This is an English transcription of Mr. Eben Moglen's speech at the Open World Forum, October 2010. Mr. Moglen is the Chairman of the Software Freedom Law Center.
The transcription is made by Răzvan Sandu, directly from the English video available here.
Keynote
Address
EbenMoglen, Chairman of Software Freedom Law Center
Open World Forum, Paris, October 2010
It's a great pleasure to
be here. I want to thank the organizers particularly for allowing me
to compete with your cocktails. I guess, given that situation at the
end of a long day, the best I can do is to talk about something
completely different - so I'm going to talk about Freedom. I didn't
hear it mentioned much today, so perhaps it represents a useful
change of subject.
The purpose of the
software which everybody has been talking about, seen by the most of
the people who made it, was to create Freedom. It was the consequence
of the existence of the Free Software Movement – FOSSIL,
apparently, if you have been listening to today's proceedings –
but, actually, I think, a more or less living organism. The Free Software Movement is a conspiracy to save the 21th century from
itself, generated in the last quarter of the 20th century by a series
of people who worried about the nature of technology free of ethical
an social imperatives for the securing of liberty. The purpose of the
Free Software Movement can be defined fairly simply, as follows:
''Make technology that supports Freedom, through sharing. Put that
software in everything. Turn Freedom on.". So far, we have
completed stage one of that process: the software intended to support
freedom now runs everywhere. When I was a young programmer, in the
1970s, software engineering had a single overarching goal, which was
summed up in a short phrase: "Write once, run everywhere". Nobody
did it. We did it. Freedom now runs on everything, from the smallest
object in your pocket to the largest cluster of computers in the
world, whichever one you're talking about. Indeed, neither the stuff
in your pocket nor the largest computers in the world can run on
anything else reliably and with the kind of portability of software
that was the goal of software engineering when I was young. We
achieved "Write once, run everywhere" because we were tightly
focused on a single goal: "Make software that supports Freedom. Put
that software in everything. Turn Freedom on".
Now, we have
achieved, as I say, the goal of stage one: we have built software
that sustains freedom. It sustains freedom in several important
respects: first, it supports sharing. We used that support for
sharing – predominantly, the GNU General Public License and the
other arrangements that protected freedom to share – we used that
legal and social technology to destroy a malevolent monopoly whose
intention was precisely the opposite: "Put unfreedom everywhere.
Charge royalties.". That monopoly is now failing and will soon be
gone. That's happening because freedom runs everywhere and is
available everywhere to anyone who wants it, at no cost, to copy,
modify and improve. That process protects itself against
appropriation, it protects itself against unfreedom manufacture out
of free parts and it does what it can to prevent the rent seeking
buried in the patent system by people who unwisely applied the patent
system to software, in order to enable rent seeking. However, we
have, in the process, created a network whose possibilities for
unfreedom are as difficult and as threatening as the problems in the
network we are seeking to prevent. We have created a platform which
allows free culture: Wikipedia exists, Creative Commons exists,
sharing knowledge is now possible all the way to the bottom of
opportunity levels in every human society, because the mobile
telephone is there and were it not for the rules of so-called Intellectual Property, we could deliver every piece of knowledge,
every kind of art, every thing of human value to every human brain.
In the next generation, we will make a determined attempt to allow
every human brain on the planet to learn. For the first time in the
history of the human race, we will make a determined attempt to
prevent every single human brain from being starved of the knowledge
that it seeks to acquire. If we succeed, we will change the destiny
of the human race, as we always intended to do.
But we face a very
significant problem, one we knew would develop over time, but which
has developed faster and in a more threatening fashion that we
expected and it is built of our parts. You now live in a network
which surveils you more deeply, which knows more about you and which
renders the knowledge about you more dangerously accessible to those
who wish to modify your behavior than anyone of the 20th century
political systems we refer to as totalitarian. Those systems could
only surveil and observe your behavior and they could only do so to
the extent that your behavior was accessible to other human beings
who informed on you. The network now knows your thoughts, your plans,
your question, your dreams, your fears, your uncertainties. It
surveils every party you go to, every drink you have, every message
you leave for a friend. Five hundred million human beings have
decided to allow everything they do in their social lives, from day
to day, to be collected in one big database. Run for profit, by a fool (applauses). If we were to allow that situation to continue for
much longer, we would face a situation in which the very fundamental
texture of human autonomy would begin to be adjusted by the network.
What you search for, what you find, what you buy, when you decide to
want something and what something you decide to want would begin to
be thoughtfully shaped by machines operating at the directions of
those who wish to take economic rents out of the modifiability of
your behavior. Not to mention all the governments which can now, with
a subpoena blank or an administrative order of some kind, seek from
every third party who collects information about you, the information
they require in order to interfere with, disrupt or forbid your
activity. I don't need to explain to anyone who lives in France how power-hungry the establishment can become on those subjects.
Now we come (applauses),
now we come to this unfortunate technical reality described by this
cloudy name: The Cloud. The funny thing about the cloud is the people
talk about it everywhere I go but, if you ask them to explain what it
is they can't do it, because they don't know. So, I'm going to
explain in two – I hope – fairly simple conceptions what the
cloud is. First, the cloud is the server-client architecture of the
Net, on steroids. And second, the cloud is the server-client
architecture of the Net, on steroids, virtualized. The first part of
it comes down to this: the Internet was constructed by researchers
attempting to complete the task of architecting an entirely
descentralised network consisting exclusively of peers. The goal in
doing so was to allow arbitrary machines, in a network of arbitrary
geometry, to survive arbitrary interferences by minor annoyances
like nuclear war by routing all traffic in a completely
non-hierarchical fashion without any regulation by masters over
servants. This was reflected in the very form in which the network
understood, at its beginning, the concept of a server and a client.
Those of you who are custom to using only software produced by the
dying monopoly may not understand this, but everyone who uses Free
Software at least plain passively understands it, because your Free
Software computer treats the server as the computer closest to you
and the task of that server is to serve human interaction. That's how
X-Window works, right ? The X server serves com processes in the
network, all of which are assumed to be equal in hierarchical status,
the opportunity to communicate with the human being - and so it
serves the opportunity to get to your eyeball, your eardrum and your
fingertips. In other words, the Net consisted of a non-hierarchical
collection of processes, in which each human being had a server that
served interaction with him. The basic technical achievement of the
monopoly was to distort all of this completely. Windows was a
degenerate version of the structure of the network originally
architected by people who did not have the same neurological
dysfunctions as the architects of the monopoly (laughs). The purpose
of the server-client interaction structure in the Net became to
create hierarchies among machines in which some were servers and most
were clients. And human beings used clients to deal with servers
which operated, with respect to that human beings, du haut en bas.
We rebuilt the Net, over a period of almost 20 years, to prefigure
this peculiarly hierarchical and statist conception of the nature of
the Net, which was never any part of the original architecture, but
was solely an artifact of the rent-seeking policies of the
monopolist. Now, that hierarchical architecture of the Net is
enabling the gathering of political power in the center, with respect
to disempowered endpoints. And both manufacturers of proprietary
software and the architects of proprietary networks absorb, as
mother's milk, the business model opportunities created by a
hierarchical Net, with power at the center and disempowered clients
at the edge. Those are the preconditions for the cloud. The unfair,
inappropriate, architecturally unnecessary, economically
anticompetitive architecture given to the Net is the watervapour out
of which the cloud condenses. All that is left to make the thing
called The Cloud is to remove the relationship between iron and the
server. This is accomplished by the uniform adoption of
virtualization layers, many of which we wrote. The virtualization
layers makes it possible for hierarchy to use the accumulations of
power at the center evermore efficiently and evermore mysteriously
with respect to the disempowered client at the edge. Taken to an
extreme, that hierarchical network architecture allows the client at
the edge to be completely disempowered. It receives what is known as
Software As A Service - more appropriately, I think, labeled Software
As A Disservice - that is to say you can't provide any services to
the net, all you have is software given to you to execute by some
master with a disembodied server somewhere. Moreover, and even more
aggressively inappropriately, the cloud comes to be seen as “all
your data, er, belong to us”. The virtualization of storage implies
that the party at the edge of the net no longer exercises control
over her own information, which is physically located at an arbitrary
place chosen for her by the people who run The Cloud. Any legal
obligations that may exist with respect to the control or management
of her data has been lost neatly subverted. If there are, for
example, rules concerning the nature of the regulation of the data in
the cloud in a particular place, data will mysteriously tend to move,
by means even legitimate or illegitimate, to locations where those
regulations are weaker rather than stronger. The North American
economy is slowly shifting thoughts to an economy based primarily on
data mining, which might be thought of as exercise of control over
the data representing the human lives of everyone on Earth. This is
not a recipe for freedom. This is the biggest and most successful
recipe for unfreedom that has ever been devised in history of human
beings. We have come, at the moment we expected it to arrive, we have
come to a faithful set of choices. The technology of digital
computation, storage and control now offers us, at one and the same
time, the greatest possible opportunity, namely the elimination of
ignorance, forever, and the power to allow every human brain to learn
and, on the other hand, the completion of a structure of social
control, more sorrow, more complete, more technologically perfect
than any that has ever existed in the history of human beings.
Dearly beloved, I set before you a choice between life and death.
Fortunately, the tools are still in our hands. We made this stuff and
we can fix the problem.
As I have already
suggested, the primary difficulties that we face arise from two bad
technical decisions, both of them reversible. In the first place, we
allowed the conception of the server as a form of centralized power
divorced from the human being. It was not there in the original
design of the Net, it was not there in the original design of Unix,
it is an artifact of bad software, manufactured by people with ill
will. We do not have to accept the idea that services are
centralized. If we had an enormous number of cheap, reliable,
low-power serving computers, running software designed to provide
services to others on our behalf and storing our data in them, in
safe locations, we could convert a network presently consisting of
centralized services into a network consisting of federated services,
that is services rendered by people to people, for people, in a
non-hierarchical fashion. Second, we could reverse the virtualization
epidemic, not for the purpose of eliminating virtualization or for
preventing those who own heavy hardware for making better use of of
it, but to prevent the idea that you ought not to have a computer of
your own, you ought not to store your data on your own, you ought not
to provide services to the world on your own, you ought to be a
consumer of the services provided by the Net. So, do we have such a
possibility for reversing the centralization of the networks
architecture? Yes, we do.
Already, throughout the
hardware environment of the world you will notice the beginnings of
the distribution of the so-called "plug servers": tiny objects,
requiring very little power, using comparatively low-power, low
speed, but quite muscular little chips, mostly made by ARM. You can
buy, at the moment, at prices indicative of the beginning of a
hardware form-factors run, that is in the neighborhood of ninety to a
hundred-fifty US dollars around the world, objects no larger than a
cellphone charger, which contain a fully operational server with a
wired NIC, wireless, some S-ATA ports, some USB, some serial console
attachment possibilities and so on - in other words, a fully featured
computer, capable of delivering services over the Net to anybody who
wishes to interact with you. Those plug servers, which will soon be
cheaper than cellphones – when they are made in appropriate
quantities – those plug servers, supported by Free Software –
that's us, folks, the people who believe in freedom! - supported by
Free Software, will soon be providing a form of personal private
cloud, which reverses the negative social consequences of power
concentration in the Net. Your data, kept in your home or your
office, securely backup-ed to the plug servers of your friends,
capable of being read by nobody without a search warrant, protecting
everything inside your apartment by intrusion-detection software
which works, providing you free telephone calls over the Net through
Asterisk, allowing your friends in China to climb over the Great Firewall using proxies servers several billion wide, many to many for
the Chinese Communist Party to interfere with, affording you the
opportunity to federate your social life rather than centralize it,
moving you painlessly into a migration of Facebook, Flickr, Twitter
and all the other bad things… You don't lose your friends, you all
just leave, bit by bit, and, as you go, you cease to use the
centralized servers, because you have a direct encrypted channel
between yourself and each of your friends – in other words, we
begin federating what the bad folks centralized. We do this in
machinery which is so cheap, so ubiquitous, so low in its power
demands that we no longer care about reliable electricity – one of
those servers will run on 2 W bands. We will succeed – we WILL
succeed – in providing freedom in a package so inexpensive, so
reliable and so thoughtfully engineered by us, for us, that it will
no longer be possible for people around the network to concentrate
power, to concentrate data or to conduct meaningful surveillance of
our individual lives. We will do this not soon, but now.
The hardware
economics are not a problem for us – they're already solved. The
software economics are not a problem for us – we solved those long
ago. The technical problems are not a problem for us – we're good
at that. That's how we got here! The political questions are not hard
for us: we love freedom and we hate tyranny. We know exactly how to
tell the difference. No matter what it requires a hoodie, or a
spacesuit or a uniform. We know what we're doing. We gonna put
freedom in new things. We gonna spread those things across the
planet. We're gonna turn freedom on. So what I wanna tell you is:
“It's OK! We're still here. We haven't gone away”. The Free
Software Movement isn't dead, it hasn't become “open-”anything
(applauses). We know exactly what we need to do and we gonna do it.
We gonna make it and we gonna say: “Hey, here, we made this
freedom. We think you may like it. Want some? Take it. It's free”.
Wanna join up? Thank you very much!
