towards paying free software developers

Suppose that someone writes a great program and releases it under a free software license. Suppose that they developed this program at their own expense. Don't they deserve a reward?

The non-rival nature of software using free software licenses means that such developers can't get a reward but, how about this intead?

 
             The Free Software Precursor License
                      DRAFT 27-Sep-2006

        Copyright (C) 2006 Thomas Lord (lord@emf.net)

 Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim copies
 of this license document, but changing it is not allowed.


                              Preamble

 Free software licenses such as the GNU General Public License
 are designed to guarantee all recipients of a program the
 freedoms to use, copy, modify, and share the program, or any
 modified version of the program.  That is an important and
 valuable outcome for a programming effort but it creates a
 practical problem for some programmers who would like to
 develop free software.  Once a program becomes available to
 the general public under a free software license, the
 copyright owners have given up all exclusive rights that,
 under other kinds of license, would produce revenue for the
 copyright holders.  In other words, publicly available free
 software is a non-rival good which is great for users
 freedoms, but lousy for financially rewarding programmers for
 their creative work per se.

 The problem extends beyond copyright and includes patents.
 When an inventor who holds a software patent permits that
 patent to be practiced in a free software program, he has
 given away the rights of exclusion that would allow him to
 derive revenue from the practice of that patent in that
 program or in any program derived from that program.

 The purpose of this license is to create a balance that is
 fair to the users of a program, but that also enables authors
 and inventors to secure, for a limited time, such exclusive
 rights to their free software creations that they can be
 financially rewarded for having made their effort.

 Accordingly, when this license is applied to a program:


   0) At the time of initial release, everyone is free to use,
      copy, modify, and share the program non-commercially and,
      under the terms of this license, for research whose
      primary aim is to improve the program or develop other
      software under this same license.

   1) A specific date is declared, after which everyone
      is free to use, copy, modify, and share the program
      without restrictions against commercial activity.
      We encourage authors and inventors to declare a date
      that is much sooner than the expiration of relevant
      copyrights and patents.

    2) A specific price is declared which, if paid to the
       copyright holder, will cause the program to immediately
       be licensed to everyone for free use, copying,
       modification, and sharing.

    3) Modifications distributed to the program prior to the
       date on which commercial restrictions are lifted may be
       distributed to the copyright holders under any agreed
       upon terms or may be distributed to the general public
       under terms that include a reciprocal, not commercially
       restricted license to the copyright holder.

    4) One year after commercial restrictions are lifted from
       this program, everyone has the right to distribute
       this program, or modified versions which they have
       created, under the commercially restricted form
       of this license, setting a date not to exceed
       10 years after which commercial restrictions will be
       lifted.   The copyright holders of this program may
       make such distributions at any time.

 We acknowledge that this license does not, prior to the date
 on which commercial restrictions are lifted, satisfy the
 commonly used definitions of "free software" or "open source".
 We acknowledge that some members of the free software and open
 source communities will criticize to this license on that basis.
 We respectfully refuse those criticisms on the grounds that
 we believe, using this and similar licenses, the public will
 benefit from a greater enjoyment of software freedoms, because
 more and better free software will be created.   We take
 special note, for example, that numerous significant free
 software programs which the public enjoys today became free
 software precisely because they were developed as non-free
 software, and the public rights either purchased or granted
 with the passage of time.

 We acknowledge that it is possible to use this license
 abusively, such as by setting an unreasonable date for
 unrestricted release or an unreasonable price.   We believe
 that a proper and sufficient public response to such abuses is
 to simply ignore programs so released.

 Finally, we encourage the continued development and use of
 open source licenses which are compatible with this license.
 That is to say, we encourage open source software to be
 released under terms that permit its combination with programs
 under this license, even during the period of commercial
 restrictions. 

Wikipedia vs. Britannica

WSJ has a little interview between Jimmy Wales (of Wikipedia and porn fame) and Dale Hoiberg (of Encyclopaedia Britannica fame).



Jimmy Wales comes of as an ignorant lout. Which he is. But he is also a modestly competent business person and, judging by appearances, this spells doom for Britannica. If Jimmy is the ignorant lout in this conversation, Hoiberg (Britannica's Editor in Chief) is the frail Luddite.


I am sad to conclude that Wikipedia will trump Britannica in the not-far-off future. How will Wikipedia trump Britannica? Simply by *becoming* Britannica, but with better I.T. and shrewder business sense.

Britannica has some 4000+ experts writing and editing articles with a rigorous process of cross-checking, review, and editorial selection. The world contains at least 10s of thousands of qualified experts and probably an order or two of magnitude more than that. That means that Wales has quite a few more would-be, quite qualified encyclopaedists to draw from than Britannica actually employs. All that Wales needs is a smooth transition to an organizational structure that offers those experts a very Britannica-like home.

Britannica may pay its experts a modest sum but, for the most part, it is an honorarium not a living. Nearly none of Britannica's experts are "in it for the money." And so those many more experts-in-waiting? All that Wikipedia needs to offer them is credibility, not money. Will "Wikipedia Certified Expert" be something they can add to their CV? Once so, Wales will find himself turning away experts at the door -- "Sorry, no more room."

But wait, I hear you feign to cry, isn't Wikipedia *all about* replacing a system of traditional, careful, and systematic content development and editing with a wild, new-age harnessing of free-for-all energy? Isn't the defining feature of Wikipedia a "light touch" when it comes to setting rules or establishing exclusions about how articles may change?

No, Wikipedia is about no such thing. Wikipedia is about attracting volunteer labor and selling the work-product of that labor for self-sustenance of the project and (for the organizers) for-profit spin-offs. There is no other invariant principle in play here, unless you want to count the domain name "wikipedia.org", as a principle. There is no other constant than selling to volunteers and selling the product created by those volunteers.

The rules of Wikipedia participation? They are as fluid as Wales' imagination subject only to the constraint of keeping the volunteerism up. And the volunteers? A few loud voices may think that they have Important Principles to protect but if the uncritical mass disagrees? Well, I guess those few loud voices will leave in a huff. Or an hour and a huff.

Wikipedia has already begun dabbling in raw authoritarianism. In the German edition experiment they are preparing the market to further embrace the idea that -- this public editing thing? yeah, that's not what this is really about.

Wikipedia will, in the next year or two, make an effort to make a list: the core articles. Sure, people can create entries about, say, every car model that has ever been mentioned in a Simpson's episode and those articles will evolve as they always have but.... there will be a core list. The Important Articles. The articles on Quantum Mechanics and World War II and G.H.W. Bush. And the rules will change for the Important Articles. And they will change to bear a very close resemblance to Britannica.

And Wales will spin off the web service and print service that reaps the profit from this.

Everything that Britannica has been saying since this debate erupted will be accepted as True and Important. And all of the praise and treasure will go to Wales with the explanation that he said it first. Even though he didn't.

Britannica has about 1 or 2 years to avoid this outcome by: (a) forking wikipedia; (b) being the ones to define the rules for expert editing. I think it is unlikely they will do so.

-t

stew on it

So, here's what i'm starting with: 2 small russets, an onion, a bit of olive oil, salt, pepper, garlic, a tiny amount of white mushrooms, some flour (of course). Had that in the pantry. Oh, and the real kicker: an $11 or $12 bottle of wine abandoned in the laundry room (next to the water heater! sheesh. no respect for wine!) by otherwise quite charming former neighbors.

So, shopping: another russet. A large parsnip. A bunch of kale. A bag of brown mushrooms. A couple of carrots. And the big-ticket item: a pound of (grass-fed, organic-fed) stew meat.

The goal is a simple but interesting stew. Of course, if you chop everything up and stick it in a pot and simmer for a few hours -- you certainly come up with something edible. Tasty even. But let's talk subtleties. Developing flavor. And let's also talk about balances of ingredients. Here's what I actually did and I'm pleased with the results.

First note, the meat, in my ingredient mix, is a minority ingredient by far. The potatoes alone outweigh it. This recipe (imo) treats meat properly: as expensive and precious and something to be raised with some care. (Vegetarians: try adopting this with, perhaps, some white beans and a dash of miso.)

Second note: this is very much a recipe for a cast iron dutch oven on the stove-top. You'll see.

Enough of enumerating notes. This recipe is about developing flavors even though the main cooking method is stewing (cooking at a simmer). The complexities of browning reactions are key to my approach. So....

Heat the dutch oven at high heat. Just short of smoking, really. Add some olive oil. Add half (what will fit without crowding the pan -- putting so many ingredients in at once that the temperature falls to far and exuded juices result in steaming) of the meat (chopped into bite-sized pieces) and brown the heck out it. Stir perhaps once and remove to a separate pan. Then do the other half. In point of fact, I actually do it in a more involved way. "Half-brown" the first part of the meat and remove that. Then fully brown the second part and remove that. Then complete browning the first half. Why? Because when you start browning the meat it gives off lots of juices and these start making a nice "muck" in the bottom of the pan. Things brown better in that muck. So the second batch of meat browns very nicely whereas the first won't brown nicely without drying out. Cooking the first batch of meat in two stages ensures that it, like the second batch, browns nicely without drying out.

Next, still on high heat, perhaps with a little more oil -- the taters. Of course they won't cook through. Of course, do not stir them more than once or twice or thrice. But do get them to brown a little and contribute to the muck. Once partially cooked you can set aside the meat and taters in the same bowl because you later want those to simmer for about the same amount of time.

Externally brown the parsnips next, in the same muck, but set those aside in a separate bowl. If you were to stew those with the meat and taters they would get too mushy. We have to add those to the stew later.

Is the dutch oven nice and freakin' hot? Toss in the onions (not diced, please -- rather nice football-shaped bite-size slivers) with the aim of caramelizing around the edges while leaving undercooked in the middle. When they are along that path, toss in the mushrooms. Remove these ingredients (slightly undercooked, please!) to yet another bowl.

Simultaneously return the meat and taters to the vessel, dump in 1/3-1/2 a bottle of wine, and reduce the heat. Time to aim for that very low simmer that characterizes a stew. Add a little water, as necessary, to ensure that everything is covered.

Go do something else, other than stirring from time to time, for a good half hour. Again, the goal is a very low simmer. So low that you are worried that the edges of the pot aren't really that hot (hence the stirring). Not a low boil. A simmer. Bubbles, yes, but -- you should be able to count them on the fingers of one hand. Oh, and, add the garlic now (please don't brown it for this recipe -- no shortage of bitter here already).

Did I mention that, as you were browning various things, that's a good time to salt-and-pepper various ingredients, estimating conservatively? It's always easy to add more later, if needed, but you can set the baseline while browning (and the salt, especially, helps with the searing and helps make the emerging flavor easier to judge).

Anyway, as a side effect, you've now reduced that incredible muck you built up during the browning exercise and the sauce should be starting to taste pretty nice.

When you think there are about 20-30 minutes of cooking time left it's time to add the kale, carrots, and partly cooked onion and shroom. You might, like me, need to top off with a bit more water.

10-15 minutes left? Whisk in a few tablespoons of sifted flour. See if you can't reduce the heat any further while still keeping up the barest excuse for a simmer.

Taste. Adjust salt. You're a jerk if you cook the veggies to mush. If, like me, you have less than 4-6 hungry mouths to feed, aim for a little bit *less* than thoroughly stewed. Tastes great and freezes well. 7 or so modest portions. Tastes great (can I say that again) and tastes better the next day and darn good out of the deep freeze.

-t

Why would software be different, then?

I have no great sympathy for those who commercially copy music without paying the musicians. -- Richard M. Stallman

Huh. So, what's with the GPL, again?

-t

dinner, breakfast, today, tomorrow, and more

Tomorrow is "labor day" -- a holiday in the US. As a result, the grocery store I usually shop at daily will be closed. So this is a chance to illustrate, in minature, how I think about managing my pantry for efficiency, easy, yumminess, and nutrition. That and some very easy yet satisfying recipes.

Shopping trip:

Load up on seasonal, good, inexpensive veggies. I bought a bag of mushrooms, an ear of corn, a fist full or two of green beans, some carrots, a bell pepper, some italian parsely, some brocolli, some green onion, and I refreshed my supply of yellow onion and garlic. Oh, and four medium russet potatos.

I had, left-over, a half of a huge chicken breast. I supplemented this with a pound of chicken thigh meat. The butchers at my particular grocery do well by those of us who like to stir fry and use similar techniques and for under $4/# you can get boneless, skinless, organically fed, free-range chicken thigh meat. So I grabbed a pound of that.

A dozen eggs. Some cheddar and jack cheese. I have already on hand some salsa, sour cream, and tortilla.

I buy some very nice frozen, whole-wheat pie crusts of a brand I have favorable experience with.

Cooking:

I spent most of an hour prepping all the veggies -- washing and cutting them up into small pieces, each one in its own metal bowl. A few minutes cutting up the chicken.

The thigh meat in the dutch oven, stove-top. The breast in a cast iron skillet along with chili spices.

Meanwhile, simmer two of the taters, well through, in preparation for mashed potatos.

Add veggies between the two simmering chickens in rough proportion. In the dutch oven, the goal
is just to minimally cook the chicken and soften veggies. In the skillet, the goal is to pan roast -- until slightly dry, in fact.

To the dutch oven I eventually add a bit of some chicken/veggie stock I have left over and a bit of beer. I make a quick roux and eventually add that, too. Oven preheating to a bit over 375.

Mash the taters with a bit of salt, pepper, cheese, and green onion.

Thicken the stew in the dutch oven with the roux. That goes in a pyrex vessel, with the taters spread over the top, to bake until nicely browned.

The breast-meat and veggies, nicely pan roasted, forms a quiche.

Now I've breakfast and dinner for two for two days, with a bit left-over plus ample stuff around to crank quesadilla (on the nice cast-iron griddle) for snacks in between.

Tomorrow, since I don't really need to cook any meals, I hope to find the time to bake some nice cookies -- in part to share as a belated welcome to the new neighbors. Hmm.... more on cookies, later.

Should bordem strike, I think I have some used oil in the fridge with which to make fries from the remaining taters.

My life has its troubles, to be sure, but as far as I'm concerned I eat outrageously well. How's about you?


-t

Google: evil?

There is an interesting discussion, around this date, on David Farber's "Interesting Persons" mailing list on the topic of whether or not Google is living up to its "Don't be evil" motto.

People interested in the ethics of Google might find it useful to review some source materials:

Google's statement of corporate philosophy:
http://www.google.com/corporate/tenthings.html

An article published in 2003 in Wired, "Google vs. Evil", by Josh McHugh. It contains a review of some controversial issues and some interesting comments (and "no comment"s) from Google:
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.01/google_pr.html

It's a tricky business to arm-chair a company like Google. In spite of that, I'd like to offer what I think is a fairly novel take on why Google is in an ethically tough spot and how I think they (and we) should respond.

Consider Google's mission statement:

Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.

And later we'll relate that to their motto:

Don't be evil.

Three concepts are central to Google's mission:

1. "the world's information"
2. "accessible"
3. "useful"

While in a vague sense these terms suggest an appeal to universal values, in fact, they lack universal meaning and are inherently value-neutral.

"The world's information" does not literally mean all information that is, in principle, available. Nor does it literally mean all information to which access is granted by, for example, a "robots.txt" file. Google must, necessarily, make choices of inclusion and exclusion. Google must, necessarily, choose strategies of discovery (e.g., web crawling) and acquisition (e.g., search logging, gmail, book scanning). These choices reflect Google's narrowly defined internal values (Sergey's opinion, ultimately, they say) mediated through external factors such as regional jurisprudence (e.g., a lawsuit by Scientologists that results in excluding certain web pages). The delineation of "the world's information" by Google therefore forms a privatized, anti-democractic, hegemonic project -- it simply cannot express universal values.

"Accessible" means "accessible via a specific kind of index." What a user discovers through Google, and what materials he or she accesses, are shaped by that indexing. Thus, for example, a Google policy of punishing the clients of a search rank optimizing service makes a decision for users of what is, in fact, accessible and what is not. Are these choices, imposed by Google, consonant with the values of users? There is no a priori reason to expect them to be and, once again, Google is found to be engaged in a privatized, anti-democratic, hegemonic project.

"Useful" forces us to ask "useful for what?" What is important? What is our metric of utility? Google's position in a popularity ranking of competing search engines gives, at best, a relative impression of utility. It does not begin to speak to how that utility compares to the utility achievable in general. And if we hypothesize that Google's project favors some uses over others then its hegemonic nature becomes clear once more: Google has no constraints that lead it to make the world's information "useful" in any general sense -- rather, Google's economic role will be to shape user ambitions by arbitrarily emphasizing some uses over others. And so we see such things as search rank optimization services and a culture of elite political bloggers who place a high social premium on gratuitous cross-linking. And we see "attract good AdSense ads" as a new business model for content providers. "Utility," here, is curiously emphatic about uses which reinforce Google's business model.

Some readers will find that the preceding simply states the obvious: that Google's stated mission is at best value-neutral and, at worst, carries considerable moral risk. Should we then take comfort in Google's motto: "don't be evil"?

Could it not be, for example, that in a market-driven meritocracy, Google will emerge as the "benevolent dictator" of search? It is one thing to observe that Google's project is to promote a privatized, anti-democratic hegemony but another thing entirely to leap to the conclusion that that is a *bad* thing. If Sergey and Google generally define their hegemony well, won't we all benefit?

To get to those questions I think it helps if we look beyond the general principles of mission statements and mottoes and turn to consideration of Google's past, present, and future technological and business degrees of freedom. That is to say that if we *are* going examine the morality of Google, surely we must do so by examining Google's actual choices of consequence.

I am not referring, primarily, to famous choices that are reviewed when considering Google. For example, I am not immediately concerned with whether they have struck the right balance with the government of China or which records they should or should not hand over to governments in various circumstances. It seems to me that those famous questions are mostly of the "which is the lesser of two evils" variety: morality fails, mostly, except in that it guides us to rely on popular ethical heuristics to make those decisions (yes to regional sovereignty, yes to judicial warrants, no to warrantless law enforcement fishing expeditions, etc.).

Rather, we should ask how Google places itself in a position where such questions seem, with increasingly regularity, to arise and become important. What more basic choices to they make that create those dilemmas and what alternatives are there to those more basic choices?

I locate Google's relentless drive to place itself in moral dilemmas for which there is no good answer in Google's impulses to monopolize certain things which are better off not being monopolized: it's "raw data" and it's platform for implementing indexing and search algorithms.

One cornerstone of Google is its facilities for collecting information: from web crawling, to hosting email boxes, to caching, to scanning books. At the most basic level, Google must organize this information so as to keep track of the most rudimentary privacy concerns (my email is different from your home page) and legal concerns (that scanned book is different from my email). Internally, they must make this information accessible in the most primitive but important ways: spreading it out over storage clusters and ensuring it can be MapReduced and indexed on large compute clusters.

That cornerstone is Google's raw data and platform for examining it. Their first business model choice -- their first moral choice -- is whether to hoard that raw data and platform or, instead, to open it up. Google's choice is to hoard it -- they decided to make money by retaining the exclusive rights to build applications on that platform. They decided to make money by retaining the exclusive rights to decide what is and is not included in the raw data. The raw data and platform which is the foundation of Google have, or at least it is very well arguable that they have, universal, objective value. But once Google decides to hoard these resources and make itself the arbiter of what services are built upon them -- then Google's project becomes inherently hegemonic. With that hoarding decision, Google makes itself the decider of values. Far from a "don't be evil" company they become a "because we say so" or "because we can" company.

In an alternate universe, Google would not be a search company, or an ad company, though it might have subsidiaries or close parnters in either business. Rather, Google would be in a business at the conjunction of commodity computing, service hosting, the sale of raw data, the lease of data collection facilities, and the making of a market for search results produced by competitive sources.

The massive accumulation of "the world's data" is inevitable and this alternative Google would begin to democratize the decisions of inclusion and exclusion that define what "the world's data" consists of. It might be sensible for this alternative Google to form public interest non-profits to work out the most basic meta-data to manage privacy, copyright, etc.

This alternative Google would make the question of "accessibility" an object of competition and open innovation. Google would provide a (not even the) platform on which different approaches might be explored by competing sources.

This alternative Google would liberalize the process by which "utility" might be discovered and designed.

If Google will not form itself into this alternative, perhaps it is something the rest of us ought to do for ourselves.

-t

Two postscripts:

1) Google APIs represent a baby step in the direction I advocate. The real test asks whether Google will put the development of such APIs above its current proprietary advantages -- will they sacrifice a near monopoly on search, ads, etc. to emphasize opening their platform as the right model?

2) In a longer essay, in addition to considering Google's attempts to hoard raw data and platform, I would want to examine Google's attempts to hoard talent and the resulting, unseemly, recruiting practices of billboards, contests, challenge problems, and the Google Summer of Code.

RMS v. free software economics

In a recent interview in The Hindu (an Indian national newspaper), Richard Stallman (founder of the Free Software Foundation and GNU project) was asked what I think is a very good question:

Q. There are a lot of misconceptions about free software. What kind of an economic model does an entrepreneur look at when he starts out with free software?

That is not simply a "what's in it for me?" question. The free software movement, as I understand it, is aimed at securing a specific set of freedoms to which all people are entitled. In particular, the movement aims to give users a useful freedom to study, modify, and share the software they use in day to day life. If the economic incentives to create proprietary software are significantly greater then, predictably, free software will be consistently out-competed. The gap between the capabilities of free and proprietary software will consistently grow. Software freedoms will have less and less practical meaning to users.

And, so it is, as things stand. We have now, something like a million contributors to free software and open source (says RMS) with the majority of them unpaid. What do they comprise? An economically inefficient and unjust systems software team who maintain a commodity platform on which the next generation of proprietary software will be developed -- from Google to Amazon to all of Web 2.0 to commodity computing and network appliances.

Far from empowering other than fringe users (and them, for only a short time) the free software movement has empowered, more than any other group, the developers of proprietary software.

Where is RMS on this issue? His response to the question quoted above begins:

RMS: I want to ask you why that question is worth asking. First of all there are many people who don't have to make money. Importantly even if a person has to make a living, he doesn't have to make a living from everything he does.

The question matters, RMS, because it is central to securing useful software freedoms for users! RMS continues:

Lots of people develop free software in their free time and there are people who have to make a living and they do make a living.

To jump from, this person is not rich and therefore has to work, to this person can't write free software because he is not paid to write it, is an error.

Let's note that RMS is being non-responsive. He was asked about the entrepreneurial incentives for developing free software. He instead answered the (unasked) question "Can poor people also develop free software?"

Indeed, not only can poor people write free software but many do: as part of an effort to get a job. And, what does that imply? It implies they will tend to be drawn towards working on free software projects that command the greatest commercial attention. And which projects are those? They are those projects which aim at making the development of proprietary software more efficient. In other words, yes, relatively poor people can write free software and because the economic incentives to do so are so slim -- they write free software to further the aims of proprietary software developers.

Richard Stallman's software license, the GPL, may be famous for turning the legal system of copyright upside down -- using it to secure public freedoms rather than restrict them. Similarly, the corporate world has turned the economics of free software upside down, turning the disincentives for user-empowerment inherent in its non-rival nature into a new efficiency for the development of proprietary software.

RMS concludes:

There are over a million contributors to free software, a substantial fraction is getting paid and a majority are volunteers.

I suspect the reason people bring up this question of economics as a secondary detail is because they are labouring under the misconception that the free software community is impossible, unless the developers are getting paid.

No, RMS. The reason people bring up this question of economics is because they have a sharper eye on the goal of user empowerment than you do.

There is no question that free software community is possible with a majority of participants unpaid. That is, as RMS points out, an empirical fact.

The question is -- what is the function of that community within society? Is it to empower computer users generally? Or to empower proprietary software developers who would seek to gain unjust and undue power over those users? The economic incentives to develop free software at all, and to develop this rather than that program, dominate the answer. And you, Mr. Stallman, have gotten it badly wrong.

-t

the odds of death by terrorism

I don't intend to spend a huge amount of posts on this blog talking about global affairs but I notice that a fellow Berkeley blogger is wrestling with the argument that, since the odds being killed by a terrorist are so small, we are clearly over-reacting. After all, if the odds of death-by-bathtub-drowning are greater then shouldn't we spend more social resources on that problem than we do on, say, listening to overseas phone calls or making people take off their shoes in the airport?

Well, no. And, refreshingly, for a reason that is pretty easy to understand.

Bathtub drownings, for example, are statistically independent from one another. If my neighbor dies in a bathtub accident that does not change the odds that I myself will drown in a bathtub accident -- at least not in any noteworthy way. Oh, sure, if he and I both use the same kind of bathtub and the design of the tub was a factor then my neighbor's ill-fate is empirical evidence that I have cause for concern -- but the simple fact of my neighbor's demise does not raise the odds that I will die similarly.

Terrorism is different. Events are not independent and, largely, past events increase the odds of future events. What are the odds that someone will try to fly a plane into the Transamerica building in San Francisco? Probably quite small but, whatever the odds are, they increased by a large multiple on 9/11. What are the odds of a bomber attacking BART? Those odds went way up with the attack on the London underground. Unlike bathtub accidents, terrorist events breed copycats. Each terrorist attack is both an instance of destruction and a broadcast message teaching people around the world what kinds of plots can be carried out.

Kids these days may be too young to remember the spate of airline hijackings that came to seem almost a fad in the 1970s. They may be just too accustomed to suicide bombings in Israeli civil spaces and think that that is just an eternal pattern. The fact is that terrorism, unless successfully checked, tends to inspire more terrorism. Otherwise it would, indeed, be just a rare and peculiar form of crime to be handled by ordinary law enforcement.

All of this suggests the gloomy prediction that, so long as terrorism stands unrefuted as a way to achieve political goals, attempts at terrorism will grow exponentially. The total number of bathtub accidents, all else being equal, is just a constant % of the number of baths taken in a given year but terrorism attempts will tend to accelerate -- unless....

Unless what? I have trouble not reaching the conclusion that cultural changes are needed. In other words, smashing systems that reward the families of terrorists; humiliating proponents of terrorism with utter political and economic defeat; spreading peaceful means of achieving political and economic aims such as democracy and trade. If the US is failing in these aims those failures are tactical, not strategic. We are failing to do a good job of portraying alternatives. We are failing when terrorist guerillas are more effective than we are at providing aid where aid is needed. We fail at the one thing that successful terrorists are masterful at: getting the message out.

-t