Thursday, Aug 28, 2008
The DSSA, Pennington says, is a way for the open-source side to go on the offensive, to do more than just defend against new restrictions. "This is one of the first proposals that allow people to gather and support our interests."
But others say that Pennington's DSSA signifies the increasing "politicization" of open source. And they don't think that's a good thing: Technologists in general, and open-source advocates in particular, lean toward strong libertarian ideals. They're not usually inclined to seek solutions through government mandate. Tim O'Reilly, a computer book publisher and the sponsor of several influential tech conferences, recently wrote that the DSSA violated certain personal freedoms. Open-source software, he declared, should stand on its own merits and not be sanctified in the law.
His column, when contrasted with a recent speech by the Stanford constitutional law professor Lawrence Lessig, who told a crowd of open-source programmers that they're not doing nearly enough to ensure that their ideas are heard by politicians, has sparked a spirited debate in the community over political strategy. At two open-source conferences -- O'Reilly's late July Open Source Convention and LinuxWorld Expo -- people were asking themselves these questions: "Should we do more than fight the bills we find repugnant? Should we introduce our own?" And then, if the decision is made to get into politics, there are another, more pragmatic, questions: "Considering the political heft of our opponents, could we ever pull of the sort of legislation we need? Can our political machine match theirs?"
If open-source advocates do decide to muddy their hands in political warfare, there's one more concern, suggested somewhat obliquely by folks like O'Reilly. Politics is dirty, dog-eat-dog; it "spins" and "lobbies" for its side; and having moral rightness in your camp -- as the open sourcers say they do -- doesn't necessarily ensure victory. In that light, some people worry whether Linux, which would enter politics to save itself, could in the process lose its soul.
Lessig, always popular with the open-source community, has -- in the few weeks since he gave his speech at O'Reilly's conference -- achieved the status of an Internet demigod. Virtually every influential blog, discussion site and mailing list referenced the talk, an 8-MB multimedia version of which was posted on the Web (more than a half-dozen mirror servers were conscripted to handle the demand).
In Lessig's view, society has never been as subservient to copyright interests as it is now. "Take the additions [to copyright law], the changes ... to copyright's scope, put [them] against the background of an extraordinarily concentrated structure of media, and you produce the fact that never in our history have fewer people controlled more of the evolution of our culture," he said. "Never."
And some of the blame, Lessig said, could be placed at the feet of the open-source developers in the room: "Now, I've spent two years talking to you. To us. About this. And we've not done anything yet. A lot of energy building sites and blogs and Slashdot stories. [But] nothing yet to change that vision in Washington. Because we hate Washington, right? Who would waste his time in Washington?
"But if you don't do something now, this freedom that you built, that you spend your life coding, this freedom will be taken away ... And if you can't fight for your freedom, you don't deserve it.
"But you've done nothing."
At that point, after Lessig had excoriated the audience for its apparent political apathy, the crowd exploded in applause. "And I was the first one up," says Michael Tiemann, chief technical officer of Red Hat, and a longtime pioneer in the commercialization of free software.
Tiemann sees Lessig's speech as a turning point for the open-source movement, a long-awaited political call to arms. "I don't know if you can hear it on the tape, but I got up to ask the first question. I was the person who suggested that this is a call to organize, this is a wake-up call. We should begin now."
Less than a month later, when Tiemann was in San Francisco for the LinuxWorld Expo, he decided to marshal his enthusiasm in the service of Walt Pennington's DSSA. He organized a march from the Moscone Convention Center, where LinuxWorld was being held, to San Francisco City Hall, a few blocks away, where he showed off Pennington's proposed law. It was kind of a silly march, considering that the DSSA is an aspiring state law and would have no place in a city hall. Tiemann picked City Hall because it was close to the Moscone Center, though it was apparently not close enough for many people, since Tiemann's march attracted only a few dozen followers.
Tiemann and Pennington insist that the poor attendance doesn't mean that the DSSA is unpopular -- it just needs time to catch on. Tiemann is a gregarious, intelligent fellow who, though by all accounts a gifted technologist, has an activist's heart. He's a talker, a debater, and when you speak to him you can tell that he likes the spectacle of politics as much as the ideas he's expressing.
Ask Tiemann if he feels bad that only a few people marched with him on behalf of the DSSA, and he offers a story from his college days, in the 1980s, at the University of Pennsylvania. He says he was one of the first few students at UPenn to join the movement to get the university to divest from apartheid-era South Africa. At one of the first meetings, "there was one professional organizer, two in his entourage, and only about three students from the college," Tiemann says. "But over a period of weeks it started getting picked up, and more people came." And then came Tiemann's action: "We organized the longest sit-in in the history of College Hall -- we beat the record by like four days." And later, Tiemann says, "I organized a campaign to send zero-dollar checks to the alumni fund with the memo 'No money until you divest.' And we successfully torpedoed the fund-raising drive that year."
What that showed him is that successful political movements always start small, but that doesn't hurt their ultimate effectiveness. "One year after I graduated, UPenn divested from South Africa," he says. "Two or three years after that the apartheid regime fell and Mandela was released from prison. When I was sitting on the steps of College Hall, I did not believe that Nelson Mandela would ever see the light of day, let alone be the president of South Africa."
Tiemann adds: "Now, will Richard Stallman be president eight years from now? ... I don't know."
But if fighting to end institutional support of a brutal, racist regime was hard, fighting to end government support of Microsoft, a legal company whose sins are much less grave, will be more difficult. How will Tiemann and Pennington convince governments -- for they say that California is only a starting point -- that proprietary software spells trouble?
If the recent history of Pennington's idea is any sign, it won't be easy. Just like "security," the word "act" in Pennington's Digital Software Security Act is also deceptive, because it makes the plan sound as if it's a real, official bill that lawmakers are mulling over, when in fact there's nothing official about it. The DSSA is not an act, a bill or a law: Currently, it's only several paragraphs of wishful thinking posted on the Web site of the San Diego Linux Users Group. Pennington has shared his plans with several California legislators and many software companies, but so far only Red Hat has offered any real support for it. IBM, Sun and Hewlett-Packard, all of which support Linux, would not comment on it. Oracle -- whose $100 million "no bid" software contract with California was canceled amid scandal this year when it was discovered that the state didn't need the software -- also refused to comment. A Microsoft representative declined as well, but sent a link to O'Reilly's column criticizing the idea.
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