On Thu, Jul 26, 2007 at 01:54:34AM +0900, Todd B. wrote:
indeed independent (often not the case) and that on the other hand
all viewpoints eventually.
Unfortunately, I think bias is stronger in general in this area than in
many others. It is only fairly recently that a perspective that
considers the possibility that copyright law is not intrinsic to the
concepts of proprietary rights has become publicly acceptable to any
degree again (it was once more normal to regard copyright as separable
from property rights, but things changed in the 20th century).
For a look at what copyright and patent law went through as ideas before
being provided for in the US Constitution, and the considerations that
followed, it’s instructive to read the writings of Thomas Jefferson in
personal letters on the subject (searches for likely terms with “Thomas
Jefferson” in the search terms, on Google, should help there). It’s
also
worthwhile to read writings of supporters of the Free Culture movement,
perhaps starting with the 1,000 foot view in the Wikipedia entry:
Free-culture movement - Wikipedia
Obviously, the Free Culture movement is about as biased as it gets, and
there are some questionable premises in some of these writings. A
source
of writings with less questionable premises, and less radical viewpoint,
but probably no less biased perspective is the Right to Create weblog, a
very well-written treatment of the idea that current patent law is way
outside the realm of reasonability:
http://righttocreate.blogspot.com/
The Free Software Foundation offers the writings of Richard Stallman and
others, which often carry a tone of reasonability but assume premises
that are at times self-contradictory and rather extreme. The writings
of
Theo de Raadt, the man who started the OpenBSD project (OpenBSD’s Linus
Torvalds, basically), has very strong views on the subject that are
worth
reading to help understand the landscape. His is a primarily practical
(very engineer-like, rather than philosophical like Richard Stallman’s)
approach to open source software. Linus Torvald’s commentaries on the
subject are, like de Raadt’s, very practical, but unlike de Raadt he
takes a position that proprietary and open source software are
equivalently effective and useful, that there’s nothing wrong with
proprietary software per se, and one must choose licensing based on
need.
The self-contradictory issue with de Raadt’s approach is in the simple
fact that he maintains strong copyright control over the format of the
OpenBSD installer CD, and Torvalds’ relates to the fact that his
arguments against the GPLv3 should, taken to their logical conclusion,
prompt him to use something more like the BSD license rather than the
GPLv2 that he favors. Just my personal observations, devoid in this
context of value judgment.
There are a couple of small projects just barely getting off the ground
that favor an open source approach, but are specifically opposed to
certain other open source approaches out there, that come to mind.
They’re advocacy efforts that are still in early planning stages, and
not
widely known yet, but what little information they provide at this time
might be of interest for purposes of completeness of understanding of
the
various positions on the pro-open source side of things. One is the
Software Liberation front:
http://softwareliberationfront.org
The other advocates what it calls a Copyfree approach to licensing:
http://copyfree.org
There’s an interesting piece of writing about intellectual property law
that gives a supposedly Libertarian take on it:
http://www.libertariannation.org/a/f31l1.html
. . . though of course there are other arguments within libertarianism
both for and against. A book, available online, called “Against
Intellectual Monopoly” might also prove interesting:
http://levine.sscnet.ucla.edu/general/intellectual/against.htm
Interestingly enough, the strongest arguments I’ve found online for
copyright and patent law as applied to software are those of Microsoft’s
executives in various press releases over the years. That should
suggest
some Google search terms for you, I would think.
For offline, hardcopy materials, the already suggested Amazon search
turns up some interesting options. Unfortunately, I haven’t read much
of
the hardcopy materials on the subject, and of what I have read the
titles
tend to be fairly interchangeable so I have some difficulty recalling
which I’ve read and which I have not.
For the most part, the least biased-sounding stuff tends to be materials
written by advocates for open source software – which, of course, means
there’s bias, but they’re pretty good at not sounding biased. There are
also many on both sides of things who sound very biased indeed, such as
Richard Stallman and Steve Ballmer. Linus Torvalds is an odd duck, in
that he really seems very evenly divided between closed source and open
source software, but his bias (more difficult to recognize than some,
perhaps) is toward a particular type of software world wherein
proprietary and open source software are mixed and carry fairly equal
weight.
The Ruby list probably carries some of the least biased commentary I’ve
ever written on the subject of open source software licensing and
copyright law, including this very email.
faith does not explicitly state that mankind is something special). I
actually have no idea if an unbiased view on this matter is even feasible.
I love this example, but I never throw it at doomsday theorists
because it is another one of those topics – just like this one –
that I want to intelligently discuss with other people, but just
haven’t had the time to research it myself yet. No doubt I would be
entering a mob armed with hatchets and sickles with only my bare
fists.
Note, for instance, that even that example relies on biased assumptions.
There’s a fair bit of science and some strong opinions supporting the
idea that the scope of anthropogenic global warming trends assumed in
this example are alarmist and unrealistic. In fact, there’s some
question about what positive effects might occur as a result of global
warming trends even if they are true. The proponents of anthropogenic
global warming crisis are more visible, but they are not the only
credible position on the subject. I’ve got some available reading on
this subject queued up as well, but it’s so far off-topic it really
shouldn’t be mentioned in any more depth here. I only addressed it to
point out that on such charged issues I’m not sure you can ever find
anything that qualifies as “unbiased”.
Yes, I’m aware of all this. These are the dillemas that I wish to delve
into.
There are a great many arguments for all sorts of positions with regard
to open source software out there. The most cogent and well-supported,
however, tend to be those that make clear a basic economic model as the
basis of the argument, so you know up front what the bias of the
argument
will be. Richard Stallman’s arguments depart from this somewhat in that
his very collectivist bent with regard to software economics is somewhat
hidden between the lines of his arguments, but if you understand that
fact of his assumptions the remainder of his argument becomes strikingly
clear and strong, in that light. The corporatist position of
Microsoft’s
executives is of course unavoidable, and thus casts all of those
arguments in a revealing light for anyone able to differentiate between
corporatist capitalism and free market capitalism. Linus Torvalds, Eric
Raymond (author of “The Cathedral and the Bazaar”, meantioned elsewhere
in this thread), and Theo de Raadt are quite open and forthright about
their biases. Thomas Jefferson’s writings on the subject are
instructive, in that he makes a very strong, clear, cogent argument
against copyright and patent law in principle, then ends up caving in at
the end and making some weak statement to the effect of “but we want to
encourage innovation, so I guess we’ll go with it anyway” (wildly
paraphrased).
Best of luck with all this. Feel free to contact me off-list to share
with me any information of interest, questions, or arguments you find
interesting – copyright and patent law make up a subject of great
interest to me, as it applies both to ethics and economics.
