I've been listening to a batch of old talks to fire up my zealotry in time for Software Freedom Day, and found a passage from this talk by Eben Moglen, formerly of the Free Software Foundation, now of the Software Freedom Law Center, that I thought might be of interest to people involved in the Coffs WiFi project:

Free hardware and free software are two thirds of the platform for free culture but without bandwidth, boxes sit dumb. We must recapture for everyone the common property of the electromagnetic spectrum. Every legal system at its bottom agrees that the spectrum is common that it belongs to all, and every legal system denies as practical reality what it proposes as principle. Every system continues to maintain that government must control how spectrum is used. Sometimes quite explicitely for the purpose of remaining itself in power; sometimes in a claim of some civilizing mission on the belief that government and only government can really artfully determine who ought to speak to the masses in the interest of the expansion of knowledge; and sometimes, as in my society, out of sheer venality: "We, the politicans, have taken bribes from you, the media owners, and we will faithfully reflect the interests of our masters, who have put us in." But whatever the reason may be, whether venality or lust for power or a misguided belief in the superiority of government wisdom about who should speak to many, spectrum allocation is an evil whose time has come.

This is far more complicated than the problems that we have solved in freeing software. More complicated than the problem that we face in keeping hardware free. Far more complicated than the problem of inducing 12-year-olds to share music and help free culture. But it is not beyond our power on the basis of what we already have. We need dream no utopian dreams to achieve bandwidth for all on equal terms. We possess already working code and proof of concept: it is called WiFi. It is the attempt to use a small, not particularly desirable piece of spectrum, to model the possibility of self-organized, non-hierarchical, decentralized, equal-measure access to electromagnetic spectrum and we are showing what the alternative actually is. Those of us here who work on this issue are able to show to populations all around the globe the "telephone bill"-less future. The place where nobody pays to talk to anybody else by the zip, by the minute, by the tick, by the impulse, anymore. We can build that thick mesh that embraces all of us and add at communal expense the long-haul communications portions which tie that mesh together, and we can offer people equality of communication. Mr. Murdock will be disappointed. Deutsche Telekom will be heart-broken. Tough.

Because what is at stake is exactly that moment at which we make learning open. Like the recognition that science itself can be based only upon print that is within the reach of every scientist. In the very same way that western science depended in the 16th century on the movement for freedom of thought--what more noble proposition could we take for our movement than the simple words "epursi muove" with which Galileo pointed to the intrinsic relationship between freedom of thought and scientific progress--in the same way that the scientific revolution in the west first depended upon free information exchange, so now. In the next generation we will confront once again the recognition that without a movement for freedom of thought science is tied to ownership. Does anybody who inspects the current pharmaceutical industry or the forthcoming genetic revolution doubt me? Without the free exchange of ideas, science is the servant of inequality. And it is science, the ability to know, the ability to teach, the opportunity to learn everything that any human mind can reason out: it is science which is still at the root of the development of our societies.

So the movement for free spectrum, like the movement for unlicensed printing, is a movement to put beneath science the power of all the available human minds. Like the war against censorship in western Europe, the war for free spectrum is a war for the freedom of ideas in its most valuable sense: the ideas that changed society extend life, make human existance better. We have grown so accustomed to the idea that the power to communicate with one another is something we have to buy from someone else that we are in danger of forgetting just how much rests over the long history of human beings on the inherent virtue of untrammeled communication.