[Events] Notes on History & Ethics of Free Software resource

[Asheesh Laroia]

Hi Shauna, and all,

A lot to chew on here. Let me start by trying to address your questions, and then
see if I can identify some next steps.

Quoting Shauna Gordon-McKeon (2013-05-20 16:28:24)
> I asked Asheesh to type up his notes for the "Ethics and History of Free
> Software" talk he usually gives at our OSCTC event.  As I was writing up some
> feedback it occurred to me that others might be interested in discussing how to
> improve the talk.  So here it is:  https://openhatch.org/wiki/OSCTC_Resources/
> Ethics_history_talk
> 
> And here's my feedback:
> 
> ___Before we start___
> 
> * Do we need to do this in pure lecture format?  It might be interesting to
> think about how students can engage with the topic more, rather than being
> passive recipients of the lecture.  Even if it's just building in more
> discussion questions, that'd be nice, but perhaps we can do more.

I agree. I'd love to make this more interactive.

> 
> ___1. Preface___
> 
> * These notes can definitely be formatted more usefully.  For instance, the
> very first line is "Should all software be open source?" but it's not clear
> whether that's rhetorical or a discussion starter.  Perhaps when we build in
> discussion questions they can be colored or highlighted in a way to be more
> visible.

*nod*, that would be useful.

> * While I'm on this line: "Should all software be open source?" seems like a
> bit of a red herring of a question.  Do you think the answer is yes?  I don't.
>  I mean, I think it's really interesting to discuss the real and perceived
> weaknesses of free software, but it's hard to do that at the beginning of the
> lecture when attendees don't know much about the issues.  

I do in fact feel strongly that yes, all users of software deserve the permissions
to control that software as it runs on their computer, which are spelled out
equivalently in the definitions of open source software (from OSI) and that of
free software (from FSF).

I do also think that there are real and perceived weaknesses of free software at
the moment (for example, apps with bugs) and structurally (methods of incentivizing
the creation/modification/etc. of the software that are frustrated by the ability
to distribute the software at no cost, for just one example).

Just to explain why that is there. I do want to plant the seed in people's minds that
this is a very reasonable position to have, even if we can't get there overnight.

> * Bringing up RMS in the preface, when people don't know who he is or why we
> should care about his opinions, seems kind of irrelevant.

Yes, *grin*, now that you put it that way, I see that it could be.

I suppose the point is to state that I think this is a reasonable desire, and to
both not "take credit" for the idea (i.e., I want students to not think I came
up with this idea), and not "out myself" as a free software zealot (hence the
desire to attach the notion to someone else).

The correct fix seems to be for me to say that this is in fact my opinion, and
I want to talk about people who have defined the landscape to illustrate what
these terms mean, why they are important, and how they have evolved.

> ___2. History____
> 
> * But did free software really start with RMS? In some senses yes, but in
> others no - after all, the whole narrative you tell here is one of RMS
> defending free software culture from an incursion of proprietary culture.  So
> how did that emerge?  How did software itself grow up?
> * Bonus: starting the history before RMS might give us the option to highlight
> a greater diversity of people.
> * That said, I like the printer story.  It's concrete, and not too long.
> * From section 2.2.5 "this is the GNU project, standing for GNU's Not Unix." --
> Probably should mention what Unix is!
> * From section 2.3 "So he and the GNU team worked to make sure the GNU tools
> and his system worked together." - What GNU team?  How did he get a GNU team?  
> How did people find out that this college student was doing this work?
> * Section 2.5 about free software vs open source brushes past that ethical
> issue quite quickly, and it doesn't get raised again in the ethics section.  
> It's worth considering how deeply we want to delve into this issue and how
> helpful it would be for attendees to think about.
> * From section 2.8 "That's enough history for now."  Is it?  That brings us up
> to 1998, leaving 15 more years of history we could touch upon.  I'm not super
> familiar with free software history so I would really love it if we could talk
> about what else we *could* include, even if we don't end up including it.  

I like the printer story, too! One fun fact is that per 
http://oreilly.com/openbook/freedom/ch01.html , the historical record on the
printer story is actually fairly fuzzy. But as an illuminating story, I do
really like it.

I do try to illuminate the history pre-RMS briefly by saying that when he asked
around to find the person who wrote the driver, it was easy because back then,
there weren't that many people who wrote software, so you probably were friends- 
of-friends with them. I will see if I can put in a few more sentences before.

I think when I actually give the talk I do say what Unix is, something like,
"The operating system that he was used to using." As I write out these responses
to what you wrote, it seems very clear to me that:

* The outline I provided here is just my lecture notes, not the very words
  I try to say.

* I would do well to turn this into a more-well-planned presentation with
  images that serve to illuminate concepts, and with basically every word
  planned out.

Doing the more-planned-out version would definitely help people deliver the same
talk, and it would also help me deliver a consistent talk between events.

Good question about where the GNU team came from. Honestly, it would be useful
to talk about the basics of free software community organizing here, such as
the fact that Richard posted his announcements to USENET, with e.g. a screenshot
of such a message, so that people would have a sense that it is somewhat
analogous to posting a message on a LinkedIn or Facebook group that is generally
about programming. (For clarity, from what I can tell by checking sources now,
he was a staffer at the AI lab, not an undergraduate or graduate student.)

As for brushing past open source vs. free software... this is a personal thing 
of mine to not want to overload newcomers with anxiety about which term to use 
when both terms reflect the same principles of software licensing, and the modern 
use has become quite blurred (for example, searching for [open source ethics] on
e.g. Google leads to lots of hits that one might otherwise label as "free software 
ethics").

I'm very open to specific feedback or suggestions here, but for now my strategy 
remains to tell people why the term open source came into being, and to leave it 
at that.

As for "That's enough history for now," well, it's all the history I have time 
for! I didn't even get to tell my favorite story, which is:

* DeCSS: (1998) How Big Media made open source DVD players illegal

For other stories in the 1998 onward range, they include:

* Adobe eBook DRM, 2001: Why a programmer found himself in jail for showing how
  enable "Read this book aloud" on a no-cost, legally-acquired copy of 
  Alice in Wonderland

* 2002-2007: Why KDE created a totally new web browser, and how its rendering 
  engine (KHTML) became WebKit in Safari, and became the core of the Chrome
  web browser, and outcompeted Opera's own HTML renderer

* 1997-2009: How one math grad student's experiences with Mathematica led him
  to create some of the world's most used (within academia) computer math software
  as proprietary software, only to wake up around 2006, realize he had swindled
  a generation of math researchers of their freedom, and flip out and build
  Sage Math, accruing a team and building best-of-class software for abstract
  math researchers <http://sagemath.blogspot.com/2009/12/mathematical-software-and-me-very.html>

* 2004: Why the web's most self-aggrandizing development firm released Ruby on Rails,
  and how open source and partial code sharing have changed the flavor of web programming

* 1994 on: How a programming language (PHP) emerged from one hacker's scripts to literally
  maintain his personal home page

* 2001: How and why Sun released their newly-acquired office suite, formerly known
  as StarOffice, as free software (now known as OpenOffice and LibreOffice)

* 1995-1998: How Microsoft incorporated NCSA Mosaic code into a new Internet Explorer,
  gave it away, and obliterated Netscape's web browser market (for good or for bad, not
  intending to pass a value judgement here).

* 2005: How the open source code of LiveJournal helped some users leave the website's
  changing culture, but keep the user experience they were used to by forking
  the source into Dreamwidth, in which a community of bloggers learned and taught each
  other Perl, to make one of the most gender-diverse programming communities in open
  source.

* 2001: How the first relase of Mac OS X for the desktop market was made possible by
  embedding and extending open source software, with care to choose non-GPL code,
  preventing users of Mac OS X from having the same freedoms Apple had to build and
  modify the software.

(All dates approximate, just made up from what I remember. Some of these headlines might
not be totally accurate, either, but they're as I remember them, with some basic searching
done while typing them out to substantiate them.)

> ___3. Ethics___
> 
> * More rhetorical questions!  Can we make these actual questions?
> * I think we could have a more concrete discussion of different licenses and
> why people would prefer one to another.  You touch upon this when talking about
> permissive licenses.  I think it's interesting conceptually - which is more
> "free", a license that makes you free to make it un-free, or software that must
> remain free?  But there are lots of legitimate reasons to argue for more
> restrictive or even proprietary licenses - that I think are worth going over.  
> * I love the Skype story but it's not clear how it supports the premise that
> "all software should be free".  I mean, it sure supports the idea that Skype
> should be free software!  But I don't think it's necessarily framed in the
> lecture in the best way?  Maybe link it to security/reliability and the bias
> that people have towards believing that proprietary software is, well, better
> for that?  Alternatively link it with a story about the opposite - a case where
> the freeness of the software decreased security/reliability.

I agree the rhetorical questions should get cleaned up/cleaned out. I try to
provide answers to these, in my own narration,  but that doesn't appear here in
the text as wiki'd.

Having a discussion of the different licenses makes sense. It's also a great time
to emphasize that "free software" is really about users of the software having
freedom, not about programmers having maximal freedom e.g. over their users.

The idea behind the Skype story is to illuminate the need for software freedom 
in communication software. One tragedy in the Skype story is that American 
civil liberties organizers were promoting the use of Skype in China, and due to 
Skype being not free software, there were technical measures in place that prevented 
(and still prevent) people from easily checking if the security claims are 
accurate. If that isn't clear in my delivery, then I can definitely frame that better.

> ___4.  Economics___
> 
> * It would be nice if we had numbers when talking about people working in Open
> Source.
> * We can also touch on alternatives such as open source in science/academia or
> open source work funded by non-profits such as Sunlight, OLPC as opposed to
> businesses.

These make lots of sense to me.

> ___5.  Closing___
> 
> Do we want a more capstone-y wrap up section, instead of just transitioning
> into whatever comes next?

I think that makes a lot of sense to add.


Okay, so I said I'd write next steps. Basically, I should revise this talk by
taking your feedback, adding slides and more of a word-by-word plan that meets
these suggestions.

Feedback on my response here is very welcome!

-- Asheesh.