Setting software free: Eben Moglen and digital age morality

Reading Eben Moglen’s keynote address, “Freeing the Mind: Free Software and the Death of Proprietary Culture,” I felt a bit like Richard Stallman while he worked to replace UNIX with GNU: reaching the same destination but apprehensive about the other guy’s route.

Moglen, a law professor and founder of the Software Freedom Law Center, discusses free software v. the behemoths of software largely in moral terms. Software is a public utility, he argues, and one that must be recognized as such because, in the 21st century, it is the cornerstone of “the ethical right to share information” (Moglen 2003). And, for the first time in history, information isn’t weighed down by the heavy, expensive, hard-to-transport molecules upon which it was once carried—pages in books, magnetic clusters on videocassettes, optical stamps on compact discs. Now that everything can be transferred freely through the Internet, it is revealed that information was free all along; it was just those pesky info-bearing artifacts we were paying for.

Moglen goes on to say: “every piece of useful or beautiful information can be distributed to everybody at the same cost that it can be distributed to anybody. For the first time in human history, we face an economy in which the most important goods have zero marginal cost” (Moglen 2003). Quite true. But miraculous as a zero marginal cost may be, Moglen neglects to tackle the issue of the cost of the first copy. This was true long before the Internet.

The first copy of a book is exorbitantly expensive, because the costs begin when the author puts the first page into the typewriter and starts typing. Then there is the author’s time, effort, grocery bills, electricity bills, water, heat, trips to the library—and all before the book even gets to a book publisher, which the digital age purports to replace. The great thing about printing is that the cost of subsequent copies approaches zero. In the digital age, the cost of copies two to two million is zero. Wondrous as it is, it doesn’t erase the time, effort and money that went into copy one.


ref : fsdaily

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rakeshkumar
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