Eben Moglen, founder and chairman of the Software Freedom Law Center, is the ideal mix of a law professor mix and a free-software technologist. In the following two-part interview with Slashdot – News for nerds he talks about free software, locked down information systems, and the importance of sharing. Here is a passage from the interview, which is well worth watching:
“One of the things which everybody really now understands is that what makes the web a miracle also contains its dangerousness. The web was created for openness and power of construction. The browser made the web extremely easy to read, but it didn’t make it extremely easy for normal people to write. And so a little thug in a hooded sweatshirt came along and he made the web easy to write on condition that people allow him to surveil all of it [Mark Zuckerberg]. This was a horrible deal, bad for everybody as it turns out, except the little thug who made a lot of money. But what it created was a man in the middle attack on human civilization.”
