Eben Moglen Quotes (13 Quotes)

We'll release the first discussion draft very late this year or very early next year. We'll provide an extensive rationale as to why we made the choices we made and, in a limited way, why we didn't include some other suggestions.

Can a one judge sitting somewhere in a trial court issue an order that says nobody in the world is allowed to have, to use, to improve or to develop software for playing multimedia content without the permission of the manufacturers of the content themselves ... This is an astonishing development in the course of our understanding of what we call the copyright bargain, the relationship between authors' rights, publishers' leverages and consumers' needs.

IBM has decided that being a company committed to open standards, open document formats and free software means ultimately reassessing the patent process and its role in your relationship to your customers,

Mr. Stallman made perfectly clear that his point of view is It's enough. It's enough that the world has to pay attention to that (DRM) problem the way the world needed to pay attention to the patent problem 10 years ago.

Version 2 has now been running for nearly 15 years without substantial modification. It GPL 2 has successfully been used to go from a world in which free software was a very marginal community to one in which everyone, everywhere is aware of it.

The foundation believes that free software---that is, software that can be freely studied, copied, modified, reused, redistributed and shared by its users---is the only ethically satisfactory form of software development, as free and open scientific research is the only ethically satisfactory context for the conduct of mathematics, physics, or biology.

We think it's a serious problem we don't have a solution to recommend. We regard today's draft as simply serving notice that this is a problem that can no longer be ignored.

The idea that we are anti-capitalist is a stupid idea. Free software is not anti-capitalist. Capitalism now makes a great deal of money out of free software and it voluntarily pays us money to make, improve and lawyer for it.

The big boys, corporations and governments, have far more reason to be interested and concerned this time.

(Open-source firms) are engaging in substantial, active, prosperous business making money for their shareholders and helping investors.

In the world we're living in right now, no one can make small, cheap consumer electronics without our software. Our pre-market clout, our use as a raw material of manufacturing, is now large enough to bring an industry coalition into being.

Patents which conserve an edge in a rapidly changing market, may have uses for companies such as IBM. But patents which inhibit your customer's ability to achieve their own goals or to contribute to jointly build technology or community build technology are not useful to a company such as IBM wishes to be.

No matter what your stand on software patents, and I oppose them, I call on developers to contribute to the OSDL patent commons project because there is strength in numbers and when individual contributions are collected together it creates a protective haven where developers can innovate without fear.