That Revolting Zombie In The Vatican

Seriously, I could not be "praying" harder for that disgusting old hate-monger to kick the incontinent-urine-filled bucket. What I don't get is the legions of monstrous ignoramuses swaying and gibbering like retards and wishing for him to hold on for, what, a few more days? Guys, your whole bullshit delusion is predicated on your infatuation with death; you should all be cheering for it harder than I am.

This week's been pretty fulfilling, Thanatos-wise, what with that Terri buying it and Jerry Falwell looking pretty close to it himself. (As far as prayers go, Marc Maron had the best one for Falwell: That he be pounded into the earth like a nail by a falling chunk of frozen blue airplane urine and have it slowly melt into his mouth as he lies dying.) Unfortunately, the week's fatalities also include comic prodigy Mitch Hedberg. I shit you not, guys -- he's fuckin' dead. MTV said heart attack, but, no offense, I feel like his heart was probably attacked by a bottle of pills and a couple of six packs.

I was goind to post the following on my Advogato diary, but I don't know how well it would go over there.

So, on the 26th, as I mentioned, I took the Chinatown Bus to Boston to attend the Free Software Foundation's annual Associate Member's meeting -- the price of membership buys you a day of lectures from the FSF's board. (For those of you who don't feel like to trying to grok their mission statement, you may think of the FSF as a kind of ACLU for software.) The first bus arrives in Boston at 11:00ish, so I missed the first couple of speakers, but here's what happened after I got there:

Henri Poole gave a short talk about the usefulness of community-building web tools for grassroots political campaigns, particularly as observed during the 2004 Howard Dean campaign. Interestingly enough, he recommended Drupal, the base system for CivicSpace; I'd evaluated it while trying to set up undecidable.net and found it to be the most polished but also, in some ways, the least featureful. Henri was careful to emphasize that the FSF is nonpartisan, but most of the questions from the audience were geared towards our currently uncomfortable political position; weirdly enough, several people asked about the "Dean scream."

Gerald Sussman was the next up; his talk was about the history of Engineering. The majority of it was devoted to historical data about the people behind various engineering innovations, as an illustration of the way in which scientists and engineers facilitate eachothers' work -- doing new science requires the invention of new tools, and the resulting discoveries themselves lead to further applications. Towards the end he introduced the problem of process patents, which interrupt this cycle by preventing research from feeding back into the scientific community. The audience didn't have many questions, except for a Russian-sounding guy in the first row who kept insisting that he could prove that all patents, not just process patents, were harmful -- Sussman disagreed, citing some of Edison's patents that led to the electrification of New York City, and required protection so that funding could be secured. (Not an subject I know that much about, admittedly...)

Then there was lunch -- I talked to a few people I was sharing a table with, including a guy who used to work on iPhoto at Apple (he's a GNOME hacker now).

After lunch, Eben Moglen gave a great speech about the legal and financial status of the FSF over the course of the past year. He made a number of interesting revelations, which I here re-reveal, in no particular order:

• The FSF was subpoenaed multiple times for various documents related to the SCO v. IBM trial; some of these subpoenas they took great care to respond to, others they simply ignored
• They've (the FSF) managed to acquire a few million dollars in the bank in gifts from some rather weathy corporate donors
• The latest threatening rumblings, as far as Free Software goes, have been related to patents, and, like the SCO debacle, are traceable back to Microsoft, though perhaps more directly this time than before -- he's been hearing reports of what he called "muggings" on the part of Microsoft, which go as follows: A CEO of a Fortune 500 company receives an invitation to dinner with Steve Ballmer or Craig Mundie; when he shows up, the CEO finds out that, in fact, he's having a meeting with a bevy of Microsoft lawyers who inform him that if his company goes with Free Software, they're opening themselves up to a range of patent-related lawsuits; the lawyers claim to have a detailed analysis of the legal liabilities faced by this CEO's company, but in order to see it, he's gotta sign an NDA -- and in some cases, this NDA says he can't discuss their findings with a lawyer -- any lawyer -- a stipulation that Moglen was pretty sure is illegal.
• Using some the money they've amassed this year, the FSF is opening a legal wing called the Software Freedom Law Center that's going to expand the Foundation's role in representing the developers of Free Software developers in cases dealing with things like GPL violations and patent infringement. He wants to recruit 15 young technically sophisticated law school graduates. The FSF is already assisting projects such as WINE, Plone, PostgreSQL, Apache, and Samba.

He also had some prognostications for what he'd be talking about at next year's meeting:

• He predicted that patent aggression from Microsoft would be the most significant concern for Free Software; a patent showdown of some sort, probably over XML document format interoperability (i.e., MS Office vs. OpenOffice.org), wouldn't be a matter of if but rather a matter of when.
• Fortunately, "when" would probably not be until 2008, owing to the precarious status of Windows Longhorn and vendor demand for "server" versions of their "desktop" offerings. By that time, Moglen said, the FSF would be well prepared to handle whatever Microsoft throws on the table.
• In the meantime, he said, they'd be working on the new version of the GPL, among other things.

Overall, his speech was very upbeat. The FSF was in great shape, he said, despite what it's been through over the past few years. His closing line drew lots of clapping and desk-pounding: "We have earned some political capital, and we intend to spend it."

One of the reasons I went to the meeting in the first place was to hear RMS, and he was next to take the podium. I was a bit surprised by his speech (not least of all by his voice -- it's actually kind of nasal, not at all like Goliath from Davey and Goliath like I imagined) -- the topic had been given beforehand as an explanation of the need for a Free BIOS, but he ended up just rattling off a list of bullet points:

• A Free BIOS is necessary to avoid the entanglements introduced by Treacherous Computing initiatives (Treacherous Computing is Stallman's name for Trusted Computing; he had to explain this to the Russian guy in the first row who couldn't believe an industry group would label their products 'Treacherous').
• Because of the refusal of most major GNU/Linux distributions to cease including non-Free Software, the FSF has heretofore been unable to endorse any particular distribution. Stallman announced that Ututo GNU/Linux, an all-Free Software distribution, would be the officially recommended FSF GNU/Linux distribution.
• The following improvements were on the table (but not set in stone) for the GPL v3.0:
  • Improved compatibility with other Free Software licenses
  • Better support for linking Free Software libraries with non-Free Software
  • A "retaliation clause" to punish licensees who participate in aggressive patent prosecution (this one seems kind of ill-advised to me)

After each sentence he had to clear his throat -- I feel like he might have been a bit under the weather. When he was finished, he opened the floor to questions. The vast majority were asinine what-if challenges to the language of the GPL (e.g., what if I license my program to someone under a non-Free license until they donate X dollars, at which point I release it to them under the GPL -- is that okay?), which Stallman rightly said he wasn't willing to discuss. Novalis, who, I think, is the FSF webmaster, piped up from the first row and fielded some of them whenever RMS started really laying into someone. Perhaps sensing that the discussion was straying a bit too much Henri Poole raised his hand in the back of the room and asked Stallman what his vision for the next 20 years was, seeing as how it was more or less the FSF's 20th anniversary. Stallman said he didn't have a "vision."

"Well, then, what do you see happening in the next 20 years?"
"Fascism."
"Fascism? That's your vision for the next 20 years?"

RMS had put his feet up on the desk so that he was reclining odelisque-like. He said that the U.S. government was basically obliterating everything that was good about life, period. "Doesn't the pendulum swing both ways?" someone asked. RMS didn't think it had ever swung this far right for so long before. At this point, the moderators thought it prudent to get the next speaker on stage.

It was Larry Lessig, who you may remember from his appearance on The West Wing, or his book Free Culture, or for just being an all-around genius. His talk was accompanied by a PowerPoint presentation in which the slide transitions were fairly exactly synchronized with his spoken words -- neat! What he talked about was kind of a re-tread of the things he wrote about in Free Culture, basically that people who produce creative works are always building on what's come before them (a process he refers to as "remixing"), whether or not it's obvious from looking at their final product, and that we, as a society, are in a uniquely restrictive climate when it comes to the rights of creative producers to do this as a result of overly restrictive copyright laws (which stem, in part, he thinks, from the inability of lawmakers to address the fact that digital use of copyrighted materials unavoidably creates copies). He talked a bit about his Creative Commons project, which provides and promotes the use of custom and varyingly "free" licenses for creative work, to allow creators to permit selected "remixing" of their work without giving up other rights. He'd made a rather cryptic remark at the beginning of his speech about how he might have to run for the exit after the audience heard the claims he was going to make, which turned out to be:

• The Free Software movement should get more involved in the production of Free creative software products, to facilitate the creation of culture in the developing and third world
• We should promote the concepts of freedom to creative content producers all over the world, even if the creators are unwilling / unable to produce their work on Free Software platforms.

It was a very good speech, even if I'd already heard most of it before. When Lessig finished talking, Stallman stood up in the back and said, "The Free Software Foundation will never support the use of any non-Free Software platform."

Thus began a half-hour long argument between the two of them in which the audience and Eben Moglen eventually had to intervene. Lessig argued that you could certainly urge creative producers in parallel to support both Free licensing and Free Software, but it would be a mistake to write anybody off (and potentially lose out on the production of creative work) simply because they wanted to make their art in Macromedia Flash. Stallman said that freedom was more important that creativity and that there was no excuse, period, for endorsing non-Free Software in any context, even by looking the other way while promoting creative freedom. Their argument got fairly heated -- at one point, Stallman asked Lessig why he'd think it was a good idea to give a speech like this, and Lessig replied, "I'm going to a board meeting tomorrow and you said that the price of going to the board meeting was coming here and giving a talk." Rowr. So eventually Moglen stood up and said that he thought the intersection of creative freedom and Free Software was going to be a huge issue and that it might be a good idea for the FSF to devote a great deal more effort towards producing Free versions of popular pieces of creative software, like Flash. After some more back and forth between RMS and Lessig, the audience started to disperse and gather around each dude.

I packed up my stuff and hopped back on the bus. It was very cold when I got back to NYC; an aggressive bum at the East Broadway subway station asked if he could have the contents of my Au Bon Pain bag, and I gave it to him, but you know what? I wasn't done yet.