 | Tangentium |
March '04: Menu
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May 2004: Key terms definedGPL (General Public License)There is no space here to describe the GPL in any detail. The original version of the license is in any case available on http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/copying-1.0.html, and one can also read chapter 9 of Richard Stallman's biography. Briefly, though, it should be observed that the GPL is what really makes open source software a possibility, by turning around ideas of copyright (thus the neologism, "copyleft") and making it a violation of the license to restrict access to and use of the licensed product. Users of a GPL product have complete freedom to use and modify the product, under the sole condition that they do not then go on to restrict the use of the (possibly modified) product to others. Without the GPL, there would be minimal motivation to make modifications to open source products, as these could immediately be copyrighted and hence exploited by others. As is inevitable when discussing complex ideas in a single paragraph, this is a simplification - but interested readers should follow one of the abovementioned links for more information. The GPL should not just be seen as a legality. Instead it's a fundamentally political challenge to entrenched ideas about "intellectual property" and the idea that software and knowledge itself can be capital. Version 1 of the GPL explicitly relates it to freedom and rights: "The General Public License is designed to make sure that you have the freedom to give away or sell copies of free software, that you receive source code or can get it if you want it, that you can change the software or use pieces of it in new free programs; and that you know you can do these things. To protect your rights, we need to make restrictions that forbid anyone to deny you these rights or to ask you to surrender the rights. These restrictions translate to certain responsibilities for you if you distribute copies of the software, or if you modify it." In many ways then the GPL is an attempt to protect autonomy in the use and design of software against its appropriation and/or conversion into capital. Therefore, because it is the GPL, rather than the code itself, which is central to open source and an explicit challenge to intellectual property laws, it is the GPL itself which is becoming the focus of both legal and PR challenges: see, for example, this story about Microsoft's "Shared Source" initiative. This one has a while to run yet - but as it represents merely another technological medium in which the tension between autonomy, authority and property is played out, there is no final end-point in sight, merely a shift in the tenor of the struggle. UtopiaNot many authors have a genuine claim to have named a literary genre, but Thomas More is one, With the publication of his Utopia in 1516. In this book he described the imaginary testimony of the traveller, Raphael Hythloday, regarding his journey to the crescent-shaped island of Utopia somewhere in the Southern Hemisphere. (Follow this link for the complete text of Utopia.) The important aspect of the book was that the "perfect society" of the Utopians was also a direct criticism of some of the injustices More saw in the "real world" (for example, capital punishment for theft). This idea of an imaginary, perfect society serving as a critique has been a staple of political literature ever since, in books ranging from William Morris' News from Nowhere to Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time. (One should also note the dystopia, where the future or alternative society is not desirable, but is rather a distillation of all that the author sees as cause for concern in the current world: the classic examples being Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four and Huxley's Brave New World.) It did not take long for the term to leak out of a purely literary context and enter political discourse. With utopias being based on political criticism, this was a natural development. But the "unrealism" of the utopian imaginings allowed the term to acquire derogatory connotations, and to be contrasted with more "pragmatic" political strategies; for example, Marx's referring to "utopian socialists" such as Charles Fourier or Robert Owen. Modern attempts to create alternative ways of living continue to be implicitly dismissed through use of the term -- which, like "anarchy", is now more a metaphor than a thought-through critique, although not quite so blatantly. One should not forget though that "utopias" exist as ideals, not realities. Idealism is a perfectly legitimate mode of political thought: utopian ideals serve as critiques of the real. And when we are told about how "unrealistic" these ideas are, this may itself serve as a sign of how far away our supposedly advanced, progressive world is from certain fundamentals. As Norman Geras writes in his essay Minimum Utopia: The world as it is and as it has been presents us with a picture of cruelty, slaughter, gross forms of exploitation and oppression, dire need. If we could hope to achieve merely — merely — a condition in which people had enough to eat, adequate water, shelter, health care, and the fundamental rights of expression, belief and assembly; and in which they were free from arbitrary imprisonment, torture, ‘disappearance’, threat of genocide; now wouldn’t that be something. Even to articulate the thought is to bring home how remote this objective is. In The Soul of Man Under Socialism, Oscar Wilde wrote that "a map of the world which does not include Utopia is not worth looking at". It may be a destination that, unlike Raphael Hythlody, we can never actually reach, but it is a journey worth undertaking nevertheless. | |