Eben Moglen is right, but he ain’t no prophet.

How can this article not even mention Richard Stallman and the Free Software Foundation? Richard Stallman foresaw all the problems with proprietary and un-inspectable software and built a whole foundation and intellectual practice around that realization. In 1985.

I remember reading articles in the late 1980s about this crazy dude who thought (horror!) that we should be able to actually know what our software is doing.

Richard Stallman was on the forefront of warning everyone about the dangers of secret code and in my lifetime views on him have gone from, “Wow, this dude is insane and wrong and bad” to, “Well, maybe he is right about some things, I guess” to “Huh, turns out rms was right about absolutely everything and we were very, very stupid.”

Eben Moglen doesn’t deserve opprobrium, but the journalist should do more research.