Eben Moglen on Free Software and Social Justice

The original appearance of this entry was in Danny Weitzner - Open Internet Policy

Leader of the free software movement, colleague and friend of mine Eben Moglen gave an important
talk on Free Software and Social Justice at the Plone Conference Keynote earlier this year. Eben gives a most compelling account of the connection between open access to software and general social welfare. I encourage you to read the whole speech, but consider Eben characterizes the importance of software in our society by analogy to previous large scale intellectual, technological and economics developments:

The twenty-first century economy is undergirded by software. Which is as crucial as the underlying element in economic development in the twenty-first century as the production of steel ingots was in the twentieth. We have moved to a societal structure in this country, are moving elsewhere in the developed world, will continue to move throughout the developing economies, towards economies whose primary underlying commodity of production is software. And the good news is that nobody owns it.
The reason that this is good news requires us to go back to a moment in the past in the development of the economies of the West, before steel. What was, after all, characteristic of the economy before steel was the slow persistent motivated expansion of European societies and European economies out into the larger world for both much evil and much good built around the possession of a certain number of basic technological improvements, mostly around naval transportation and armament. All of which was undergirded by a control of mathematics superior to the control of mathematics available in other cultures around the world. There are lots of ways we could conceive the great European expansion which redescribed human beings’ relationship to the globe. But one way to put it is they had the best math. And nobody owned that either.
Imagine if you will for a moment a society in which mathematics has become property, and it’s owned by people. Now every time you want to do anything useful: build a house, make a boat, start a bridge, devise a market, move objects weighing certain numbers of kilos from one place to another your first stop is at the mathematics store to buy enough mathematics to complete the task which lies before you. You can only use as much arithmetic at a time as you can afford, and it is difficult to build a sufficient inventory of mathematics, given its price, to have any extra on hand. You can predict, of course, that the mathematics sellers will get rich. And you can predict that every other activity in society, whether undertaken for economic benefit or for the common good, will pay taxes in the form of mathematics payments.

From there he goes on to show how it is the sharing software will contribute to greater equality, prosperity and justice. I’ve sometimes wondered why so many smart, dedicated, insightful people are so passionate about free software. Eben explains why. Read it!