Blogging The FSF 2007

I'm typing this up on Sunday morning on the F train back to 7th Ave. after de-busing off the Lucky Star bus from Boston.

True to my word, I took the bus up to Brookline last night and stayed at Joel's. His new house is fucking huge, and, using some polite mathematical estimates, he got it for a steal -- I guess because it's a bit run down in some fairly significant ways. Whatever, man. It's got a fucking turret.

The bus ride was great until it got dark -- looking out the window of a moving vehicle is pretty much my favorite thing in the world, but when you can't see anything, you can get kind of button-holed by grim thoughts. I listened to a couple series of The Ricky Gervais show, which helped. After getting out at South Station, I hopped the Red line to Park St. and then got on the Green line, which I'd never ridden before. The trains are much shorter than the ones on the Red line, and the individual cars are tiny, too. And, for a Friday night on a train headed to the suburbs, it was fucking packed with -- from what I could tell -- drunk townies. Halfway along, these two pimply post-high-schoolers got on, each carrying a six-pack. One of them sort of punched me in the chest with his, kind of gripping it like brass knuckles. "Yo," I said. The other, noticing my leather jacket, I guess, asked, "Hey, do you listen to punk music?" "Yeah," I said. "What kind of punk music?" Because I'd been sort of blurting it all week, I came up with "POGUES!" "The Pogues?" said the first one. "Fuck yeah -- that's real fuckin' Irish music!" Did I mention these guys were Irish? They had, you know, real fuckin' Irish faces. Luckily, it was almost my stop, because I was sort of out of things to say. The two dudes, as I was getting off, turned to a couple of high school girls sitting next to me and opened with "Yo, what are you guys doin' tonight? Are you getting fucked up?"

The turret is actually the library room, complete with circular book cases and everything. There's also an outdoor jacuzzi and a fucking bar built into a wall in the basement. The room I was sleeping in had a "secret door" that they hadn't seen when the agent was showing them the place that led into a weird, practically windowless, toothpaste-green room with a bench with an air conditioner above it built into the wall. Joel and Liz surmised that this must have been some kind of rec room, but they really don't know for sure. Past that room was another huge, weird empty room, this one with stairs that led up to an enormous furnished attic whose interior measure was longer than its exterior measure. Also there was a black hole at its center and a howling ghost from another dimension that eats souls just kind of hanging out. Did anyone else read that book? Come on.

We drank wine until 4:00 AM and listened to the new Arcade Fire album. I woke up at 8:00, still kind of drunk, and called a cab to get to the stop for the Green line. I actually got to the meeting in the middle of the first speech this time instead of the fifth. This year it was held in a room at the back of Building 3, which is the one with the columns -- really beautiful.

(Does anyone remember a web site from around 2000 called geekporn.com? It's something else now, but at the time it was a kind of amateur porn site dreamed up some MIT kids that was supposed to feature pictures of men and women of the type you might see in your Computer Science class. Unfortunately, not to make a cliched joke here, that was the reason it didn't really catch on. But there was this really, really gorgeous girl in some of the pictures -- I mean, the rest of the people were, you know, perfectly adequate, but this girl was phenomenal -- and her thing was posing naked in front of Building 3 with a bunch of physics equations drawn all over her body in black marker. I know, you're rolling your eyes. But so now I've been there.)

Gerald Sussman gave the same talk he always gives, focusing on what he refers to as "robust systems" and "paranoid programming" -- pretty much, just that systems should be highly interoperable and flexible in terms of the input they accept and the output they produce. Eh, I think it's debatable. But the innovative thing he brought up this time around was some Scheme syntax he'd developed for writing expression-matching rules. Not just your standard string-matching regexp stuff: These rules performed higher-order speculative matches on Scheme expressions similar to the way ML matches function signatures -- the "/" rule, for example, might match a numerical sub-expression by factoring it. He also indulged in a brief digression based on a description of how a particular species of tropical frog goes through one of its life stages in a strikingly mammalian way (something about the way the way the developing tadpole is positioned relative to the egg) but is otherwise pretty much indistinguishable from other types of frogs. Frogness, Sussman explained, is not defined procedurally.

RMS was in a much better mood this year than he was the previous two years, when he'd kind of slouched into the room and passed out on the table. This time around, he was wearing a button that said "Emacs Loves Every User" -- as opposed to organized religion, I think, don't remember his explanation. He gave a very articulate argument against software patents, bringing up the most convincing rationale I've yet heard, namely: Software source code is more or less acknowledged to be a type of speech and as such it's theoretically impossible and practically infeasible to enumerate the mathematical ideas -- the currency of software patents -- expressed by a program. He mentioned, anecdotally, a case in which the authors of XYWrite (the word processor I used to write practically all my papers in elementary school and junior high) had to send out a downgrade to their users to defuse a patent dispute over automatic word abbreviation -- the patent was later overturned based on prior art found in Emacs. "It's nice to know that I've had at least one patentable idea in my life," said RMS.

Eben Moglen was up next. He's kind of the reason that I've been going to these meetings -- he's an incredibly articulate and charismatic speaker who can go for hours, literally, without consulting any notes or saying "um." He was a bit more brusque than I remembered him being last year and didn't seem to be amused by RMS cheerfully interrupting him at times. As usual, the focus of his talk was on the obstacles facing the world of free software for the coming year -- last year it was patents, this year it's mainly DRM (but also patents) -- and, as usual, he was optimistic. "The breaking point of DRM is nearly upon us," he said. The two main proponents of DRM, he said, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, have an uphill battle ahead of them in terms of making the case for their respective new platforms. Jobs, Moglen said, is hoping that the iPhone is so cool that it won't matter to users that it's completely crippled; Gates is hoping "that an operating system that can be subverted by a 12-year-old to allow him to control his own hardware and destroy everyone else's is a salable proposition."

He discussed at length the provisions in GPLv3 designed to combat DRM, in particular the current peculiar industry practice of selling hardware at a loss and recouping money on subscription-based access to restricted content. Companies like TiVo are going to suffer if and when people relicense under the GPLv3, and they've already attempted to bargain with the FSF -- to no avail -- by offering to remove the encryption on downloaded content as long as the connection to the TV guide service can remain protected. ("You are are under the mistaken impression," Moglen recounts telling them, "that my client is the Free Movie Foundation.") "The tide of DRM is going to turn this year," he said. "If I am standing here next year and it hasn't, you know what to throw at me." RMS piped up from the back of the room: "DVDs?"

As usual, he ended with some rousing bon mots: "You have to be bigger than about a hundred billion dollars a year these days before your CEO doesn't return our phone calls." Then, to the audience, he said, "I ask you to do a thing that has never been done before. I ask you to rearrange Microsoft's patent portfolio for them."

After Moglen's talk, there was a Q & A session with the FSF board members. Thankfully, this year featured fewer people trying to stump RMS with GPL loopholes, just general public flailing over ways of increasing acceptance of Free Software and punishing its detractors. Among the revelations: IBM has 6 full-time people tracking the revisions of GPLv3; there's a good chance Sun might be willing to release Solaris under some variant of the GPL (although Sussman was skeptical: "Humans are so complicated," he mused. "I prefer to deal with machines").

Mako Hill gave a short talk about his draft of a definition of what he calls "Free Culture." I tried to think of reasons I'm opposed to the idea but couldn't get anything articulate together. And that was it for the meeting!

As per tradition, a fair number of people went out to eat at The Middle East afterwards, and this year I joined them. At first I was a little shy, but I was sitting next to Brett Smith and Mako, neither of whom are shy themselves, so the chatter was pretty lively and I got sucked in. Most of the people who come to these meetings seem like they're actively involved in a bunch of pretty important projects -- Wikia, the Linux kernel, Gnome -- and kind of all know each other already, and I'm just this guy who writes a little Scheme and just shows up sometimes. I don't feel like anybody really knows who I am. Still, listening to people talk about all this stuff that we're all pretty passionate about put me in mind of time I spent in college feeling like all I really had to do to accomplish big things was put my shoulder to it and work. Like I said to Eve afterwards, "I want to run away and join the circus. But I think the circus is called MIT."