Lecture on the Global Software Industry and Free Software

A lecture delivered in Edinburgh, Scotland on the 26th of June, 2007, titled “The Global Software Industry in Transformation: After GPLv3” by Columbia law prof Eben Moglen of the Software Freedom Law Center is available online. The lecture was hosted by the Scottish Society for Computers and Law. Stored on the Internet Archive, it’s available in three formats: video, audio only, and text (transcription). (As it’s unedited, I recommend audio.)

The GPLv3 referred to in the title is the latest version of the GNU General Public License, described in Wikipedia in the following way:

The GPL is the most popular and well known example of the type of strong copyleft license that requires derived works to be available under the same copyleft. Under this philosophy, the GPL is said to grant the recipients of a computer program the rights of the free software definition and uses copyleft to ensure the freedoms are preserved, even when the work is changed or added to.

Moglen draws an intriguing parallel between software and mathematics, arguing that the former is as essential to society as mathematics and, like the latter, must therefore be freely available.

The lecture also offers you an opportunity to see the Internet Archive doing its thing as an open source multimedia repository. Consider this as the place to put (for free) the files you want to share freely.