RMS and His Magic Bread

One of the reasons I admire RMS is because of his complete integrity and consistency. He simply will not compromise on his principles, even if it leads to the loss of support from those who are not so rigorous. I'm also impressed by the steadfastness of his vision: he does not flit from one trendy idea to another, but sticks unswervingly to his core beliefs.

But even I am astonished by this July 1986 interview with him, which could have been conducted yesterday:

BYTE: Given that manufacturers haven't wanted to fund the project, who do you think will use the GNU system when it is done?

Stallman: I have no idea, but it is not an important question. My purpose is to make it possible for people to reject the chains that come with proprietary software. I know that there are people who want to do that. Now, there may be others who don't care, but they are not my concern. I feel a bit sad for them and for the people that they influence. Right now a person who perceives the unpleasantness of the terms of proprietary software feels that he is stuck and has no alternative except not to use a computer. Well, I am going to give him a comfortable alternative.

I was particularly struck by the following passage:

Stallman: I'm trying to change the way people approach knowledge and information in general. I think that to try to own knowledge, to try to control whether people are allowed to use it, or to try to stop other people from sharing it, is sabotage. It is an activity that benefits the person that does it at the cost of impoverishing all of society. One person gains one dollar by destroying two dollars' worth of wealth. I think a person with a conscience wouldn't do that sort of thing except perhaps if he would otherwise die. And of course the people who do this are fairly rich; I can only conclude that they are unscrupulous. I would like to see people get rewards for writing free software and for encouraging other people to use it. I don't want to see people get rewards for writing proprietary software because that is not really a contribution to society. The principle of capitalism is the idea that people manage to make money by producing things and thereby are encouraged to do what is useful, automatically, so to speak. But that doesn't work when it comes to owning knowledge. They are encouraged to do not really what's useful, and what really is useful is not encouraged. I think it is important to say that information is different from material objects like cars and loaves of bread because people can copy it and share it on their own and, if nobody attempts to stop them, they can change it and make it better for themselves. That is a useful thing for people to do. This isn't true of loaves of bread. If you have one loaf of bread and you want another, you can't just put your loaf of bread into a bread copier. you can't make another one except by going through all the steps that were used to make the first one. It therefore is irrelevant whether people are permitted to copy it—it's impossible.

Books were printed only on printing presses until recently. It was possible to make a copy yourself by hand, but it wasn't practical because it took so much more work than using a printing press. And it produced something so much less attractive that, for all intents and purposes, you could act as if it were impossible to make books except by mass producing them. And therefore copyright didn't really take any freedom away from the reading public. There wasn't anything that a book purchaser could do that was forbidden by copyright.

But this isn't true for computer programs. It's also not true for tape cassettes. It's partly false now for books, but it is still true that for most books it is more expensive and certainly a lot more work to Xerox them than to buy a copy, and the result is still less attractive. Right now we are in a period where the situation that made copyright harmless and acceptable is changing to a situation where copyright will become destructive and intolerable. So the people who are slandered as “pirates” are in fact the people who are trying to do something useful that they have been forbidden to do. The copyright laws are entirely designed to help people take complete control over the use of some information for their own good. But they aren't designed to help people who want to make sure that the information is accessible to the public and stop others from depriving the public. I think that the law should recognize a class of works that are owned by the public, which is different from public domain in the same sense that a public park is different from something found in a garbage can. It's not there for anybody to take away, it's there for everyone to use but for no one to impede. Anybody in the public who finds himself being deprived of the derivative work of something owned by the public should be able to sue about it.

A little later on, he returns to that loaf of bread:

Stallman: More people using a program means that the program contributes more to society. You have a loaf of bread that could be eaten either once or a million times.

It's an important point, and one I think we could usefully employ to get across what is at stake here.

Imagine that you are in a world where people are starving. Imagine you have some bread, and you were confronted with starving people: most would feel a compulsion to share that bread. But imagine now that you had RMS's special kind of bread that could be eaten once or a million times: how much greater would the duty to share that bread with the hungry be? And how much more despicable would the person who refused to share that bread be?

Translate this now to the realm of ideas. We are surrounded by people hungry for knowledge, and we do possess that magic bread - digital copies of knowledge that can be shared infinitely without diminishing it. Do we not have a similar moral duty to share that magic bread of digital knowledge with all those that hunger for it?

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter and identi.ca.