Post Syndicated from Bradley M. Kuhn original http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2012/12/14/unamerican-mccarthyist-cancer.html
In mid-2001, after working for
prior year and a half, I’d actually just started working
at FSF full-time. I’d recently relocated
to Cambridge,
offices. The phone started ringing. The aggressive Microsoft attacks
had started; the press wanted to know FSF’s response. First, Ballmer’d
said the
GPL was a cancer.
Then, Allchin
said it was unAmerican1. Then, Bill Gates added (rather pointlessly
and oddly) that it was
a pac-man
that eats up your business. Microsoft even
shopped weird
talking-points to the press as part of their botched political
axe-job on FSF.
FSF staffing levels have always been small, but FSF was even smaller
then. I led a staff of four to respond to
the near
constant press
inquiries
for the entire summer. We
coordinated speaking
engagements for RMS
related to the attacks, and got transcripts published. We did all
the stuff that you do when the wealthiest corporation in the world
decides it wants to destroy a small 501(c)(3) charity that publishes a
license that fosters software sharing. From my point of view, I’ll
admit now that I was, back then, in slightly over my head: this was my
first-ever non-software-development job. I was new to politics, new to
management, new to just about everything that I needed to do to lead the
response to something like that. I learned fast; hopefully it was fast
enough.
The experience made a huge impression on me. I got quickly comfortable
to the idea that, if you work for a radical social justice cause,
there’s always someone powerful attacking your political
positions, but if you believe your cause is just and
what you’re doing is right, you’ll survive. I found that good non-profit
work is indeed something that just one of us can do against all that
0. Non-profit work really was
money and power trying to crush us into
roaches
the dream career I’d always wanted.
Still, the experience left me permanently distrustful of Microsoft.
I’ve tried to kept an open mind, and watch for potential change in
behavior. I admittedly don’t think Microsoft became a friend to Free
Software in the 11 years since they put me through the wringer during
what was almost literally my first day on the job as FSF’s Executive
Director (a position I ultimately held until 2005). But, I am now
somewhat sure Microsoft’s executives aren’t hatching new plans to kill
copyleft every morning anymore. Indeed, I was excited this week to see
that my colleagues at the Samba
Project acknowledged
Microsoft’s help in creating documentation that allowed Samba to
implement compatibility with Active Directory. Even I have to admit
that companies do change, and sometimes a little bit for the better.
But, companies don’t always change for the better. Over an even
shorter period, I’ve watched another company get worse at almost the
same rate as Microsoft’s improving.
Specifically, this
week, Mark
Shuttleworth of Canonical, Ltd. said that those of us who stand strongly
against proprietary software device drivers are insecure
. I wonder if Mark realized the irony of
McCarthyists
using the
term McCarthyism
to refer to the same people who Microsoft
called unAmerican
just a decade ago.
I marvel at these shifting winds of politics. These days, the guy out
there slurring against copyleft advocates claims to be the biggest
promoter of Free Software himself, and in fact built most of his product
on the Free Software that is often defended by the people he claims are
on a witch-hunt.
I
wrote
many
blog
posts
in 2010 critical of Canonical, Ltd. and its policies. Someone
asked me in October if I’d stopped because Canonical, Ltd. got better,
or if they’d just bought me off. I answered simply, saying, First of
. Indeed, I’m supportive
all, Mark hasn’t shared any of his unfathomable financial wealth with
me. But, more importantly, Mark is making enough bad decisions that
Canonical, Ltd.’s behavior is now widely criticized, even by the tech
press. Others are doing a good enough job pointing out the problems
now; I don’t have to
of RMS’
recent comments about Canonical, Ltd. and its Ubuntu project (and
RMS surely has a larger microphone than I do, since he’s famous). I’ve
also got nothing to add to his well-argued points, so I simply endorse
them.
Nevertheless, I just couldn’t let the situation go without
commenting. This week, I watched Microsoft (who once ran a campaign to
kill FSF’s flagship license) do something helpful to Free Software,
while also watching Canonical, Ltd. (who has helped write a lot of GPL’d
software) pull a page from Microsoft’s old playbook to attack GPL
advocates. That’s got an intriguing symmetry to it. It’s not
“history repeating itself”, because all the details are
different. But, one fact is still exactly the same: The Wealthy sure do
like to call us names when it suits them.
Update 2012-12-15: In addition to my
usual identi.ca comment
thread (which has been quite active on this post), there’s also
a comment thread
on Hacker News and
also one
on reddit about this blog post.
Update 2012-12-18: Karen
Sandler and I discuss some of the issues related to Shuttleworth’s
comments on Free as
in Freedom, Episode 0x36.
0 Strangely, my head
(somewhat-uselessly) still contains now, as it did then, verbatim copies
of Dead
Kennedys’ lyric sheets, so I quoted that easily from memory.
Fortunately, I am pretty sure verbatim copying something into your own
brain isn’t copyright infringement (yet).
1I realized
after reading some of the reddit comments that it might be useful to
link here to
the essay
I wrote at the time of Allchin’s comments, called The GNU GPL
and the American Dream.
