Open Source Party Line

I don’t buy the analogy Charlie poses, where we ought to “Imagine if all the active members of Greenpeace drove Ford Expeditions and Chevy Tahoes and failed to recycle any of their paper, plastic, and aluminum goods”: for one thing, the “all” in that quotation is a nifty little argumentative slip. Charlie also supposes in his example that all of the goals of Greenpeace members are identical (again, the party line), yet I wonder how he’d feel about a hypothetical Icelandic head of state who drove an SUV and refused to recycle yet passed legislation permanently outlawing the hunting of Minke whales. Political positions are not all-or-nothing.

Furthermore, I don’t like being landscaped as a “copyfighter”, for the same reasons that Krista has recently and brilliantly expressed: “I’ll agree that practicing what one preaches is definitely a good thing. [. . .] But here’s the thing: I’m not a copyfighter. I am an intellectual property scholar, and there’s a difference between those two things.” Clancy attempts a mitigating response, suggesting that “To me, a copyfighter is someone who engages in conversations on authorship and intellectual property, even if the approach is oblique, as I’d consider Mike’s to be. Moreover, copyfighters look at our current copyright model — automatic copyright, life + 70 years as soon as the content is put into a fixed medium — and express some kind of qualm about it; they think it should change in some way. To be more specific, I don’t think one necessarily has to want to do away with copyright, advocate copyleft, or even support Creative Commons to be a copyfighter”, which is a wonderfully convenient way of trying to get everyone on your side — only I don’t like somebody telling me what my beliefs ought to be, and that’s what Clancy and Charlie are doing. They’re drawing a party line, and saying, “If you’re open source, you’ll do X.”

I don’t think so. And, in fact, I might suggest that drawing a party line — telling people that if they’re in favor of open source, they have to use open source software — is a fine way to get people to say, “OK. I guess I’m not in favor of open source, then.”

As George W. Bush demonstrated to the United Nations with his “with us or against us” rhetoric, if you draw an exclusionary line, people will cross it. Only they might not go in the direction you want.