The network is the name of a social structure. That substantially incresaes the adjecency of people and reduces intermediaries.

This is a also a fundamental change in organizations. It is easy to make organization cause many of the issues are presolved: infraestructure;

Here comes everybody: organizing without organization.

Technical challenge to state regulation: the State needs to abandon legal categories like telephony that are entirley accounted for politics in the 20th Century. Ability from incumbents to deploy State violented in an intent to retain property over things that are no longer that way, under 20th Century vision.

Eyballs market: only 24 hours of eyeballs market in each human being. Attention then, becomes scare. The particular social benefits attribute to the technology as increses in freedom do not necessarly occur.

How does those who defend freedom use this new reality to displace incumbants and bring new forms of production and distribution of knowledge that will benefit all human beigns.

After the “crash” of the Internet bubble, the market for eyeballs was re created on a more rational basis: Google. They had two rules about technology: a) never pay for anything on a per unit basis; b)…

Google use all the computer cluster on earth to study the value of the eyeball. And then they constructed a market to bid on the world attention. The market for eyeballs was recreated? Why it’s going to break? For the moment, it’s a solid system.

If information free, would it crash the eyeball economy? It will change. We know that the content production, which is the usual concern, is less of a concern, because people can live of making free software. And it’s the same with music. The incumbents do not benefit the distribution.

What we will have when we educate EVERYBODY? We have been capitalizing on scarcities that have been destructive from the beginning. I don’t know what is going to happen when we eliminate ignorance with those scarcities?

Information about the eyeball and the freedom of the eyeball are not unrelated.

Microsoft can’t nationalize anarchism.

Is there some stratigic play that can hurt freedom? Yes, Microsoft could win, but now it’s too late. But Microsoft said in 2002 that they would never.

Free Software Movement

Politics is who controles the switches of the Internet. Many are important, but the ones closest to your eyeballs are the ones who are at the end of the network, they are the ones that determine how individuals perceive the world.

Who controls the swicther are questions of politics. Questions of gate-politics. Policits of other things are conducted through the ownership of switches.

Community Reinvestment Act

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_Reinvestment_Act

That is a lie, it was just a matter of economic justice. It’s a lie! Fox news is presenting that. For some people, it will become true: that’s why switches are important. Dictatorship is monarchy with radio, the leader constantly speaking in the home (sort of 1984).

Both ends are regulated (swicth at the home and switch that says who can’t speak). And capture the State is the way to change reality, through media.

Gramsci, IFP in the ethos construction. For Topics in Political Philosophy.

Broadcast media converted for populist purposes… Why Pirate Radio failed? Free Software. Experiments with the 20th Century had to fight the technology from outside. The FS revolution was about taking general purpose switches and changing in all respects how they worked.

Software is at the center because the switches are general purposes computers! The question is what software runs those switches and to whom does it work?

Richard M. Stallman

Programs that could be copied, modified and shared. For Stallman, it was a moral problem. It was wrong from prevent people from sharing. It was a moral duty, like Thoreau. I have a responsibility to live, I will make what I am allowed to do, to make and share. I’ll make a system to do that.

He is responding to UNIX.

The largest manufacter of computers in the 1960’s is AT&T. The consumed all of their computation internally. But the problem of building the Bell system was being compatible across different technologies. In the mid 60’s they got a question: how to build a building operative environment that can work in different hardwares in a uniform way so we can ignore the hardware architecture.

Rights one run everywhere.

Unified OS: UNIX.

Some technical decisions.

Binary language

To…

Reading that humans can understand.

In order to read object code, you can’t understand, modify or share. What you need is source code!

000101000101010010101 __ _____ __ ADD R6, 3 (R4)

Today, Windows is only object, source code is not under there.

Unix was not like that. UNIX would have to be written and distributed in source. The reason that this seems like a technical challenge is that the writing of an OS was not thought possible. The technical challenge of writing a program in a high level language was difficulty.

In Bell Labs, they developed a language who’s source code is understandable by human beigns that could compile to a nice code that could work. The language was C, and there they wrote there all the UNIX tools.

C was a language for people to make mistakes, and there’s no such people.

You could put it on a C compilor and would work in different machines

They send UNIX for several places, and people can see the source code, but they don’t have a licence to make modified versions and can’t share modifications. Stallman consider this inmoral, and says that we need to write the whole thing from scratch. Our ideas, with different rules.

Anybody can copy. Any can modify. Any can share. And you extend with the same rights you had.

The things thar replaces is GNU Gnu’s not Unix.

How about we build it from the top down? We will start there depending on UNIX and then we will get to the bottom, and we will shift. That was a good plan. It needed a C compilor, different from every C compilor. It had to solve the problem that Bell labs made, in order to do that, you need a compilor that its very flexible.

Stallman said that he would write that compilor. He knew nothing, so he was completely unrestrained, he made the GCC. He needed a Licence, amd je wrote the General Public Licence. At UC Berkley, some guys were working to improve UNIX, and began new parts to eventually replace the system.

They created the Berkley Systems Division Licence (BSD) that said software, do what you want, they didn’t see that people might turn them on proprietary software, which Stallman did see. BSD was a licence could be used to make code that people could / couldn’t share.

GNU: Share Alike Licences BSD: Free Sharing

Both goods, both values. A lot of good stuff came out of it.

AT&T responded by suing UC Berkley / Eventually, there was a settlmenet. AT&T released some patents, the BSD took certain parts of the SD Units and we will not distribute. That was exactly what Stallman was trying to prevent.

GNU was never attacked, because the principle of control was copyright law. At&T claim was that the authors of SD Unix there was copyright infringement. Stallman principle was that nobody who worked in GNU had nothing to do with UNIX.

Kernel: Stallman said we will write the kernell (the basic program at the OS) last.

Stallman had an idea, that it’s being worked but it’s a dead project.

Layer next to the Kernel is C Library: a library of rutines that gives C programs access to the kernel. There is an API (Applications Program Interface) embeded in the C Library. Everything that is above the C Library layer, you don’t have to know anything except the API, you don’t have to know anything in the kernel.

User Space, that’s where Stallman was working, the kernel was there he didn’t read it, not care about it. Nobody was reading it and copying it. And there were no patents because math functions could not be patented. No wide scale patenting of software. Trying to avoid own knowledge.

Meantime, the software buisness was changing.

Copyright: you get protection for exchange to create (and divulge). For copyright, you had to publish it and register it. You could go to the Library of Congress and read every copyrighted object. Also Trade Secret Law. You wish to keep it secret, and make people promise to not reveal those secrets.

How can Windows be trade secret software and copyright software at the same time?

Why Object Code (00001010101001) cannot be copyrighted? They are only purley functional, they are ment to tell a machine how to work? The rules of Scrabble can’t be copyrighted! Source Code is expressive. The Source Code in Windows is very expressive, that constitutes part of the Code and is copyrigthtable?

TS / CR is a contradiction.

Administrative Rule of the Library of Congress: you have to deposit only 25 pages and the pages you want to!

http://www.empowermentzone.com/copysoft.txt

It’s a rule that can be changed with a stroke of a pen! Microsoft exists because the Library of Congress doesn’t change and administrative rule that can be changed at administrative discretion.

If you write it from scratch, nobody can hurt you. But patent law can hurt you.

Linux Torvalds developed the Linux/Kernel, designed to work for PC’s. Stallman thought that that was not the way (see this controversy).

Copyright is about the expression, not the idea! And that is a constitutional idea for the SC and for Moglen is a moral idea. The SC has to say why it would be OK to patent software, and there are at least two votes that say that it shouldn’t.

-- RamiroAlvarezUgarte - 02 Oct 2008

Please, forgive typos and everything

-- RamiroAlvarezUgarte - 02 Oct 2008