Unfortunately too many people just give you a blank stare when you mention that 100 years from now we'll be printing up everything we can't augment. We'll also have brain-machine-interfaces that allow one to 'memorize' copyright media. How does the government/society plan to control our memories in the future? Just go with whatever laws the corporations come up with? Are we going to continue to deprive children of software knowledge so that they're dependent on downloading worthless digital copies of closed source code with who knows what coded into it? Thing is once everyone can code, free and open-source digital goods will undoubtedly prevail.
> How does the government/society plan to control our memories in the future?
That's easy. DRM for machine-to-brain interfaces. Who's going to stop that from happening? Mozilla?
The scary part will begin when they'll be able to delete our memories remotely, because we "stole" their media, or perhaps the content owner simply withdrew the license from the distributor, and now you're not allowed to "own" it anymore and keep it inside your brain.
Or think about what happened inside the DoD when the Snowden leaks or the Wikileaks ones came out, and banned all employees from reading the articles about it. If you think that in the future we won't need "computers" anymore, because our brains will act as the computers of today, I could see the government setting up "infrastructure" to ban such leaks from getting accessed by people, or also deleting them remotely.
Or, we could rise up and demand total control of our own minds. Freedom of thought, things like that. We need to educate the general public before they surrender their mind to proprietary software, though.
And if people have no choice, there is still jail-breaking. And if jail-breaking is forbidden, I'll do it anyway. And possibly start a career as a runner. That would probably get me killed, but if I don't, I may not be able to look at my reflection in a mirror.
I disagree. Others have said (much more eloquently than I) that software is the new literacy. In a hundred years, I believe someone who can't at least read code will be at a disadvantage similar to someone who can't read English today.
Programming is craftsmanship, not really literacy. The difference is that most people don't like crafting, but they do like communicating. Most people are consumers.
But it is the ability to read and (for the most part) understand that novel, which is important. There are definitely more books (and things in general) being written in the age of literacy than there was before.
I try not to make prediction that long in the future, because intelligence explosion is likely to happen sooner than that. http://intelligenceexplosion.com/
Once it does, we will likely fall into one of three outcomes: Heaven, Hell, or Annihilation —most likely Annihilation if we're not careful. Any finer point will be moot.
(EDIT: Before you down-vote the singularity crap, please follow the link. The arguments are long, but serious. Machines will take over the world at some point. We just need to ensure they're gentle about it.)
This is only true at our current level of intelligence. And we're not finished climbing this ladder. If we get to build serious brain-computer interfaces, those will help with many tasks, including computing.
Working memory for instance is closely associated to fluid intelligence, which is kinda required to program seriously. What if we stick a chip in your brain that doubles it?
Finally, programming is not a specialized skill like making cars. It can help you do anything, provided you understand whatever you are doing. This is as general as it gets. Anyone who can learn programming should learn it, eventually.
sure, everyone can be taught. I just don't see it happening anytime soon. If we are talking if 100 years from now, anything is possible and it is a different debate altogether. But in next 20 years thus is not happening.
With same logic , Everyone can be taught to be a rocket scientist too.
> We'll also have brain-machine-interfaces that allow one to 'memorize' copyright media. How does the government/society plan to control our memories in the future?
We can memorize copyrighted media now, without needing brain-machine-interfaces. I have hundreds (probably thousands) of copyrighted works memorized. My memory is not perfect, but it retains enough of these works that if I were to recall them and write down my recollections and distribute that, I would be infringing their copyrights.
I don't foresee copyright law needing to be or actually being changed in response to the development of more efficient ways to get copyrighted media into our brains, such as brain-machine-interfaces.
This is one of Richard's recurring topics, and I agree with matt__rose and higherpurpose that there is some irony since China, along with a few other countries like the USA, Iran, Russia, could do with a more free and open internet. The Internet should be basic infrastructure, inexpensive, and very secure. That is the goal.
I know I have the minority opinion, but I believe that a FSF world is the way go, long term. I think that tax jurisdictions that promote all kinds of open source, and an unfettered Internet will have long term advantages.
- You do not have choice of service providers. All providers are government department and there's nearly no competition.
- Try to use Google in China, lots of fun!
- Try to access any popular web site in China like Youtube, facebook, etc. Good luck.
- If you say something bad about the government on Internet, you may have the risk of being kidnapped by some unknown person and thrown into some unknown mountain area. (No kidding, one of my friend had this experience.)
Specific to RMS: I'm the translator of Free as in Freedom (Chinese edition.) Until now, I have no idea if the word "free" (自由) could appear in the title when we publish it.
I think the parent commenter was agreeing with you. The English idiom "could do with" (which I think is somewhat uncommon in California, where I live) means something like "could benefit from", "still needs", or "would like". It suggests that someone doesn't yet have the thing that they "could do with", but that it would be good if they did, at least from the speaker's perspective.
If you say something bad about the government on Internet, you may have the risk of being kidnapped by some unknown person and thrown into some unknown mountain area. (No kidding, one of my friend had this experience.)
Would you elaborate? This is very interesting. How did they get out of that situation?
Gavin, I understand the FSF's position. Even though I am actually wearing a FSF thirty today, I disagree with their stance that other open source license are not useful. Really, it is up to creators to license code the way they want to.
They don't have any such position, at least not so absolutist. In fact, that was the whole point behind LGPL, to bridge the gap between GPL and BSD licensing. RMS also approved of the Ogg Vorbis library using the BSD License.
They do make exceptions when there is strategic sense.
> I disagree with their stance that other open source license are not useful
There are two inaccuracies with this statement:
1) The FSF does not disapprove of the use of non-copyleft free licenses. They encourage the GPL, but as pointed out below, they themselves have both released code under other licenses and approved of the use of other licenses.
2) You seem to have missed gavinpc's point, which is that the FSF is the Free Software Foundation, not the "Open Source Software Foundation". They don't say that "other open source licenses" aren't useful, because they don't refer to their own licenses as "open source" licenses. They dislike the term "open source" and don't use it themselves.
BTW, by "all kinds of open source" I meant to say that there are good use cases for GPL, Apache, etc. licenses, depending on the projects and the desires of the creators.
The USA has a great firewall like china, Russia, and Iran? Well, til (or you could be exaggerating a connection between the USA and Chinese Internet, which would be very much BS).
I regret I missed the event. It should be noted that rms came to China already quite a few times. I hope his message goes thru and reaches a wide audience here, because keeping full control on ones digital life is as important in China as in other places, or even more. (And I think the main threat for laymen is not from government, but from companies who would sell their users' souls for a short-term increase of their market shares.)
Having just checked the FSF website, there will be a similar function on May 19th, at Zhejiang University in Hangzhou. Admission open to the public, with or without registration. http://www.fsf.org/events/rms-20140519-hangzhou
For readers unfamiliar with Chinese academic institutions, both UCAS (May 17th) and Zhejiang (May 19th) are institutions noted nationally and internationally for graduate and research programs especially in sciences and engineering.
Just let you guys know that China is keeping increasing control of online content. And the new leader has his plan to push it to another extent. Not a nice outlook.
Two years ago, when I left China for US college, I feel most people around me don't care about FOSS, or respect originality & copyright.
- They use cracked software. You can buy a disk that installs cracked Windows for less than 1 dollar. Cracked Photoshop & MS Office & whatever licensed software are all over the internet.
- They download music & movie for free.
- China's internet is full of copycats because the original websites aren't available due to censorship. (Like FB & Twitter). One of the largest IT Company, Tencent, is full of copied products.
But now I feel China is making some progress. Like:
- Online streaming companies are paying for copyrighted material, and you can't easily download movie/anime for free as you do in the past.
- As Apple becomes more popular, many people start paying for music in iTunes. To my delight, websites like http://mou.li/ even let people buy Sublime Text & Alfred & 1Password easily in China. I really can't believe people would pay over $50 for a text editor two years ago, but now some of them do.
- A recent example. A very large company in China named Guokr launched a website: http://www.15yan.com/ . It's a blatant copy of medium. And in their about page, they are literally saying something like "Our product is currently a copycat of Medium, and we'll adpat it to Chinese market to make it better".
Shortly after the website went public, someone asked a question in a Chinese Q&A website: "Can we tolerate such blatant plagiarism?"
Take a look at it: http://www.zhihu.com/question/23400374 . I know you can't read Chinese but take a look at the pictures in the highest upvoted(2130)[1] and third highest(756)[2] answers. Two Chinese Web-Devs compared the CSS and HTML of these two sites, expressed their anger, and described the copycat as "humiliating" and "disgusting". Nearly all the answerers requested this copycat going down immediately and said they'd never use it.
I'm really happy China is really making some progress on this matter.
And rms would be the first to agree with you that there are more important freedoms:
"I hesitate to exaggerate the importance of this little puddle of freedom, because the more well-known and conventional areas of working for freedom and a better society are tremendously important. I wouldn't say free software is as important as they are."
And he explains why he speaks about Free Software:
"It's the responsibility that I undertook, because it dropped in my lap and I saw a way I could do something about it. But, for example, to end police brutality, to end the war on drugs, to end the kinds of racism we still have, to help everyone have a comfortable life, to protect the rights of people who do abortions, to protect us from theocracy, these are tremendously important issues, far more important than what I do. I just wish I knew how to do something about them."
"I wish I knew how to make a major difference on those bigger issues, because I would be tremendously proud if I could, but they're very hard and lots of people who are probably better than I am have been working on them and have gotten only so far," he says. "But as I see it, while other people were defending against these big visible threats, I saw another threat that was unguarded. And so I went to defend against that threat. It may not be as big a threat, but I was the only one there."
Like any activist, he speaks of what he knows. That doesn't mean he considers the rest unimportant.
Lucky that the Chinese are capable of concern for more than one thing at once.
You might enjoy pondering a moment on the connection between open source software and censorship, for example in an email client that encrypts sensitive messages.
