[Reader-list] A Contrarian View of Open Source - Bruce Sterling

[Jeebesh Bagchi]

Enjoyable text on software industry, tech attitudes and need for 
solidarities. It is interesting. happy reading.

best jeebesh
--------------------------
http://www.viridiandesign.org/notes/301-350/00325_open_source_speech.html

"A Contrarian View of Open Source"
Bruce Sterling

San Diego July 26, 2002

Thanks for showing up to see the obligatory novelist at this gig.

It's very touching of you to take the trouble to watch me get some emotional
issues off my chest.

You know, I don't write code. I don't think I'm ever going to write any code.
It just amazes me how often people who know absolutely nothing about code
want to tell software people their business. "Why don't they just," that's
the standard phraseology. "Why don't they just" code-up something-or-other.
Whenever I hear that, frankly, I just want to slap the living shit out of
those people.

That's like people whose fingers are covered with diamonds complaining about
the easy lives of diamond miners.

You're, like, seven miles down in this diamond mine, and these cats are
laboring, laboring with these pickaxes and blasting caps and giant grinding
machines. And it's like: "Why don't you people just put in a tomato garden
down here? Don't you like fresh air in this diamond mine? How about some
zinnias and daisies? You over there, with the carpal tunnel wristbands ? you
sure look pale, fella! Don't you like the sunshine?"

They don't like to confront the sweat, and the labor, the human suffering....
Even people who are in the industry don't like to talk about what a massive
drag it is, to sit there, grinding code, at 3 AM, as your eyes, and your
wrists, and your spine, all slowly give out. Everybody has to come up with
these farfetched, elegant, literary metaphors to describe this process.

Stuff like "the Cathedral and the Bazaar." Now, I get it about being the
bazaar. I'm a science fiction writer, I got no problem at all with bizarre
stuff. But commercial software? Microsoft? As a cathedral?

Have you ever seen a cathedral? Cathedrals are medieval religious centers
where people do penance and take vows of poverty. They worship relics of the
holy dead in there. Microsoft is a commercial software company. It's the
commercial software company. It's got to be about the least cathedral-like
structure known to humankind.

When you go into a cathedral, you don't read shrinkwrap licenses. There are
no developers' documents in there. You've gotta read stuff like the Bible in
a cathedral.

And it's an interesting book, the Bible. Not one word about software in it.
It's got all these obscure parables and weird war stories and such.

Like the story of Jesus Christ chasing the moneylenders out of the temple. I
know this is kinda hard for contemporary people to get their heads around,
but Jesus Christ used to beat people up with a whip for being capitalists. He
chased the moneylenders out of the sacred precincts. They were extremely
alarmed by this. They were screaming stuff, like "Hey wow! The Prince of
Peace is beating the living crap out of us!" He didn't even claim that they
were crooked moneylenders in the temple, it's not like they were Enron or
anything. It's just ? the very idea that there should be any commercial
activity whatsoever in a cathedral ? this was enough to make the world's best
known prophet and pacifist philosopher completely blow his top.

This interesting divine perspective is kinda overlooked in Eric Raymond's
metaphorical treatments, I'm noticing.

When you look at the way Open Source plays out in our society, you get a
rather traditional industrial dynamic, very early-20th-century.

It's this classic artisans-versus-factory model. It's not about a bazaar.
Because bazaars are pre-industrial, they're swarming with crooked rug
merchants, and pickpockets, and lepers straight out of the Arabian Nights.
Open Source isn't about being some kind of canny rug merchant with an eye out
to make some fast dough. Open Source, basically, is about hanging out with
the cool guys.

It's very tribal, and it's very fraternal. It's all about Eric, and Linus,
and RMS, and Tim and Bruce and Tom and Larry. These are guru charisma guys.
They're like artists, like guys running an art movement. Guys who dress up
with halos and wear wizard hats. That form of organization is not a bazaar.
It's not a cathedral. But it nevertheless has some distinct advantages.
Because if you're in a cathedral then you have to wear this holy uniform all
the time. If you're in a bazaar you have to stake out this patch of ground
and keep it, and defend it, or just get overwhelmed by other guys greedier
than you.

The coolest thing about doing this artsy noncommercial creative work is that
you get to stop. You get to throw up your hands and quit, if you want. It's
like a charity. The widows and orphans are telling you "Thank you for not
letting us starve, kind sir!" They're all grateful to you, they're touching
the hem of your garment. You get to feel pretty good about what you're doing,
and if you're tired, you just stop. It's like: "Okay, I'm tired! I've got
compassion burnout now. No more free software. Lady, you and your damn kids
can starve."

Nobody can do anything about that sudden refusal on your part. "Well, he gave
us a really cool algorithm.... What more can we possibly ask?" If you abandon
your rug in the bazaar, people just steal it immediately. They steal
everything in a hot second. But if you abandon your open source code, the
code just sort of sits there. Other people pitch in, and it gets bigger and
fatter. There are big festering piles of code, huge piles of code. This has
been playing out for seventeen, eighteen years now.

A classic struggle in other ways. You've got the Stallman free-as-in-freedom
model... This guy sees code as some kind of handmade luxury vehicle. Maybe
it's a tank. And you've got Gates, who is the commercial industrialist robber
baron. The Ford Model T... any color you like as long as darkness is the
standard.

If you're prettier then Gates underprices you, and if you're cheaper then he
uses Fear Uncertainty and Doubt. This guy... William Gates? He's my age. He's
a gentleman of my generation. We're a few months apart in age. I've never met
him. I hate to pick on him. Really. He's obviously a very smart man. And he's
a nicer guy, as a human being, than a lot of his competitors. But I have to
pick on Bill, instead of Bill's competitors. Because Bill physically killed
and ate all his competitors.

The older Bill gets, the uglier he gets. He's a guy riding a white horse,
that turned into a runaway bronco bull, that turned into a scaly crocodile,
and now, it is turning into some kind of diseased revenant. It's like the
Steed of the Nazgul, those black, flying zombie horses that explode when
exposed to fresh water. That's what Microsoft is like now. These guys, these
Nazgul... They used to be kings. They were originally human beings, they had
wives and children and futures, they had their own little nations to govern
and manage. But then there was the One Ring ? One Ring to Rule Them All. One.
And they couldn't resist. And they gave in.

It's not even about "Fear Uncertainty and Doubt" any more. The flavor of it
has changed. If you look at it, it's all about Fear Uncertainty and Hate.
"Where do you want to go today ? to give us some money, OR ELSE?"

And the answer ? the popular American answer, really a kind of consumer
uprising here ? is: "I wanna go steal some MP3s!" That's the answer. "I wanna
go pirate some Hollywood movies and keep 'em for myself, please!" And the
reaction is: "Gee, our customers are criminals! They must be spied upon, lest
they hurt us, and one another!"

The result is 95% market domination by Microsoft. But that's not a market
economy. That's not even capitalism. That is a state-capitalist,
state-sanctioned monopoly that Mussolini would have smiled on. Mussolini used
to give the people of Italy free radios. But they would only tune in to the
fascist station. This was supposed to be the only kind of radio that people
in Italy understood. This was the entirety of Italian radio as a medium.
Mussolini's radio had just one big dial on the front that said "Radio Zone."

The devices we're looking at now have that vibe to me. The contemporary PC,
this is like hostility and paranoia made into a plastic consumer device. By
Intel, and Dell. And Bill ? I don't sense that he's happy about this. The man
seems troubled. He has a guilty conscience. He's vaccinating kids in Africa
who don't have telephones, while kids in the USA who have Pentium 4s are
spewing his viruses.

What the hell kind of industrial policy is that? Teddy Roosevelt would jump
down off Mount Rushmore and kick our ass from hell to breakfast for
tolerating such a situation. It's the Palladium Security State. It's an
operating system that hates and fears you.

Microsoft Windows is slowly but surely becoming an armed terrorspace. It's
like an airport. You go into an airport nowadays, it's really kind of amazing
that the people who run them still expect you to spend money in there. They
still pretend to you that you are this pampered jet-set consumer, instead of
a captive under armed guard, which is what you are.

People in airports do horribly oppressive things to you. They go through your
shoes, they empty your pockets. They confiscate various small but valuable
items. "Where Do You Want to Go Today?" That's what they say in the airport,
but there's this skeleton grin behind that question. There are men in camou
with automatic weapons. There are surveillance cameras all over the place.
You can't bring in your wife, your girlfriend or your grandmother without a
ticket. You can't sob as you kiss your mother goodbye for the last time at
the airport, because it's all on security tape. Then you wander into this
rigid, bloated terrorspace, where, during every move and every action you
undertake, it's presumed that you have swallowed dynamite and will cheerfully
kill anyone you see.

And yes, that's also the contemporary computer system. The computer industry
is really screwed-up now. There are razor-thin returns on investment, because
you are no longer allowed to invent anything or genuinely surprise anybody.
And if you do, that will be immediately swept up into Microsoft's operating
system, or even Apple's dinky little operating system. The computer industry
is losing tons of money now.

All that boasting about the largest legal creation of wealth in history...
It's the largest semi-legal destruction of wealth in history. It blows my
mind that these VC guys, who spent 20 years blathering about Ayn Rand
capitalism, don't just admit that they live and work in a stagnant monopoly.
What a bunch of limp-wristed sissies these captains of industry turned out to
be, all these swaggering mercenaries so eager to punch out the bureaucrats in
the free market. They're a race of slaves! They're like deer in the market's
headlights, they creep around like mice.

It reminds me a lot of METROPOLIS. That old silent movie, with the robot that
turns into a pretty girl? In that film, METROPOLIS, they've got this
sweet-tempered liberal girl, who's trying to educate the workers' children.
But she gets kidnapped by the corrupt oppressors from the top of the
givernment. Then in comes this deranged operating system that moves like a
woman.... The difference between the denizens of METROPOLIS and the movers
and shakers in the computer industry is that the degraded proletarians are
willing to rebel, while the Americans just moan and writhe in their sleep as
their stock options go underwater.

It amazes me that the grocery boys in Silicon Valley don't just kick them
unconscious and take their sports cars.

The stark moral choices that underlie all this... they just keep getting
starker. There's nothing newly created. Even free software guys, who like to
spend a lot of time talking about grand community-building schemes, spend
most of their working time aping commercial products. That's what they do.
"We've built something that can interoperate with Microsoft!" That's like
sticking banderillas in a bull, when the world really needs at this point is
something like... a piping-hot catfish dinner.

OPEN SOURCE CONFERENCE ORGANIZER: I'm sorry, sir -- we have to move your
 room.

Bruce Sterling: You have to move my room?

ORGANIZER: Yeah. Sorry.

Bruce Sterling: Can't you just throw out half the audience?

AUDIENCE: (laughs ominously)

ORGANIZER 2 (soothingly): It's just right next door, though.

Bruce Sterling: It's "just right next door?"

ORGANIZER 2: Just right next door.

Bruce Sterling (to audience): Are you guys gonna rebel at this?

Guy in Audience: Open up the walls!

ORGANIZER 2 (hastily): No, they can't open up the walls. They're gonna move
that one in here. That room next door is bigger. More people will be able to
sit down. It'll be more comfortable for everybody.

Bruce Sterling: Maybe I should just wind this up.

AUDIENCE: NOOOOO!!

Bruce Sterling: You're really going to get up? Like the waters of the Red
Sea? Okay, let's see you do it. I'm the last man out of the room.

(tape break)

Bruce Sterling: I know lunch is coming, we've got to eat... But I'm still
venting my ever-growing fury!

There's a noticeable lack of basic creativity in the free software world,
that is alarming and not very flattering. People in free software still have
a basically piratical state of mind. They want goods without working for
them. They still have a cracker state of mind. "How can I look through that
closed bedroom window?"

"GNU's Not Unix." Okay, you're "not Unix" ? but what are you really? Why do
you have to live in that shadow? The shadow of this other enterprise. There's
something basically juvenile about that. Something that is unworthy,
creatively feeble, childish.

But it's not as bad as the scene in commercial software. There's no reason to
buy Microsoft dot-Net stuff that spies on you and installs digital rights
management gizmos against your will. Why buy into that? Do you want to get
sucker-punched? Do you want to make Jack Valenti the king of your box and
Mickey Mouse his commissar?

Plus there's those virus horrors. And why people are willing to do this to
the people they love and trust best in the world is beyond my understanding.
If you had some kind of sexually transmitted virus, and you woke up in the
morning dripping pus, I would hope that you would understand that there was
some kind of moral need for immediate action. Even if it was kind of
inconvenient and humiliating and personally degrading.

But if you're running Microsoft Outlook and Outlook Express, it somehow seems
kind of okay to spew Klez-H, Sircam, Klez-E, Magistr-B, Hydris-B, Magistr-A,
BadTrans- B, Vavidad.E1, Yaha-A and MyLife-J.

And you're not just infecting your girlfriend, boys. You can hit your mom,
your grandmother, your maiden aunt, your ten-year-old daughter! "Gee, why
didn't you teach your ten year-old not to click on the attachments?" Because
she's ten years old, you moron!

I had a long argument about this with Cory Doctorow. He and I were really
going at this hammer-and-tongs, over the growing spam and virus crisis. And I
thought that there needed to be some kind of political and legal solution.
Like building a galvanized steel cage in Cuba and throwing all the spammers
and virus writers in there as unlawful combatants who are clear and present
deadly enemies of humanity.

AUDIENCE: YAAAY!!! (Applause)

Whereas Cory is a techie, and he wants a techie solution. So he's a fan of
stuff like Vipul's Razor, and he doesn't mind if the traffic on the Internet
is 96% fraud, malware and evil garbage as long as none of it gets on his
 feet.

So, I let Cory convince me and I installed Mozilla on my Mac. And its
bug-track completely wrecked System 9. So I stopped fighting with Cory
Doctorow. Not because he was winning the argument, but because his fucking
Open Source solution cost me three days of desperate effort to restore my
files! So I took the further trouble to install System X, and I backed up
everything of course, but I still don't get it about System X quite frankly,
and neither does System X. It never knows what it's running. There are chunks
of Microsoft code in there like giant lumps of black putty just lying to you
about what they are doing on the Internet. It's like trying to wade through
drilling mud running this thing. It steers itself by committee.

And Microsoft Internet Explorer and AOL, they desperately hide the realities
of the Internet from you, so that they can profit from your growing and ever
more permanent confusion.

As opposed to the sparkling lucidities of the free software developers! Free
software, basically congealed by people who have some vague idea what they
are doing, and are loathe to spend any time writing down specs, when they
could be writing new features.

Another Guy in Audience: Preach it, brother!

"Don't like it? Hey, just reconfigure it yourself, don't bother me!" It's the
Hippie Squat Model of software architecture. "If I want to paint the doors
and floors bright blue and put the toilet right into the kitchen, why not?"

It's very offensive to user sensibilities and it is as ugly as a sack full of
penguin guts. But, you know, that is a vital systemic advantage. Because that
catches the eye of the committed crusader. It actually brings people in who
will stay and work hard for no money.

It's like life in a refugee camp. If you want Doctors Without Borders to show
up, you don't want to have yourself any kind of really nice refugee camp.
With some flowers, and a safe place for old ladies to knit. You want that
inferno of starvation and disease that looks really good on CNN. Because if
you actually organized a refugee camp, then you'd have stuff like taxes and
gas and electricity and police protection, as opposed to what one gets in
squatters' camps, which is, incessant internal quarrels. Because there's
never just one gang trying to run the anarchy. You get bitter quarrels,
between Free Software and Open Source, between the Stallman hero-model and
alternative business.

And, that's an interesting discussion. But, nevertheless, it's an industrial
model which is in practically every sense much less attractive than the one
of the early 1980s, when there was a genuinely functional computer industry
with some actual competition in it and room for real innovation.

But at least open source is clearly better than the Microsoft stranglehold.
Man, US Steel, General Motors and Standard Oil at their worst and cruellest
were better than that.

What's the real price you pay for free software? The real price you pay is
having to bow the knee to the weird organizational model and the freaky,
geeky social values that prop that up. If you're the user, you have to hang
out with Linux freaks.

Yet Another Guy in Audience: And buy us beer!

That is the price. You pay a price in attention and respect, and hours and
hours and hours of selfless devotion. You keep feebly hoping that something
will actually work right out of the box, and maybe even look nice. But then
you get stuff like Gnome, KDE and Eazel... They just don't like to do the
boring stuff for the stupid people! That's just not in the job description!
It's not even a job. That's the secret.

You know, information doesn't get to be free. But that's got very little to
do with the bits, or the atoms, or the bandwidth, or the speed of the
copying, or any of these things that techies lick their chops over.
Information stays expensive because of the social processes in which
information is embedded.

Let me see if I can make this clear to you with a whole series of nice little
literary metaphors. We need to personalize this problem, as a series of human
stories about human relationships.

First of all, let's just forget about stuff like cyberspace and the speed of
light and the weightless bits. Given that there is a ferocious triple
dominance of Microsoft on operating systems, Intel in chips and Dell in
hardware, the computer industry is finally getting boring. Almost as boring
as my own business, the book business. It's still pretending to innovate, but
its glamour routine has gotten all ritualized. The machines are slow, the
programs are bloated, the changes are cosmetic, just like the heyday of
Detroit's Big Three carmakers, so many years ago.

The computer business wants to be really hot and sexy. It's like
eavesdropping on a rich kid's affair with a supermodel. He's the user, he's
the customer. He's eager, he's gullible. But she'd better be taut, hot, and
totally glittering, or he'll pitch her right off the edge of the loading
 dock.

She's the vendor. She's this lean, mean, beanpole- tall jet-setter who's
always heaving iron in her gym or preening before the cameras, screaming
hysterically for next season's fashions. And as long as both of them don't
know what's coming next -- as long as they can't outguess that, as long as
they just plain don't know -- then they'll be as glamorous as all get-out.
Just as long as their bubble of mutual infatuation has yet to burst.

Because in the information economy, everything important that happens is
about the relationship. The information economy is about who promises what to
whom. Behind the scenes, it's all about commitment.

The point is to make it harder to break up with me, the vendor, than it is to
put up with my continual exploitation. There are basically six ways to do
this. They get used in the information business all the time.

Number One. A contract. We'll put it on paper. We'll make it a legal, binding
relationship. We somehow agreed that we really need each other in order to go
on living. We stood in front of witnesses and we agreed to stick it out no
matter what. That's normal, it's honest, it works. Unless it doesn't work, in
which case it gets really nasty and leaves permanent scars.

Number Two. Brand-Specific Training. I'm really complicated and hard to
figure out, but I give you something you just can't seem to get elsewhere. We
spent endless days and nights talking over all my painful personal quirks and
kinks, and getting all wrapped up in me and my needs. Now that you finally
understand me, it just seems exhausting to throw me over and try to date
somebody new.

Number Three. Search Costs. There's probably somebody else who would suit you
as well as I do, but you're never going to find them ? not in a sorry little
town like this, anyway.

Number Four. Information Formats. Nobody else can even speak our language
around here. We've got a private argot of voodoo keyboard rituals. It's like
a private lovers' baby-talk. If you try to ditch me and pick up somebody else
talking that way, she'll look at you as if you came from Mars.

Number Five. Durable Purchases. You bought a huge mainframe and special
scanners and printers, and a car and a fridge and a house. You can't just
walk away from all that. Boy, can I ever make that cost you.

Number Six. Loyalty programs. I seem to like you better every time we go out
together. I come up with all kinds of sweet little favors based on how well
we're getting to know each other. Your Mom and Dad will love me. So will your
friends and family. Look how thoughtful and generous I am with the people who
can commit. Let's all get real, real cozy.

There are some other interesting aspects of this informational romance. They
may not seem real technical ? you may not find them built into the hardware ?
but these gambits all get people to pay big, expensive wads of money for
information that wants to be free.

A. Branding and Reputation. Listen, baby: you can trust me. I've got
breeding: my famous family of products has been around for generations. I'm
just not that kind of guy! Why would I risk all that just to take advantage
of you in this one little situation? Stick with the gold standard ? me and
mine ? and save yourself a lot of heartbreak.

B. Standards-Setting. Everybody depends on me. I shoulder the grave
responsibility of being reliable and predictable. I am the authoritative
source through which all good things flow. The government smiles on me. So do
international committees. If it doesn't work with my stuff, it just plain
doesn't work.

C. Expectations Management. Also known as "Fear Uncertainty and Doubt." I
know you're thinking of buying from that other vendor. But his stuff is
hazardous and will injure you. Besides, I'm making one of those myself, just
next quarter. Mine will be much better than his, and more people will use it,
so you'll just have to buy it from me anyway, and plus, everybody will laugh
at you. You'll lose your job. Look at the way I stepped on my competitors. I
could step on you, too.

D. Creeping Featuritis. I'll add more and more "attractive" features to keep
my jaded user intrigued. You like eye shadow? Lip gloss? Tattoos? Piercings?
How about some latex and black rubber? Would a clown wig help?

E. Sell the Organization, Not the Information. Let's be very clear about
this. I'm not selling you ones and zeros. You are hiring me as your grand
vizier, because I have a deep cybernetic insight that is denied to lesser
beings. I'm an indispensable part of your management team. Just give me your
wallet, I'll look after all that.

F. Dubbed Local Versions. It's too hard to get a date in the English-language
market, because they're all so cynical and sophisticated! But I'll be
wonderfully glamorous if I take everything I learned and translate it into
Hindi, Chinese and Malay.

Quite a spread, isn't it? You wouldn't think relationships could be so full
of pitfalls!

And then ? there's the Open Source Model.

That Linux Girl. That little slip of a hippie girl.

She's barely noticed at first. She lives in a little trailer shack, and her
address at MIT is 666 Infinite Corridor. She's got this mad geek stare in her
eyes. She's got open arms, and a threadbare tank top, and unbuttoned jeans.
Free Love, that's what it's all about for our Linux Girl. Free like freedom,
free like beer, free like, whatever.

She's playing old, sentimental, Linda Ronstadt albums... "You and I travel to
the beat of a different drum"... Love, Peace, and Linux...

"I love geeky guys," says the Linux Girl. "All geeky guys, I love ALL geeky
guys. And I'm not ready to settle down. EVER!! I don't do that AT ALL!!
Washing your socks, ironing your shirts, HA HA HA, let me offer a light
little hippie-girl laugh here! Just cruise on by the trailer, handsome! I'll
take my clothes off. No, it's better than that. I'll take my RIBS off! You
can see RIGHT THROUGH ME! I've got nothing whatever to hide! I am open all
the way through!"

The A&R guys from the industry are dropping by... "We may have a star here
boys, I'm liking this Janis Joplin thing... But wait a minute, Janis here
doesn't do anything but free concerts! And I guess her code looks pretty
tight and shapely, but her body is completely transparent! You can't get
anybody to pay to see a woman sing when her body is clearer than glass! It
kinda defeats the whole purpose, really! It's like some kind of totally
academic thing she's got going on here! She's like the Visible Woman! There's
something creepy and medical about her..."

Free Love as a policy is sort of okay. I mean, people will kinda overlook it
when you're young... Because they expect you to die, of VD or AIDS or
something! But the Linux Girl just laughs at viruses. "HA HA HA! Only
debutantes from Redmond get viruses!"

And then she starts having children. Any guy's children. She'll have your
child, as long as you're not particular about giving it your name. She's got
a whole brood of kids, like Sendmail, and Postfix, and Apache, and Perl. And
some of 'em die young, and some are mentally retarded. But the hippie earth
mother is just hitting her stride here. She's a one-woman demographic boom!
She's having litters of kids, kids by the dozens.

Cops are coming around, and stuff... "Is this your trailer park, ma'am?"


"Not really, officer!"

"Could we see some ID, please?"

"I never bother much with any official papers!"

"Are you from around here, ma'am? You don't look very American."

"Actually, I'm Finnish, officer! Look at this old birth certificate!"

"We'd better run her in for questioning.... Whoa! I can't even get a grip on
her! It's like pitchforking mercury! It's like she's made outta mirror
 sites!"

And the guys from Redmond come by and roll down the smoked glass in the back
of the limo... "She's DISGUSTING! She's a cancer on our community!"

Now the very earth is starting to crack where this woman walks... She's as
big around as a bus! She's got children in places other business models can't
go, places they've never even heard of! She's got children like... Red Flag
Linux.

This Chinese kid, in a little Mao suit. "Thank you for the free software,
Mother! We will destroy the running dogs of Wall Street now!"

"No problem, Red Flag, they're doin' it to themselves! He's such a polite and
disciplined little boy, my Red Flag Linux!"

And then there's the Simputer. He speaks Telugu and Hindi and Urdu, and he
costs only two hundred bucks!

"I love you Mom! I am the future, Mom! Demographics and birth rates are on my
side, Mom! My new President is an atomic rocket scientist Mom! Someday you
will die, Mom, and I take you to the Tower of Silence for a Parsi funeral
where the vultures will eat your flesh, and then the future of computing will
be mine as far as the human eye can see!"

"HA HA HA, oh my Simputer boy, he's so imaginative!"

In conclusion: these are some pretty hard times.

In times of adversity, you learn who your friends are. You guys need a lot of
friends. You need friends in all walks of life. Pretty soon, you are going to
graduate from the status of techie geeks to official dissidents. This is your
fate. People are wasting time on dissident relics like Noam Chomsky.
Professor Chomsky is a pretty good dissident: he's persistent, he means what
he says, and he's certainly very courageous, but this is the 21st century,
and Stallman is a bigger deal. Lawrence Lessig is a bigger deal.

Y'know, Lawrence, he likes to talk as if all is lost. He thinks we ought to
rise up against Disney like the Serbians attacking Milosevic. He expects the
population to take to the streets. Fuck the streets. Take to the routers.
Take to the warchalk.

Lawrence needs to talk to real dissidents more. He needs to talk to some East
European people. When a crackdown comes, that isn't the end of the story.
That's the start of a dissident's story. And this isn't about fat-cat crooks
in our Congress who are on the take from the Mouse. This is about global
civil society. It's Globalution.

I like to think I'm one of your friends. That's easy enough to say. But one
of the true delights of the world of free software is that it's about deeds,
not words. It's about words that become deeds when they're in the box.

And boy, what kind of deeds are we seeing this season! Cybersecurity, the
terrorspace, information warfare, pirate panic... and Mickey Mouse as an
armed enforcer with a Congressional license to stalk and whack P2P networks,
mafia-style? As Worldcom has lost more money that the gross national product
of Hungary? You're gonna see who your friends are before this is over. You
have a lot more friends than you think.

Thanks!

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