The “Be very afraid” tour

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| notes = Break-out session at Red Hat Summit 2007, 2007

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"[Eben Moglen:]"

I beg your pardon, certainly, I thought the question was so obvious that it needed no repetition:
“Could I explain the threat
posed
to GPL’d software’s freedom
by the Microsoft/Novell Novell#Agreement with Microsoft?”.

And I’m gonna speak in slightly more general terms than that, beginning with:
Imagine a party which wants to eliminate free software’s freedom,
or at least hobble its developers in serious ways,
so as to inhibit their ability to compete.
Imagine that such a party has patents of uncertain validity,
but in large numbers, which it could conceivably use
to scare developers
and users.
Imagine that such a party then begins to make
periodic threats
in the form: “Gee, we have a lot of patents.
Never mind how many, never mind what
they are, never mind how good they are,

we have a lot of patents,
and someday something terrible will happen.
Don’t use that software.”

Imagine that that’s a strategy that the party adverse to freedom engages in
because it’s better than suing.
Suing is expensive,
suing is irreversible,
and suing might actually cause you to have to explain which patents they are and why they’re any good.
So 'threatening' is better than suing, okay?
Imagine a party who engages in recurrent threats every summertime,
for years on end,
on a sort of annual “Be very afraid” tour, okay?

I know, it sounds absurd, I know.

Imagine now that what happens is that the annual “Be very afraid” tour starts creating terrible pushback,
because people call up, who are the CEOs of major banks and financial institutions,

and they say:
“Those people you’re threatening are 'us'.
We’re the largest, richest, most powerful people in capitalism,
and we determine the value of your stock.
We think you should be quiet now.”

Okay?
That happens
if you do this thing, of saying
“Be very afraid”
to people who have lots and lots of money and lots and lots of power
and who control the value of your stock –
they will push back.
The business model of threatening to sue people
works if the people are 12-year-olds.
It does not work real well if they are the pillars of finance capitalism.
So, as a party engaged in annual “Be very afraid” tours,
you’re gonna start to get pushback by enterprise customers
who say “That’s us you’re threatening.”.

Now what if you could reduce their sense
of being the people who are made afraid?

What if you could find a way to give 'them' quiet and peace –
and make a little money on the side –
so that the only people who are left quaking when you did your annual “Be very afraid” tour,
were the developers themselves?
Now you would have given yourself a major ecological boost,
in swinging your patents around
and threatening to hurt people.

Deals for patent safety
create the possibility of that risk
to my clients, the development community.
If enterprise thinks
that it can go and buy the software my clients make
from some party who gives them peace from the adversary
in return for purchasing a license from them,
then enterprises may think they have made a separate peace,
and if they open the business section one morning and it says

“Adversary makes trouble for free software”,
they can think
“Not my problem,
I bought the such-and-such distribution,
and I’m okay.”

This process of attempting to segregate
the enterprise customers –
whose insistence on their rights
will stop the threatening –
from the developers who are at the end, the real object of the threat,
is what is wrong with the deals.

So what you ought to do is to say to parties
“Please don’t make separate peace at the community’s
expense.
Please don’t try
to make your customers safe,
if that’s gonna result in the destruction of the upstream rainforest where your goods come from.
We’re an ecological system. If you
undermine community defenses you’re undermining the whole ecology,
and doing that for the benefit of your customers at the expense of your suppliers is not a good way to stay in business.”

So 'that’s' the fundamental discussion
about the problem created by such deals.

Now you have the second question, which is:
“What to do about it?”,
but Joe didn’t ask that question.

'[Applause]'
Yes.

Category: American speeches