Date: Mon, 22 Feb 1999 05:08:51 +0000 (GMT) From: Terry Lambert <tlambert@primenet.com> To: mason@acheron.middleboro.ma.us (Mason Loring Bliss) Cc: tlambert@primenet.com, FreeBSD-advocacy@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: NetBSD/Linux 'distribution' Message-ID: <199902220508.WAA29696@usr07.primenet.com> In-Reply-To: <19990220225046.M11361@acheron.middleboro.ma.us> from "Mason Loring Bliss" at Feb 20, 99 10:50:46 pm
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> (I don't want to start a flame war, and I *have* stated this belief before, > but it seems that the only possible outcome or goal of proprietary software > is the ability to say "I have this, and I won't let you have it," regardless > of the relative merit of the reasoning with regard to anyone involved. (But > then, I really don't like capitalism, either. (And yeah, I've been known to > hug the odd tree now and again.))) Imagine a world where the only thing of value is information. In this world, the initials F.S.F. are an acronym for "Free Stuff Foundation". Information has value, because it's the information about the position of atoms in an object that define that object, and there is sufficient technology to rearrange atoms any way you want to arrange them, and the only question is how to arrange them. What are the first order ramifications? People are made of atoms. If I can push atoms around effectively for free, this means I can do two really provocative things: first, if an atom moves somewhere I don't want it to, I can put it back where it came from; second, I can make exact duplicates of anything, sans spin direction on the copy's electrons. What are the second order ramifications? If I don't like your idealogy, I can change your mind. No, not by arguing; by literally changing your mind. Of course, I could be doing this "for your own good". I could even be doing this for your own good -- no quotes because there's no hypocricy needed. I could either be a zealot, or I or someone else could have changed my mind. It could even have been changed, such that I wouldn't want to change it back. What are the third order ramifications? When you can not only change what you (or someone else) wants, but what you (or someone else) wants to want, that's power. That's too much power. That's way way too much power to give to your six year old. Too much power to give to you. Your priest. Your Senator. Your President. Anyone who thinks they know what's best for you, and that you aren't acting in those best interests. How to avoid it? Don't tell anyone how to do it. Build active and passive defensive systems. Build them very well. And then give them away to everyone; an artificial immune system to an artificially created threat. Only a moron would give away the source code to his immune system. But don't worry right now. It's not an immediate threat. It's a long way off. This stuff is all theoretical. What we write today and give away under the GPL will never have an impact on trillions of tiny robots wandering around in our bodies some time in the future. After all, what does software research have to do with massively parallel distributed systems like those? An exercise: Nanotechnology AltaVista found about 52482 Web pages for you. +Nanotechnology +IBM AltaVista found 8660 Web pages for you. +Nanotechnology +Xerox AltaVista found 4125 Web pages for you. +Nanotechnology +"AT&T" AltaVista found 454 Web pages for you. +Nanotechnology +NSF AltaVista found 3025 Web pages for you. +Nanontechnology +DARPA AltaVista found 221 Web pages for you. +Nanontechnology +NSA AltaVista found 114 Web pages for you. +Nanotechnology +Russia AltaVista found 3750 Web pages for you. +Nanotechnology +China AltaVista found 4910 Web pages for you. +Nanotechnology +"North Korea" AltaVista found 47 Web pages for you. Oh yeah. There's at least a good 30 years before someone forces someone else to build something like that. On the bright side, the immune system you get will be protected by a 128 bit cryptographic system, for which only your government and a key escrow company will have the other set of keys. Terry Lambert terry@lambert.org --- Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present or previous employers. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-advocacy" in the body of the message
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