Anyone who is interested in software theology has heard of him. To those who believe that the tools of the digital world should be freely available to everyone, he is next to God, God being Richard Stallman. To the other side, the companies that treat software as a product and make their billions from it, he is a lethal antagonist, a man who knows his history and law so well that they shrink from the brilliance of his erudition and rapier thrusts against greed and theft.
Yes, it's Eben Moglen I am talking about. Moglen, the professor of law and legal history at Columbia University, founder-director of the Software Freedom Law Centre and travelling Messiah of Software Freedom. Moglen is currently in India spreading the word at Delhi, Bangalore and Thiruvananthapuram but unfortunately he is addressing the choir. It's a great pity that general audiences will not be listening to this riveting speaker who makes a compelling case for the democratisation of information tools of the 21st century. Moglen belongs to that rare class of thinkers who can hold you spellbound for a couple of hours without the aid of any notes or power point presentations.
What does he preach? Moglen believes that knowledge should be open to everyone, and in this digital age, software, the key tool, should be free to all. But free, as he repeatedly emphasises, not as in free beer but free as in the freedom to pursue knowledge. That distinction is important. It means that you use the available tools to improve the human condition but give back to society the improvements you make on these tools. Thus, while “Microsoft sees software as a product, a thing that must be scarce,” Moglen views it as the accretion of human knowledge built over a long, long period and therefore “a culture” just like literature. In his world view, knowledge can never be a product to be shut off to people according to their ability to pay. That's where the battle lines are drawn between the companies who thrive on products, which are fortified by patent laws, and the free software heretics.
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