 Okay, so welcome everybody to our next featured speaker. It's Alison Randall and she will talk about the philosophy of free software. So welcome her please for the warm applause. So a few words of warning. This is not a comprehensive history of philosophy. I'm going to cover a little over 2,000 years of history in 20 minutes. So it's very light on details. And I'm not endorsing the views of any particular philosopher that I mentioned many of them believed very crazy things that like slavery was good and women were equivalent to property and all sorts of other things. So just because I mentioned some idea here that seems very interesting and you want to delve more deeply you may find things in their belief system that you absolutely do not agree with. I am also grouping by chronology. I'm not grouping by topic. So things are going to jump around a lot. You're going to see a lot of skipping threads here and there. So what I'm kind of trying to trace is the development of ideas through time. And a few ideas that I want you to keep an eye out for are freedom rights as in human rights, individual rights, the rights of social units or societies or states or governments. And then also what's right as in what's right or wrong or good or bad. And then the concept of property because that kind of leads into the concept of software as I get to free software towards the end. So most of this talk talks about western philosophy but I want to do a very brief bit on eastern philosophy because it predates western philosophy. A few ideas that kind of feed into the later developments. So Buddha believed that suffering was universal and it was really in your mind. You caused it through your own complex thoughts and could be liberated from suffering by doing what's right. Where what's right has a whole array of pieces in the way that humans live that were outlined in great detail. Confucius, he had an emphasis on humaneness and culture and doing what's right. And one of the things that he sort of go through his teaching is the idea that you know property is important but humans are more important. Human life is more important and the rights of humans is more important than property. Heraclitus, he believed in constant change. All things around us are changing constantly. He also believed that there was a sort of a fundamental law, a truth behind all laws that humans expressed. Socrates, we don't actually know very much about Socrates because only Plato ever wrote down things that he supposedly said. But some ideas we can pick up from him. He believed that the value of craft or techni which is where we get the word technology was in its benefit to users and not in how much money you could make off of it. He considered making money to be a different skill but that was not related to how you evaluate techni and he also had an idea that there was kind of a right and wrong. There was a good that was independent of, in his case it was independent of divinity. One of the great debates that Plato recorded is around so is something right because the gods tell us it's right or is it actually fundamentally right and that's why the gods are telling us that. He concluded that there's a fundamental rightness and even if the gods told us that lying is good it still wouldn't be. Plato was a student of Socrates and he kind of took this fundamental nature of things a bit farther into almost a concept of classes and objects that you would have an abstract idea of a dog and then you would have all these instances of dogs in the world but the true nature of a dog is that abstract idea. So the fundamental truth. He believed that human beings came together to form societies in order to meet their needs and that one of those needs that was met through forming societies was justice to avoid oppression. He was a big fan of philosopher kings, what we would call benevolent dictators, highly enlightened human beings who would have absolute power and make society good because of using that power well. He also believed in constant legal reform that since the laws were only there to meet the needs of human beings then of course you would have to constantly revise them so they would more accurately meet the needs of human beings. Diogenes actually was around the same time as Plato but he was an active critic of Plato because he said that Plato was entirely misrepresenting Socrates through the writings but really the only recording we have of Socrates is through Plato's writings. He believed that individual freedom was a much more important value than the traditional hierarchy but he also believed that there was sort of a universal sense of right and wrong that was not defined by culture or the particular context that you're in right now. Aristotle was a student of Plato and he believed that individuals should be able to own property but it should always be shared so you get this sort of pride of ownership but then the pleasure of sharing with others. He believed that societies were formed to respect rights and he believed that doing right is sort of the proper function of a human being. Like you might say the proper function of a hammer is to hit a nail sort of doing right is the proper function of a human being. And then we kind of skip a few years because they went off into this strange tangent where the question was whether your life was entirely dictated from birth to death and there was no way you could change anything and it kind of like made a whole lot of debates about freedom and rights completely meaningless if you can't actually change anything in your life the entire time. So there wasn't a whole lot of interesting conversation about freedom going on there except the question of whether freedom even existed. Thomas Aquinas, he believed that there is sort of a universal truth, universal law, good, bad, right, wrong and that we discover it through reason through the faculties of our mind but he believed that what we're discovering is something that is dictated by divine law so it's sort of the opposite of Socrates. He decided that there was a divine truth and we could only discover it through reason. So, he believed that humans have a natural tendency to pursue happiness which is sort of an individual freedom but also a natural tendency to pursue justice which is kind of like a society freedom and that the freedom of individuals was in fact the power to weigh between the two decide when your individual happiness is worth sacrificing for the justice of society and vice versa. Descartes kind of elevated reason to the absolute height, the pinnacle of everything so reason was the ultimate source of good and bad and truth and the way you determine what's right and what rights humans should have is through a process of reason. Princess Elizabeth who was by the way born right here in Heidelberg she is famous for a series of dialogues with Descartes that led to one of his most famous works, Passions of the Soul and she argued that the thing is we have reason and it may lead us to land on good things but there's no guarantee that your reason is going to lead you to making good choices or taking good actions and even if you have good intentions you may accidentally end up doing things that cause harm through the best of intentions and you still have to evaluate by the results. She, having been born of royalty, she argued that centralized rule has a serious problem that it really does lack the information to make proper decisions around what individuals need around what society needs. John Locke, so his idea is that freedom is sort of a fundamental property of human beings and that by your fundamental nature you have a right to own property. A property was very important in these contexts because there was an opposing idea of serfdom where the royalty or the ruling class would own all the property and all you could ever do is live on it and grow food for the royalty and that was it. So then there was the concept of freedom is property is the kind of freedom that you have the ability to own your own things, to own your own land, to create your own food. He believed that society is about creating security for individuals and that in order to create the society that adds security you end up giving up some liberty. Sound familiar? So he believed that property rights is actually one of the most important freedoms and that the government is able to enforce property rights better than the individual because the individual can only argue against other individuals whereas the government can sort of dictate from the top down. So he was in favor of strengthening governments in order to protect property rights and security. Du Chatelay, she had a number of dialogues with Locke on the laws of identity of contradiction. She believed, so identity is if a thing, a thing is what it is and contradiction is if a thing is it can't also not be. So Locke was saying there is no such truth to either of them and she's saying no, no there's a fundamental reality here. If something is it is and if it is it can't not be. Which kind of goes into her whole idea of universal principles. There's like a fundamental truth underlying all human knowledge and actions. Now she's primarily famous as a mathematician and physicist for her commentary on the works of Isaac Newton and work on that was actually so presaged some of the work of Einstein on kinetic energy. It's 300 years too early so it's like very rough but there's actually some of the formulas end up in Einstein's work. So you can kind of understand being a mathematician and physicist why she was so concerned with no, no there's a reality and it is what it is. Like this is a common thing among mathematicians and physicists. Hume, he believed that humans have a natural benevolence but it's only to people in close association so like your close family and friends and so the justice of society is something that we create by convention. He thought that property art rights were some of the most important rights that we can create by convention. And one of the things he's famous for is Hume's law which is to say describing the way that society works today doesn't really tell you how it ought to be. It's actually very hard to reason from what you see around you today to what should be. You shouldn't try to make that connection. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, so he believed and this is kind of the opposite. You're going to get a sense that there's a lot of back and forth here. There's a lot of dialogue. There's a lot of people having different ideas of the same fundamental principles. So he believed the natural state of humanity is to simply follow your desires sort of like animals wandering in the field. You own nothing. You need nothing. You're just sort of hunter-gatherer sort of kind of natural freedom. But he believed in a very industrial revolution kind of way that the purpose of forming societies is for progress. That's the fundamental reason that we joined together. And things like property and protection that come out of that, they're just really side effects. The main purpose of coming together is for progress. Immanuel Kant, he also elevated reason as sort of the fundamental definition of what is right and wrong. You'll see that coming up more and more as time goes on. Sort of the idea of divinity as the fundamental definition that was replaced with the idea of human reason as being a way of reaching what is the definition of right and wrong and what human rights we should have. His focus was on intentions and actions. So what's important is that you want to do what's right and you do what you think is right. But if it has terrible consequences, that doesn't really matter. At least you tried your best. And he kind of unified two ideas that were floating around before the question of whether reason or experience should be the primary definition of reality by saying that so our experience is actually a combination of what we perceive, what our senses can absorb and how we reason about what our senses absorb. So it's actually both together defines what we experience. Thomas Paine, he believed that no one should own property by default but that property came about for agriculture. So it's kind of like that progress idea but a very specific sort of progress which is necessary, so agriculture was necessary, people needed to like mark off a plot of land if they were going to grow food in it but it's not actually a good thing that they own that. And in recompense for taking that land away from other people they should pay taxes and those taxes should be used to the benefit of all the people who don't have land. So they're kind of like paying for the obligation they've created through taking property away from others. Bentham is another opposite again. He believed that there is no such thing as natural law or rights. And again it's reason that defines what is right or wrong but the way you evaluate what is right or wrong is by social utility. So he believed that because there's no natural rights whatsoever the only rights you have are the ones that are granted by the state. So that includes property. And that violating those rights is perfectly justified for the good of society because the state only gave you those rights they can take them away if it's for the good of everyone. Hegel believed in a concept of developing yourself to the greatest good but that development could be limited by the social institutions you live in and so you should create very very strong governments in order to protect your ability to become the greatest self. So the rights granted allow you to exercise your individual choice. He saw life, freedom from slavery and property as like the most important rights that you could be granted. He's credited as being one of the significant influences behind the Nazi movement but he would have been completely horrified to see that what his idea of the strong government ended up creating as opposed to creating self-actualization. Thomas Hill Green, so you kind of start to see a shift like from we need strong governments to protect people he's like no no, the government should stay out of the way and they should only intervene in order to protect liberty so it's like you can really get too much intervention if you go way over the top on the strong government side and that the whole purpose of forming together into social units is to promote the development of individuals to promote your own greater good. My least favorite philosopher. So Nietzsche believed there is no such thing as truth there is only an infinite number of perspectives there is no such thing as right or wrong, it does not exist all there is is a bunch of cultural definitions and you know the culture you were raised in will tell you what's right or wrong but in fact your culture is probably like has no grounds for telling you that and you should ignore it and that the strongest people will define their own values they'll throw off the shackles of culture and define their own values and impose their will on the weak and he believed that the fundamental truth of human existence is the will to power the desire to impose your will on everything and everyone around you Creepy dude, even all the photos of him are creepy and a little refreshing break So Gandhi, he lived in a system that was it was very unjust towards a certain set of people the set of people he was part of and while there was at the time an idea that the way you deal with a system you don't like is through violent revolution he believed that instead you should take a path of non-violence and express what needs to change in a very constant, very visible but very peaceful way and he was very successful at it he also believed in accepting a wide array of beliefs especially a wide array of religions for him that he believed that if you dug deeply enough you would find there's an ethical core across all of them so there's a fundamental truth that you find sort of woven between all the value systems of the world that was his perspective Keens, he's kind of coming at it from an economic perspective he believed that the free market doesn't always work it can actually cause problems when it goes a rise is sort of partly out of the depression the Great Depression of the 20s is sort of a reaction to that he believed that self-interest may not always be enlightened it may be completely selfish and self-interest may not serve the public interest so sometimes you have to impose structures so that the self-interest doesn't drive in ways that are destructive he believed that state intervention was a good thing to mitigate recessions and depressions and he also believed that social units forming together can accomplish more than individuals and that was kind of why you should form them and give them power Hayek was a great opponent of Keens because he felt that Keens had sort of encouraged a growth of big government and destruction of free market capitalism so his argument was that social order is just so incredibly complex like human societies are so incredibly complex that you just can't completely understand them to the point of really being able to effectively direct them from the top down, it just doesn't work which actually is an idea that kind of you can think hark back to the Châtelet as well Philippa Foote, she believed in right, sort of defining what's right by what's beneficial to the individual and society evaluating it both ways and that there was a certain compulsion to read like there was a certain reason towards it like you could reason your way to deciding what was right but there's also a voluntary aspect so it's not like you're a slave to reason you have in fact a choice and there's value in the fact that you make that choice she was very opposed to Nietzsche she wrote actively against him and believed that kind of harking back to Aristotle a bit that justice and benevolence are sort of the fundamental constitution of a human animal like you had to evaluate humans by their fundamental constitution sort of like you can't evaluate a cheetah running fast the same way you would evaluate a tortoise running fast they're different animals they have different fundamental constitutions and so you evaluate them differently but for evaluating humans justice and benevolence is one of the most important aspects of their basic behavior and I couldn't find a photo for her under a public domain or creative commons license so this is a photo of one of the very earliest philosophers according to Plato was Socrates teacher in rhetoric her name was Aspasia it just looked a little weird having no photo there after everybody else had one Martin Luther King Jr so he was like Gandhi operating in a system that was unjust although in his case it was a system that was founded on the principles of freedom they just weren't applied equally his philosophy of nonviolent civil disobedience was very much inspired by Gandhi he even took it a little further and he believed in using established legal channels in order to bring about social change and he was very successful at that Martha Nussbaum believed or defined a set of sort of universal abstract norms so one of the hard things about defining what's right in a universal sense is we have many cultures and cultures have different ways of expressing things so she sort of took a step back from saying well that culture is bad in all ways or this one's good in all ways and said let's define it more abstractly maybe a bit like Gandhi in a sense that we have these things and then they will be expressed differently in different cultures so she called these the functional freedoms so they're valuable both in themselves they're valuable to human beings and also as a means to an end so one of these values or one of these functional freedoms is personal control over your environment so that includes both the right to participate in the political process the right to own property the right to modify your environment around you to reason about it and to improve it and it's in her work that I see the greatest influence on free software which is not necessarily surprising so I don't believe that Stalman ever met her or attended one of her classes or read her books but she was getting her PhD in philosophy at Harvard he has met her I wonder when I don't know where he told me that so she was getting her PhD in philosophy at Harvard in the early 70s and she was teaching philosophy in Harvard through the 70s and 80s which is exactly when Richard was sort of defining the principles of software freedom and whether he had already met her yet or not in those academic circles those ideas were becoming quite vocally circulated so I'm looking at the details of her work I'm quite confident there was influence even if I don't know exactly when they met or what they talked about and here we come to what I consider to be one of the greatest philosophers of our time Richard Stalman so some of the things he's famous for are the four software freedoms copy left licensing and the rights of users or defining the rights of users and defending the rights of users so this is where I'm going to spend a little bit more time so originally in the 1940s when software was first created it was seen as a utilitarian good it was not protected as property hardware was protected as property but software was not considered like a bridge you can't really own it it's just sort of an expression of it in the 1960s in the US copyright registration started to be granted but they were granted under something called the rule of doubt which is where the copyright office would basically say we really don't think this is copyrightable but we'll issue you a registration just in case it's proven to be copyrightable later just in case in 1974 there was this commission form to investigate the question of whether software should be copyrightable it took them until 1979 to bring back an answer so when Bill Gates sent out his letter to hobbyists saying you're stealing software by sharing it he was wrong they were not it was perfectly legal in 1979 they issued a statement that they believed that software should be copyrightable but it wasn't actually added to copyright law until 1980 so there's an interesting factor of timing that I didn't really realize until I started studying this and that is that Richard Stallman's first statements around communal software the nature of free software was 1981 so in another talk that I gave this year kind of explained it as free software is an equal and opposite reaction to proprietary software a lot of people kind of think of it they think oh well yeah proprietary software has been around forever and free software is this strange new idea no same time same place and same reason they were both sort of created an environment of oh suddenly people are thinking about the possibility that software might be something you can own and what does that mean so in 1983 he published the GNU Manifesto and started the GNU project in 1985 the Free Software Foundation was launched with the GNU Emacs license 1987 was the GCC GPL which is the GNU Emacs license the GCC GPL were kind of the precursors to the GPL 1.0 or version one which was 1989 but you see the ideas shaping in his head over that decade so you're probably all familiar with the four software freedoms but I will repeat them anyway because they're worth repeating they're the freedom to use, study and modify redistribute and redistribute modified versions of software now the reason I kind of reflect these back to NUSBOM is if you think about her functional freedoms the idea is so it has to be valuable in itself and here you have these freedoms are valuable in themselves it's valuable to use and study and modify and redistribute software but there's a greater purpose it's also a means to an end it's also a means to user freedom increasing the freedom of the people who are doing these activities so it's both pieces it's the inherent value and the means to an end so copylift is if you think back to Martin Luther King it's a bit of using the established legal system to bring about social change so it starts with the idea that software is property now people will debate even within the free software community that software should be property or should not be property but right now under copyright law it is and copylift builds on that principle to say okay if it's property then we still want to make sure we ensure this sharing as well so a developer owns their software that they create the product of their labor and that developer grants the four freedoms and at the same time requires that anyone who benefits from those four freedoms is also required to grant the same freedoms so it's like it's in a sense it's twisting the original idea of copyright to hold things to lock things down in order to require them to be free so if there's any question about whether Stallman thinks of this as philosophy these are a couple of quotes but there's certainly plenty more and in the first one he was responding to someone who was like narrowing him down on what the legal interpretation of something would be and he's like no no no we're not talking about what the current law would say we're talking about ethics so this is a completely different question we're talking about ethics which is philosophy and a second quote where he's again saying I'm thinking about what the law should be the philosophy is sort of the principles and then law is the expression of that in our practical society sometimes it's an inaccurate representation of our philosophy sometimes it's a more accurate representation he also explicitly compares like proprietary software with the Jim Crow laws which are the racial segregation laws of the 1960s that Martin Luther King was so actively fighting against so he very definitely whether he talks about it most of the time or not there is very definitely an aspect to his thinking that sees this as philosophy so to tie it back together a bit within free software we have a sense of a right and a wrong there is a fundamental right and wrong freedom versus proprietary and there are people like Nietzsche who will take everything they can get and give nothing in return this is the social injustice or the will to power they are not the way that society should operate there is also a sense of using the laws that we have copyright in order to create social change working within the system now to change it to more accurately reflect the fundamental philosophy that we see the thing that I really want people to carry away from this is the sense that free software is not a frenzy idea it's not like a little segment of people on the side working on software this is actually one of the fundamental philosophical debates of our time and it all has to do with this new thing software that never existed before and how that should be integrated into our whole system of society and humanity and rights that's it any questions? Do we have time for questions? I'll listen for a talk please queue up at the mic for questions so I know you were trying to give this whirlwind tour so you missed a few things that I actually and you probably know them you just decided to cut them and I'm actually basically asking why you cut them because I know you were aware of them the two philosophical schools that I've recently modeled free software around and this is influenced by my experience in recent times in free software our Hegelian models of triads which you didn't mention because I feel like we have this free software versus proprietary software our modeling of it is basically in this Hegelian sort of way I don't know if we're modeling it correctly I think there might be flaws in saying you mentioned a few times free software diametrically opposed to proprietary software that's kind of the Hegelian thesis and antithesis and I worry that we're modeling it that way mistakenly but there's a certain post structuralist argument to the manner to which we've interacted with power and the way we've created these different power structures both in the proprietary software side we're just using copyright power to just totally restrict people and then obviously we have to admit to ourselves with copy left we're using that same power we always say it's this judo move to fight against but we're also creating power structures that have created complexities and then when I think about things like proprietary relicensing and having using copy left the way I see a pharaoh GPL being used it disturbs me as the author of the license but on the other hand I think of Foucault and I'm like well I've just created a power system that's now being used against me and I created it I wonder if you think about those two ideas like the Hegelian triads and Foucault and post structuralism and how it interacts with our current issues of the day in free software it comes back to my warning at the beginning that I can't cover two and a half thousand years of history in twenty minutes and do a very comprehensive job of it but those are two very interesting ideas and that actually so what I said last night that now I want to do another talk which is instead of doing the history and then kind of tying it into free software at the end I want to take free software and I do the philosophy of free software in much more detail those are two things I would put in and also news bombs sort of functional freedoms is another thing that I would expand much more thoroughly in another talk or blog poster but yes that's true thank you Hi Alison thank you very much my question is a bit left field I think and if you can't choose not to answer it feel free to I'm a biologist and I'm very interested in the current re-app search I guess of biotechnology and I've seen quite a few quotes quoting that biotech right now is the software movement of a decade ago and to me as a biologist the propriety is the one thing but the life aspects of biology is the other thing if people start tampering with it and my question is do you think you can use the same philosophical question that you're raising here about free software towards the biology angle I think you can from the proprietary angle so many of the arguments that we make here do apply there I think in terms of the fact that you're mucking about with life aside from free software being used it is in like medical context where it could like malfunctioning could cause the loss of life I think there are ethical concerns in biotech that we fortunately don't have to deal with in software in some ways it makes our questions easier so you get the next round so my follow up to that is a comment that I see the biotech community is taking a lot of the cue from the software movement and I was wondering if we could consider that responsibility carefully because if we omit that responsibility they might do so as well but I'm not sure if we feel that is our job maybe not so I think software developers alone probably don't know enough to do it but I'd love to start a conference in Cape Town with you about that it's a dialogue we need both involved or comments so without that let's thank the speaker again