]

The reason copyright exists is because the person who created X (a book, a play, etc) wanted to be paid. The US Constitution describes the reason for copyright as "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts." The question then is, if you allow people to copy "information", then do you reduce progress, because people don't get paid for their work? The answer to that may be 'no', but it isn't as simple as comparing information to bread.

You might be interested to know of Thomas Jefferson's writings on the topic (to have "Monopolies may be allowed to persons for their own productions in literature and their own inventions in the arts for a term not exceeding ___ years but for no longer term and no other purpose." in the Bill of Rights) and Benjamin Franklin's on patents ("that as we enjoy great advantages from the inventions of others, we should be glad of an opportunity to serve others by any invention of ours, and this we should do freely and generously"). TJ was initially opposed to monopolies of any sort, but that changed over time.

I point this out to suggest that these utopian ideas you see have echos even back into the centuries.

[bitdiddle]

Interesting thought, I'm of that era, I began programming after graduate school in 1983, and remember the beginning of GNU well, as well as the fork that is called "open source".

I find it interesting to hear arguments that open source has more or less shown that "free software" is no longer so relevant. I agree that the FSF has been somewhat marginalized but I don't think that bodes well for the future of programming.

Ebon Moglen also writes and speaks well on many of the political and economics aspects of software as it relates to property and law. Many American indian tribes, .eg., treated land and resources as common but treated things like a teepee painting and even a brave's name as property. It's complicated :)

[xradionut]

I was in the military and at university when this was published. In '86 I had been using computers for several years, since I had relatives (father and two uncles) that had jobs that exposed me to almost all the computing platforms of the day. The very small sub-set of geeks that I hung around with "knew" then that there was great opportunity for open source, even though there was no such term for it then. We shared all software, both the commercial and the public domain. We built computers from kits and home-etched circuit boards. Nobody cared what computer you had, having one and sharing it with like minds was the norm. When the internet and OSS came along, we were already there.