Talk:Eben Moglen

ok to use audio/video in proprietary format??

Is the link to audio/video in proprietary format a good idea ? What is the exact policy regarding external links and link to proprietary format ?

No, it is definately not a good idea. These links should point to Ogg Vorbis and Ogg Theora or some other format one can play with free software (Speex, FLAC, Dirac, etc.).

You are allowed to link to proprietary formats and to non-proprietary formats. The latter are preferable, but there is no ban on the former --Gronky

Megabytes and Mibibytes

For the sake of making this page a useful source of info for the general public, can we please follow the standard set by every other wikipedia page and use Megabytes instead of Mibibytes? --Gronky

Heh. Which megabyte would that be? One actual megabyte, that is, 1,000,000 bytes? Or 1,024,000 bytes (which Firefox apparently uses in its download manager)? Or 1,048,576 bytes, which Windows Explorer uses? Both Firefox and Windows Explorer calls what they show "MB", by the way. I chose the last one, which can unambigously be labeled with "Mib". Those who don't know the difference won't care. Note that many of the file sizes were specified in various other kinds of "megabytes"; I have merely unified them and labeled them with an exact label. 194.47.144.5 21:55, 9 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Which megabyte? It doesn't matter. The difference between two definitions you give is minimal. Only nerds like us know what a Mibibyte is. Wikipedia is for the general public, those who couldn't give you any definition for megabyte if you asked them, but they know a 65 megabyle file is real slow on their phone line connection, etc. This might be your soapbox, mine is GNU/Linux instead of Linux, but lets not be a pain in the ass to the wikipedia readers by trying to use wikipedia as a loudspeaker. --Gronky

Firstly, it's called a mebibyte, not mibibyte. But that doesn't matter, because I never use the full word. I use "Mib", which is close enough to "Mb" for people to reasonably guess that it's the same sort of thing. And if they don't, they'll find out when they download the file anyway. 194.47.144.5 19:49, 12 Feb 2005 (UTC)

I have now changed all occurences of "Mib" to "MiB" to conform to the usage in the Mebibyte and Megabyte articles. /Same user as above, 00:38, 21 Jul 2005 (UTC)

Russian article

Hey, I am new here. I just added a Russian article on the subj and I am wondering what hoops I have to jump through if I want it cross-linked with all other languages. Thanks much! melikamp 06:15, 29 August 2005 (UTC)

If you mean having the Russian version linked with all versions in other languages: Some people here run bots that automatically update interwiki links. They will automatically pick up the change you made and propagate it to other language versions. That can take a while, though. Rl 06:55, 29 August 2005 (UTC)

Stance?

Removed this from the article since it's redundant and could be interpreted as slightly POV:

Moglen believes the GNU General Public License is not a contract.

This is silly; of course he does. It says so right in the GPL itself, it is also the FSF's official stance, and Eben is their General Counsel. Also, to call it a "belief" seems to be trying to characterize it as a controversial or unexpected position; i.e. POV. --83.226.8.35 08:39, 21 January 2006 (UTC)

please improve this article!

This person will be a remote presenter at Wikimania, and as such we can expect this article to get more traffic than usual. Now would be a great time improve if possible, and make sure everything is accurate! Brassratgirl 20:17, 8 June 2006 (UTC)

Anarchist?

User:200.69.167.103 just added [Category:American Anarchists]. I would like to see some reference to where he calls himself an anarchist; otherwise I will revert this. --193.11.177.69 03:08, 5 July 2006 (UTC)

Apparently, in Free as in Freedom, Eben makes a reference to his anarchism. It's cited here in the first paragraph:

In a restaurant in New York two men were sitting together having lunch and they considered the next steps of their little revolution. One of them, Eben Moglen, briefly thought about how they must have looked like to the people passing by. `Here we were, these two little bearded anarchists, plotting and planning the next steps. Anybody who overheard our conversation would have thought we were crazy, but I knew: I knew the revolution was right here at this table.’ And the man sitting next to him, Richard Stallman, was the person who was supposed to make it happen. (Cp. Williams 2002, 184)

Moglen also wrote an article called Anarchism Triumphant and has been publicly associated with anarchism many times. Of course, the above statement could also be hyperbole or tounge-in-cheek. Personally, I'm completely neutral on whether to keep the category. Perhaps someone should just ask him. -- mako 15:40, 9 July 2006 (UTC)

Another argument for calling him an anarchist is that he talks about free software in terms of allowing "anarchist" systems, which he says work better [1]. And another argument for saying he's not an anarchist is that in this interview [2] he says that some people might call him an anarchist based on inconclusive evidence (he doesn't say he is not an anarchist, he just ridicules the evidence used by some to say that he is). Go figure. Gronky 22:08, 9 July 2006 (UTC)

I have read FAIF, and interpret that passage it as an obvious allusion to the old clichéd idea of bearded subversive anarchist revolutionaries. I also note that he also wrote something called “The dotCommunist Manifesto”, and recently said “I’m enough of a Marxist that I actually do think that it matters what capitalists do”. So, I don’t think either of those things could be used to definitively categorize him as either an anarchist or a Marxist. I don’t think it would help to ask him, since if he wanted to risk labelling himself as something that specific, you would think he would have done so by now. I’m removing the category. -- 193.11.177.69 00:42, 14 July 2006 (UTC)

The anarcism he is promoting is only a mode of production for knowledge - we have no good sources (that I have heard of) for him being a narcist when it comes to politics. Lundse (talk) 10:47, 17 September 2008 (UTC)

Born date?

When was Moglen born? This is completely missing from the article. --Haakon 17:10, 30 September 2006 (UTC)

In a linux.com interview with Eben Moglen at the Red Hat Summit in San Diego, he declared: I started working as an APL application programmer for the Scientific Time Sharing Corporation (STSC) in 1973 when I was 14.

Source : [3] 14 sec. from the beginning.

Was he really born in 1959? Other Wikipedia sources (german, dutch and italian) report he was born in 1956. --Ripat 11:23, 18 September 2007 (UTC)

The currently listed birth date was retrieved by should surfing his passport. I don't think this meets [4] ~~ —Preceding unsigned comment added by 76.68.251.235 (talk) 21:20, 16 October 2008 (UTC)

Unencyclopedic

Basically this only covers the activities with and the pro-FSF stance. Surely there must be more to this person than one prejudiced viewpoint?211.10.18.77 10:23, 24 October 2006 (UTC)

I agree that this is not a very well-rounded article, but that's just the way development works. Some aspects of some topics take longer to finish than others. Help if you can. Gronky 11:30, 24 October 2006 (UTC)

His FSF and related activities are the reasons for his notability - they should fill the bulk of the article. And we don't have much else, eg. biography-wise, as I understand it. Moreover, I don't think you can classify his views as prejudiced - they are quite well argued and are certainly more than just one simple viewpoint. Lundse (talk) 10:52, 17 September 2008 (UTC)

Lawyer?

Lquilter just (02:47, 29 October 2006) added "Category:Lawyers". But some time ago, on 23:28, 3 June 2005, Gronky removed the category "American Lawyers", saying "he's not one". Who is and isn’t a lawyer, anyway? Moglen recently seemed to confirm being an "attorney":

[Leo Laporte:]

So, are you, you’re an attorney, Eben?

[Eben Moglen:]

Yes, that’s correct, I went to law school and got a history Ph.D. after a career as a computer programming language designer.

So is he or isn’t he a lawyer? --193.11.177.69 06:19, 29 October 2006 (UTC)

Sorry I didn't check for that history. He's a law professor at Columbia; he was admitted to the NY bar in 1988 with bar registration # 2218014. (See NY State Bar Assn search at http://iapps.courts.state.ny.us/attorney/AttorneyDetails?attorneyId=5452766 .) So he is an attorney. The article itself says he's general counsel for the Free Software Foundation, so as general counsel he's a lawyer. -- LQ 13:17, 29 October 2006 (UTC)

I see, thank you. Please write this information into the article, even if just as a reference. Interestingly, that page you referenced says “Next Registration: Jul 2006”; does this mean he’s missed renewing something and isn’t a lawyer anymore? Also, wouldn’t “Category:American lawyers” be better than “Category:Lawyers”? --193.11.177.69 08:48, 30 October 2006 (UTC)

I added the bar search as a reference; the other material is basically already included. ... Registration "July 2006" means that he was due to re-register July 2006. He might be a little late, or they might not have updated their database. You wouldn't be disbarred right away for being a little late on your bar dues. Individual bars might eventually do disciplinary proceedings for bar dues, but one would have to check with the state bar association. Not sure. --LQ 16:14, 30 October 2006 (UTC)

I just checked, it now says "Next Registration: Jul 2008". --193.11.177.69 22:22, 23 May 2007 (UTC)

New Photo

I've uploaded a newer, high-resolution photo which I took at Eben's lecture in Edinburgh at the end of June. If people think it is better then they may want to crop and use that image instead of, or as well as the current image. Karora 07:31, 26 July 2007 (UTC)

Speeches and Such

This article has turned into a very long list of external links. Of course, Wikipedia is not a collection of links and I suspect this articles has sort of gone off in the wrong direction. I would very much like to see this list survive (it's fantastically detailed) but probably not on this article page. mako (talk•contribs) 17:45, 10 April 2007 (UTC)

We hit this problem on the Richard Stallman page about a year ago. The solution was to move the long lists of links to wikiquote. So when someone has the time and motivation, the links in this article could be moved to http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Eben_Moglen Gronky 01:53, 24 May 2007 (UTC)

I've trimmed it extensively (there were judgements calls but I tended to choose his major and most influential works and speeches and was biased towards links from his homepage or for large reputable sources). I have copied the removed links below. You, or whoever else is interested, should try to move those into Wikiquote or elsewhere. mako (talk•contribs) 13:56, 26 May 2007 (UTC)

Wikiquote is not a collection of links, either. bd2412 T 20:22, 20 September 2008 (UTC)

I concur with BD2412 and I understand q:WQ:NOT says so too. We collect quotes, not links. --Aphaia (talk) 09:49, 24 September 2008 (UTC)

I removed the links since they now all live happily on Wikisource --193.11.177.69 (talk) 23:26, 2 June 2009 (UTC)

Wikimedia Foundation office switching to Google Apps

Pretty amazing. Sorry Eben! 128.59.181.20 (talk) 04:30, 3 November 2010 (UTC)

Pronounciation

How should we pronounce his name anyway? --Do.you.sina (talk) 21:06, 25 February 2012 (UTC)

Not a "communist"

Moglen is not a communist, even though he wrote "The dotCommunist Manifesto." Here are a couple of sources:

My students are beginning to believe, to my shock, a communist thing - namely, it`s our music, and how dare they take it away from us - which is an enormously important and suggestive development. But, the theory of commercial distribution of proprietary culture is not a theory that one can say people have a duty to resist. I`m not at the Abby Hoffman "Steal this Book" level.

— Eben Moglen

I have seen comments by a number of people whose bias against the term "social justice" leads them to conclude that Moglen is a "communist" proposing to take from the rich to give to the poor. Of course we do that to some extent already, as he points out when he says we are "only partially . . . a capitalist society". But Moglen is not talking about redistribution at all. He believes we can achieve social justice without taking anything from anybody.

— Geof Glass

I'm going to delete the "communist" mention, and also the Jewish American mention since it doesn't belong in the "Professional biography" section.

AndyBloch 19:12, 4 May 2012 (UTC)

Agree. I have never seen any source where Moglen identify himself as "a communist", "a capitalist" or jewish. Belorn (talk) 23:42, 4 May 2012 (UTC)

References