Last week, a group of activists and organizations came together to publish the Declaration of Internet Freedom, a set of principles that make up a vision for a free and open Internet. Groups behind the document include Free Press, Fight for the Future, Public Knowledge, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, as well as others that fought against and helped defeat SOPA/PIPA earlier this year.
Since its launch, the Declaration has attracted a wide range of signees, including orgs like Amnesty International, the Harry Potter Alliance, and Mozilla; as well as individuals like artist/activist Ai Weiwei, musician Amanda Palmer, and Internet pioneer Vinton Cerf. And just yesterday, Rep. Darrell Issa became the first member of Congress to sign the document.
Read the handy infographic below and voice your support for an open Internet by joining thousands of others in signing the Declaration. Then use the EFF's action page to send a letter to your congressional representative asking her or him to join Issa in signing the Declaration. And if you've got ideas for additional principles or any general feedback about the document, you can contribute your thoughts and suggestions on Step2 and Reddit.
Phi Beta Iota: Gordon Cook sets the gold standard for thoughtful integrated observations and analysis of the Internet. His materials is read by the greatest of pioneers such as Vint Cerf, as well as by those who aspire to be pionoeers, such as those building the Freedom Tower and the Autonomous Internet Roadmap. Some say data is the new dirt. Others say data is the new gold. We say that cyber is the new world mind, in which humans, information, and the connections among them become the World Brain and implement a transparency so strong that it eradicates corruption and ends fraud, waste, and abuse against the many and in favor of the few.
Phi Beta Iota: This is a hugely important reference work, the first of its kind, and very strongly recommended to all who care about human dignity, human freedom, and human evolution.
ROBERT STEELE: I thought F/OSS had merged as a meme. Now I understand you to mean that while both have practical similarities in outcomes, the underlying ethics are completely different.
RICHARD STALLMAN:
Nothing has changed. The free software movement remains what it has always been since 1983: an ethical and political campaign for freedom for computer users.
Open source remains what it has been since 1998: a practical recommendation to let users change and redistribute source code.
I still champion free software, and disagree with the ideas of open source because they omit the most important idea.
INSERT: A program is free software if the program's users have the four essential freedoms:
The freedom to run the program, for any purpose (freedom 0).
The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor (freedom 2).
The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others (freedom 3). By doing this you can give the whole community a chance to benefit from your changes. Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
“FOSS” and “FLOSS” are ways of talking about both free software and open source without choosing between them. If you want to talk about the community's development practices, for instance, that sort of neutrality between the two philosophical camps may be useful.
Nearly all open source software is free software. The two terms describe almost the same category of software, but they stand for views based on fundamentally different values. Open source is a development methodology; free software is a social movement. For the free software movement, free software is an ethical imperative, because only free software respects the users' freedom. By contrast, the philosophy of open source considers issues in terms of how to make software “better”—in a practical sense only. It says that nonfree software is an inferior solution to the practical problem at hand. For the free software movement, however, nonfree software is a social problem, and the solution is to stop using it and move to free software.
“Free software.” “Open source.” If it's the same software, does it matter which name you use? Yes, because different words convey different ideas. While a free program by any other name would give you the same freedom today, establishing freedom in a lasting way depends above all on teaching people to value freedom. If you want to help do this, it is essential to speak of “free software.”
We in the free software movement don't think of the open source camp as an enemy; the enemy is proprietary (nonfree) software. But we want people to know we stand for freedom, so we do not accept being mislabeled as open source supporters.
INSERT: Beyond Software
Software manuals must be free, for the same reasons that software must be free, and because the manuals are in effect part of the software.
The same arguments also make sense for other kinds of works of practical use — that is to say, works that embody useful knowledge, such as educational works and reference works. Wikipedia is the best-known example.
Any kind of work can be free, and the definition of free software has been extended to a definition of free cultural works applicable to any kind of works.
Phi Beta Iota: Proprietary may be powerful in isolation, but it does not scale. Only infinite human intelligence applied as an open (free) collective is capable for creating infinitely scalable software. Those who suggest that machine intelligence will scale faster than we can imagine are missing the difference between linear and non-linear / intuitive scaling. IOHO.
Thanks for posting that. I have one small correction to suggest, though. That Guardian article from 2008 does not represent my latest thinking. Shortly after that, I realized that the term “cloud computing” is too broad — it includes many totally different practices. So I concluded that it is a mistake to formulate any statement using that term. Some of those practices are bad, and some are ok. So I do not say, “cloud computing is bad”. Rather, I say “the term ‘cloud computing' is too broad — let's talk about a specific topic.”
Posted by Brian_Anderson on Wednesday, Mar 28, 2012
You’re on the Internet. What does that mean?
Most likely, it means one of a handful of telecommunications providers is middlemanning your information from Point A to Point B. Fire off an email or a tweet, broadcast a livestream or upload video to YouTube, and you’re relying on vast networks of fiber optic cables deep underground and undersea, working with satellites high above, to move your data around the world, and to bring the world to your fingertips.
It’s an infrastructure largely out of sight and mind. AT&T, Level 3, Hurricane Electric, Tata Indicom – to most these are simply invisible magicians performing the act of getting one online and kicking. To many open-source advocates, however, these are a few of the big, dirty names responsible for what they see as the Web’s rapid consolidation. The prospect of an irreparably centralized Internet, a physical Internet in the hands of a shrinking core of so-called Tier 1 transit networks, keeps Isaac Wilder up at night.
The Open World Forum is the leading global summit meeting bringing together decision-makers, communities and developers to cross-fertilize open technological, economic and social initiatives, in order to build the digital future.
The event was founded in 2008 and now takes place every year in Paris. With over 160 speakers from 50 countries and an international audience of 1,400 delegates in 2010, Open World Forum has grown very fast. The Forum is governed by steering group that brings together the leading international technological communities (Apache Software Foundation, Linux Foundation, Open Source Initiative, OW2 Consortium, Qualipso Consortium), and the main Open Source software associations from the French-speaking world (Adullact, AFUL, CNLL, PLOSS, Silicon Sentier), with support from major European and French institutions (the European Commission, the Paris City authorities, and the Ile-de-France regional council and regional development agency) (Agence Régionale de Développement).
The Forum’s partners include 70% of the key global players from the IT world.
The Open World Forum is being organized this year by the Systematic competitiveness cluster based in the Paris region, supported by a Forum Committee which brings together the main partners and contributors to the OWF (AF83, Alter Way, Bull, Systematic’s Open Software Special Interest Group and Smile).
Liberation Technology is much broader than Information Communications Technology (ICT) and is not synonymous (although it should be) with Open Source Everything (OSE). It seemed like a good time to provide an update on this key term. Within the ICT arena, we distinguish Autonomous Internet (OpenBTS to Open Specturm), and Advanced Information Operations (AIO), the latter rooted in OSE and permitting M4IS2* at machine speed.
M4IS2: Multinational, Multiagency, Multidisciplinary, Multidomain Information-Sharing and Sense-Making.
