By Paul Ferris
Editor, Linux Today
It was Wednesday night, at the Bazaar in New York City.
I finally got to meet Ralph Nader. I attended his keynote
address at the Bazaar, and I was able to track him down after the
speech and ask a few questions.
Ralph is one of my most admired heroes. If you listen closely to
Ralph’s ideas — if you pay attention — you will see that he is
actually a man on a mission similar to Richard Stallman, Eric
Raymond or Bruce Perens.
Ralph speaks his message with very little wasted verbiage, and
the issues that he addresses span a range that is breath-taking.
Some of this ability, I’m sure, relates to experience. His focus is
upon changing the government to benefit the rights of the
individual and to protect those rights across the board.
There is a common thread here with the Free Software movement if
you are paying attention. Both efforts seek to empower people to
control their own lives in the face of enormous corporate interest
to the contrary.
I meet a lot of people that have the attitude that Microsoft
should be left alone, and that Free Software will win eventually
because it has a more powerful development model. This “hands-off”
idea of government is idealistic, and has it’s place.
Unfortunately, I don’t think that Microsoft is one of these places.
Beyond a shadow of a doubt Microsoft has crossed the line and I’m
grateful for the work of people like Ralph Nader.
Just saying that we’ve won, and that Microsoft will eventually
fall, and that that will be enough remedy to the current situation
is like an old joke I used to tell about fire safety. The joke goes
like this: “Remember, if you are ever in a burning building and
your clothing catches on fire, you must not panic. You must, by all
means, not run. Stop, lie down — wait. The fire will eventually
burn itself out.”
That’s where we are today with Microsoft. There’s a lot of
burning of competitors going on. The damage is enormous. The DOJ
was right on the money with their lawsuit. If anything, it was not
comprehensive enough. I don’t believe that we should just “wait”
till the fire burns itself out. We should be doing whatever we can
to address the fires of today and the wreckage of yesterday.
Ralph was introduced as having started his consumer rights
advocacy by trying to stop a large corporation that was making
products that crashed. His work was still on-going today with
Microsoft in that regard.
He then took the microphone and held the audience in rapt
attention for the good portion of an hour.
He began by explaining how paranoid Microsoft was about market
share and that they were not just competing aggressively — they
were scaring executives so much that a good portion of them would
not speak freely about what was going on.
I myself have to point out here that free speech is one of the
examples that we use when talking about Free Software — “Think
Free Speech, not Free Beer”. Executives of major corporations were
being controlled by Microsoft all the way down to their rights to
free speech. Sure, they were free to talk — if they didn’t mind
seeing their livelihood go away.
One of the scariest things is that according to Ralph, Microsoft
is still expanding it’s sphere of influence. Given that this
company is in anti-trust court, that’s surprising. In the past,
landing in anti-trust court has had a sobering impact on the
monopolistic company in question. They change their dealings with
competitors almost instantaneously.
Not so in regards to Microsoft, they seem to be still attempting
business as usual. They are still acquiring new businesses and
making new alliances as if things were still the same.
Microsoft’s clearest competitor today is its own installed base
of customers, according to Ralph. They must continually provide
these customers with reasons to “re-purchase” the same technology
over and over. This is an enormous market. I felt that this issue
itself is often misunderstood by our media. Most people in the “us
versus them” category don’t realize that Microsoft views its own
past customers in an adversarial light.
This is an advantage, beyond a shadow of a doubt, for our
movement. Each “customer” that switches to Free Software typically
stays in our court, and is often there for the long term. This in
spite of the fact that we’re actually doing nothing to force them
into the buying decision in the first place.
We don’t view anybody as an individual in this kind of an
adversarial light. We’re into freedom, and
therefore we have no need or desire to harm consumers in this
damaging way. If anything, we’re attempting to provide everybody
with choice. Even those that wish to purchase proprietary
products will benefit from the work of the Free Software community.
Indeed when they surf the web today they constantly benefit from
this style of software development.
Ralph compared Microsoft to the railroad monopolies of the past,
except he went on to point out how bad things would have been if
those railroads had proceeded to buy out all of the companies
making railroad cars, and then moved into taking over the companies
that were shipping the contents in those cars.
And he said as far as Microsoft is concerned, that’s where we
are today.
His view of Microsoft innovation (quoted from Jamie Love,
Ralph’s technical partner in non-crime) was that it was “Innovation
in ruthless marketing only.” Microsoft does not succeed due to
better products or patents — it succeeds mainly due to its ability
to engage in exclusionary tactics and bundling deals.
My personal views of these statements is that they are right on
the money. Microsoft is a dangerous enemy of the Free Software
movement because they wield this kind of power. I myself have
witnessed these tactics in force when I have tried to install Free
Software or even proprietary Open Systems software such as
HP-UX.
The proprietary aspects of Microsoft marketing and technical
obfuscation are so potent that customers are reduced to making
choices for all of the wrong reasons. It is almost always to the
detriment of freedom, future growth and quality. It is certain to
cost more with regards to the monetary aspects as well.
Ralph Nader spent a good portion of his talk addressing the fact
that consumers have been harmed by Microsoft. He discussed
potential remedies and finally made comments in regards to how we
need to change the laws in regards to personal privacy.
Like it or not, Democrat or Republican, you would have to be
fairly clue-less not to see that in terms of the new electronic
frontier we must change the laws in regard to digital rights. We
have none, and we didn’t get here by not having rights. The U.S.
Constitution gives us certain irrevocable rights and the work that
Ralph Nader is doing here is nothing short of absolute necessity
for the insurance of future freedom in America, much less the world
itself.
He suggests many changes to the law that need to be made in
keeping up with the changes brought upon by collection of data in
the new digital world. I suggest that we in the Free Software
movement are a group of people, if there is any, that is best
mobilized and educated to understand and actually act in this
direction.
Further Contemplation — Ralph Nader and The Free
Software Community
We share a lot of goals, our community and the work that Ralph
is doing. What I see is that we’re working within the current
system (using things like the GNU Public License, for example) to
change the way that software is developed, protected and extended
in the future.
The work that Ralph is doing concerns changing the current set
of laws to protect our rights to privacy and freedom in the future,
as well as address the enormous damages of the past.
This is important because no amount of GPL’ing of code can make
up for the fact that 90% of the people on the planet using
computers today have been harmed. No amount of GNU/Linux progress
will make up for the fact that just that percentage alone gives a
big corporation an enormous amount of leverage over the person
using a computer today.
If this market had been obtained in a legal fashion by actually
creating superior software and unique innovations, it would be a
different situation. Yet the rulings of Judge Jackson and the
public outcry by people who have been damaged tell of a different
situation altogether.
We’re both working toward similar goals, it’s just that we’re
using different defensive strategies and working on different
battlegrounds. Ralph has the benefit of many years of experience
and we should listen to him and use some techniques that have been
developed in the face of staggering amounts of power and money.
I’m going to be examining this issue in the future myself. I
think we, the Free Software community, are an irresistible force
for change. I think we stand for individual freedom in the face of
some of these large corporate interests that are often perceived as
insurmountable.
The success that Ralph has accumulated to the contrary in the
past proves that this is simply not the case. It proves that we as
individuals can make a difference. It rings harmonious
with many of the successes of the Free Software movement. Listen to
Richard Stallman’s message for example, and you will realize that
one person did, in fact, have a staggering impact on the happenings
of today.
I got some face time with Ralph after his speech. I bought a
couple of his books, one for my Father as a Christmas gift — Dad,
if you’re reading this, sorry about blowing the surprise. How many
of your heroes do you share with your parents?
I asked Ralph and Jamie if their letters to President Clinton
ever got answered. The unfortunate answer was that more often than
not, they are not answered. The main one I was interested in was a
letter
written in regards to the “Registration Wizard” shipped with
Windows 95. Back in 1995, when the issue was a small one and
the data largely uncollected, Ralph and Jamie Love made a serious
attempt to stop the damage before it became a reality.
Today, somewhere in Redmond, a potentially large database of
consumer information about programs loaded on Windows systems
exists. Microsoft swears that they would never use the information
for marketing purposes.
I’ll bet that most people who are familiar with large corporate
morality, and especially Microsoft, would beg to differ. I know
that I’m one of those people.
I spent some time talking about the common goals that we share
as a community and the work that he was doing. How the Free
Software movement is almost a political party and that we should be
organized as such.
Ralph’s question to me at this point was along the lines of why
weren’t we already? I believe that there are efforts under way in
the form of Slashdot discussions and organization efforts — but we
could be so much more than we are today.
You know, I didn’t have a good enough answer for him. It was
implied that if we harnessed our efforts politically that this
would be a Good Thing(tm). It was clear that he was speaking to me
in the active sense — this work needs to be done.
Ralph Nader is one of those people who, like him or not, looms
largely in many dimensions. Whether or not you respect all of the
dimensions, the chronological one has to be admired. He’s been
doing consumer advocacy for a long time. So long that it spans
generations and has amazingly kept up with the changes wrought by
our accelerated technological growth.
Further reading:
Essential.org — A
consumer rights web resource.