Richard Stallman Was Right All Along

Thom Holwerda :

I, too, disregarded Stallman as way too extreme. Free software to combat controlling and spying governments? Evil corporations out to take over the world? Software as a tool to monitor private communication channels? Right. Surely, Free and open source software is important, and I choose it whenever functional equivalence with proprietary solutions is reached, but that Stallman/FSF nonsense is way out there. 

But here we are, at the start of 2012. Obama signed the NDAA for 2012, making it possible for American citizens to be detained indefinitely without any form of trial or due process, only because they are terrorist suspects. At the same time, we have SOPA, which, if passed, would enact a system in which websites can be taken off the web, again without any form of trial or due process, while also enabling the monitoring of internet traffic. 

Combine this with how the authorities labelled the Occupy movements - namely, as terrorists - and you can see where this is going. 

In case all this reminds you of China and similarly totalitarian regimes, you're not alone. Even the Motion Picture Association of America, the MPAA, proudly proclaims that what works for China, Syria, Iran, and others, should work for the US. China's Great Firewall and similar filtering systems are glorified as workable solutions in what is supposed to be the free world. 

The crux of the matter here is that unlike the days of yore, where repressive regimes needed elaborate networks of secret police and informants to monitor communication, all they need now is control over the software and hardware we use. Our desktops, laptops, tablets, smartphones, and all manner of devices play a role in virtually all of our communication. Think you're in the clear when communicating face-to-face? Think again. 

How did you arrange the meet-up? Over the phone? The web? And what do you have in your pocket or bag, always connected to the network? 

This is what Stallman has been warning us about all these years - and most of us, including myself, never really took him seriously. However, as the world changes, the importance of the ability to check what the code in your devices is doing - by someone else in case you lack the skills - becomes increasingly apparent. If we lose the ability to check what our own computers are doing, we're boned.

This evening I took a look at the official Gbloink! page, and realized it was, er, pants.

Now I've got a video on YouTube and a couple of sets of gbloink!tunes up on SoundCloud, there was a danger that Gbloink! could look and sound quite respectable.

But the site itself was an embarrassment. (Count that as a BIG failure for GeekWeaver and for my sad lack of CSS skills. OK, my general resistance to web-design and CSS naivity is a large part of it; but if I'd had a working copy of GW, then I'd have been more tempted to tinker and try to improve matters.)

So I figured : I'm paying for hosting on Webfaction. I can have as many Wordpress blogs as I like. Why not put one to some use? I quickly discovered that Wordpress is formidably good these days. Very simple to set up on Webfaction. With a huge ecology of plugins that install themselves (I didn't know that!) And great templates.

It didn't take long to find a template I liked, pull the video from YouTube, install a SoundCloud plugin, and generally make a whole new-look for the old Gbloink! material.

So, I present: the new http://www.gbloink.com.

The controversial thing I've added is the Facebook "Like" button. I'm pretty conflicted about this. On the one hand, the purist in me doesn't like to give a company as evil as Facebook more power over the web, and my online existence. On the other, there is so clearly a wave of new infrastructure being constructed by Facebook and the other internet playas, and it's at least necessary to understand what's going on. And, anyway, playing with Wordpress plugins to engage the new web trends gives me an exhilarating sense of ... keeping up. :-P

A couple of questions you may be asking :

1) OK. But Gbloink! was written 13 years ago? What's with that? When are you going to get on and either a) write a new version or b) do something else of musical interest?

2) Hmmm ... thinking of moving *all* your blogs to WP, then, are you?

To which the answers are :

1) God knows! Last night I checked out London's mind-blowing OpenLabs' OpenNight which left me wildly inspired and a little bit overawed. These are hardcore open-source, experimental music geeks who do livecoding in Scheme, hack their own electronic instruments and even sing their explanations about using Bézier curves to model sound-waves. The previous time I went, one guy was DJing with mind-control!

Like I say, a bit overwhelming. I definitely want to get in with this, and maybe do a performance at some point; but not sure if I have anything awesome enough yet.

Still ... I'm starting to think :-)

2) Well, my immediate thought is OPTIMAES. The Ning site got flooded with spam. And now Ning plan to charge. Meanwhile it looks as if Wordpress have social network plugins. It's possible I can have most of what Ning gave me, in a space I have more control over, and am *already* paying for. So, it's likely that I'll experiment with migrating OPTIMAES there.

Keep you posted ...

It's amazing that over 10 years after Michael H. Goldhaber wrote "The Attention Economy", Eric Raymond wrote "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" and at least 8 years after Clay Shirky wrote "Help! The Price of Information has Fallen ..." that famous, public alleged "thinkers" are arguing about this at such a naive level.

Anderson is right that Free will dominate the production of *non-scarce* information products. (The only paid information products will be commissioned ie. the author will be paid for attention.) But he's lying through his teeth about there being opportunities to build business models around this.

Rubbish! It's just going to get amateurized. And there won't be much of a money-business at all around the provision of content or culture. Or its "community management".

It's not going to happen with non-scarce resources, which is why there *will* be a "Hosting" business. And a business supplying computers or handsets to access the free information. But these will be far smaller than the currently existing computer and phone businesses. (Think Open Source circuit-board design meets printable electronics.)

It's true that Anderson doesn't answer Gladwell's "cost of the distribution infrastructure" point. I'd say that the best answer to that is likely to be that we're going to break up those big infrastructures and replace them with smaller, cheaper, more decentralized production. So we won't need the grid because we'll be catching our own sun and wind energy (free) with locally made equipment (very cheap) and local distribution nets (cheaper). Similar for food, furniture, homes etc. Production that relies on huge economies of scale, mass-production, mass-marketing, long-distance transport etc. is likely to go bust anyway due to energy crunch on one side, and smarter, better informed tools which can pull manufacturing closer to the end-consumer, on the other.

Propellerheads (Reason) is Swedish, Ableton and Steinberg are German, ImageLine (Fruity Loops) is Belgian ...

I'm wondering (again), why the Scandinavian (and Benelux) peoples seem to own the software synthesizer and virtual studio business. And why the Free Software alternatives (which you'd imagine would attract enthusiastic contributors) have made little headway against this bastion of proprietary software.

Interesting, Steinberg are actually now owned by Yamaha whereas Boston based Cakewalk (the biggest US based music-software name) are owned by Roland. So Japanese hardware companies have moved in to take over their pure-software rivals.

Bonus question : what became of great British hope SSEYO?

GNU is 25 this month.

Umair pushes back on a comment I wrote to him the other day.

I think this is one of the grand, defining debates of our times ... with the discovery of "the edge" or "peer" or the "bazaar" model of production, those of us who believe in it, still need to orient our political attitudes with respect to it.

Do we remain sceptics, believing that, whatever its virtues, peer is just a tool, hostage to the foibles of human choice? Or do we believe it is, if not a law, then at least a pattern of the system dynamics of economies, as near to a historical inevitability as we may hope for in our times?

Sad to see M$ wheedling their way into the OLPC.

Stallman responds.

Update : Following arguments on OLPC News