Viridian Note: Bruce Sterling on Open Source

[anna balint]

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


--- "A Contrarian View of Open Source" 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 asa 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 reallygoing 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 wantsa 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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FREE LIKE A PUPPY
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