On technological liberty

In his keynote at the 2019 Legal and Licensing Workshop (LLW), longtime workshop participant Andrew Wilson looked at the past, but he went much further back than, say, the history of free software—or even computers. His talk looked at technological liberty in the context of classical liberal philosophic thinking. He mapped some of that thinking to the world of free and open-source software (FOSS) and to some other areas where our liberties are under attack.

He began by showing a video of the band "Tears for Fears" playing their 1985 hit song "Everybody wants to rule the world", though audio problems made it impossible to actually hear the song; calls for Wilson to sing it himself were shot down, perhaps sadly, though he and the audience did give the chorus a whirl. In 1985, the band members were young and so was open source, he said. But there were new digital synthesizers available, with an open standard (MIDI) that allowed these instruments to talk to one another. It freed musicians from the need for expensive studio time, since they could write and polish their music anywhere: a great example of technological freedom.

They were singing about freedom, he said, and how fragile it is. It is a political song that describes the threats to freedom if people are inattentive.

His talk would look both backward and forward, he said, taking the novel approach, perhaps, of viewing software freedom through the lens of the thinking of three philosophers. He is "standing on the shoulders of the proverbial giants": John Stuart Mill, Isaiah Berlin, and Erich Fromm. Those three were "brutally intellectually honest" and he would do the same, he said. These thinkers all used the terms "freedom" and "liberty" interchangeably, so he would follow their lead.

His proposition in the talk is that FOSS embodies classical liberalism. The three giants had powerful ideas; from a 30,000-foot view, Mill was concerned with the sovereignty of the individual in their person and their mind; Berlin wrote about positive and negative liberty, which looks at "who governs me?" and "how am I governed?"; and Fromm discusses the psycho-social barriers to actualizing liberty. FOSS owes part of its success to these time-tested principles from classical liberal thought, he said.

Copyleft and permissive licensing are both valid and, in fact, necessary tools of software freedom. They represent the ideas of positive and negative liberty. The FOSS licensing model is a deep concept that is implemented narrowly. There are so many threats to freedom in our world, and to technological liberty, that cannot be addressed by copyright licensing alone; more tools are required.

Three giants

Mill was probably not much fun at parties, Wilson said, since he spent much of his time contemplating the errors of the human race. Mill is the father of political liberalism and his book, On Liberty, gives the underpinnings of that philosophy: "Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign." He believed in a sharp dichotomy between public and private life; Mill was a libertarian, not an anarchist or socialist. He believed in regulation, but only in the public sphere, not on private life, and only to preserve the rights of other individuals.

He also believed that no intellectual argument is fully resolved. In the mid-1850s, earth-shaking discoveries were regularly being made that were upending conventional thinking. Mill fought against the "tyranny of the majority"; he believed that the majority opinion contained flaws and that the minority opinion had elements of truth. Anyone claiming a 100% solution was claiming "infallibility"; that term was a reference to the Pope, which would have been a "mortal insult" to Englishmen at that time, Wilson said.

Wilson has no doubt that Mill would be a "formidable advocate" for free software and free culture if he were alive today. He would particularly like the "right to fork" since it provides effective protection against the tyranny of the majority.

Skipping ahead a century, Wilson turned to Berlin, whose family fled the Baltic states during the Russian revolution and who was eventually knighted by Queen Elizabeth. Berlin has two concepts of liberty, negative and positive. If the answer to the question "by whom am I governed?" for a particular area is only the individual, they are experiencing negative liberty; negative "as in a no-fly zone", Wilson said. If there are constraints from the outside, that individual is experiencing positive liberty.

For example, the internet protocols are not governed by any entity—people can use them as they see fit—which means they are experiencing negative liberty in that realm. It also means that people can use those protocols for good or bad (e.g. human trafficking). On the other hand, positive liberty can degenerate into paternalism, where restrictions are placed "for your own good". Both facets can cause problems and the balance between them shifts over time as concerns over bad actors versus paternalism wax and wane.

These concepts map directly to the differences between permissive licenses and copyleft, Wilson said. Permissive licenses are almost purely negative liberty, but not quite; adding things like defensive patent clauses adds more positive liberty into the mix. Copyleft adds even more positive liberty to prevent the hoarding of the source code. It is interesting to note that 100% negative liberty, that is the public domain, is not considered FOSS. Another thing to consider is that the GPL allows adding negative liberty in the form of additional permissions, but reserves the positive liberty additions for itself.

Thus, there is no war between copyleft and permissive licenses, both are needed, he said. There is some sibling rivalry between them, but no war. No "Sophie's choice" is necessary or desirable to permanently choose between them; it is not really meaningful to think of choosing only one of the two. "If you go down to the deep philosophical roots of open source, we need both."

He then moved on to Fromm, who is not really a philosopher but is, instead, a social psychologist. Fromm believes that ideas can become powerful forces, but only if they answer specific human needs in a social context; it requires some group of people to buy into the idea. He is also a pragmatist: freedom is only real when it is exercised. Theoretical freedom is not a freedom at all.

FOSS has attracted an identifiable "psycho-social group": software developers. It is a movement that resonates with certain kinds of people who lean toward "nerdiness", Wilson said, self-identifying as a nerd in order to be able to make that observation. Nerdiness can be a solitary pursuit, but those who buy into FOSS can gain some concrete benefits, including exercising personal creativity, gaining status and recognition with the movement, and even potentially establishing a successful career.

Wilson said that he would have liked to also talk about some of the ideas of Martin Heidegger, who had important things to say about technology. But Heidegger was a Nazi, so Wilson did not feel that he could present those ideas in a talk about freedom.

Today

It should not come as a surprise to anyone, Wilson said, that liberal democracy is under siege—again. All over the world we are seeing this, from right-wing populists attacking any form of perceived "elitism" to left-wing radicals who claim that nothing of value can be learned from dead white men. There are also the masses who don't engage on any thoughtful level at all; they do not educate themselves about what is going on in their countries or the world.

Beyond that, privacy is under siege. We are beset by obsessive data gathering by various businesses that have business models tied to monetizing all of the data they gather on us. He suggested that attendees look up Stingray devices if they have not heard about these cell-phone surveillance devices.

And truth is under attack, as well, sometimes from surprising sources. There is intentional cheating, such as in the Volkswagen emissions scandal, but there is also "fake news", of course. Beyond that, there is p-hacking, which is not that well known outside of the social sciences, but many researchers are losing their careers because of intentionally biasing the results of their studies. Medical scientists are publishing non-reproducible research in what is supposed to be the gold standard: peer-reviewed medical journals. There is a "rush to publish", which is understandable on some level, but, as a patient, he is not terribly excited by being treated by non-reproducible medicine. And on and on.

So, he asked, "is Mill still alive?" Is there still a separation between private and public lives? He respectfully disagrees with Scott McNealy, who famously said: "Privacy is dead. Get over it." Wilson is in the "cautious yes" camp with regard to Mill's ideas still being valid today. He believes that individuals are still sovereign, but only over their physical self and their own mind. Privacy does not extend into cyberspace, which is part of the public life of an individual.

Other communities

How can the free-software movement engage with other communities such as those in the free-culture world, he wondered. They are potential allies, but we should not insist they adopt our methods. We have had lots of success with FOSS, but that does not mean other communities must copy us exactly. They can learn from what we have done, but we must be respectful as we proselytize; different things will resonate with groups that are not made up of software developers. We should work with those communities with humility and understanding, he said.

There is the ancient cliche that if the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Copyright licensing has been our hammer, Wilson said. But many of the problems in learning, privacy, and truth are outside the reach of copyright licensing. That will not solve the problem of social scientists twisting their research, for example.

But we have another tool, Wilson said, the open-source development model. "This is one of our great gifts to the world." That model provides ways to track contributions, signoffs, and approvals via Git metadata. There is also a human-readable discussion list that explains why certain design decisions were made; "this is knowledge and it is trackable". Perhaps coupling that with the blockchain would create something that is "legally admissible" and is tamper resistant. Getting others "spun up this kind of model" might be the "biggest gift of all".

Going forward

He is not Moses, who had ten (commandments), nor Richard Stallman, who had four (freedoms), but he has two ideas to start a discussion on a broader definition for technological liberty. The first is "freedom from technology". This is based on "deep humanism", he said; it is the idea that "humans must be in charge". If we ever lose that control, our individual liberty is gone.

He gave a "horrible example" from recent news: the Boeing 737 MAX airplane has technology that can't easily be overridden by humans, which apparently led to two separate crashes killing all aboard. "Off" must mean off, not just "slightly less on". That is "freedom zero".

His second thought is about "ethical technology". There are three pillars to that, he said. The first is "explicability"; if no human can understand what the machine is doing, then the machine is in charge. There must be a human-understandable description of how the machine makes its decisions. "Demonstrability": there must be some form of test that can be repeated that shows that the technology works. "If you can't demonstrate it, then it's not ethical." Lastly, there must be a human or other entity "that takes responsibility for the technology and can fix it when it breaks".

Open source meets the first two criteria for ethical technology, Wilson said, but falls down on the third. "The world is littered with the corpses of dead open-source projects."

We have done great things in 30 years, he said. He wishes he could be here in another 30 to see where things go, but that seems unlikely to him. His hope is that organizations with our "same ideological beliefs" will exist and that we, collectively, will have made great strides toward a technological landscape that is humanist.

[I would like to thank the FSFE and the LLW Diamond sponsors, Intel, the Linux Foundation, and Red Hat, for their travel assistance to Barcelona for the conference.]