I’m here at NYU listening to Eben Moglen.

He wants to talk in general about where we live now

The commons is here and isn’t going away

Production done by community

the prosumer production and use of tech

you see onset of prosumer behavior

no vendor untouched by the commons

commons production changes traditonal structures

unintentionally touches his nose like a pugilist ready to box

fecundity and profitability of the commons

At this point, my PDA’s battery was drained so I had to stop. It didn’t matter. What Moglen had to say was so riveting that I doubt I could have continued blogging. He’s a firehose of exposition on matters associated with intellectual property. However, the gist of his argument was about the legal and ethical ramifications of what he described as the commons. In this case, the commons is primarily digital and primarily the Internet but even that core component alone has the ability to compete with and beat for-profit initiatives.

And what he had to say was nothing more than a clear-cut method to propagating intellectual freedom with an emphasis on the human act of sharing so that the world, in turn, may be freed from all the things that limit us now as a species.

He said something that, to me, has always stood out as a salient problem in the development of our species. He said that we have thrown away the vast majority of the Einsteins that the human race has produced. These geniuses were denied the means of participating in the production or dissemination of knowledge and never left a record of their existence. For the first time, using the Internet and digital technologies, we can erase mere circumstance as the limiting factor for the development of people. I’ve seen my cousins in the Philippines languish because of their lack of education and opportunity and I understand that the Internet has gone a tremendously long way towards the redress of these issues. In a deep intuitive way, his words struck me as nothing more than a call to revolution yet in the most benign non-violent way possible. He called it a peaceful redistribution of wealth. He posits a world where sharing is not only an ethical norm but where it becomes the business norm as well. He heavily criticizes the platformization of commerce where commercial interests no longer compete on the technical merits of their product but instead alter the marketplace to suit the needs of their bottom line through the mechanics of patents and intellectual property.

I’ve given it a lot of thought and have really come around intellectually to the side of the free software advocates. Even for myself, I can see Microsoft’s days as being numbered. I’m just still waiting for something that can be as robust as Exchange Server before I can commit to changing the Leaderboard.

Two updates: Zimbra finally does Windows Mobile 5! And here’s a YouTube video of Eben Moglen at a Plone Conference last year no less!