10 Years Ago: Eben Moglen in the European Parliament, Explaining Software Patents, GPL/Copyleft, and Importance of Free Software
Video: GPL: Eben Moglen's plea for Free Software before the European Parliament, 2013-07-09
With Invidious still under attack (most instances try to bypass aggressive blocking and some have given up), it is already difficult to download anything from YouTube [1, 2] for whatever purpose, even fairly and legally. Google is dying to make YouTube profitable; it has shut all the easier doors to shut or barricaded the gates around its near-monopoly on Web videos. Of course it's not a benign monopoly; we urge people not to upload anything to this monopoly, no matter how "widely-used" it may seem. This will only worsen over time.
We've barely managed to even download this video from 2013 (about 10 failed attempts), but here's a relevant portion about the role or the relative share of Free software one decade ago (this has improved since then). For the sake of fairness I've only cropped out 4:38 - 6:23. It focuses on the silent giant Free software had become before he gave this talk. Back in 2013 Android was maybe 5% of the connected computers and now it is 41.2%, based on statCounter. Moglen reminds people that Android contains Free software, but he habitually uses terms like "FOSS" (Free Open Source Software) because of the target audience. He does not mention "Linux". He blasts Europe for very slow adoption of Free software, as we noted hours ago in relation to Germany in particular. To him, India is a good role model when it comes to GNU/Linux adoption and technical teaching to that effect. As we showed before, despite Microsoft's ongoing interference (including Bill Gates lobbying heads of state behind closed doors while bribing them with notorious "awards"), India is adopting GNU/Linux rather fact [1, 2, 3, 4] and Windows is now down to 15% of the whole.
Why don't we see similar trends in Europe/EU, except maybe in Greece [1, 2]?
Professor Moglen, in this rather old talk, interchangeably uses "he" and "she" to be gender-neutral, just like his friend and colleague, who started the GNU/Linux operating system. █
Update
We now have a transcript of the video portion above:
[00:00]
Eben Moglen: This use of copyright law, to make sharing impermeable to breakage, to prevent anyone from taking the program private, or enhancing the program and not sharing the improvements under distribution has essentially socialized research and development in infrastructure software around the world. Android which
[00:30]
is based on GPL licensed operating system code is now the majority of all mobile computing devices on Earth. The server market, which was 100% percent dominated by Microsoft at the end of the 20th century, is no longer dominated by Microsoft at all. More than 20% of all the servers shipped in the world last year were shipped with Free Software on them from the factory.
[01:00]
The monopoly which two of the largest governments on Earth spent a decade fighting in their own courts gave way to competition from FOSS software. The GPL achieved those results because the GPL institutionalized sharing, and brought various market participants from IBM, to Hewlett-Packard, to the United States Government, to Oracle, to the
[01:30]
largest manufacturers in East Asia to a common table in which everybody's actions benefited everybody and research could be socialized rather than contained within the silos of individual firms.