WAHIL.net

Everybody knows, that DRM is bad. Also everybody knows, that Open Source is just a compromise and a stage in transition to a close-to-ideal system, which Free Software is. The free culture advocates have written dozens of books, heaps of articles and hundreds and thousands of blog entries showing the sense of standing against the law, organizations and corporations who bound (or try to put boundaries) on our freedom. Also stacks and heaps of text has been produced showing why should we boycott “bad” products designed by the aforementioned villains, the products being designed to achieve one obvious goal : to maximize profit, regardless of the consumer’s good.

The effects of these publications can easily be recognized : more and more people are now Open Source aware (mixing terms with Free Software though), there are more and more users of free/open systems, the closed formats are being pushed out, rejected by conscious users (just to mention the Ogg and FLAC’s success or even ODF’s victory over OOXML), and the new portals like do.org.pl or osnews.pl are in bloom, attracting more and more web community.

Step by step, led by the leaders like the creator of the Linux kernel – Linus Torvalds, the creator of the Creative Commons license – Lawrence Lessig or the creator of Free Software philosophy – Richard Matthew Stallman, we go on convincing more and more people and changing our reality.

However let’s try to look at the other side of the coin : with all these activities, trying to “free” the virtual world, including the user, aren’t we sometimes, however rarely, effectively restricting the freedom of those, who we want to be free ?

DRM
The F(L)OSS community opposition to DRM is widespread and firm. This comes from the fact, that the digital rights management technology is actually used to digitally manage restrictions. That’s why this post to LKML by Linus Torvalds started quite a storm : (http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.kernel/110368)
”
I want to make it clear that DRM is perfectly ok with Linux!
(…)
And like the software patent issue, I also don’t necessarily like DRM myself, but I still ended up feeling the same: I’m an “Oppenheimer”, and I refuse to play politics with Linux, and I think you can use Linux for whatever you want to – which very much includes things I don’t necessarily personally approve of.
”

Following the thread, Linus posted (http://article.gmane.org/gmane.linux.kernel/110400) also the following :

“The technology itself is pretty neutral, and I’m personally pretty optimistic that _especially_ in an open-source environment we will find that most of the actual effort is going to be going into making security be a _pro_consumer_ thing. Security for the user, not to screw the user.
Put another way: I’d rather embrace it for the positive things it can do for us, than have _others_ embrace it for the things it can do for them.”

An important question follows then : what is positive that DRM can do for us ? I decided to ask Google (the original question in polish). The first page of results only lists one text, being a news entry informing about trying to create the human face to DRM, by Valve (Steamworks); and another one, where its authors, nota bene the Internet shop software creators, trying to familiarize it to users. With our knowledge of the technology, I guess nobody is actually convinced reading an article written by people making money using the solution widely regarded as disruptive; All other results on the Google were actually contra-DRM : a text listing 10 cases against DRM :10 argumentów przeciw DRM, a not too acceptive tone text on Vagla.pl, a blog entry with a suggestive name Bye bye DRM, and so forth. Then I tried English Google, which yielded more sane cases, but their argumentation has been already long ago neutralized with – just to mention – Stallman’s article Opposing DRM.

So in the name of freedom (why shouldn’t somebody implement DRM on Linux ? We might not like it, but it’s a free country^Wsociety!) we seem to have created a loophole that could be used to win the market, that opposed DRM from its very beginnings and seemed to be closed tight for it.

But then, again. If Linux was relicensed to GPLv3, the user would have some rights removed, that were granted earlier on. Everything would boil down to resemble the closed source market : buy/take it, but you’re not allowed to do with (my) code something that I don’t like. Least of what I like is DRM, so don’t even try that!

The question, if when defending against bad technology, we can accept some restrictions, is is hard to answer by single statement. On one side, this seems to be good way to fight the danger to the community, on the other, it is a restriction on the freedoms we advocate most. The decision needs to be taken by the software developers (do they regard DRM as so bad, that they really have to restrict its creation/usage by other users at work?), but I’d also advocate to name this technology mainly as user-unfriendly.

My point is, we should not embrace a “bad” technology only because somebody “might” use it the “good” way, given that nobody ever tried to do it yet. And it’s not to be compared do P2P networks (which we defend), that might be used to share illegal copies of copyrighted works, because lots of us use them to share works (see Jamendo or GNU/Linux distros) – the P2P networks have bright areas, DRM doesn’t.

Quoting Torvalds, he treats this issue the “Oppenheimer” way. However, the latter when confronted with the catastrophic outcome of the atomic bomb explosion, which his research actually made possible, cited from Bhagavad-Gita : I became the Death, the Destroyer of Worlds. The FLOSS community, could become Torvald’s Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Means, us. I hope it never happens.

Stallman’s leadership
Not so long ago, there was a discussion, later turned into a flame war, between RMS and Open BSD developers (Real men don’t attack straw men and Play Nice – Real men don’t attack straw men (Theo)), where Stallman tried to make a point on why he can’t recommend this distribution, because it contains non-free, “bad”, software. According to RMS argumentation, it is enough to have the non-free software available to install, to disqualify the system freedom-wise, and it is the one and only condition that he takes into account recommending an OS.

Due to this reason, e.g. the Open BSD is a non-starter, forget its totally free default configuration. One can agree or not – this topic is so wide, that deserves a separate article, but the words that Stallman typed way into the discussion are worth noticing :

The Adobe flash plug-in is non-free software, and people should not
install it, or suggest installing it, or even tell people it exists.
That Firefox offers to install it is a very bad thing.

sourced from: Re: Real men don’t attack straw men

There we actually are told, that no user shall ever know about the non-free existence if he is not totally convinced not to use it, otherwise he might be tempted to install it.

This suggests what ? This suggests us to free people per-force. Looks like communist practices, where people were ‘protected’ from ‘damaging’ content by hiding it, so the population wouldn’t choose ‘bad’. Disinformation was a bread and butter, and RMS is now suggesting us to do it.
OK, this is not totally true, nobody hints us to say untrue, it is only about not telling the whole picture, omitting one solution. Hold on a sec, it is a form of lying! Additionally this way we take peoples right to subdue themselves, away from them, the right being one of the basic freedoms.

Trapped into freedom
The right to be free is a freedom of choice. Everybody can, and at least they should, decide themselves if the solution he wants, including all the restrictions, is appropriate. Given the above, an informational action (already in place, as I mentioned earlier) is much better than what RMS suggests – letting people know what they decide on choosing non-free software.

What Stallman pitches for, is quite accurately depicted by what the wider public knows about the freedom-promoting community. A few years ago, a few people actually knew about Richard’s vision of total freedom (GPL, BSD and similar licenses). Close to nobody also used the free operating systems, and when somebody got to mention it in the wide, he did it rather to discourage the users (ref the Progr@m aired not so long ago in polish commercial TV information channel TVN24). As one can now realize, so our community starts to look from the outside : we are beginning to go to the lengths of restricting people’s rights in the name of freedom.

Finishing this article, I’d like to summarize, giving the example of Linus Torvalds again, this one being, in my (author’s) opinion, a good cause to think, whether we have the right to enforce our perception of “freedom” on others. In my opinion, the soft forms of promotion, that is informational and convincing actions are better than sending “thunders” onto sinners, evangelizing and calls to convert (using Mesianism 2.0 like tone) with addition of tainting the “heretics”. According to Linus then, he might be wrong. That he doesn’t approve on something, doesn’t mean it is bone-deep “bad”, and there should be actually a path left for somebody to try to create user-friendly solution here. So, we might approve of this idea or not, but it is clear to see, that it is much more flexible and leaves the community more space to manoeuvrer than the Stallman’s model.

Well we don’t have to choose between two extremely different standards here. The history of mankind is full of stories of looking for a golden proportion, so, we, the IT crowd, following Horace’s advice, should try to define these for our freedom. It should be somewhere in between the given examples – giving the user the right to exercise his freedom in full, freedom to choose, at the same time, not being allowed to restrict the freedoms of other people. The answer is there somewhere, only time will tell, exactly where.

Good luck to you and me while searching.