Aaron Williamson's webl

The HP multifunction printer at my office consistently wakes up (from sleep mode) on the wrong side of the bed,¹ displaying this self-deprecating message:

1. “Consistently” here modifying the entire clause “wakes… bed” rather than “wakes.”  In fact, the P.O.S. rarely functions properly and suspend issues are only a subcategory in its hefty catalog of flaws. [↩]

While even we lesser lights among usage snobs know that swapping “utilize” willy-nilly for “use” is wrong, no one ever told me why.  The subject came up tonight when I was editing a cover letter for Carly, so I took the opportunity to utilize the google and educate myself.  It seems “Utilize” means “turn to practical use or account” and specifically to “make do with something not normally used for the purpose.” So while you might utilize watchmaker’s tins to make a spice rack, you would use a dictionary to look up “utilize.”¹

The predictable rejoinder of overutilizers is that the words share at least one dictionary definition (“to make use of”), so they can be used interchangably.  To which I reply that you can utilize a toilet as a punchbowl.  But I’d really prefer that you didn’t.

1. Unless you had an MBA. [↩]

David Foster Wallace, with whose loss the senselessness of our time increased measurably, wrote much during the 90s that is relevant to the present political morass.¹  Most literally relevant is Up, Simba, on McCain’s 2000 primary run and the appeal of that candidate’s character.²  But in the unlikely context of his review of a Dostoevsky biography, DFW also nails the importance of Obama’s campaign:

Our intelligentsia distrust strong belief, open conviction.  Material passion is one thing, but ideological passion disgusts us on some deep level.  We believe that ideology is now the province of the rival SIGs and PACs all trying to get their slice of the big green pie . . . and, looking around us, we see that indeed it is so.  But [biographer Joseph] Frank’s Dostoevsky would point out (or more like hop up and down and shake his fist and fly at us and shout) that if this is so, it’s at least partly because we have abandoned the field.  That we’ve abandoned it to fundamentalists whose pitiless rigidity and eagerness to judge show that they’re clueless about the “Christian Values” they would impose on others.  To rightist militias and conspiracy theorists whose paranoia about the government supposes the government to be just way more organized and efficient than it really is.  And, in academia and the arts, to the increasingly absurd and dogmatic Political Correctness movement, whose obsession with the mere forms of utterance and discourse show too well how effete and aestheticized our best liberal instincts have become, how removed from what’s really important — motive, feeling, belief.

I don’t think I’m a personality cultist devoted to an empty idea of “change,” because of the change I’ve seen already: Obama already reclaimed belief — ideology — from its abusers and made it more believable.  He’s not going to fix everything, in fact his administration is likely to be a disappointment.  But to restore conviction from its debased position in American politics is a real accomplishment and maybe the one I’m really voting for.

1. Full disclosure: all of the “much” I refer to here and in fact all I’ve ever read of DFW I read in Consider the Lobster. [↩]
2. And most timely is DFW’s account of the McCain 2000 campaign’s implosion upon “going negative” against George Bush II. [↩]

Matt Asay today springs to the defense of the widows and orphans over at Google and their comprehensive prosecution of the Google Chrome trademark. Google sent a DMCA notice to the developer of ChromePlugins.org, demanding he stop using their logos and a remix of their adorable comic, and the developer was understandably upset. Asay’s enthusiasm for Google’s cause is characteristic of his business-first approach to the Business of Open Source (though one wonders if he’s confused Google’s duty to police its trademarks for his own), but his high-handed tone is uncalled-for and his conclusions, though brief, are rife with oversimplification.

Asay responds to a rather balanced account of the enforcement with a volley of fake quotes attributed to god-knows-who: open source means “open to pilfer trademarks” and is “a stick-in-the-eye to ‘The (IP) Man’” and that all related rights are “up for grabs.” He bids the unidentified “some” people espousing these non-quotes, “pay attention… you’re wrong.”

The substance¹ of Asay’s argument is a familiar truism: open source copyright licenses are instruments of copyright law. And as he says, “without copyright there is no copyleft.” But the implication that free and open source software depends upon copyright law (and this must be the implication or there is no point at all) is wrong (and doubly wrong because he italicizes it). Were copyright abolished and the default reset to “no rights reserved,” it would be a trivial matter indeed to allow others to modify my source code — I wouldn’t even need a license, because I would have no right to exclude.  It’s true that under a no-copyright regime, copyleft would break — I couldn’t use my right to exclude to compel others to make available source code they build on top of mine. But copyleft was devised in response to copyright, not in affirmation of it. In the GNU Manifesto which launched GNU and eventually the FSF, rms’s stated goal was to combat the increasing proprietarization of software. If software could not be made proprietary, copyleft may have been unnecessary. Of course, a company could still attain a sort of de facto proprietarization by controlling access to their source, but this would be much less effective under a system that didn’t punish reverse engineering or the use of decompiled or leaked source code.

Maybe abolition of copyright isn’t the answer, but copyright (much less in its present captive state²) is certainly not the only means to software freedom. And the mere existense of exclusive rights, even if similar rights are used to beneficial ends, is no justification for anti-social behavior, whether Google’s or Asay’s.

1. And here more credible claimants to the title “substance,” such as plastic and cocaine, will forgive my lax usage. [↩]
2. My colleague Bradley Kuhn, who has said all of this before, has proposed a regime under which registrants of a copyright in software are required to deposit the entire source and in exchange are given 3 years of exclusive rights to it, after which their code becomes public domain. While not the only solution, or a universally agreeable one, it’s certainly imaginable. [↩]