Linux, Open Source, and Civil Disobedience

When I was still arguably a kid, there was an old TV show that my friends and I all watched called, “Baretta.” In the show’s theme song, “Keep Your Eye on the Sparrow,” voiced by the great Sammy Davis Jr., we hear the words, “Don’t do the crime if you can’t do the time.” The show starred one Robert Blake, an actor who, as it turns out, would later be charged with murder. He was acquitted but later charged with “wrongful death” in a civil suit which he lost, despite the criminal murder acquittal. But I digress . . .

Despite that trip down memory lane, it’s the words from the song that are stuck in my head right now, and it does have a FOSS connection.

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking lately about the Open Source community and its willingness to flout local and international laws, sometimes for very good reasons. For example, think back, if you can, to “libdvdcss,” a library that allowed Linux users to play encrypted DVDs on their computers, even though that could bring a felony charge in the United States. Consider that users had movies on DVD that they bought and paid for, and they wanted to play them on a DVD player they had bought and paid for, using a computer they had bought a paid for. Despite following all the rules and legally paying for every hardware piece along the chain, Linux users were barred because the code necessary to allow…