Eben Moglen Speaks on GPLv3

Version 3 of the GNU Public License (or GPL) is out. Eben Moglen, who is counsel for the Free Software Foundation and one of the chief architects of the GPL, recently spoke at the Scottish Society for Computers and Law. You can see a video of his speech here.

For those not yet familiar with the GPL: it is the "free as in freedom" legal arrangement (a license really) that provides a legal framework for free software.

It can be fascinating from both a legal and technical perspective. What I like about Moglen is that he frames the issue of free software and access to knowledge
as a compelling moral question. An excerpt from his speech:

"We can produce anything of value, utility, or beauty that can be represented by a bitstream, which increasingly means all beautiful and useful human activity, anywhere, at any time, to anyone, at no more cost than the fixed cost which created the first copy of the relevant bitstream. That fixed cost may be, under certain circumstances, 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 what 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. By the end of the first quarter of the 21st century, almost everything which it has been in the past the purpose of industrial civilisation to put into analogue representations of information - music, video, art, useful information concerning the operation of the physical environment, political ideas, comedy, drama - will all be universally represented in dephysicalised forms that it costs nothing to make, move, and deliver.

The consequence of those changes is the onset of a very powerful moral question. If it is possible, easily possible, to give to each human being who wishes it, anything of utility or beauty in our world of civilisation, if it is possible to deliver any such entity anywhere at any time at low cost or at zero cost, why is it ever moral to exclude anyone from anything she wants?

Why is it ever moral to deprive people of that which they could have for nothing and which they wish to have, and you already have made? If you could feed everyone by baking one loaf of bread, and pressing a button, what would be the moral case for permitting the price of bread to be higher than the poorest hungry person could pay?"

As a teacher (I teach 6 computer-related units here in the university) I am concerned about access to software. We are evolving into a society of knowledge workers - and software 
will soon be the most meaningful way to work on knowledge.  It will be as essential as air and bread. A monopoly on software is like a monopoly on mathematics - a serious limitation on how we engage the world around us. And denying basic access to the poorest nations can no longer be just a legal or economic question, but a moral one.