Chaos Computer Club 1997 February/cccd_beta_feb_97.iso/chaos/habi1/txt/hb1_25.txt

Text File | 1997-02-28 | 12KB | 255 lines

    STALLMAN: Thereis still copy-procection, and the fact
    that you don't get the source [codesl; you can't change
    the program araund and learn something,

    STEVEN LEVY: I want to answer Mark's point about
    inteilectuat property. I never meant to sey that the MIT
    people were these fantasÜc people who didn't want to
    make any money ever. The fact vvas, for example. in
    '61, when Steve Russell wrote SPACEWAR [the eor-
    liest and greatest computer game for 12 yearsl as a hack
    ar~d some people in the room helped improve it, the
    improvements came because it was an open program.
    Of course, Steve couidn't possibly have made any
    money by releasing SPACEWAR as a product, since
    I think there v~ere only fifty PDP-ls in toral made.
    Because he had tbat advantage that no one waS rempt-
    ing him, it was very naturat to just leave the program
    in the drower, let anyone took at the code, improve it,
    and what happened was you got a much better product
    from it being a universal property. In some more
    "senaus" things like assembters and compilers and all
    sorts of utility prograrns, the same system benefited
    everyone there. I think things happened that wouidn't
    hsve hawened if programs were sequestered away and
    kept proprietary.

    UNIDENTIFIED HACKER: There's one community in
    which this system does work' and that's academe, in
    par~ticular the community that h1IT is. In academia
    you're velued by how much you publish. The whole
    point is tO distover something and at the end give it
    away. And if I couid get a reasonable full pr >fessorship
    wnting software and giving it away, I'd be very happy
    to do that

    What l'm doing is something like science but different
    from science, because in science l'm pushing the bound-
    aries discovering new things. But only in computers do
    those things that I discover wrap around and increase
    my ability tO discover the next thing. Computers have
    this nice feedback, positive feedback, tbet everything I
    do on my computer makes it better for me doing
    rnore things on my computer. No other field works
    that way.

    VOICE: Organic chemistry works that way, All fields
    work that way

    BRUCE BAUMGART: I think we've forgatren
    something there, which is the bad nights at rhe lab,
    when the hacken stepped on each other's toes, when
    you were trying to get a paper done and somebody
    was hacking the text editor. You were trying to rake a
    telovision picture, and somebody was running music us-
    ing up all the disk space. There was anarchy. The big
    dogs wouid survive. You wouid go home, your stuff un-
    done, because somebody bigger than you and more
    powerfui than you and knew more codes, whatever~
    had stepped on you. or your disks or your pictures or
    something. Didn't you have bad times? Or were you
    always the biggest dog on the machine?

    RICHARD STALLMAN: I atways uled to oppose having
    it be a society of dog eat dog. I never tried to eat the
    dogs that were smaller tban me. Whenever a person
    uied to act toward me as if I were above him, I'd
    always say, "I'm not above you; do what you think you
    shouid do; you shouidn't get orders from me." And if
    somobody thought he was above me, I wouid say, "You
    can't give me orders. See if you can get rne fired; t
    want to do what I want.''

    BRIAN HARVEY- I think we're uying much too hard
    for a sort of unanirnity here tbat doesn't exist about
    what all of us hackers are like. For example. if you

    want to bring up the word "ethics"─I felt very un.
    comfortable last night with a couple of people who got







    up and talked about how they made their living by
    stealing from the telephone company. I think it's one
    thing to be a high schoot kid wanting to show off tbat
    you're capable of rnaking a phone call without paying
    for it, and it's something else to be an adolt being in
    che career of encouraging people to be ~hieves.

    STEVE WOZNIAK: I'd like to discuss the telephone
    topic from a hacker perspective. and it applies to soft-
    ware piracy. There are some people tbat actually have
    money and are ethical. Back then vve went out and
    treated telephone blue boxing and the like as a fun ex-
    piaration of the phone system. How couid we make
    every cait in the wor~d, in every nook and cranny and
    all that, but t'll rell you, my phone bill as a coilege stu-
    dent at Berkeley was very high because t paid for all
    the calls t wouid have paid for anyway. I only used the
    phone system to explore the network. Some pirates
    copy software and they'll copy everything and put it in
    their collection. but if they find something that they do
    like and decide it's a good one, they'll go ous and buy it
    because the producer deserves the money.

    BURRELL Sh1ITH (designer of the Macintosh): I think
    one of the common threads of hacking is tbar alt of us
    want a very pure rnodel of what we~re working on.
    Nowedays we're alt Yery compiex, we have stock op-
    tion~ salaries, and careers and stuff. Back then it was
    the joy of being absorbed, being inroxicated by being
    able to solve this problem. You would be able to take
    the entire wortd with its horrible problems and boil
    it down to a bunch of microchips or whatever we
    were hacking.

    I think another aspect of that is tbet hackers can do
    almos~ anything and be a hacker. You can be a hacker
    carpenrer. It's not necessarily high tech. I ~hink it has
    to do with cr~ftsmanship and caring about what you're
    doing. The joy of seeing your stufl work is the
    excitement.

    STEVEN LEVY: Yeah, but aren't there contradictions
    you have to deal with when those stock options and
    things like that get in the way? Homebrow had a perlad
    before there was a whole lot of money, when poople
    wouid come in and ssy. "Here's the plans tO this com-
    puter we're coming out with.'' Then ehere started to
    be secrets kept. How do you keep things going for-
    ward as much as possible when you have to keep those
    secrets, when you hsve allegiance to your company and
    its proprietary stuff?

    BRUCE BAUMGART: You iast graduated from the
    acedemic to the commercial. There's many worlds,
    and I think the worlds overlap.

    RICHARD STALLFtAN: The question is, does one of
    them eat up the other so chat it goes away? That's
    vvhat seems to happen.

    TED NElSON (ainhor of Computer Lib/Dream
    P1achines, fiounder of Xona~u): A perspactive that hasn't
    been mentioned is tbat in times like the Hornebrow
    Club, people had jobs. As Thomas Jefferson said, `'1
    make war so that my grandchildren cen study philo-
    sophy." The person who is studying philosophy is at
    the top of a food chain. (laughter, appbu#j The prob-
    lem when the philosophers find they cen sell philosophy
    is that suddenly it's the bottom of a food chain again.
    Oniy as long as it wasn't something that vvas commer-
    cially avallable couid it have this pure aspart.

    JOHN JAMES (FORTH hacker): There's a certain kind of
    contradiction that we're still dealing with in ehe vvorld

    of FORTH, where the public domain is the soul of it
    and it's also the curse. The advantage of a programming
    language i5 tbat you can do anything you want to do,
    so you nead compiete access to the source code, of
    course, and then you nead to be able to use the products
    in any way you want without having to let somöbody
    look at your books in all furure time. If tbat's not avall-
    able, then the advantages of FORTH really aren't there.
    But the problem is that if ever,vthing i5 public dornain,







    then how do you support elaborate systems development
    and so on? That's what we really haven't dezit with

    RICHARD GREENBLATT (tram MtT days "~e archetypal
    hacker, . . the hocker's hacker"─Hackers): I think it's
    very fundamental tbat source codes be made available.
    I don'e equate that with giving them away necessarily.
    I think it might be possible to work out some means by
    which a source code was available and yet it was licensod,
    on a basis that didn't involve a great deal of bureaucrat
    overhead to the proceedings. If that couid be done then
    you vveuid get the best of both worlds. The people
    who had written something originally wouid have the
    benefit of some royalties; they wouid aiso have some-
    vvhere in ehere "copyright so-and-so,' and it wouid be
    recorded that they were responsible for a particular
    piece of code.

    Having thought about this a lot, I've come up with
    only a few ideas to tr7 eo make it practical. One of
    them I think is that any such arrangement shouid hsve
    an exponential tailoff. In the first year the royalties
    shouid be such and such percent; after another year
    the royalty goes down one-half of what it was previous,
    or somethin' like that─so that the royalty pie deesn't
    just get bigger and bigger, but the people who did it
    originally eventually decay out, and the people who've
    contributed more recendy get the benefits.

    STEVE WOZNIAK: Hackers frequently want to look
    at code. Iike operating systems, listings, and the iike.
    to learn how it was done before them. Source shouid
    be made avallable reasonably to those sor~ of people.
    Not to copy, not to seD, but to expiore and learn from
    and extend.

    ROBERT WOODHEAD: Well, as a dedicated capital-
    ist explc~iter of the masses and running dog lackey of
    the bourgeois. I find chat Ehe software rhat I write
    usually falls into two different categories. There are
    finished prodocts like WIZARDRY that 1 seli and make
    a living on, and chen there are ~e tools that I wrote
    ro build those products. The tools I will give away tO
    anybody. But the product. that's my soul in tbst product.
    I don't wane anyone fooling with that. I don't want any-
    one hacking into tbet product and changing it. because
    then it won t be mine. It's like somebody looking ae a
    painting and ssying. 'Well, I don't like that color over
    there, so 1'11 jost ~ke a cen of paint and change it.''

    3ERRY POURNELLE (srience fichon writer, columaist in
    Byte mogszine) You never had eo deal with editers.
    (hughterj

    WOODHEAD: Yes I do. I tell 'em to go to hell. On
    the other hand, if somebody sees something I did and
    says tO me, "l~ow did you do that?'' 1'11 tell 'em in a
    minute. 1'11 give them all che information chey need so
    that they can 8° out and do something better, because
    what I vvant to see i5 really great stuff. That's why all
    the tools 1tve developed when 1've been working on the
    Lisa, I regularly send them off to Apple so tbat they
    can get them out there, because I know they're ganna
    help somobody. Then something really great's gonna
    come out and take away all the market sales of my
    prodact. Then l'm gonna have to go out and write a

    Above, Richord Sta/lman ~IT) "You see your prst computer
    langunge, and you think, 'This language is perfiect!'" Far right,
    Les Eomest (Imagen): "There are very few team hacks tbot one
    con tAlnk of that went anywhere.',