Open Source as Social Principle

Felix Stalder

Novi Sad, July 30, 2003

felix@openflows.org

http://felix.openflows.org

"Openness"

openness is not absence of structure, or "free-for-all".

Karl Popper: Open Society and its Enemies (1945)

openness has three aspects:
ideological: falsification
political: procedure to remove government
legal: rule of law, bill of rights, constitution

"Openness"

open source:

ideological: all code is buggy, no software is perfect

political: system of bug reports, incorporation of improvements independent of origin, "benevolent dictator", forking

legal: license defines rights
General Public License (GPL)

"Openness"

open source:

GPL: right to duplicate
right to modify
right to duplicate modification
obligation pass on these rights

availability of source code

"Openness"

open source:

movement of programmers: freedom of producers are codified in the GPL

better software, higher rate of innovation

users profit as well: wider availability of high quality software, no artificial scarcity

for users, no difference between open source and freeware

freeware: proprietary software without a price, free as in beer.

"Openness"

open source vs freeware

difference is central

technically: slow and unstable

socially: program remains opaque

Technology as Politics

technologies are never just technical, but full of social, political, cultural choices

technology is neither good nor bad nor neutral (Marshall McLuhan)

often hidden

as social life becomes more technologically mediated, these choices matter more

choices are materialized on the level of code

code as architecture (Lawrence Lessig)

technology is society made durable (Bruno Latour)

Technology as Politics

open source makes choices visible

governments are interested: security

MS allows certain govs to read Windows code

open source makes choices debatable

minix: read but don't write

open source puts the choices into the hands of producers and users

anyone can write functionality

anyone can contract functionality

Technology as Politics

democratization of software development and application

software as a public good, like air, water etc.

Open Source beyond Software

success of open source is an example

open content movement:

Open Source beyond Software

open access movement:

scientific journals / data

Open Source beyond Software

open source intelligence

Open Source beyond Software

common thread: different conception of how to manage IP

Battle over IP

information can be end product and raw material

distributors vs. creative producers; control vs access

attempts to expand control:

legislation (DMCA, EU Copyright Directive)

technology: Digital Restriction Management Systems (DRM) and "trusted computing"

"trusted systems presume that the consumer is dishonest" Mark Stefik

Battle over IP

attempts to expand access:

technology: Internet, cheap, accessible, global, end-to-end

non-rivalrous exchanges

concept: commons

Commons

commons: resource used and maintained by a community according to its standards, no individual owners.

public domain: copyright expired, no ownership

public information: owned by the state (in theory open to everyone)

Politics of the Commons

commons depend on context: infrastructure

open source:

free many-to-many communication

open standards to ensure compatibility and transferability

commons content

policies

protection of free communication channels

open standards vs closed standards

development of appropriate licensing schemes, restriction of copyright claim (length and scope)

Economics of the Commons

mixed economies:

no payment (volunteers)

indirect payment (students, professors)

direct payment (programmers working in companies that use but do not sell software)

donation (of hardware, server space etc.)

commercial and community versions (zope)

community financing (koro5hin, open access journals)

"Posser method" (scientific journals)

Economics of the Commons

trend towards institutionalization, professionalization of inner core

foundations to handle money (FSF, Apache, Mozilla, Blender, etc)

companies funding projects for strategic purposes (Sun: OpenOffice, AOL: Mozilla)

industry associations to directly employ open source leaders (Torvalds works for Open Source Development Lab)

new (non-profit) ventures with seed money from large foundations

Culture of the Commons

there is no information, only transformation (Bruno Latour)

from original to version

facilitator vs genius (Torvalds & Stallman)

measure: improvement

how to apply to non-functional works?

Society of the Commons

sustainability

merciless meritocracy?

Darwinism: libertarianism

socialist utopia: oekonux

service economy

new role for the public sector

Open Source as Social Principle

open source is more than software

organizational, economic, political and conceptual system

radical alternative to the status quo

basis of the information society: status of knowledge

Open Source as Social Principle

two competing vision: intellectual property:

centralized control

distributors keep producers and users apart

information is a scarce, expensive product

innovation is controlled by the center

Open Source as Social Principle

two competing vision: commons:

decentralized management

distinction between creators and users is fluid

information is nominally free, practically a service

capacity to innovate is distributed

social movement of the information age

who will win?

none, but how they lose will be important

2003-07-23T10:42:53