Saravia D. - Why free software?

Why free software?

Diego Saravia

Secretary of Technical Cooperation. Department of Physics, National University of Salta. Project Leader of Ututo. Former President LinuxMed 2002. Member of the BioLinux Group.

These are some arguments to drive the use and creation of free programs. One View. We are in a complex universe. Life arisen in the whirlpools of earth energy flows has become more complex, richer, and more powerful, apparently challenging the law of disorder or growing entropy.

Today it goes forward searching for set goals by its natural mechanisms of selection and it gets ready to take two steps in this long journey:
It has the ability to interpret and modify its own genetic code and to start designing itself and to all life forms in this planet through straight roads. In Buenos Aires, a few years ago, we were able to listen to Watson, Nobel laureate by his findings on DNA, saying that his goal was to create better human beings. Today, this knowledge is used to heal, to find better medications for painful diseases, etc. Nothing will prevent us from using them in the future to be taller, more intelligent, “better-looking”, and so on, at our convenience. Cloning and in vitro fertilization are nothing more that minor skirmishes seemingly thought to catch the eye.

It has the possibility of integrating electronic mechanisms and programming, proper of the information era, in our nervous biological systems. These techniques driven by the need of finding a solution to impairment, have attained a certain degree of maturity by enabling a blind man to see, a deaf one to hear and so on. Some time in the future, it will be possible to insert a cell phone in the human body to let us communicate to other people in ways, which in practice are, indistinguishable from paranormal phenomena. Computers interfaces, Internet, video cameras, etc. will be natural. Today, only our limited imagination stops us from seeing how far we can get. The increasing capacity of communication, barely implied by Internet, will allow in the future the evolution of mankind into one interconnected body, an entelechy of a complexity greater than anything we imagined. An entity to which will be barely cells.

All technology determines and is determined by social and economic factors that exist where the former is implanted. In both technologies there are determiners that will make a deep impact in the ways of organizing our society in the centuries to come.

The ways of socializing the new technology will determine the future forms of communal organization, of estimating the acquisition of capital that would support them and the benefits generated by them.

Today, the big genetic industry has managed to pour this technology in the field of private property and to its logic of gathering and wealth, using mechanisms called "copyright". Today, genes and organisms are registered.

Until not so long ago, the prevailing model of software licensing was going the same way. Only one big company threatened to be the only one in administering the processes of exchanging and handling of information in the whole planet. Microsoft after IBM, under the flag of an operative system and an office pack, was getting ready to determine the future. A future where they seek to charge a tax for using any information-handling tool. The way in which this was going to condition the future is barely half-seen in the open debate under the label of “Digital Gap”. The new models of software commercialization under the idea .net, reinforce this policy.

The most interesting aspect of the case is that mankind found an answer to this challenge. The information monopoly is broken; a new light is coming. Unlike genetics, the possibility of the monopoly has fallen down. Today we can think of constructing a hyperconnected human community with other tools and without economic determiners produced by capital built-up through the dominion of the value of intellectual works of software.

That is why Microsoft calls us software communists. Devastators of Copyright. It is quite right, that is why we are here.

We can say, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that the history of this fight begins with Richard Stallman, a MIT member, FSF alma mater, who arrived to its singular point with Linus Torvalds, a student from the University of Helsinki, creator of Linux and who keeps at an unbelievable speed, spreading faster than a virus, through the Internet, along with hundreds of thousands of hackers and programmers of all ages, sexes, religions and languages.

Piracy
A new ghost is roaming the planet; pirates threaten our life style, in appearance more American than ever. These disgusting beings have made from sharing a cult, if there is a greater sin in a society that worships individualism.
The name to identify them is promising: pirates. These violators of CDs, diskettes raiders, photocopiers, thieves of videos and songs destroy the property that the large companies have gathered with great sacrifice by paying a minimal percentage or salary to their creators.

As technology helps them and promotes them, since the legal barriers to stop free propagation fall down with the Internet, it is necessary to make up legal barriers to create a property and value where it is difficult to establish them naturally.

When there is no law, they are rapidly invented. That is the only way to understand that our legislators have rushed to pass the ratification for the law of intellectual property for software, and that then the Supreme Court in a weird gesture, has said that the previous law did not include them.

Our Congress has made most Argentine people criminals, just pirates according to the industry. People who lived in legality with their illegal Windows and Office; they become, through law, criminals overnight.

A law against National uses and habits, a law that instead of assimilating reality, it pronounced it illegal, quite a paradox. It reduces the law space using a law. There were no terms, ways to adapt, propositions to dialogue, none at all; just the protection of foreign interests.

Property is a robbery, anarchists used to say and they dedicated themselves to steal. We say that copyright is a way of stopping progress, we believe and we make use of free and open source software, let's make the value of that property disappear.

The children. Our Future
We have to stop the children from sharing their games in CD, through law or other anti-copy means. There is no way to make children understand by using logic the concept of copyright. That what is valuable is not the CD as such, but the content of it, and although they may lend the disc, they cannot let anyone USE it in other computers; if they use it in their own, because then it is illegal. That is why we must create expensive ads, with the image of a pirate. So that the lies repeated so many times become a truth impossible to argue.

How to detect a Mechanical Engineer to-be? Give him a little car as a present; if the car is disassembled in an hour, there is future.

How to detect a programmer to-be? Give him a computer game. If in an hour the child has discovered a way to get extra points overcoming what the author has foreseen…

Hummm, but there is a problem here, a very difficult one. Programs cannot be read, they are just written in the language of the machine... The few who manage to do it go to jail, for example the 16 year-old kid who evaded DVDs zone restrictions.

Which is the fundamental law in engineering? If something works, make a copy of it; if it is possible, improve it.

The best school of architecture, the works of millions of architects through history.

How should new programs be made? By building on the old ones.

But no one sees them, although it is more affordable to move a file from the Internet than traveling to India to see the Taj Mahal, there are laws that keep the secret.

Each programmer who wants to do something has to reinvent the wheel. To solve this, expensive technologies, libraries, objects, technological advancements in slow microprocessors were invented by the need of continuing executing old codes, but they did not work. The only thing that assures the possibility of reusing is the source code, which is why it is forbidden: to protect the copyright. To create an artificial value.

Secrets
Do you remember the Trojan horse?

There are many computer users who can have a little Trojan horse in their computers.

How can they know that the secret code they host does not have a "back door"?

What would enable the one who possess it, to see your files, listen to your conversations by the microphone, and watch your room through your cam?

Science fiction?

It is a fact. Many traps of this type have been discovered. What can prevent a software company programmer from putting one of these things in its programs, even without informing the company?

What can prevent the USA government from asking Microsoft to put a trap in Windows, so the FBI, the CIA, the NSA and others may see what the “criminals” of the world do? A safer world?

Crisis. A melting pot of opportunities.
Our country is smashed, after years of importing everything, it is clearly seen that we do not produce enough to compensate it. This model created so that a few can collect, is not only based on state deficit. Caused by the existence of AFJPs* that borrow to lend to the government, what the government previously used to pay to the retired, keeping by the way, a 30% of substantial commissions plus the corresponding interests.

Obviously, the rulers have maximized the rate of extraction from our country resources. There seems to be no way out. But this is false, there are many things to do.

For the moment, in out little space for discussion, we should not import more boxes with licenses. We should use free and open source software. In other fields, independence is more complex, it is not obvious to produce what we import now and we used to manufacture here.

But in our field is the only possible way.

The End.

There are many more arguments and each one of us like ones better than others. But we must bare in mind the deep sense of the word Happiness: being lawful in Faith, that is to say, to do what one says.

How many of you who read this and agree, keep on using Windows?

*AFJP: Managing companies of private retirement funds in Argentina

Publication: Septiembre 2005

This document is published under the FDL license
(GNU Free Documentation License, by its Spanish acronym. Version 1.2, November 2002)
of the Free Software Foundation. The copyright belongs to the authors. For further
details go to: http://www.fsf.org/licensing/licenses/fdl.txt

FORM DEACTIVATED SINCE
December 1st., 2005

Your questions, contributions and commentaries will be answered
by the lecturer or experts on the subject in the Linuxmed list.
Please fill in the form and press the "Send" button.

Question, contribution or commentary:
Name and Surname:
Country:
E-Mail address: