[Nettime-bold] Satire of Max Herman by unknown artist

["Nicholas Hermann" <NHerman@hga.com>]

++

This is some unusual stuff here.  I couldn't find the /hell.html link, but I did mind www.geocities.com/maxherman_2000.  It has a pitcher of Ted Kazinski on it.  I guess they think I'm the intellectual equivalent of the unabomber.  Is that a good or a bad thing?  Who gives a damn.  Anyone know who did that page?  Any other thoughts on the page?

++







Q.: In life_sharing, you invoke the GNU Public License (GPL) a particular form of license for software developed
                                            by the Free Software Foundation. This license allows users of a piece of code to make changes to it, to adapt
                                            it for their own purposes, so long as they then make those changes publicly available to other users and do not
                                            "close" the code as it develops. The GPL is a document that has excited interest outside of programming
                                            circles, providing a link to other takes on collective or open authorship, redefinitions of copyright, intellectual
                                            property, and so on. It is its particular status as a document that I'd like to ask you to comment on. GPL
                                            seems to be formed at the meeting point between two different dynamics which, in another context, Toni Negri
                                            names "constituent power" and "constitutional power." The GPL is a technical document that forms the basis
                                            of a particular range of working practices. As a form of constituent power, it is both a manifestation of the
                                            fecundity of collaboration and — at the present time — an insurgent reinvention of the form of property. Equally,
                                            existing as it does in the form of a license, a contract, GPL relies on the constituted power of social stasis and
                                            normalization. It is based on an immediate appeal to Law. It is this latter aspect of it which meshes so well with
                                            the determination to treat software as simply another variant on capitalist forms of property and GPL as simply
                                            a more useful means of generating such property. Constituent power, on the other hand, is the amorphous and
                                            ambivalent power of change, of the social in the process of mutation. (This at once means that it also
                                            encompasses emergent sections of the bourgeois, what is inventive and seductive in the rhetorical figure of the
                                            "entrepreneur" deployed so much around e-commerce, for instance.) For Negri there is no lasting
                                            accommodation between constituent and constitutional power. There is no synthesis onto a higher plane of
                                            compromise. I suspect that it is this sense that there is more to it, that there's more coming, more mutation,
                                            more space for profound invention that makes GPL and other systems like it attractive to take up as models for
                                            development in other contexts. Given this, I'd like to ask a couple of things. Firstly, is your use of GPL in the
                                            description of the life_sharing project accurate, or (besides the project's explicit use of software released under
                                            GPL or open-source licenses) is it more along the lines of an allusion? If so, what is it that you use GPL to
                                            point toward? What do you see lying beyond it? (In the case of life_sharing and other projects, I suspect that
                                            although they use GPL as a "model," they may actually do something rather different, rather more. One of the
                                            ways this happens is that they do not make an appeal to Law as a basic condition for their function. Here I
                                            mean Law in both senses, that of "absolute right" in that GPL is somehow seen as being transcendentally
                                            correct in some circles, rather than as being something operating within a specific historical setting; and the
                                            more direct sense that, as it exists in the form of a legal document, it allows a route into this apparently "freely"
                                            constructed relationship for the state.) 

                                            A.: The fact of adopting Linux as operating system and consequently the GPL license, is absolutely not an
                                            allusion, but the result of political choices, and for technical and legal reasons. First of all, it is necessary to
                                            make some distinctions. life_sharing contains stuff produced under three different licenses: 

                                            ++ GPL: GNU General Public License. It is the general license created to protect free software. All the software
                                            adopted in life_sharing is covered by GPL. http://www.gnu.org — Copyright: applied only where specified, on
                                            files not produced by 0100101110101101.ORG but protected by traditional copyright, i.e., certain articles or
                                            texts — We are working, together with a lawyer, to develop a license that we want to apply to all the files in
                                            which no other license is specified. This license is directly inspired by the GPL but will be extended to all
                                            cultural products, granting the possibility of: — using the product — modifying the product — distributing
                                            copies, modified or not, of the product (freely or with payment) This license also prevents the addition of any
                                            restrictions — avoiding the possibility of products covered by this license being added to or combined with any
                                            other products under any different form of license. Up until now, 0100101110101101.ORG has not placed any of
                                            the things it did under copyright. First of all, because 0100101110101101.ORG has never produced anything.
                                            0100101110101101.ORG only moves packages of information, diverts their flow, observes changes, and
                                            eventually profits from it. Visibility is the real problem of the Net. If someone uses your music, your words, or
                                            images, he is only doing you favor. Many people have spontaneously reused 0100101110101101.ORG
                                            (www.plagiarist.org, www.geocities.com/maxherman_2000/hell.html, www.message.sk/warped). If someone
                                            else profits from 0100101110101101.ORG, it's because of their own merit. In the end, it is doing the same as
                                            what we did: profit is always inevitably mutual. 


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