Open Letter By Eric S. Raymond To Chris Dodd 410
An anonymous reader writes "ESR, one of the finest engineers behind the open source movement and much of the software we use everyday, writes an open letter to U.S. Sen. Chris Dodd. ESR points out the concerns of 'the actual engineers who built the Internet and keep it running, who write the software you rely on every day of your life in the 21st century' about politicians attempts to lock down our Internet or our tools. A portion of the letter reads: 'I can best introduce you to our concerns by quoting another of our philosopher/elders, John Gilmore. He said: “The Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.”
To understand that, you have to grasp that “the Internet” isn’t just a network of wires and switches, it’s also a sort of reactive social organism composed of the people who keep those wires humming and those switches clicking. John Gilmore is one of them. I’m another. And there are some things we will not stand having done to our network.'"
Finest engineer? (Score:2, Interesting)
What open source projects does ESR actively contribute to?
Routing around the censorship (Score:5, Interesting)
Sometimes when I read
“The Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.”
which appears as a nice and cutesy rainbows and unicorns saying, I get the impression that it actually means
"Fuck off. You don't belong here and we'll subvert anything you try to do that impacts what we want to do"
In an angry, anti-establishment, "we know better than you" superior way.
Note that I do believe in a free Internet.
Unity is a sad pun (Score:5, Interesting)
This one I remember: ESR's goodbye note [lwn.net]
This one I felt certain I would find: Ubuntu and GNOME jump the shark [ibiblio.org]
(Failure to properly support Unicode in 2012? You're soaking in it.) ESR longs for the era when when the Unix ethos bound us together. It ends in another bail-out, this time with a less dramatic letter.
Maybe the Unix brotherhood has finally jumped the shark. I'm not sure I believe in the political force ESR claims to represent. It feels more like he's writing the letter to convince himself.
Jamie Zawinski was feeling the irritation back in 2003: Cascade of Attention-Deficit Teenagers [jwz.org]. Personally I blame SMS [wikipedia.org].
Well, I have a leather jacket and a USB fob with Mint 12 to get on with the exorcism before the April EOL on 10.10. I didn't know the open source movement would degenerate into a lifetime occupation of oasis hopping. That was not my original dream.
Re:To Which the Reaction Will Be (Score:4, Interesting)
It really only takes a double hand-full of networking engineers to deny access to the entire Internet. We're not where we were some moons ago when Saint Postel moved the DNS root servers to his home computers for a while, but we're not too terribly far.
If some engineers got together and decided to take down DNS, well, for most people that would be the end of internet access.
A far more disastrous scenario would have some of the larger nodes advertise bad BGP around 2am on a Friday night, and the engineers responsible being "too ill" to come in to fix it.
You are correct about the contrarian factor though. I've known IT people who will take the opposite stance simply because an certain number of people are already on the other side. I've known IT people who will enjoy a movie until it gets popular, then suddenly it is the worst movie ever. I've known IT people who believe in certain things politically, but consistently vote the opposite to 'piss off "those" people.'
Re:The internet doesn't "route around it" (Score:4, Interesting)
I am aware of a few efforts like the above in the mountains around where I live; it is a bit of work, but really not as much as you might expect. The biggest obstacles are forests, which attenuate the signal, and animals, which occasionally knock down antennas. It is harder to do this in crowded urban areas, but there are many millions of people who do not live in cities.
What defines the Internet is its protocol -- one common protocol that allows people to communicate across various networks and networking technologies. That is why the Internet can always route around censorship: anyone can establish a net network and attach it to the Internet (though in practice, by the time things got bad enough to motivate people to do such a thing, it would be far too difficult to create a network free from censorship; see: China).
Re:To Which the Reaction Will Be (Score:5, Interesting)
There is a fundamental assumption difference between the two. Atlas Shrugged is based on the assumption that it's, to use common parlance "the 1%" who make the world go round.
Fight club assumes that it's the "99%".
Fight club is right on that point (obviously -- CEOs and lawyer and finance wizz-kids do not contribute to the economy commensurately to their salaries). However, there is no such organisation as "the 99%", and therefore, hoping that you can suddenly bring down civilisation because everyone will suddenly push in the same direction is a fantasy.
Progress still happens because ideas get diffused, take hold, and eventually become so dominant that the moral zeitgeist is altered. Within 25 years, only fringe loonies will be against gay marriage (we are close to that, maybe 15 years), and pot legalisation will have become self-evident. In Europe, the last religious generation will have died out, and in the US, atheists will be the majority. The current US debates on _contraception_ will be looked upon as the abhorrent obsession of the few.
But there still will be liberals and conservatives, and the debate will be as lively as now. The point is that you do no effect change by revolutions, if the social structures allow change that is. Change occurs because old people die out, young people grow up and facts remain. Doing whatever fits reality always wins in the long run.
But the ride is smoother is you keep talking about reality.
Re:uhhh. (Score:5, Interesting)
George Washington in particular was against this - the reason he went by "Mr President" was that he wanted to have some sort of title that indicated that the President of the United States was on par with his counterparts in other countries (which were likely to be Kings, Dukes, or Princes), but he wanted to emphasize that the President is also just a regular citizen, so he started it with "Mister". One of the key reasons he was instrumental in creating American democracy is that after he won the American Revolutionary War he didn't take the army he'd just won with and try to take over the country, and then as President stepped down after 2 terms and peacefully transferred power to John Adams.
IP rights and copying (Score:2, Interesting)
Not in general, no, but in the specific case where the creator of intellectual property, or their legal agents, puts rights to that IP on the market at a specific price, and copies are made and used against the will of the IP owner and without legitimate ownership of the related rights of that IP, copying is wholly illegal, legitimately punishable, definitely counter to the authorized and intended structure of our society, and often, if not always, injures the IP holder financially either directly or indirectly, as the violation of those rights extends via any portion of a network of violators. It is this last concern -- which is also the basis for society assigning these rights -- that leads to the concept of theft: the financial injury.
If IP, or specific rights to it, is put on the market, and one is unwilling to meet the asking price, the only action available which is assured not to injure the IP holder financially by violating rights they legitimately hold and which otherwise may very well have brought them significant financial advantage is to refuse to utilize the IP in any manner that impinges upon those rights.
We live in a country where rights to IP are given value by a constitutional provision that specifically allows for patent and copyright, with the stated intention of fostering innovation by virtue of seeing to it that IP rights and recompense for same are formally supported by the system.
The relevant portion:
Congress duly followed up with a battery of IP law that does exactly that.
Consequently, the idea that "copying is not stealing" is invalid -- when copying in violation of rights of the IP holder's, you are taking rights you do not own, against the laws that say you are forbidden to do so and specifically assign them to someone else, and which specify the penalties for such takings, in accordance with the highest law of the land: the US Constitution.
If you want that to change, you can say that "copying should not be considered stealing and then work to have legislation changed accordingly. But you've got a heck of an uphill battle -- especially today, when IP represents more of the US economy's value than it ever has previously. Pretending that the situation you want already exists is counter productive to your goals -- it just marks you as a crazy person or someone so immature and unfamiliar with how the system actually works that you can be safely ignored.
I would also remind you that these same laws are what protect open source software, empower the GPL, etc. Don't know if you are a fan of those things or a true IP rights anarchist, but it's worth mentioning in any case.
Re:IP rights and copying (Score:4, Interesting)
While I respect your point of view, you're starting from a flawed perception of the true state of affairs.
First off, "legitimately" and "legally" are not synonyms. Copyright law has been extended unjustly (IMNSHO) on at least three separate occasions in the past 60 years. Therefore, while copyright holders have a LEGAL right to limit what citizens may do with their material, they do not necessarily have a LEGITIMATE right to enforce them.
Personally, my opinion is that we should roll back copyright terms to the original constitutional limits and patents for software should be non-existent. Software is already more than adequately covered under copyright law as it is.
Second, you're using the misleading term, "IP rights", which conflates three completely separate legal domains; trademark law, patent law, and copyright law. Since each domain is treated very differently in virtually all jurisdictions, they should each be treated separately in any discussion.
Third, you're also conflating copyright infringement, generally a civil matter, with stealing, a criminal offense. While in my view they are both illegal and unethical, they are by no means the same from a legal standpoint and should not be treated as such.
To sum up, your conclusion is wrong because it's based on a faulty understanding of the law.
Sigh. Where's NYCL when you need him? He can explain this much more cogently than I can.