« What we're talking about are some legal rules that assist in the construction of communities that share kwnowledge. [..] The particular knowledge being shared is knowledge about how to make computers do neat and useful things, but that process [...] goes far beyond »
« it's perhaps not terribly surprising that the initial explorations of the possibility of sharing knowledge at low friction occured in the neighbourhood of the software that made digital communities possible »
« The principal social alteration wich brings about this epohcal change in the nature of human society is the digitisation of knowledge. [...] We can produce anything of value, utility, or beauty that can be represented by a bitstream, [..], anywhere, at any time, to anyone, at no more cost than the fixed cost wich created the first copy [...]. That fixed cost may be [...] very substantial. There is no question that it continues to cost money to acquire knowledge and to represent it in beautiful and useful ways. But whats has changed is that the marginal cost of the additional copy of each bitstream has gone to zero, and with that change fundamental economic reordering begins in global society. »
« Why is it ever moral to deprive people of that wich they could have for nothing and wich they wish to have, and wich you already have made ? »
« In a competitive market the price of knowledge equalled the marginal cost of its production and distribution. [...] The Theory of the Firm demanded that under 20th Century conditions, the price of informations goods be equal of their marginal cost - that is, zero. »
« "Why is software property ?", Stallman said, "it should be knowledge to be shared, like math, like physics [...] it's evidently immoral to deprive them of knowledge; you' ve given the knowledge to the computer sitting next to them [...] the knowledge is playing a potentially determinative role in their lives [..]" And out of that fundamental ethical insight, there followed a determination that there ought to be some freedoms in connection with peoples use of computer software »
« The result is the birth of the Free Software movement. It has a technical objective, because its founder is a technical person »
« By 1979 [...] it became the general tendency [...] in American legal thinking to assume that software was protected, if that's the correct word, by the law of copyright. »
« What was achieved was, within the vocabulary of the community, a very pretty hack. »
« What the free software author wanted was actually simply to remove a few pieces from the existing copyright machine. [...] The copyright status accorded to each author of a computer program, the exclusive right to control copying, modification, and initial distribution of copies. [...] With respect to distribution, the only principle necessary in order to protect the sharing was to say "if you redistribute, wether modified or unmodified, use these permissions and no other". »
« This structure, the slightly honeycombed copyright law, serving the purpose of enabling sharing, came to be called "copyleft". »
« Monopolies, as we all know and were taught, produce inferior goods at high prices, and stifle innovation. The wealthiest and most deeply-funded monopoly [..] spends literally billions of dollars over the last two decades trying to convince [..] that the laws of our economics had been repealed for the special benefit of Mr. Gates and Mr. Ballmer »
« As most of the commercial competitors who had attempted a run at Microsoft in any comprehensive way gave up and made peace, a small and largely disorganised community of people engaged in making software for sharing transformed the terms of the debate, produced excellent goods at zero cost, and began the process of dismantling the monopoly, wich as you see is now beginning to take full speed ahead »
« The process of negotiating the content of the third version of the GPL was the process of assembling a community. »
« What we learned during the first 20 years of the free software movement's existence is a style of construction [...] wich can be defined [...] in terms of three essential components [...] : proof of concept, running code, and presence of community »
« That's all that defines 21st century economic activity, in deep contrary distinction to the industrial economies that preceded it. What the free software movement showed was that by proving a concept within reach, and offering some working model, no matter how defective, partial or bad, in the presence of a community [...], the achievement of the outcome is simpy a matter of allowing people to work freely with one another. »
« So what GPL3 meant was : proof of concept, plus running code, plus presence of the community. »
« The concept had been proved alreay, by GPL2 [...] There was running code : we worked very hard for almost 2 years to produce a first discussion draft of GPL3, wich we unveiled on January 18th of 2006 at MIT, and there was a community; many communities, in fact »
« But their convocation for the purpose of legislation was a unique event. Every other week for the past 18 months, we've convened a conferece call of twenty-one of the largest IT vendors in the world. »
« We also convened, every other week, a conversation among twenty-four of the largest users of software in the world »
« We consulted every single week the leadership of large free software projects [...], some of whom use GPL and some of whom only interact with GPLd code. We spoke to hackers of enormous influence in the community »
« We conducted public meetings on every continent, save Antarctica. »
« In the end, we got agreement. We got consensus. Those who predicted at the beginning of this process that it would dissolve into flame wars, or bad netiquette, or some screeching meltdown benefiting only the monopolists, were wrong. »
Méthode des commentaires« 21st Century law is born in the street in the same way 21st Century television is born in the street. Not sent to you from the top of a broadcast tower, but upward from the cellphone and the portable camera put through Youtube.»
« Flickr, Youtube and the other great distribution breakthroughs in our time are not actually mechanisms for the distribution of photographs or video. Flickr and Youtube and their equivalents are places for human beings to create communities through their shared interaction with images or moving pictures. As Wikipedia is a place for people to create communities around pretty much all the general knowledge that all the people in any particular community possess. A place, it's true, for arguments and handwaving and pub-type disputation, as well as learned discourse. But a place primarily where the whole point is that we're all doing it together. »
« What the net can do to politics in the Youtube, wifi, moveon, Facebook, Myspace, flashmob era remains to be written out in full [...] What the GPL did to the law of copyright was not an act of subversion, it was an act of evolutionary improvement. It was a way to take the specialised law of the legislature - let us call it the law of the publishers [...] - and to make it the law of creators by the joint unified act of creative people. »
« What is really important about what we are doing is that we are modelling other things that people can do for themselves. We are not creating something that you have to take from us, [...] you either wish or hate. We are only establishing that proof of concept plus running code plus community equals freedom. And that proposition applies far beyond the domain of computer software »
« The fundamental improvement being reached here is a nimprovement in the technology of self-government. [...] We have refashioned what competition and co-operation mean, and we have refashioned how production occurs in the digital economy. »
« The difference between us and all of those who've struggled for the freedom of thought in the past is of no particular credit to us. We are not smarter, we are not stronger, we are not more indefatigable. We are merely lucky. [...] What distinguises us is merely a contingent fact of our role : this time, we win. »
« The task I believe that I was set as the lead negotiator in this area was a diplomatic task, to separate the IT industry [...] from the entertainment industry [...].The entertainment industry on planet earth had decided that in order to acquire Layer 7 data security, it was necessary to lock up layers 2, 3, 4, 5 and 7 so that no technological progress could occur without their permission. »
« We brought them to a consensus whey were unable to brind themselves to, wich is represented in the license by a rule wich fundamentally says : "If you want to experiment with locking down layer below 7 [...], you may do so freely, we have no objection - not only do we have no objection to you doing it, we've no objection to your using our parts to do it with. But when you use our parts to build machines wich control peoples' daily lives [...], build devices that are modifiable by them to the same extent that they're modifiable by you. That's all we want. If you can modifty the device after you give it to them, then they must be able to modify the device after you give it to them : that's a price for using our parts." That's a deal wich has been accepted. »
« The decision to delegate to users a partial authority is a decision by an author. Some will make it, some will not. »
« The decision to license code for downstream re-licensing is a decision to trust the rest of the community with everything you've done. It is remarkable how often that decision has been made in the past 20 years, and it is remarkable how high the returns of that investment have been, in my judgement. Thank you all very much »