[GNU/consensus] RIP Aaron Swartz -- It all started with a paper jam.

[hellekin (GNU Consensus)]

Aaron Swartz passed away yesterday. He was only 26 years old. As a
tribute, I want to share that article he published in the Journal of
Software Technology in August 2008.
https://journal.thecsiac.com/issue/45/112

May it serve to remember him through his engagement to software freedom
and the Internet, and his will to see a fairer, freer world. May it
serve to remind us it will take effort and determination to achieve our
goals, and as our mentors, we won't let a paper jam ruin our day.

==
hk


Software Freedom and Web Applications

by Aaron Swartz, watchdog.net
Part One: The Rise of Free Software

It all started with a paper jam. It was 1980 and the Artificial
Intelligence Lab at MIT had received an elegant new printer from Xerox.
The printer, however, had an unfortunate tendency to jam, causing print
jobs to pile up and nothing to get printed until someone happened to
notice and fix the jam.

For Richard Stallman, one of the programmers at the AI Lab, this wasn’t
such a big deal. With their previous printer, Stallman had simply
changed the printer driver to detect whether the printer was jammed and,
if it was, to notify anyone who had sent it a print job.

“If you got that message, you couldn’t assume somebody else would fix
it,” Stallman later recalled. “You had to go to the printer. A minute or
two after the printer got in trouble, the two or three people who got
messages arrive to fix the machine. Of those two or three people, one of
them, at least, would usually know how to fix the problem.” (Free as in
Freedom, ch. 1)

But the Xerox printer was different: Xerox hadn’t provided the lab with
the source code to their printer drivers. There was no way for Stallman
to add this new functionality to the driver. When Stallman asked Xerox
for the code, they refused to provide it, insisting that it was an
important trade secret for their business. And when Stallman found a
student at Carnegie Mellon who had been given access to the software,
that student also refused to provide a copy, saying he’d signed a
contract with Xerox not to share it.

Stallman was outraged. Computer software was supposed to be a tool to
serve people; that’s why he and his labmates spent their time writing
software. And yet, through a combination of greed and legal
restrictions, people were forced to suffer because they were prevented
from improving these tools.

Stallman wanted to ensure no one else would be forced to suffer in this
way; he wanted to build a computer system based around principles of
freedom. In 1984 he quit his job and announced the GNU project.

Stallman later clarified that free software was software that guaranteed
users four freedoms:

    The freedom to run the program, for any purpose.
    The freedom to study how the program works, and adapt it to your
needs. (Source code is a requirement for this.)
    The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor.
    The freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements to
the public, so that the whole community benefits. (Again, source code is
a requirement for this.)

“I consider that the golden rule requires that if I like a program I
must share it with other people who like it. I cannot in good conscience
sign a nondisclosure agreement or a software license agreement. So that
I can continue to use computers without violating my principles, I have
decided to put together a sufficient body of free software so that I
will be able to get along without any software that is not free.”

Stallman codified these freedoms in the GNU General Public License or
GPL. If you modify a piece of software that is licensed under the GPL
and redistribute it, the license requires that you also redistribute the
source code at no extra charge and allow everyone who receives a copy to
do likewise.

Since 1984, the GNU operating system (whose most popular flavor is
GNU/Linux) has been built and released under the GPL. A 2007 study found
that 13% of servers and 1% of desktops were sold running GNU/Linux. And
anyone can download the entire operating system for free off the Internet.

The success of GNU/Linux has led to a larger free software movement as
well as the “open source” movement, which releases software and its
source code under copyright licenses that provide some of the software
freedoms.

The Mozilla Firefox browser, for example, is open source and currently
makes up around 15% of market. Large portions of the Mac OS X operating
system are also open source, including WebKit, the core of Safari, the
Mac OS X web browser.

The open source and free software movements have now built free
alternatives for just about every major type of computer application,
from word processing to video games. And for a time it seemed like
Stallman’s dream had come true: one could truly continue to use
computers without having laws restrict one’s freedom -- it was possible
“to get along without any software that is not free.”
Part Two: The Rise of the Web App

Tim Berners-Lee, an Englishman living in France who worked at a physics
lab in Switzerland, was frustrated with how difficult it was for
physicists to share documents. And so, in 1989, he came up with the
World Wide Web, developed the standards that made it work, and built the
first web browser and web server.

The power of the browser was its flexibility (or, in law professor
Jonathan Zittrain’s phrase, its “generative nature”). Just as a
general-purpose computer allowed you to run any program, from a music
player to a graphing calculator, the web browser let you view any kind
of document. A book, a physics paper, or photos of cats with funny
captions -- the web browser doesn’t care; it displays whatever the
server provides it with.

This seems like a trivial point now, but it was a vast change from other
networked software at the time. Email programs, for example, are
designed simply to display email -- they have an enormously specialized
interface for composing emails, finding emails, seeing who an email is
from and to, and placing emails in different folders. The same was true
for discussion software, chat software, and other pieces of software
that communicated over the network.

The Web was different: it did not specialize in any particular type of
content, but let you share whatever you like.

This lack of specialization in the Web browser allowed people to move
this specialization to the Web server. The traditional Web server simply
served up static documents that someone had previously written. But it
was quickly clear that there was no reason the server had to be so
constrained.

Instead of simply serving up previously-composed documents, the server
could compose new documents “onthe- fly” as they were requested. Thus,
instead of simply having a document which listed what restaurants have
tables available, a web server could be instructed to query the
different restaurants, learn their availability, and construct a page
from the results.

And users, instead of passively requesting different prewritten
documents, could submit requests to the server and actually begin to
interact with it. Thus, they could ask the server to reserve one of the
tables and send their name and phone number along with that request.

The result was that the humble web browser quickly began to overtake all
the other “specialized” applications. Instead of having a special
program just for reading email, people read their email over the Web.
Similarly, discussion groups, chat rooms, and other forms of social
interaction have moved inside the Web browser.

But software developers quickly discovered that, for social creatures
like us humans, everything has a component of social interaction. For
example, titling and categorizing the photos you take would seem like an
obviously solitary activity. But sites like Flickr demonstrate that
people love to discuss and categorize photos of their friends, or even
strangers, and that people, all things considered, would prefer to
organize their photos in a program that exposes them to other people.

The result is the recent “Web 2.0” phenomenon, in which just about every
piece of computing is moved onto the Web and made social in some way.
For photos and videos, there is Flickr and YouTube. For news, there are
sites like Digg and Reddit where you can submit, edit, and vote on news
stories. Calendars, todo lists, even music collections and word
processors are all being made into dynamic social web applications.

Pundits now discuss a not-too-distant future of “dumb clients” and
“cloud computing” where the other applications on the computer disappear
and all that is left is the web browser. And for people who use kiosk
computers or Internet cafes, that future is already here.
Part Three: Where Does Freedom Stand

For some, this is an exciting prospect. But for those, like Stallman,
concerned with issues of software freedom, it is frightening. Even in
the dark days of the proprietary printer driver, Stallman still had
control over the computer which drove the printer, even if he did not
have the source code to modify it. But with a Web 2.0 application, you
don’t have even that. The computer running your software is locked away
in some distant server farm. You can only communicate with it through
your web browser.

Now this does provide some flexibility. Web browsers can be programmed
to block ads or extract content. Plugins like Zotero and Greasemonkey
let users add new functionality to existing sites by intercepting and
modifying documents as they come back from the Web server.

But this is a rather pale notion of freedom, like saying that moviegoers
have control over the films they watch because they can hold pictures up
in front of the screen as they watch.

Another option, which some sites are exploring, is that of providing
APIs -- Application Programming Interfaces which allow people to write
software to do the same kind of things a user would normally do with an
app. Thus, instead of having to manually click the “buy” button on an
Amazon page to buy a new set of razors, with an Amazon API you can have
a program automatically purchase the razors for you every month.

This is undoubtedly useful, but again, a rather pale notion of freedom
compared to the four freedoms that free software provides. If Amazon was
truly free, you wouldn’t just be able to write programs to automate your
usage of the application, you’d be able to change how the application
actually works.

The obvious solution to this challenge is simply to release the software
on the Web server under the GPL or some other free software license.
Then anyone could download a copy and modify it to their heart’s
content. And a new version of the GPL has been released, AGPLv3, which
requires that people who use its software in web applications make their
software available to the application’s users under its free terms.

But only a completely asocial web application consists purely of
software. The vast majority of them are interesting because they give
you access to data contributed by other users as well. For example, the
software that lets people edit web pages is just about the least
interesting thing about Wikipedia. The reason the site is so popular is
because so many people have put their accumulated knowledge into that
software.

Wikipedia has addressed this by going one step further -- not only is
the source code free, the data is too. Anyone can download a copy of the
Wikipedia database (excluding users personal information) and start up
their own copy of Wikipedia based on it. And then they can modify their
copy of Wikipedia’s software to work however they please.

It’s beautiful in theory, but in practice, of course, nobody does this.
Even if your version of Wikipedia was full of fantastic new features, it
would still be nearly impossible to get anyone to use it. People use
Wikipedia because that’s where all the other people are; it’s
practically impossible to get everyone to switch.

For Wikipedia, the problem is somewhat ameliorated by having some
psuedo-democratic control over the site. So Wikipedia is run by a board
elected by (a tiny subset) of its users and the board has nominal
control over the software and modifications that get made to it. But
this is still a far cry from the freedom GNU/Linux users have in the
non-networked world. Running for office, getting elected, then pushing
your patches through a change-resistant bureaucracy is a lot more
difficult than modifying some source code files on your computer and
restarting.

And so, the hard-core partisans of software freedom propose that we will
see the pendulum once again swing away from centralized server computing
and back to a world where we all run applications on our local machines.
Only this time, instead of being applications that don’t use the network
or only talk to a distant server, they will be peer-to-peer
applications, seeking out other users and interacting with them directly.

Some great strides have been made in building peer-to-peer software, in
no small part because of the vast amount of interest in using the
technology to share music without getting caught by enforcers of the
law. But, especially compared to Web 2.0 server technology, peer-to-peer
is still in its infancy. Writing a social application so that it’s
peer-to-peer is about a thousand times harder than writing the same
program as a web app.

Still, peer-to-peer software, if we could make it work, would seem to
give the best of both worlds: the freedom to modify how a program
functions on our local computers as well as the ability to share and
collaborate with others across the Internet. And so, for those who care
about freedom (as well as those who care about sharing music), this
seems like an important avenue for further research.

Reference

Williams, Sam (2002). Free as in Freedom: Richard Stallman’s Crusade for
Free Software, Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly & Associates.

About the Authors

Mr. Aaron Swartz is a writer, web developer, and activist. He is the
co-author of the RSS 1.0 specification; co-founder of reddit.com, a
social bookmarking system for news; and founder of watchdog.net, a site
for political information and organizing.
Author Contact Information

address@hidden

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