... 0.0 <nettime> My Lawyer is an Artist Aymeric Mansoux nettime-l@kein.org Fri, 11 Nov 2011 14:23:23 +0100 Most discussions around the influence of the free software philosophy on art tend to revolve around the role of the artist in a networked community and her or his relationship with so-called open source practices. Investigating why some artists have been quickly attracted to the philosophy behind the free software model and started to apply its principles to their creations is key in understanding what a free, or open source, work of art can or cannot do as a critical tool within culture. At the same time, avoiding a top down analysis of this phenomenon, and instead taking a closer look at its root properties, allows us to break apart the popular illusion of a global community of artists using or writing free software. This is the reason why a very important element to consider is the role that plays the license as a conscious artistic choice. Choosing a license is the initial step that an artist interested in an alternative to standard copyright is confronted with and this is why before discussing the potentiality of a free work of art, we must first understand the process that leads to this choice. Indeed, such a decision is often reduced to a mandatory, practical, convenient, possibly fashionable step in order to attach a "free" or "open" label to a work of art. It is in fact a crucial stage. By doing so, the author allows her or his work to interface with a system inside which it can be freely exchanged, modified and distributed. The freedom of this work is not to be misunderstood with gratis and free of charge access to the creation, it means that once such a freedom is granted to a work of art, anyone is free to redistribute and modify it according to the rules provided by its license. There is no turning back once this choice is made public. The licensed work will then have a life of its own, an autonomy granted by a specific freedom of use, not defined by its author, but by the license she or he chose. Delegating such rights is not a light decision to make. Thus we must ask ourselves why an artist would agree to bind her or his work to such an important legal document. After all, works of art can already 'benefit' from existing copyright laws, so adding another legal layer on top of this might seem unnecessary bureaucracy, unless the added 'paper work' might in fact work as a form of statement, possibly a manifesto. In this case we must ask ourselves what kind of manifesto are we dealing with, what is its message? What type of works does it generate, what are their purpose and aesthetic? The GNU manifesto In the history of the creation and distribution of manifestos the role of printing and publishing is often forgotten or given a secondary role. But, what would have become of the Futurist Manifesto without the support of the printing press and the newspaper industry in France and the rest of Europe? Not much, probably. So it is not without irony that one of the anecdotes often given to illustrate the motivations of Richard Stallman to write the GNU Manifesto, the founding text behind the free software movement, is tightly linked to the story of a defective printer. Indeed, very often, the origin of the document starts with a story about a problem Richard Stallman and some colleagues of his faced when Xerox did not give away the driver source code of the printer they had donated to MIT, preventing the hackers at the lab to modify and enhance it to fit their specific needs. In this case, this particular printer model had the tendency to jam and the lack of feedback from the machine when it was happening made it hard for the users to know what was going on. [1] Beyond the inability to print, and behind what seems to be a trivial anecdote, this event still remains one of the best examples to illustrate the side effects proprietary software can have in terms of user alienation. The programmers and engineers that were using the printer could have fixed or found a workaround for the jamming, and contributed the solution to the company and other users. But they were denied the access to the source code of the software. Such a deadlock is one of the reasons why the GNU manifesto was written. What is unique in this manifesto, is the idea that software reuse and access should be enforced, not only because it belongs to a long history of engineering practice, but also because software has to be free. Looking at the text itself, we can see that the tone and the writing style used by Stallman make the GNU Manifesto closer to an art manifesto, than to yet another programmer's rant or technical guideline. As a matter of fact, we can read through the document and analyse it using the specific art manifesto traits that Mary Ann Caws has isolated based on the study of art manifestos produced during the twentieth century. [2] For instance Caws explains that "it is a document of an ideology, crafted to convince and convert." This is correct, the GNU manifesto starts with a personal story, turns it into a generalisation including other programmers and eventually involving the reader in the generalisation and explaining to her or him how to contribute right away. Caws also characterises the tone of manifestos as a "loud genre", and it is not making a stretch to see this feature in the all-capital recursive acronym GNU and the way it is introduced to the reader. It is the first headline of the manifesto and sets the self-referential tone for the rest of the text, as well as embodying a permanent finger pointing to what it will never be: "What's GNU? Gnu's Not Unix!." Furthermore, she reminds us that the manifesto âdoes not defend the status quo but states its own agenda in its collective concern", which is what Stallman does with the use of headlines to announce the GNU road-map and intentions clearly: "Why I Must Write GNU," "Why GNU Will Be Compatible with Unix," "How GNU Will Be Available," "Why Many Other Programmers Want to Help," "How You Can Contribute," "Why All Computer Users Will Benefit." the GNU Manifesto also instructs its audience on how to respond to the document with the presence of a final section "Some Easily Rebutted Objections to GNU's Goals" that lists and answers common issues that come to mind when reading it. Last but not least, manifestos are often written within a metaphorical framework that borrows its jargon from military lingo and for many the GNU Manifesto is being perceived and presented as a weapon, essential in the war against the main players of the proprietary software industry, such as Microsoft. In fact many hackers saw in the GPL an effective tool in "the perennial war against Microsoft." [3] Thus, when the copyleft principle, the mechanism derived from the GNU manifesto, is introduced in the 1997 edition of the Stanford Law Review, it is precisely described as a "weapon against copyright" [4] and not just a 'workaround' or 'hack'. >From the manifesto to the license... This particular concept of freedom, as it is expressed in the manifesto, is focused on the usage and the users of software. It will eventually lead to the maintenance by the Free Software Foundation (FSF) of a definition of free software and the four freedoms that can ensure its existence. On top of that, the GNU Manifesto is practically implemented with the GNU General Public License (GPL), that provides the legal framework to enable its vision of software freedom. It means every work that is defined by its author as free software, must be distributed with the GPL. The license itself works as a constant reference to the manifesto, by the way it is affecting the software and its source code distribution. Every software distributed with the GPL becomes the manifestation of GNU, and the license's preamble is nothing else but an alternative text paraphrasing the GNU Manifesto. This preamble is not a creative addition to the license, on the contrary the Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) of the FSF even insists that it is an integral part of the license and cannot be omitted, thus making form and function coincide. Even though the GPL was specifically targeting software, it does not take long for some people to see this as a principle that could be adapted or used literally in other forms of collaborative works. As early as 1997, copyleft is mentioned as a valid framework for collaborative artworks in which artists would pass "each work from one artist to another." [5] Of course, this is suddenly brought to our attention not because of the collaboration itself, but because of its sudden legal validity. Indeed the idea of passing works from one artist to another and encouraging derivative works is nothing new. For instance, back in the sixties, mail artists such as Ray Johnson even used the term "copy-left" in their work, [6] and it was possible on some occasions to spot the now very popular copyleft icon, an horizontally mirrored copyright logo, marking a mail art publication. In this context copy-left was seen as a symbol of "free-from-copyright relationships" with other artists in a way that was "not bound to ideologies".[7] In a strange twist, the use of this term is echoing years later, not without cynicism, in some reproductions of Johnson's works which are now stamped "Copyright the estate of Ray Johnson."[8] So why a sudden interest in such practices? Precisely because of the growing development of intellectual property in the field of cultural production. At the time, under the 1976 copyright act, the only recognised artistic collaborative work was the joint work, in which it is required that all the authors agree that all their contributions are meant to be merged into one, flattened down, work. This made perfect sense in the context of the print based copyright doctrine but was clearly not working for digital environments where the romantic vision of the author is dissolved in the complex network of branches, copies and processes inherent to networked collaboration. This situation provided much headache to lawyers focused on the copyrighting of digitally born works. One of these works is for instance Bonnie Mitchell's 1996 âChainArtâ project, in which her students and fellow artists were invited to modify a digital image and pass it to someone else using a file server. In such a project the whole process and its different iterations are the work itself, not the final image at the end of the chain. The work exists as a collection of derived, reused and remixed individual elements that cannot be flattened down into one single 'joint work' and as a consequence, from a legal perspective, could neither be protected nor credited properly under the limited copyright regulations.[9] No surprise then that Heffan picked the Chain Art project as an example of artistic work that could greatly benefit from the GPL and the use of copyleft that can encourage "the creation of collaborative works by strangers".[10] ...and back to the manifesto Although this conclusion makes perfect sense legally, it clearly overlooks and diminishes the artistic desire to reflect upon the nature of information in the age of computer networks. Many artists adopted the GPL early on, not because of their wish to collaborate with strangers, but instead to augment their work with a statement derived from the free software ideology. For instance Mirko Vidovic used the free software definition to develop the GNU Art project,[11] in which suddenly, the GPL becomes a political tag, a set of meta data that could be applied to any work of art. By choosing the GPL as a means of creation and distribution, artists are aiming at implementing an apparatus similar to the digital aesthetics that Critical Art Ensemble (CAE) had described "as a process of copying [â] that offers dominant culture minimal material for recuperation by recycling the same images, actions, and sounds into radical discourse".[12] The weapon against copyright becomes a flagship for the recombining dreams of the digital resistance as envisioned by CAE. But by directly reusing the GPL, projects such as GNU Art failed none the less to really break through the position of Stallman that refuses to take part in judging if whether or not works of art should be free. This is why a few lawyers, MÃlanie ClÃment-Fontaine, David Geraud, as well as artists, Isabelle Vodjdani and Antoine Moreau, felt the need to make more explicit the artistic context and motivations of a liberated work of art by creating the Free Art License (FAL), equivalent to the popular free software GNU public License and articulated specifically for the creation of free art. [13] Suddenly, the license becomes an art manifesto. In the FAL the rules of copyleft are exposed, they stand on their own and enable the artistic creation, not for the sake of creating but as a means to produce singular and collective works. What is seen as freedom is just a very specific definition as envisioned in the GNU manifesto and that can only exist within the set of rules it represents. Moved to an artistic context, the rules to define freedom become a system to make art. In the same way that 'cent mille milliards de poÃmes' was the 1961 OuLiPo manifestation of creative rules, the free art license is also a combinative manifesto, one that enables free art. It is not a simple adaptation of the GPL to the French copyright law, it is a networked art manifesto that operates within the legal fabric of culture. Anyone who respects the rules of the FAL is allowed to play this game. Just like the ludic aspect in OuLiPo's work, and its probable root from Queneau's flirt with surrealism, artists who start to consciously use the GPL and the FAL solely for its 'exquisite' properties might start a superficial relationship with the creative process. Indeed, Raymond Queneau, co-founder of the OuLiPo reminded us already that we should not stop at the process' aesthetics itself because "simply constructing something well amounts to reducing art to play, the novel to a chess game, the poem to a puzzle. Neither saying something nor saying something well is enough, it is necessary that it be worth saying. But what is worth saying? The answer cannot be avoided: what is useful."[14] In other words and adapted to the FAL, the network aesthetics are not enough, their existence must be contextualised and positioned to escape its fate of a convenient technological and legal framework. This is why if the game aspect is obvious in the collective works that surround the FAL, we must see beyond the rules that are presented to us to perceive that such an artistic methodology aims to be an answer to the issue perceived by Chon in the analysis of the âChainArtâ project. Namely, to engage with the fluidity of information and try to turn the clichÃd attitude of artists towards their unique and immutable contributions to art into a useful game. At the same time the emphasis is put on the collective nature of production and not community work. The main issue with the intention of the FAL is that unlike the digital aesthetics modeled by CAE from LautrÃamont's ideas,[15] the mechanism of a free art, against the capitalisation of culture and for the free circulation of ideas within the network can only work by making the machine responsible for this very same capitalisation legitimate. While the mail art derivatives are happening outside of any obvious legal regulations, the copyleft art is literally hacking the system to reach a symbiosis and establish a kingdom within the kingdom. As a consequence these political works are very different from the artistic politics developed after the Russian revolution and World War I. Here, the artist is not an agent of the revolution but the vector of an 'arevolution'. A copyleft art is in the end not so much a critical weapon but instead a cornucopia that operates recursively and only within the frame of its license. Artists that are engaging with it, thus turning the license in a shared manifesto, cannot materialise an anti-culture, a counter culture, nor a subculture, they must create their own from scratch. Instead of seeking opposition and destruction of an enemy, they aim at founding and building. Conclusion If we look at 1897 MallarmÃ's 'Un coup de dÃs jamais n'abolira le hasard', it is possible to only see it as an interesting visual design experiment in poetry. This approach misses the reason why this work exists in the first place. By turning art into the gathering and composing, even painting of both time and space within a text, it reached the apotheosis of parnassianism and symbolism upon which modernism broke through.[16] A similar issue of complex lineage and contextual information surrounds a document such as the FAL and leads to concurrent 'raisons d'Ãtre.' Indeed, the FAL is not just an 'excercice de style,' it is the embodiment of several elements that are announcing important changes in artistic practices: a call to turn legal rules into a constrained art system, a reflection on the nature of collaboration and authorship in the networked economy, a living archeology of the creative process by bringing traceability and transparency, and ultimately, the mark of an age of copyright and bureaucratic apotheosis that is pushing artists to develop their practice within the administrative structure of society and embed it in their creative process. Unfortunately, and this is one of the reasons there is so much confusion and misunderstanding about the use of such licenses by artists and theoreticians, is that, with such a manifesto where form meets function, once the license is used, it triggers a process of rationalisation that leads to a fragmentation of the original ideology and intention into different, possibly contradictory, elements: * A toolkit for artists to hack their practice and free themselves from consumerist workflows. * A political statement against the transformation of the digital culture into what CAE calls the "reproduction and distribution network for the ideology of capital". * A legal and technical framework to interface with the current system and support existing copyright law practices. * A lifestyle, and sometimes fashion statement. In practice it is possible for an artist to only see one of these facets and either ignore or not be aware of the others, making the license as manifesto multidimensional, open to different interpretations, not unlike the medium it was drafted in: the law. --- [1] Sam Williams, Free as in Freedom: Richard Stallman's Crusade for Free Software, ed. Sam Williams (Sebastopol: O'Reilly and Associates, Inc., 2002). [2] Mary Ann Caws, Manifesto: A Century of Isms (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000). [3] Ibid. 1, p. 13. [4] Ira V. Heffan, "Copyleft: Licensing Collaborative Works in the Digital Age," in Stanford Law Review, Vol. 49, No. 6 (Jul., 1997), pp. 1487-1521. [5] Ibid. [6] "From Mail Art to Net.art (studies in tactical media #3)", McKenzie Wark, email on the nettime mailing list, http://www.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-0210/msg00040.html. [7] "RYOSUKE COHEN MAIL ART - ENGLISH", accessed May 13, 2011, http://www.h5.dion.ne.jp/~cohen/info/ryosukec.htm. [8] Ibid. 6. [9] Margaret Chon, "New Wine Bursting from Old Bottles: Collaborative Internet Art, Joint Works, and Entrepreneurship," in Oregon Law Review, Spring 1996. [10] Ibid. 4. [11] "GNUArt", accessed May 13, 2011, http://gnuart.org. [12] Critical Art Ensemble, "Recombinant Theatre and Digital Resistance," in TDR (1988-), Vol. 44, No. 4 (Winter, 2000), pp. 151-166. [13] "Free Art License 1.3," accessed April 19, 2011, http://artlibre.org/licence/lal/en. [14] Constantin Toloudis, "The Impulse for the Ludic in the Poetics of Raymond Queneau," in Twentieth Century Literature, Vol. 35, No. 2 (Summer, 1989), pp. 147-160. [15] Ibid. 12. [16] Jacqueline Levaillant, "Les avatars d'un culte: l'image de Mallarmà pour le groupe initial de la Nouvelle Revue FranÃaise," in Revue d'Histoire littÃraire de la France, 99e AnnÃe, No. 5 (Sept. -Oct., 1999), pp. 1047-1061. a. -- http://su.kuri.mu 0.1 Re: <nettime> My Lawyer is an Artist Message not available nettime-l@kein.org Mon, 14 Nov 2011 23:38:05 +0100 Keith Sanborn said : > Very interesting to consider Mallarmé and OuLiPo in this context. > > So is this endgame a condition of history or are there ways out? > Beyond the mutually exclusive strategies you enumerate? Do you have > one to propose? Or must we make our own inferences from the > interstices between the elements of your text? The only thing that I'd like to propose is an encouragement to artists interested in the topic to keep in mind that free culture is a hub where many agendas and interests will collide and overlap regardless of their personal intention and the one of the license creator. Knowing that might be a beginning of a strategy. That said, it is worth mentioning the existence of projects that attempt to break down the "multidimensional" nature of some free cultural or open content licenses. Some of which will be familiar to this list's members: the Peer Production License, the Open Art License, the exception GPL aka ethical GPL, personal "forks" of the Free Art License, etc. In each case, the recipe is the same: isolate an issue that is not compatible with a mode of production, a creation process, a belief or philosophy and then forbid/manipulate it as a condition hard coded in the license. Such licenses are more than an artistic statement, in the sense of a purely artistic phantasy, they also aim at founding and building a body of cultural expressions. But none of them are a way out, instead it is a way in, a further nesting into some strange legal matryoshka, building on top of the original copyleft nest within copyright. Best, a. -- http://su.kuri.mu 0.4 Re: <nettime> My Lawyer is an Artist Heiko Recktenwald nettime-l@kein.org Tue, 15 Nov 2011 11:15:43 +0100 Hi Am 11.11.2011 14:23, schrieb Aymeric Mansoux: > It is in fact a crucial stage. By doing so, the author allows her or > his work to interface with a system inside which it can be freely > exchanged, modified and distributed. The freedom of this work is not > to be misunderstood with gratis and free of charge access to the > creation, it means that once such a freedom is granted to a work of > art, anyone is free to redistribute and modify it according to the > rules provided by its license. There is no turning back once this > choice is made public. This is IMHO pure nonsense. IMHO nothing can stop a pruducer from changing his mind for the future. Why should it be the way you imagine? What should be the reason for such a limitation ("no turning back") of his freedom? Can you show me, sorry, ONE case where a court has decided in your way? This artist is a lawyer, very best, H. > The licensed work will then have a life of its own, an autonomy > granted by a specific freedom of use, not defined by its author, but > by the license she or he chose. 0.5 Re: <nettime> My Lawyer is an Artist David Griffiths nettime-l@kein.org Tue, 15 Nov 2011 18:07:40 +0200 Heiko Recktenwald wrote: > Hi > > Am 11.11.2011 14:23, schrieb Aymeric Mansoux: > >> It is in fact a crucial stage. By doing so, the author allows her or >> his work to interface with a system inside which it can be freely >> exchanged, modified and distributed. The freedom of this work is not >> to be misunderstood with gratis and free of charge access to the >> creation, it means that once such a freedom is granted to a work of >> art, anyone is free to redistribute and modify it according to the >> rules provided by its license. There is no turning back once this >> choice is made public. > > This is IMHO pure nonsense. IMHO nothing can stop a pruducer from > changing his mind for the future. Why should it be the way you > imagine? What should be the reason for such a limitation ("no turning > back") of his freedom? Can you show me, sorry, ONE case where a court > has decided in your way? With a licence such as the GPL my understanding was that the "no-turning back point" happens whenever someone else contributes or forks the work - from this point on agreement has to be reached from all authors before the licence can be changed - in practice this is not generally possible. In terms of software, the freedom considered important by the GPL is that of the users of the work, not the developers (i.e. it should remain free/open for the users benefit). cheers, dave 0.6 Re: <nettime> My Lawyer is an Artist Rob Myers nettime-l@kein.org Tue, 15 Nov 2011 19:01:26 +0000 On 15/11/11 10:15, Heiko Recktenwald wrote: > IMHO nothing can stop a pruducer from > changing his mind for the future. They cannot however prevent the people who have received copies of their work under a licence offering that work to other people under the same licence. So yes the artist can stop offering the work under that licence, but they'll have a hard time suppressing it. - Rob. 0.7 Re: <nettime> My Lawyer is an Artist Heiko Recktenwald nettime-l@kein.org Wed, 16 Nov 2011 17:03:10 +0100 Am 15.11.2011 20:01, schrieb Rob Myers: > On 15/11/11 10:15, Heiko Recktenwald wrote: > >> IMHO nothing can stop a pruducer from changing his mind for the future. > > They cannot however prevent the people who have received copies of their > work under a licence offering that work to other people under the same > licence. This is what I am asking myself. I dont think the GPL produces any obligation, it is just the actual consent of the author that matters and may change. IMHO, best, H. <...> 0.9 Re: <nettime> My Lawyer is an Artist Message not available nettime-l@kein.org Thu, 17 Nov 2011 02:24:35 +0100 Dear Florian, Am 16.11.2011 19:07, schrieb Florian Cramer: >>> It is in fact a crucial stage. By doing so, the author allows her or >>> his work to interface with a system inside which it can be freely >>> exchanged, modified and distributed. The freedom of this work is not >>> to be misunderstood with gratis and free of charge access to the >>> creation, it means that once such a freedom is granted to a work of >>> art, anyone is free to redistribute and modify it according to the >>> rules provided by its license. There is no turning back once this >>> choice is made public. >>> >> This is IMHO pure nonsense. IMHO nothing can stop a pruducer from >> changing his mind for the future. Why should it be the way you >> imagine? What should be the reason for such a limitation ("no turning >> back") of his freedom? Can you show me, sorry, ONE case where a court >> has decided in your way? >> > A producer/copyright owner can change their mind about the license of > a work in the future, but cannot retroactively change a license > granted in the past if it was an indefinite license. This is a beautifull idea but is it true? What is "a licence"? Is it a thing that you get? No, it is a set of rules on what you can do with something else, some code or whatever. And all rules have to be interpreted. Transfers of the code accordiing to the words of the licence have to be valid. I would make a difference between the relation between creator A and user B and the relation between user B and C. Even if creator A would OWE something to user B, he would owe nothing to user C. But I doubt that there is any DUTY of creator A against anybody in those licences in any legal sense and think that there is nothing but a poem and actual consent on creator A, that can change. Best, H. <...> 0.11 Re: <nettime> My Lawyer is an Artist Rob Myers nettime-l@kein.org Sun, 20 Nov 2011 12:26:24 +0000 On 17/11/11 01:24, Heiko Recktenwald wrote: >> A producer/copyright owner can change their mind about the license >> of a work in the future, but cannot retroactively change a license >> granted in the past if it was an indefinite license. > > This is a beautifull idea but is it true? Yes. > What is "a licence"? A legal grant of permission. In some jurisdictions it is a form of legal contract. > Is it a thing that you get? No, it is a set of rules on what you can > do with something else, some code or whatever. Which affect whether you get a particular thing or not. > And all rules have to be interpreted. Transfers of the code > accordiing to the words of the licence have to be valid. All legal documents have to be interpreted. The GPL and various Creative Commons licences have been interpreted and upheld by the courts. > I would make a difference between the relation between creator A and > user B and the relation between user B and C. > > Even if creator A would OWE something to user B, he would owe > nothing to user C. B owes something to C, though, and B got it from A. A cannot change B's ability to give A's work to C. What A "owes" C depends on how Romantically we view A's work. But C will certainly end up with A's work. You are right that A and B have different relationships to C: under copyleft A can relicence adaptations of the work, B can't. But that's very different from being able to prevent C from receiving the original work from B. > But I doubt that there is any DUTY of creator A against anybody in > those licences in any legal sense and think that there is nothing > but a poem and actual consent on creator A, that can change. As I say, the courts have upheld these "poems". A has no power to prevent C receiving the work from A. We can phrase this as a duty not to prevent C from receiving the work if we really want to. - Rob. 0.12 Re: <nettime> My Lawyer is an Artist Aymeric Mansoux nettime-l@kein.org Mon, 21 Nov 2011 22:54:26 +0100 Rob Myers said : > On 17/11/11 01:24, Heiko Recktenwald wrote: > > I would make a difference between the relation between creator A and > > user B and the relation between user B and C. > > > > Even if creator A would OWE something to user B, he would owe nothing > > to user C. > > B owes something to C, though, and B got it from A. A cannot change B's > ability to give A's work to C. What A "owes" C depends on how > Romantically we view A's work. But C will certainly end up with A's work. <...> Just to add to what Rob and the others have already said, I think there is also a confusion between copyright, moral rights and the effectiveness of the latter within copyleft practices. In theory A can still stop C to keep on making a particular usage of A's work if there is a way to demonstrate that this particular usage, even though fully respecting the terms of the license, is damaging for A's honor and reputation. That's the simplified general idea. In practice every juridiction has its own way to define moral rights and by extension its own cases of what is considered "damaging". To make things worse the very concept of moral rights does not exist in all juridictions. Overall, whether it is defined or not, the whole idea is difficult to put in practice, if not hard to make relevant to a specific context. In the end, this only concerns very specific situations that will only change the nature and possibly terminate the license or the contract between A and C. B's rights will remain unchanged, as well as the ones from D, E, F, ..., Z because free culture licenses are irrevocable. The GPLv3 and CC licenses are very explicit in that regard. A good illustration of the difficulty to deal with moral right issues is by checking all the mechanisms in CC licenses to make sure A is not wrongly credited for changes that were not endorsed. So, as stated previously, once the decision is made, is public and that the licensed work has been already copied/distributed, there is no turning back. a. -- http://su.kuri.mu 1.0 Re: <nettime>The Fading Altruism of Open Sour Keith Hart nettime-l@bbs.thing.net Wed, 19 Dec 2001 04:32:30 -0500 It appears we cant even agree that one major difference between Free Software and Open Source/Linux is the attitude to money and hence to capitalism. Jaromil (below) thinks a statement posted on the net by the politburo settles the issue. But read Florian's 'in it for the money' and even more Stefan Merten's interview, where he imagines a society 'beyond labour, money and exchange' (both below). Jaromil: >Free software is a matter of freedom, not price; the word "free" >has to be intended in this way here. Furthermore, referring to the >wrong assumption by Keith Hart in this thread: >> The open source movement is split on the issue of exchange and money >> payment. Those who follow the Free Software Foundation appear to >> consider that any hint of money and exchange, even of reciprocity, >> leads directly to unacceptable compromise with capitalism. >refer to http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.html to have a clear >point about the free-speech / free-beer issue. Florian Cramer: >The real amount of altruism in Free Software >development may be debated, but any programmer who's mostly or even only >in it for the money would be stupid to program anything but proprietary >software (which, no doubt, is more profitable). Interview with Stefan Merten, Oekonux, nettime, 7/12/01: >But whereas Free Software >emphasizes the freedom Free Software gives the users, >Open Source does not care about freedom. The Open >Source Initiative (OSI) was founded exactly for the >reason to make Free Software compatible with business >people's thinking, and the word "freedom" has been >considered harmful for that purpose. >I had the idea that Free Software is something very >special and may have a real potential for a different >society beyond labor, money, exchange - in short: >capitalism - in 1998. As it happens, I had come across the free speech/free beer distinction without having to consult the gnu website. It still seems to me that the freedom of Free Software is largely, but not exclusively tied up with the normative absence of money. This allows the purists to insist that those who wish to work across the divide 'do not care about freedom' or are 'only in it for the money'. And behind that, of course, is a desire to preserve the mystique of a hacker elite. Keith Hart 1.1 Re: <nettime>The Fading Altruism of Open Sour Felix Stalder nettime-l@bbs.thing.net Wed, 19 Dec 2001 10:22:41 -0500 >As it happens, I had come across the free speech/free beer distinction >without having to consult the gnu website. I think the free speech / free beer distinction is really counterproductive at this point. I understand its historical value in rallying US hackers in the context of a culture that fetishes "individual freedom" to a degree that it's something that one has no longer to explain or argue for. Free speech = good, in all circumstances. I'm not arguing against free speech, what I'm arguing against is the idea that free speech offers a good metaphor to understand the value of free software / open source. Lessig, in his new book The Future of Ideas, offers a much better definition for what "free" in this context means. He writes, "a resource is 'free' if (1) one can use it without permission of anyone else; or (2) the permission one needs is granted neutrally" (p.12). Our roads, for example, are free in Lessig's sense. This is the case even if a toll charge is levied because the charge is imposed neutrally. Everyone pays the same price independent of the purpose of driving on the road. A road would no longer be free if, say, Coke had sponsored its construction and therefore could prohibit Pepsi trucks from using it. In this definition, there is no difference in the freedom created by open source or free software. >It still seems to me that the >freedom of Free Software is largely, but not exclusively tied up with the >normative absence of money. This allows the purists to insist that those >who wish to work across the divide 'do not care about freedom' or are 'only >in it for the money'. And behind that, of course, is a desire to preserve >the mystique of a hacker elite. I agree with Keith, the absence of money per se is not a virtue. Insisting on the evils of money in all contexts, is the simple inversion of the capitalist logic which says making money per se is good. The transformation of resources and their impact is what really matters. And so far, I haven't seen anyone who could show the open source approach transfers time and money (or donated hardware if you prefer) into worse code or less code than the FSF approach. Felix --------------------++----- Les faits sont faits. http://felix.openflows.org 1.2 Re: <nettime>The Fading Altruism of Open Sour Florian Cramer nettime-l@bbs.thing.net Wed, 19 Dec 2001 19:31:43 +0100 Am Wed, 19.Dec.2001 um 10:22:41 -0500 schrieb Felix Stalder: > capitalist logic which says making money per se is good. The > transformation of resources and their impact is what really matters. And > so far, I haven't seen anyone who could show the open source approach > transfers time and money (or donated hardware if you prefer) into worse > code or less code than the FSF approach. By all probability not, because Free Software and Open Source are technically the same - the "Open Source Definition" is almost identical to the "Debian Free Software Guidelines" [and was drafted by the very same author, Bruce Perens]. The both terms don't even describe differences in development methodology. They are diverge in philosophical and political terms: "Open Source" is, according to those who launched the term, about technically better software ("software that sucks less"), "Free Software" is about old-hacker-school freedom of information. - It's quite ironical that other net cultures - such as this one here - has gotten it the other way round. Felix, one may of course say that the "Free Software" notion of freedom is naive, but on the other hand the GNU-style "Free Software" movement remains the only one to date that had a consistent agenda and politics against the proprietarization of code and knowledge. (And many of those who dismissed the FSF positions as obnoxious hippie fundamentalistm have changed their mind since DMCA, DCSS and Sklyarov.) The point is not that, say, "Linux" would stand (as "Open Source") against "GNU" (as "Free Software"). The term "Open Source" was coined and disseminated by Eric S. Raymond very late, in 1998, as a rebranding for code that preceded the term for ears or even decades (including GNU, Linux, BSD, Apache, Perl, sendmail etc.) and which had simply been called Free Software before. Florian -- http://userpage.fu-berlin.de/~cantsin/homepage/ http://www.complit.fu-berlin.de/institut/lehrpersonal/cramer.html GnuPG/PGP public key ID 3200C7BA 1.3 RE: <nettime>The Fading Altruism of Open Sour Kermit Snelson nettime-l@bbs.thing.net Wed, 19 Dec 2001 22:21:08 -0800 Florian Cramer: > By all probability not, because Free Software and Open Source are > technically the same This is true, and the fact may be demonstrated by examining the two lists of licenses evaluated by the Open Source Initiative [1] and the Free Software Foundation [2] respectively. Of the dozens of software licenses that may be clearly identified as being on both lists, only the Apple Public Source License is considered "open source" by the OSI but "Non-Free" by the FSF. That one exception may, moreover, be due more to political than technical reasons. The FSF accepts the rest as "free software" licenses, although it nonetheless deprecates many of these as "GPL-Incompatible." Keith Hart: > It appears we cant even agree that one major difference between Free > Software and Open Source/Linux is the attitude to money and hence to > capitalism. The two camps have indeed taken very different rhetorical paths to what are demonstrably identical conclusions. I am less optimistic than Felix, who interprets this as evidence of a great movement that is capable of absorbing "very different, even contradictory ideas." I see it the other way around, namely as a single idea that has been absorbing different movements. There's no other explanation, I think, for the fact that we're hearing so much group singing lately between left-leaning communitarians and the libertarian right, and not only on the finer points of software license agreements. Keith's recent proposal in this thread to vacate the legal monopoly of central banks on the issue of legal tender certainly has the potential to throw yet another log on this cozy campfire. Kermit Snelson Notes: [1] http://www.opensource.org/licenses/index.html [2] http://www.fsf.org/licenses/license-list.html 1.4 RE: <nettime>The Fading Altruism of Open Sour Heiko Recktenwald nettime-l@bbs.thing.net Thu, 20 Dec 2001 17:15:55 +0100 (CET) > This is true, and the fact may be demonstrated by examining the two lists of > licenses evaluated by the Open Source Initiative [1] and the Free Software > Foundation [2] respectively. Of the dozens of software licenses that may be You take this blabla much to serious. "Open Source" for example isnt just an idea, a good idea like BSD licences, GNU etc, but first of all it is a label. Something for the "No logo" book. This labelism of the different initiatives has nothing to do with the central concept. Maybe this is why I dont like Linux. So much chaos and desktop cosmetics. I stay with FreeBSD. And I like GNU. H. 2.0 <nettime> Interview with Stefan Merten, Nov 2001 kadian antal nettime-l@bbs.thing.net Wed, 5 Dec 2001 13:44:14 -0800 (PST) Preview of next issue of subsol, online Dec 15 http://subsol.c3.hu // FREE SOFTWARE & G P L SOCIETY // << Interview with Stefan Merten, Oekonux, Germany >> by Joanne Richardson, November 2001 >> Q: Oekonux - an abbreviation of "OEKOnomie" and "liNUX" - is a German mailing list discussing the revolutionary possibilities of Free Software. Many people speak of Free Software and Open Source Software interchangeably - could you explain how you understand the differences between them? The term "Free Software" is older than "Open Source". "Free Software" is used by the Free Software Foundation [http://www.fsf.org/] founded by Richard Stallman in 1985. The term "Open Source" has been developed by Eric S. Raymond and others, who, in 1998, founded the Open Source Initiative [http://www.opensource.org/]. It's not so much a question of definition as of the philosophy behind the two parts of the movement - the differences between the definition of Open Source Software and Free Software are relatively few. But whereas Free Software emphasizes the freedom Free Software gives the users, Open Source does not care about freedom. The Open Source Initiative (OSI) was founded exactly for the reason to make Free Software compatible with business people's thinking, and the word "freedom" has been considered harmful for that purpose. >> Q: Free software means the freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve the software, and these freedoms are protected by the GNU General Public License. The definition presupposes open sources as the necessary condition for studying how the software works and for making changes, but it also implies more. The definition of Open Source is quite close: it means the ability to read, redistribute, and modify the source code - but because this is a better, faster way to improve software. Openess = speed = more profit. The Open Source Initiative proclaims quite proudly that it exists in order to persuade the "commercial world" of the superiority of open sources on "the same pragmatic, business-case grounds that motivated Netscape." But recently, it is the term "Open Source" that has gained popularity … and by analogy everything has become "Open"--open source society, open source money, open source schooling (to echo some of the titles of panels of the last Wizards of OS conference in Berlin.) Indeed the Open Source Initiative has been extremely successful in pushing the freedom-subtracted term into people's heads. Today people from the Free Software Foundation always feel the need to emphasize that it's the freedom that is important - more important than the efficiency of production, which is the primary aim behind open source. Of course open sources are a precondition for most of this freedom, but open sources are not the core idea of Free Software and so Open Source is at least a misnomer. >> Q: How do you mean it's a "misnomer"? The two movements exist and the names correspond to the different ideas behind them. And "Open Source" is the name the people from this initiative chose for themselves, and seems quite an accurate characterization of their focus. Free Software and Open Source Software are not two movements, but a single movement with two factions, and as far as I can see the distinction plays a major role mostly in the more ideological discussions between members of the two factions. They are collaborating on projects, and sometimes unite, for instance, when it is a question of defending against the attacks of Micro$oft [http://perens.com/Articles/StandTogether.html]. And, no, "Open Source" is not an accurate characterization of this faction, since their focus has been making Free Software compatible with business people's thinking. A more correct name would have been "Free Software for Business" - or something like that. >> Q: What seems misleading to me is that the leftist intelligentsia has begun to use "Open Source" as a cause to promote without realizing the pro-capitalist connotations behind the term. Today the widespread inflation of the term "Open Source" has a deep negative impact. Often the core idea behind Free Software - establishing the freedom of the user - is not known to people who are only talking of Open Source - be it leftist intelligentsia or other people. I think this is a pity and would recommend using only the term Free Software because this is the correct term for the phenomenon. You don't call "green" "red" if "green" is the right term - do you? After all, even "Open Source" software would not be successful if the practical aspect of freedom was not inherent in its production and use. Interestingly, in an article entitled "Its Time to Talk about Free Software Again," one of the founders of the Open Source Initiative also considers the current development as wrong. [http://www.perens.com/perens_com/Articles/ItsTimeToTalkAboutFreeSoftwareAgain.html] >> Q: The idea behind Oekonux began, in kernel form at the first Wizards of OS conference in Berlin in 1999. How did the motivation to begin Oekonux develop from this context? I had the idea that Free Software is something very special and may have a real potential for a different society beyond labor, money, exchange - in short: capitalism - in 1998. In September 1998, I tried to make that a topic on the Krisis mailing list. However, next to nobody was interested. In July 1999, I attended the first "Wizard of Open Source" [http://www.mikro.org/Events/OS] conference organized by mikro in Berlin, and was especially interested in the topic "New economy?". However, in the context of the idea I mentioned above - the potential to transform society - I found the ideas presented there not very interesting. After the talks I took the opportunity to organize a spontaneous BOF (Birds Of a Feather) session and luckily it worked well. So we sat there with about 20 people and discussed the ideas presented in the talks. At the end I asked all the people to give me their e-mail address. After the WOS conference, mikro created a mailing list for us - and that was the birth of the Oekonux mailing list which is the core of the project. In December 1999 I created the web site [www.oekonux.de]. Its main purpose is to archive the mailing list. Texts and other material created in the context of the project is presented there as well as links to web sites and pages relevant to our discussion in some way. There is also an English/international part of the project ([www.oekonux.org] archiving [list-en {AT} oekonux.org]), which, however, is still nearly non-existent. I find this a pity but unfortunately until now there is nobody with enough free time and energy to give this part of the project a real start. So until today all the material is in German and there are only a few translations of the texts. In June 2000 I created another mailing list ([projekt {AT} oekonux.de]) which is concerned with the organization of the project. During April 28-30, 2001 in Dortmund we had the first Oekonux conference ([http://www.oekonux-konferenz.de/]), which brought together people from different areas who were interested in the principles of Free Software and the possible consequences of these principles on their particular field. The conference was attended by about 170 persons from a very broad range of ages and backgrounds, from software developers, to political theorists and scientists. It was a very exciting conference with a perfect atmosphere and another milestone in the way we and - if we're not completely wrong - the whole world is going. The next conference is planned to take place in Nov 1-3, 2002. >> Q: How active and large is the list? >From the start we have had very interesting discussions with some silent periods but usually an average of 6-8 mails a day. The atmosphere on the list is very pleasant and flames are nearly unknown. Fortunately it has not been necessary to moderate the list, as it regulates itself very well. The discussions are very contentful and this interview would not have been possible without them. They cover a wide number of details but nearly always stay on the central topic of the list: the possible impacts of Free Software on society. At the moment we have about 200 subscribers at [liste {AT} oekonux.de], who come from a wide range of intellectual traditions and areas of interest. Though of course they all share a common interest in political thought, there are people from the Free Software and Hardware areas as well as engineers of different brands, hard core political people as well as people with a main interest in culture and so on. Though the traffic is quite high we have nearly no unsubscriptions which I think is a proof for the quality of the list. >> Q: In a previous interview with Geert Lovink [http://www.nettime.org/cgi-bin/wilma_hiliter/nettime/200104/msg00127.html?line=8] you mentioned that the relationship between free software and Marxism is one of the central topics debated on the list ... Do you think Marx is still relevant for an analysis of contemporary society? Could you give an idea of the scope of this debate on the list? First of all we recognize the difference between Marx' views and the views of the different Marxist currents. Although different brands of Marxism have distorted Marx' thought to the point where it has become unrecognizable, I tend to think that only Marx' analysis gives us the chance to understand what is going on today. The decline of the labor society we are all witnessing in various ways cannot be understood without that analysis. The Krisis group [http://www.krisis.org] has offered a contemporary reading of Marx, claiming that capitalism is in decay because the basic movement of making money from labor works less and less. This doesn't mean that capitalism must end soon, but it won't ever be able to hold its old promises of wealth for all. A number of people on the Oekonux mailing list have built upon the Krisis theories and carried them onto new ground. On the list among other things we try to interpret Marx in the context of Free Software. It's very interesting that much of what Marx said about the final development of capitalism can be seen in Free Software. In a sense, we try to re-think Marx from a contemporary perspective, and interpret current capitalism as containing a germ form of a new society. >> Q: According to many circles, Marx is obsolete - he was already obsolete in the sixties, when the mass social upheavals and the so-called new social movements showed that not class but other forms of oppressive power had become determining instances and that the economic base was not the motor that moved contradictions. I think that at that time the economic base was not as mature as it has become today. In the last ten to twenty years Western societies started to base their material production and all of society more and more on information goods. The development of computers as universal information processors with ever increasing capacity is shifting the focal point of production from the material side to the immaterial, information side. I think that today the development of the means of production in capitalism has entered a new historical phase. The most important thing in this shift in the means of production is that information has very different features than matter. First of all, information may be copied without loss - at least digital information using computers. Second and equally important, the most effective way to produce interesting information is to foster creativity. Free Software combines these two aspects, resulting in a new form of production. Obviously Free Software uses the digital copy as a technical basis. Thus Free Software, like any digital information, is not a scarce good; contrary to the IPR (intellectual property rights) people, the Free Software movement explicitly prevents making Free Software scarce. So, scarcity, which has always been a fundamental basis for capitalism, is not present in Free Software: Existing Free Software is available for next to zero price. More importantly, however, the organization of the production of Free Software differs widely from that of commodities produced for maximizing profit. For most Free Software producers there is no other reason than their own desire to develop that software. So the development of Free Software is based on the self-unfolding or self-actualization of the single individual. This form of non-alienated production results in better software because the use of the product is the first and most important aim of the developer - there simply is no profit which could be maximized. The self-unfolding of the single person is present in the process of production, and the self-unfolding of the many is ensured by the availability of high quality Free Software. Another important factor is that capitalism is in deep crisis.Until the 1970s capitalism promised a better world to people in the Western countries, to people in the former Soviet bloc and to the Third World. It stopped doing it starting in the 1980s and dismissed it completely in the 1990s. Today the capitalist leaders are glad if they are able to fix the biggest leaks in the sinking ship. The resources used for that repair are permanently increasing- be it financial operations to protect Third World states from the inability to pay their debt, or the kind of military operations we see in Afghanistan today. These processes were not mature in the 1960s but they are today. Maybe today for the first time in history we are able to overcome capitalism on the bases it has provided, by transcending it into a new society that is less harmful than the one we have. >> Q: How can Free Software "overcome" capitalism from the bases it has provided? The idea of a dialectical negation of capitalism (an immanent critique from the inside that takes over the same presuppositions of the system it negates) has frequently been discredited. Both Marx and Lenin's ideas of a dialectical negation of capitalism preserved the imperative of productivity, the utility of instrumental technology, the repressive apparatus of the State, police and standing army, as a necessary "first stage." And if you start from the inside, you will never get anywhere else . . . the argument goes. Free Software is both inside and outside capitalism. On the one hand, the social basis for Free Software clearly would not exist without a flourishing capitalism. Only a flourishing capitalism can provide the opportunity to develop something that is not for exchange. On the other hand, Free Software is outside of capitalism for the reasons I mentioned above: absence of scarcity and self-unfolding instead of the alienation of labor in a command economy. This kind of relationship between the old and the new system is typical for germ forms - for instance you can see it in the early stage of capitalist development, when feudalism was still strong. >> Q: In what sense is the production of Free Software not "alienated"? One of the reasons that labor is alienated is because the workers sells a living thing - qualitatively different forms of productive activity which in principle can't be measured - in exchange for a general measure, money. As Marx said somewhere, the worker does not care about the shitty commodities he is producing, he just does it for this abstract equivalent, the money he receives as compensation. It seems you're talking about the difference between use value - the use of goods or labor - and exchange value - reflected in the price of the commodities that goods or labor are transformed into by being sold on the market. It's true that the use value of goods as well as labor is qualitatively different. It's also true that the exchange value of a commodity - be it a commodity or wage labor - is a common measure, an abstraction of the qualitative features of a product. But after all you need a common measure to base an exchange on. One of the problems of capitalism is that this abstraction is the central motor of society. The use of something - which would be the important thing in a society focusing on living well - is only loosely bound to that abstraction. That is the basis of the alienation of work performed for a wage. In Free Software because the product can be taken with only marginal cost and, more importantly, is not created for being exchanged, the exchange value of the product is zero. Free Software is worthless in the dominant sense of exchange. Free Software may be produced for numerous reasons - but not for exchange. If there is no external motivation - like making money - there must be internal motivations for the developers. These internal motivations, which are individually very different, are what we call self-unfolding (from the German term "Selbstentfaltung", similar but not completly the same as "self-development"). Without external motivations, there is not much room for alienation. Of course self-unfolding is a common phenomenon in other areas, such as art or hobbies. However, Free Software surpasses the older forms of self-unfolding in several ways and this is what makes it interesting on the level of social change: * Most products of self-unfolding may be useful for some persons, but this use is relatively limited. Free Software, however, delivers goods which are useful for a large number of persons - virtually everybody with a computer. * Most products of self-unfolding are the results of outmoded forms of production, like craft-work. Free Software is produced using the most advanced means of production mankind has available. * Most products of self-unfolding are the fruits of the work of one individual. Free Software depends on collaborative work - it is usually developed by international teams and with help from the users of the product. * All products of self-unfolding I can think of have been pushed away once the same product becomes available on the market. By contrast, Free Software has already started to push away software developed for maximizing profit in some areas, and currently there seems to be no general limit to this process. So contrary to older forms of self-unfolding Free Software provides a model in which self-unfolding becomes relevant on a social level. The products of this sort of self-unfolding can even be interesting for commercial use. >> Q: Some theorists have analyzed the internet as a kind of "gift" economy. In other words, it is not subject to measure and exchange. Things are freely produced and freely taken. And unlike exchange, which has a kind of finality (I pay one dollar I buy one bottle of Coca Cola, and it's over), the gift, since it cannot be measured, is a kind of infinite reciprocity. Gifts are not about calculation of value, but about building social relationships. Do you see Free Software as a gift "economy"? I don't like talking about gifts in Free Software or in terms of the Internet in general. There is no reciprocity in Free Software as, similarly, there is no reciprocity on the Internet. I have used thousands of web pages and millions of lines of code contained in Free Software without giving anything back. There simply is no reciprocity and even better: there is no need for reciprocity. You simply take what you need and you provide what you like. It's not by chance, that this reflects the old demand of "Everybody according to his/her needs". Indeed there are several attempts, which are at best misleading, to understand the Internet and/or Free Software in terms of capitalist dogmas. The talk about "gift economies" is one of them, because it focuses on gifts as some sort of - non-capitalist but nonetheless - exchange. Even worse is the talk of an "attention economy" which defines attention as a kind of currency. The Internet, and especially Free Software are new phenomena which can't be understood adequately by using the familiar thought patterns of capitalism. >> Q: In what sense is "GPL Society" beyond the familiar thought patterns of capitalism? With the term "GPL Society" we named a society based on the principles of production of Free Software. These principles are: * self-unfolding as the main motivation for production, * irrelevance of exchange value, so the focus is on the use value, * free cooperation between people, * international teams. Though the term has been controversial for some time, today it is widely accepted in Oekonux. I like the term particularly *because* you can't associate anything with it that you already know. GPL Society describes something new, which we try to discover, explore and understand in the Oekonux project. Ironically, part of this process of understanding has reached the conclusion that a GPL Society would no longer need General Public License because there won't be any copyright. So at least at this time maybe it should be renamed ;-) . As I tried to explain Free Software is not based on exchange so neither is a GPL Society. How a GPL Society may look like concretely can't be determined fully today. However, at present there are many developments which already point in that direction. * One development is the increasing obsolescence of human labor. The more production is done by machines the less human labor is needed in the production process. If freed from the chains of capitalism this development would mean freedom from more and more necessities, making room for more processes of self-unfolding - be it productive processes like Free Software or non-productive ones like many hobbies. So contrary to capitalism, in which increasing automation always destroys the work places for people and thus their means to live, in a GPL Society maximum automation would be an important aim of the whole society. * In every society based on exchange - which includes the former Soviet bloc - making money is the dominant aim. Because a GPL Society would not be based on exchange, there would be no need for money anymore. Instead of the abstract goal of maximizing profit, the human oriented goal of fulfilling the needs of individuals as well as of mankind as a whole would be the focus of all activities. * The increased communication possibilities of the Internet will become even more important than today. An ever increasing part of production and development will take place on the Internet or will be based on it. The B2B (business to business) concept, which is about improving the information flow between businesses producing commodities, shows us that the integration of production into information has just started. On the other hand the already visible phenomenon of people interested in a particular area finding each other on the Internet will become central for the development of self-unfolding groups. * The difference between consumers and producers will vanish more and more. Already today the user can configure complex commodities like cars or furniture to some degree, which makes virtually each product an individual one, fully customized to the needs of the consumer. This increasing configurability of products is a result of the always increasing flexibility of the production machines. If this is combined with good software you could initiate the production of highly customized material goods allowing a maximum of self-unfolding - from your web browser up to the point of delivery. * Machines will become even more flexible. New type of machines available for some years now (fabbers, [http://www.ennex.com/fabbers/index.sht]) are already more universal in some areas than modern industrial robots - not to mention stupid machines like a punch. The flexibility of the machines is a result of the fact that material production is increasingly based on information. At the same time the increasing flexibility of the machines gives the users more room for creativity and thus for self-unfolding. * In a GPL society there is no more reason for a competition beyond the type of competition we see in sports. Instead various kinds of fruitful cooperation will take place. You can see that today not only in Free Software but also (partly) in science and for instance in cooking recipes: Imagine your daily meal if cooking recipes would be proprietary and available only after paying a license fee instead of being the result of a world-wide cooperation of cooks. >> Q: This sounds very utopian: Free Software as the sign of the end of capitalism and the transformation of the new society? How do you predict this transformation coming about - spontaneously, as the economic basis of capitalist production just withers away? I hope these more or less utopian thoughts give an idea of the notion of a GPL Society as it is currently discussed within the Oekonux project. And it's not Free Software in itself which may transform capitalism. Instead, the principles of the production of Free Software - which have developed within capitalism! - provide a more effective way of production on the one hand and more freedom on the other. The main question is how is it possible to translate these principles to other areas. I tried to explain how Free Software - as a germ form of the GPL society - is inside as well as outside of capitalism. I think Free Software is only the most visible of the new forms which together have the potential to lead us into a different society. Capitalism has developed the means of production to such an extent that people can use them for something new. Of course, the transformation also requires a political process and although historically the preconditions now are better than ever before there is no automatic step that will lead to the GPL society. People have to want this process. However, I'm quite optimistic that they will, because Free Software shows us, in microcosm, how a better life would look, so the GPL Society is in the best interest of people. And Oekonux is there to understand the process of this change, and perhaps at some point our thoughts may help to push the development forward :-) . 3.0 [Nettime-bold] Re: [graham@seul.org: Re: [ox-en] Threads "The Fading Altruism of Open Source" on <nettime>] Florian Cramer nettime-bold@nettime.org Fri, 18 Jan 2002 14:15:21 +0100 Am Mon, 14.Jan.2002 um 23:51:38 +0100x schrieb jaromil: [quoting Graham Seaman from seul.org:] > 3. They've provided a prediction as to what should happen as the recession > in technology hits in America - the number of people writing free software > should go through the roof. I don't think there's going to be any such > event - but it should be something perfectly testable (just watch > freshmeat and compare the number of entries from Stefan Merten with the > number from Americans ;-). In an interview on <http://kerneltrap.com/article.php?sid=459>, Matt Dillon, a major developer of the FreeBSD operating system (and former Linux kernel hacker), has its own answer on whether Free Software is altruistic or not. It is, without knowing it, quite a good response to the recent on the economy of Free Software in Nettime (and, apparently, Oekonux): Matt Dillon: Well, I could say something about open-source in general. Specifically I would like to say something about open-source and making money. There are two kinds of open-source programmers in the world. No, make that three kinds: There is the open-source programmer who is still in school, the open-source programmer who has a real job, and the open-source programmer who tries to make a living out of his open-source programming. In many respects, each individual goes through ALL of the above phases. We've all been in (or are in) school, we all must eventually make a living, and having been somewhat disillusioned by real work we have all either tried or will try to make a living from our open-source endevours. This last item -- making a living from open-source, has been over-stressed by the open source community (mainly Linux related developers) over the last few years. Guys, if you haven't figured it out by now it is mostly an illusion! The hype made it possible. The crazy stock market made it possible, but it didn't last now did it? If I take a hundred people I know only two or three can make a living from their open-source work (and I'm not one of them today!). The open-source community has to come to terms with this. Don't let it get you down! I read LWN.NET (Linux Weekly News) every week and I see a definite trend towards mass depression as the internet craze settles down into something a bit more sustainable. Don't let it get to you! Face the issue squarely and come to terms with what it means for your own work. If an older generation (that's me! At 35! God I feel old!) can teach the younger generation of programmers/hackers anything it is that the character of open-source will always be with us, with or without wall-street, and that we open-source programmers do not do these things for a 5-minute spot on CNN, we do these things because they are cool, and interesting, and make the world a better place for everyone. That is our legacy. We are not an anarchy, we are a charity. A very *LARGE* charity I might add! Florian -- http://userpage.fu-berlin.de/~cantsin/homepage/ http://www.complit.fu-berlin.de/institut/lehrpersonal/cramer.html GnuPG/PGP public key ID 3200C7BA 4.0 [Nettime-bold] Re: <nettime>The Fading Altruism of Open Sour Keith Hart nettime-bold@nettime.org Wed, 19 Dec 2001 04:32:30 -0500 It appears we cant even agree that one major difference between Free Software and Open Source/Linux is the attitude to money and hence to capitalism. Jaromil (below) thinks a statement posted on the net by the politburo settles the issue. But read Florian's 'in it for the money' and even more Stefan Merten's interview, where he imagines a society 'beyond labour, money and exchange' (both below). Jaromil: >Free software is a matter of freedom, not price; the word "free" >has to be intended in this way here. Furthermore, referring to the >wrong assumption by Keith Hart in this thread: >> The open source movement is split on the issue of exchange and money >> payment. Those who follow the Free Software Foundation appear to >> consider that any hint of money and exchange, even of reciprocity, >> leads directly to unacceptable compromise with capitalism. >refer to http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.html to have a clear >point about the free-speech / free-beer issue. Florian Cramer: >The real amount of altruism in Free Software >development may be debated, but any programmer who's mostly or even only >in it for the money would be stupid to program anything but proprietary >software (which, no doubt, is more profitable). Interview with Stefan Merten, Oekonux, nettime, 7/12/01: >But whereas Free Software >emphasizes the freedom Free Software gives the users, >Open Source does not care about freedom. The Open >Source Initiative (OSI) was founded exactly for the >reason to make Free Software compatible with business >people's thinking, and the word "freedom" has been >considered harmful for that purpose. >I had the idea that Free Software is something very >special and may have a real potential for a different >society beyond labor, money, exchange - in short: >capitalism - in 1998. As it happens, I had come across the free speech/free beer distinction without having to consult the gnu website. It still seems to me that the freedom of Free Software is largely, but not exclusively tied up with the normative absence of money. This allows the purists to insist that those who wish to work across the divide 'do not care about freedom' or are 'only in it for the money'. And behind that, of course, is a desire to preserve the mystique of a hacker elite. Keith Hart 4.1 [Nettime-bold] Re: <nettime>The Fading Altruism of Open Sour Felix Stalder nettime-bold@nettime.org Wed, 19 Dec 2001 10:22:41 -0500 >As it happens, I had come across the free speech/free beer distinction >without having to consult the gnu website. I think the free speech / free beer distinction is really counterproductive at this point. I understand it's historical value in rallying US hackers in the context of a culture that fetishes "individual freedom" to a degree that it's something that one has no longer to explain or argue for. Free speech = good, in all circumstances. I'm not arguing against free speech, what I'm arguing against is the idea that free speech offers a good metaphor to understand the value of free software / open source. Lessig, in his new book The Future of Ideas, offers a much better definition for what "free" in this context means. He writes: "a resource is 'free' if (1) one can use it without permission of anyone else; or (2) the permission one needs is granted neutrally" (p.12). Our roads, for example, are free in Lessig's sense. This is the case even if a toll charge is levied because the charge is imposed neutrally. Everyone pays the same price independent of the purpose of driving on the road. A road would no longer be free if, say, Coke had sponsored its construction and therefore could prohibit Pepsi trucks from using it. In this definition, there is no difference in the freedom created by open source or free software. >It still seems to me that the >freedom of Free Software is largely, but not exclusively tied up with the >normative absence of money. This allows the purists to insist that those >who wish to work across the divide 'do not care about freedom' or are 'only >in it for the money'. And behind that, of course, is a desire to preserve >the mystique of a hacker elite. I agree with Keith, the absence of money per se is not a virtue. Insisting on the evils of money in all contexts, is the simple inversion of the capitalist logic which says making money per se is good. The transformation of resources and their impact is what really matters. And so far, I haven't seen anyone who could show the open source approach transfers time and money (or donated hardware if you prefer) into worse code or less code than the FSF approach. Felix --------------------++----- Les faits sont faits. http://felix.openflows.org 4.2 [Nettime-bold] Re: <nettime>The Fading Altruism of Open Sour Florian Cramer nettime-bold@nettime.org Wed, 19 Dec 2001 19:31:43 +0100 Am Wed, 19.Dec.2001 um 10:22:41 -0500 schrieb Felix Stalder: > capitalist logic which says making money per se is good. The > transformation of resources and their impact is what really matters. And > so far, I haven't seen anyone who could show the open source approach > transfers time and money (or donated hardware if you prefer) into worse > code or less code than the FSF approach. By all probability not, because Free Software and Open Source are technically the same - the "Open Source Definition" is almost identical to the "Debian Free Software Guidelines" [and was drafted by the very same author, Bruce Perens]. The both terms don't even describe differences in development methodology. They are diverge in philosophical and political terms: "Open Source" is, according to those who launched the term, about technically better software ("software that sucks less"), "Free Software" is about old-hacker-school freedom of information. - It's quite ironical that other net cultures - such as this one here - has gotten it the other way round. Felix, one may of course say that the "Free Software" notion of freedom is naive, but on the other hand the GNU-style "Free Software" movement remains the only one to date that had a consistent agenda and politics against the proprietarization of code and knowledge. (And many of those who dismissed the FSF positions as obnoxious hippie fundamentalistm have changed their mind since DMCA, DCSS and Sklyarov.) The point is not that, say, "Linux" would stand (as "Open Source") against "GNU" (as "Free Software"). The term "Open Source" was coined and disseminated by Eric S. Raymond very late, in 1998, as a rebranding for code that preceded the term for ears or even decades (including GNU, Linux, BSD, Apache, Perl, sendmail etc.) and which had simply been called Free Software before. Florian -- http://userpage.fu-berlin.de/~cantsin/homepage/ http://www.complit.fu-berlin.de/institut/lehrpersonal/cramer.html GnuPG/PGP public key ID 3200C7BA 4.3 [Nettime-bold] RE: <nettime>The Fading Altruism of Open Sour Kermit Snelson nettime-bold@nettime.org Wed, 19 Dec 2001 22:21:08 -0800 Florian Cramer: > By all probability not, because Free Software and Open Source are > technically the same This is true, and the fact may be demonstrated by examining the two lists of licenses evaluated by the Open Source Initiative [1] and the Free Software Foundation [2] respectively. Of the dozens of software licenses that may be clearly identified as being on both lists, only the Apple Public Source License is considered "open source" by the OSI but "Non-Free" by the FSF. That one exception may, moreover, be due more to political than technical reasons. The FSF accepts the rest as "free software" licenses, although it nonetheless deprecates many of these as "GPL-Incompatible." Keith Hart: > It appears we cant even agree that one major difference between Free > Software and Open Source/Linux is the attitude to money and hence to > capitalism. The two camps have indeed taken very different rhetorical paths to what are demonstrably identical conclusions. I am less optimistic than Felix, who interprets this as evidence of a great movement that is capable of absorbing "very different, even contradictory ideas." I see it the other way around, namely as a single idea that has been absorbing different movements. There's no other explanation, I think, for the fact that we're hearing so much group singing lately between left-leaning communitarians and the libertarian right, and not only on the finer points of software license agreements. Keith's recent proposal in this thread to vacate the legal monopoly of central banks on the issue of legal tender certainly has the potential to throw yet another log on this cozy campfire. Kermit Snelson Notes: [1] http://www.opensource.org/licenses/index.html [2] http://www.fsf.org/licenses/license-list.html 4.4 [Nettime-bold] RE: <nettime>The Fading Altruism of Open Sour Heiko Recktenwald nettime-bold@nettime.org Thu, 20 Dec 2001 17:15:55 +0100 (CET) > This is true, and the fact may be demonstrated by examining the two lists of > licenses evaluated by the Open Source Initiative [1] and the Free Software > Foundation [2] respectively. Of the dozens of software licenses that may be You take this blabla much to serious. "Open Source" for example isnt just an idea, a good idea like BSD licences, GNU etc, but first of all it is a label. Something for the "No logo" book. This labelism of the different initiatives has nothing to do with the central concept. Maybe this is why I dont like Linux. So much chaos and desktop cosmetics. I stay with FreeBSD. And I like GNU. H. 4.5 [Nettime-bold] Re: <nettime>The Fading Altruism of Open Sour Talan Memmott nettime-bold@nettime.org Thu, 20 Dec 2001 13:51:21 -0800 > The point is not that, say, "Linux" would stand (as "Open Source") against > "GNU" (as "Free Software"). The term "Open Source" was coined and > disseminated by Eric S. Raymond very late, in 1998, as a rebranding for > code that preceded the term for ears or even decades (including GNU, > Linux, BSD, Apache, Perl, sendmail etc.) and which had simply been called > Free Software before. Just thinking about this a bit..... The Open Source examples, seem almost like 'terra' for the net... BSD, Aplache, Perl, sendmail.... Something like 'Open Source' becomes 'Open Space'... Overgrown from some feudal practice of power... Beyond Governance... Great Plains... 4.6 [Nettime-bold] Re: <nettime>The Fading Altruism of Open Sour Harald Hillgärtner nettime-bold@nettime.org Fri, 21 Dec 2001 19:49:16 +0100 Am Donnerstag, 20. Dezember 2001 17:15 schrieb Heiko Recktenwald: > > This is true, and the fact may be demonstrated by examining the two lists > > of licenses evaluated by the Open Source Initiative [1] and the Free > > Software Foundation [2] respectively. Of the dozens of software licenses > > that may be > > You take this blabla much to serious. "Open Source" for example isnt just > an idea, a good idea like BSD licences, GNU etc, but first of all it is a > label. Something for the "No logo" book. This labelism of the different > initiatives has nothing to do with the central concept. Maybe this is why > I dont like Linux. So much chaos and desktop cosmetics. I stay with > FreeBSD. And I like GNU. ... And I do like GNU/Linux, cause it's both Free Software, and I really like plurality (or "chaos" in other words). In addition I like "dektop cosmetics" and a commando line interface on the same time on the same machine, cause I can use both on specific tasks and I like the idea of "non-proprietarization of code and knowledge", which is the main difference between Open Source and Free Software and which is one of the most valid argument in this debate (thanks to Florian Cramer). And this idea of non-proprietarization is the lesson, which has to be learned by the proprietarization of Unix in the 80s. Harald. 5.0 [Nettime-bold] Re: <nettime> The Fading Altruism of Open Source Developmen Florian Cramer nettime-bold@nettime.org Wed, 12 Dec 2001 15:43:05 +0100 Am Wed, 12.Dec.2001 um 00:56:27 +0100 schrieb oliver frommel: > The Fading Altruism of Open Source Development by David Lancashire > First Monday, volume 6, number 12 (December 2001), > URL: http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue6_12/lancashire/index.html Thanks for providing the link! To quote from the article and attempt some answers: >> The most fundamental question of all: why does open source >> development occur in the first place? This question applies as well to, say, Nettime (where people freely give away their some of their intellectual work) and all other non-profit volunteer projects. The work of Free Software may just be more pervasive and hence visible to scholars than other volunteer projects because (a) it translates very immediately into everyday use value, (b) its products are infinitely reproducible (also true for Nettime, but not true for all non-Internet volunteer work). - And: Free Software may be the most sophisticated non-profit volunteer project in the way it ensures the free circulation of its products, through the copyleft. David Lancashire's article is an interesting read about the regional distribution of Free Software development, yet as I think problematic or even wrong in many of its core assumptions. But, after of all, I do not see the claim the title makes, "The Fading Altruism of Open Source Development" backed up or elaborated anywhere in the text. While the First Monday article recognizes the entanglement of Free Software development with academia to some degree, it fails, in my view, to interpret this entanglement in cultural and economical terms. Free Software development grew and continues to grow out of student projects at university computer science departments (MIT: GNU project and X11, UC Berkeley: BSD Unix, University of Helsinki: Linux, Universität Tübingen: KDE), and the Free Software copyleft was invented to preserve the traditional academic freedom of information for computer code. Other points: >> The combination of highly-complex and anti-proprietary projects offers >> the only quadrant in which the tension - between economic and cultural >> assumptions about underlying human behavior can meaningfully be >> compared. It is an unfortunate fact then, if a somewhat revealing one on >> its own, that there are so few successful projects which fall into this >> category. To me it rather seems an unfortunate, if a somewhat revealing fact what the author David Lancashire thinks are facts of Free Software: >> Linux, an operating system begun in 1991 in order to provide a >> free alternative to commercial UNIX systems, is the most prominent >> example. The second-most so is undoubtedly GNOME, a free graphical-user >> interface (GUI) for UNIX-compatible systems begun in 1996 to compete >> with the partly privately-owned K-Desktop Environment (KDE) suite for >> UNIX and the completely proprietary Microsoft Windows. - Linux is an operating system kernel started in 1991 which, by itself (i.e. without a compiler, linker, bootloader and core system libraries, init and login daemons and userspace operating system tools), is a non-functional piece of software. As a matter of fact, it was started not to provide a free alternative to proprietary Unices, but a POSIX-compliant (i.e. more functionally more complete) alternative to Andrew Tanenbaum's free Minix operating system. - Not Linux, but GNU was started (in 1984) in order to provide the free alternative to commercial (proprietary) Unix systems. It ended up creating fully functional free equivalents of all core Unix components(compiler, linker, system libraries, userspace operating system tools - the contents of /bin, /sbin and /lib on any "Linux distribution" is almost 100% GNU) except the kernel. It's easy to claim, as in the above quote, there is a lack of "highly-complex and anti-proprietary" Free Software if one doesn't seem to know GNU, the free BSD operating systems (FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD), the X Window System, Mozilla, the Debian GNU/Linux distribution - and wilfully excludes gcc, Perl, Python, PHP, PostgreSQL, Emacs, Apache, sendmail and other highly complex Free Software projects from one's consideration. What's more, Lancashire makes questionable assumptions about Gnome, KDE and Windows; - KDE is not "privately owned" in any way, but one of the most decentralized and non-corporate Free Software projects. Its code is released under the GNU General Public License (GPL); it relies on a library ("Qt") which is developed by a company, but equally available under two Free Software licenses including the GPL since a couple of time. (The fact that Qt was proprietary is history; and Qt never was a part of KDE itself.) - Quite on the contrary to the assumptions of the article, Gnome development is much more in corporate hands: The core developers are employed by Ximian and RedHat (with Ximian, the company of Gnome's founder and project leader Miguel de Icaza, being the major driving force). In addition, Gnome development is supervised by the "Gnome Foundation" whose function is to, official quote, "coordinate releases of GNOME and determine which projects are part of GNOME" and "act as an official voice for the GNOME project" <http://foundation.gnome.org>. Members of the Gnome Foundation include, next to free developers, Ximian, RedHat, Hewlett-Packard and Sun. (Sun also made Gnome the new desktop interface of its proprietary Unix "Solaris".) - The comparison of KDE and Gnome to Windows is mismatched. Both KDE and Gnome are only sets of (a) high-level libraries and component models and (b) basic graphical desktop user components (menus, window manager, file managers, configuration panels, utilities); they are not desktop operating systems on their own, but operate on top of "third party" graphical user interface libraries (Qt and GTK respectively) which in turn operate on top of a "third party" graphical display engine (= the X Window System) which in turn operates on top of "third party" core operating systems (GNU/Linux, *BSD, proprietary Unices etc.). Windows, on the other hand, has always been a unit of a graphical display engine (GDI), graphical user interfaces libraries (MFC), high-level desktop components (OLE/Com) and basic graphical desktop user components (Explorer, Start menu etc.) on top of a core operating system (DOS) and has become a fully self-contained operating system including kernel, OS userspace, graphical display engine at least since Windows NT 3.51. >> With a combined total of over 430 developers, no other two projects >> approach the "authority" of these cases as benchmark examples of >> their kind, This is wrong, and so I doubt the study has a good empirical base. The (truly non-corporate) Debian project <http://www.debian.org> alone has 908 regular developers. In the case of Gnome, the results concerning US-American and non-US-American involvement are likely to be distorted by the fact that it is largely an American project with US-American companies involved - while the (more or less competing) KDE project is largely a project of European developers. (This interesting cultural split has been noted several times on Slashdot.org, an American forum which, sincle a couple of months, shifted its own bias from Gnome to KDE). After all, the study's _economical_ analysis seems questionable to me becaiuse it does not - but should - differentiate between "private"/ "privately owned"/"commercial" on the one hand and "proprietary" one the other (as in the second-last quote). As many Free Software projects - like the RedHat GPL Edition, RedHat's/Cygnus' GNU C compiler, GNU ghostscript, Ximian Gnome, Ximian Evolution, Trolltech's Qt - demonstrate, "commercial" doesn't have to mean "proprietary". In fact, the GNU project involved commercial operations from the beginning on. Richard Stallman financed the Free Software Foundation (and kept himself alive) by expensively selling GNU software on streamer tapes. Interviewed in 1984, the BSD project leader and inventor of the "vi" editor Bill Joy said about GNU Emacs that it was "a nice editor too, but because it costs hundreds of dollars, there will always be people who won't buy it." <http://www.cs.pdx.edu/~kirkenda/joy84.html> Some other quotes: >> Mexico contributes three times as many developers to Gnome as Linux, >> and Finland (perhaps understandably considering its status as the >> homeland of Linus Torvalds) appears unwaveringly in the Linux camp. The high involvement of Mexicans in Gnome would probably have surprised the author as little as the high involvement of Finns in Linux if he knew that the Gnome project was founded in Mexico by a Mexican, Miguel de Icaza, who continues to be its chief developer. Perhaps another proof for the problematic empirics of the study: >> If this simplified model can explain the relative erosion of open >> source production in the United States, can it explain the rise of it >> Europe? Primarily, it should be clear that if the opportunity cost of >> working on open source projects is lower for European developers than >> their American counterparts, the potential benefits Europeans gain >> from working on them are much greater as well. In a global economy >> lacking perfect labor mobility and characterized by wage-inequality >> across countries, we expect individuals to produce free software if >> doing so can help them shift to a higher wage-level. This >> "fixed-cost" analysis implies (as Lerner and Tirole suggest in their >> paper) that developers may embrace open source work as a way to >> tap-into lucrative corporate networks abroad. This may explain why >> open source development is more popular in Canada than the United >> States, although the data from Europe is inconclusive on this >> question. This also helps to explain why the majority of open source >> developers are relatively young. Older, settled programmers have less >> need to establish a monetizable reputation than their younger, more >> mobile counterparts, given less time in which to amortize its >> immediate costs. My own casual insight into free software hacking rather suggests that (a) free software developers are younger because they are typically students or freshly graduated - and probably more idealistic than older people, (b) free software developers are disproportionally located in Europe because the public acceptance and deployment of free software is higher (in relative terms) in Europe than in the US, resulting in a condition where - many computer science departments make Free Software development part of their curriculum and encourage to write Free Software as C.S. diploma projects. (Linux, for example, was Linus Torvald's diploma project at the C.S. department of the University of Helsinki.) After all, C.S. departments and university computing centers had a pressing need for a free Unix-compatible operating system. (AT&T Unix used to be almost free for universities in the 1970s but was relicensed after the AT&T breakup.) When I first visited meeting of my local Linux User Group in 1996, they took place in the C.S. department of a local university whose department white board proposed several Linux kernel hacks as diploma projects. - Because of the higher deployment of Free Software in Europe, European C.S. graduates may have a higher chance to work in Free Software environments on in-house projects (databases and network infrastructures, embedded controllers etc.). Even if these projects are not for public release, they typically generate free code (or free documentation) on the side, because other free software had to be bugfixed/extended for the project purpose or simply because a certain tool had to be written to accomplish a certain task within a project. While Linus Torvalds and Miguel de Icaza used their reputation to go abroad and work in the U.S., proving that this indeed may be a motivation to write Free Software, this certainly fails as a general model and explanation. - Why, then, is it that Indian and Russian programmers hardly contribute to Free Software development at all? Many Free Software developers I know have left-wing political views though and see work on Free Software as unalienated labour for which they are willing to make economical sacrifices. - A motivation and lifestyle that I guess everyone who works in the arts, academia or media (and probably everyone on Nettime) knows quite well... Florian P.S.: While I have great sympathy for the conclusion that... >> the insights political economists can shed on these movements allow >> for a much more nuanced view of development than is made by advocates >> of post-scarcity gift cultures. ...and think it is necessary (a) to revise Raymond's enthusiastic distortion of the (quite nonideal) gift cultures described by Marcel Mauss (b) not to speak of "post-scarcity economics" by falsly drawing from non-scarce immaterial goods (=software and information which is scarce only in its dependence on material carriers/hardware) to scarce material goods (energy, food, clothing, housing, etc.), it still remains true that, since the 1980s, the software industry has made software artificially scarce by declaring it a material commodity. A questionable and, via the enforcement of "intellectual property" laws, increasingly totalitarian commodification to which Free Software provides an alternative. (- An alternative with the well-known downsides of economic self-exploitation of its producers, although they [still] are in an economically more comfortable position than those working in other fields of culture.) P.P.S.: The fact that the Debian GNU/Linux distribution, probably the largest high-quality collection of Free Software, has grown to six full CD-ROMs/4 GB of compiled binaries (from two CD-ROMs back in 1997) is my empirical evidence against any claim about "the fading altruism in Free Software development". -- http://userpage.fu-berlin.de/~cantsin/homepage/ http://www.complit.fu-berlin.de/institut/lehrpersonal/cramer.html GnuPG/PGP public key ID 3200C7BA 5.1 [Nettime-bold] Re: <nettime> The Fading Altruism of Open Source Developmen Craig Brozefsky nettime-bold@nettime.org 12 Dec 2001 10:42:10 -0600 oliver frommel <oliver@firstfloor.org> writes: > hello, > > i don't know if this has already passed the nettime mailing list but i > could not find anything in the archive .. it is a fairly interesting > article about the economic and cultural background of free software > development. it is long and has a lot of images so i only post the url .. > > The Fading Altruism of Open Source Development by David Lancashire > First Monday, volume 6, number 12 (December 2001), > URL: http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue6_12/lancashire/index.html I started reading this and then I got to the outline of their analysis was immediately turned off. It's like the guy looking for his car keys under the street lamp cause that is where it's brightest. -- Craig Brozefsky <craig@red-bean.com> http://www.red-bean.com/~craig Ask me about Common Lisp Enterprise Eggplants at Red Bean! 5.2 [Nettime-bold] Re: <nettime> The Fading Altruism of Open Source Developmen Felix Stalder nettime-bold@nettime.org Wed, 12 Dec 2001 12:39:49 -0500 I never understood why people think of Open Source in terms of _altruism_. Perhaps, it's due to some confusion related to the "saintly" image of Richard Stallman, but it's the completely wrong approach and shows a very limited understanding of economic relationships where things are more varied than than selling things vs giving them away. To make a long argument short, altruism is, if anything, the effect of Open Source but not its cause. For Open Source to work, people do not need to be altruistic, or at least not all of them. As far as I can see, many of the developers who contribute to Open Source do so in the context of their professional work, be it as members of academic institutions -- where publishing and visibility has nothing to do with altruism but is a necessity of survival -- or in the context of companies who use and extend Open Source software in the work they do for clients. But let's forget for a moment software and look at another great Open Source project: the law. Nobody would claim lawyers as a profession to be altruistic, even though there are certainly individuals with altruistic motives. Many of them are highly paid and some are very much motivated by money. Nevertheless, they all contribute to a great Open Source project. The law and the court proceedings (ie. the code) are public and if you want, you can use an argument made in one case by someone else in your own case. In fact, this is standard practice and crucial to the efficient working of the legal system. This is how the system learns and evolves and how it avoids to be clogged with an endless numbers of identical cases. If lawyers could copyright their arguments (i.e. restrict other lawyers from using them), the system would break down, particularly the Anglo-American system of common law. In some ways, creating the law is similar to creating software. The first copy (i.e. deciding the first case in a new area) tends to be very expensive, but subsequent copies (i.e. deciding further similar cases) are much cheaper. The problem -- and the reason why lawyers make a good living -- is that there are rarely identical cases, or, at the very least, it is very hard to tell if a case is identical to one that has already passed through system. What you pay a lawyer for is her knowlegde of the relevant cases and her work to take whatever necessary from them and then customize it for your own context and needs. Sometimes this "customization" is relatively trivial, sometime this includes a significant contribution to the evolving public knowledge base. To some degree, the same model applies to Open Source Software development. What you pay, say, IBM for when they install a new server with Linux on it, is the service they provide to you for customizing what is out there (Linux etc.) to your own ideosynractic needs. And rarely, your needs are exactly the same than other people's needs. Many people who contribute to Open Source Software work in contexts that produce software but don't sell it. Be it that they are academics/students or be it that they sell services. Taking from and contributing to free code is in both cases a strategy that makes sense for very "selfish" reasons, even though they also contribute to the free knowledge base. --------------------++----- Les faits sont faits. http://felix.openflows.org 5.3 [Nettime-bold] Re: <nettime> The Fading Altruism of Open Source Developmen oliver frommel nettime-bold@nettime.org Wed, 12 Dec 2001 22:38:52 +0100 (CET) On Wed, 12 Dec 2001, Florian Cramer wrote: > .. > It's easy to claim, as in the above quote, there is a lack of > "highly-complex and anti-proprietary" Free Software if one doesn't seem to > know GNU, the free BSD operating systems (FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD), the X > Window System, Mozilla, the Debian GNU/Linux distribution - and wilfully > excludes gcc, Perl, Python, PHP, PostgreSQL, Emacs, Apache, sendmail and > other highly complex Free Software projects from one's consideration. > this is true but there are a lot of "parallel projects" trying to make money from free software (through consulting mainly, in accordance with stallman's views, or customization of free software). e.g. activestate tries to make money from perl, python, mozilla, php .. (www.activestate.com) "Sendmail, Inc. develops commercial products and services that simplify the deployment of sendmail" (www.sendmail.org) postgresql offers commercial support http://www.ca.postgresql.org/users-lounge/commercial-support.html a lot of development on the gnu c (and others) compiler system was traditionally done by the cygnus corporation (now integrated into redhat) when you look at a lot of recent projects like e.g. JBOSS (www.jboss.org) that use "industry standards" like the j2ee (java2 enterprise edition) it is clearly not the fun that is the primary motivation for the free software programmers in this field. I do not criticize people making money through consulting etc. but it I think you need to take that into consideration as the author of the article does. I think you are right in stressing the difference between commercial (what? software? enterprises? ..) and proprietery software. But if you take into consideration that "free" software does create complex relationships I find it hard to accept a synthetic seperation between the software product "as such" and the dependencies it creates. Think of the creation of industry standards making users and developers somehow dependent on the original creator. complex software makes its users dependent in the developers. > > While Linus Torvalds and Miguel de Icaza used their reputation to go > abroad and work in the U.S., proving that this indeed may be a motivation > to write Free Software, this certainly fails as a general model and > explanation. - Why, then, is it that Indian and Russian programmers > hardly contribute to Free Software development at all? > There are some developers from Russia. E.g. Alexey Kuznetsov has done a lot of work on the networking code. This shows a weakness of Lancashire's empirical research: it neglects the quality of contributions to free software, even the quantity of contributions per developer. > Many Free Software developers I know have left-wing political views though > and see work on Free Software as unalienated labour for which they are > willing to make economical sacrifices. > many software developers I know have right-wing libertarian views, with a strong disregard for what any possible end user might want. usually a lot of free software developers don't even regard other human beings as equal to any degree (this is what Lancashire decribes in the paragraph about Neuromancer, Turkle etc.). You might recognize a certain misogynous attitude in hacker culture in general ("GUIs are for girls", "real men use command line", "real men use linux", you could go on like this for quite a while). The same goes for "gay operating systems" and so on. It would be interesting to analyze the composition of the "free software community" in terms of race for this matter (I remember irc sessions with about 100 people doing free software development with participants mainly from the US, among all one african american, having to fight permanent harassment). For me this shows that any explanations in terms of gift or even GPL culture are less plausible than Lancashire's analysis which still might have its own flaws. Oliver 5.4 [Nettime-bold] Re: <nettime> The Fading Altruism of Open Source Developmen scotartt nettime-bold@nettime.org Thu, 13 Dec 2001 13:15:13 +1100 On Wed, Dec 12, 2001 at 10:38:52PM +0100, oliver frommel wrote: > when you look at a lot of recent projects like e.g. JBOSS (www.jboss.org) > that use \"industry standards\" like the j2ee (java2 enterprise edition) it > is clearly not the fun that is the primary motivation for the free > software programmers in this field. Well, look at the Jakarta Tomcat servlet engine, which is *the* standard servlet engine, not just *a* standard servlet engine. Tomcat is the \"reference implementation\" of the Servlet specification of Sun Microsystems' J2EE standard. And IBM gave away a big chunk of it's IDE code to the Eclipse project; the idea is an open source development environment that is modular and can be extended with both proprietry _and_ open source solutions. Also part of IBM's Websphere use the Jakarta ANT product in it, as well as the fact that their webserver technology is based on Apache. IBM, and lots of other big IT corporates like Oracle, have embraced both Java (ultimately owned by their competitor, Sun Microsystems, although now opened to a 'community process'), and indeed, Linux and Open Source. The open source paradigm has been well embraced by many large IT corporations. Jakarta project products are found in widespread use throughout corporate development. regards scot. 5.5 [Nettime-bold] Re: <nettime> The Fading Altruism of Open Source Developmen Heiko Recktenwald nettime-bold@nettime.org Thu, 13 Dec 2001 04:10:28 +0100 (CET) Hi, On Wed, 12 Dec 2001, Felix Stalder wrote: > I never understood why people think of Open Source in terms of _altruism_. > But let's forget for a moment software and look at another great Open > Source project: the law. Nobody would claim lawyers as a profession to be > altruistic, even though there are certainly individuals with altruistic > motives. Many of them are highly paid and some are very much motivated by Isnt the legal system in some form "altruistic" per se ? But I wouldnt call it "Open Source". Casebooks are books. Ideas are free anyway. At least outside of the world of patents for gifs etc.. H. 5.6 [Nettime-bold] Re: <nettime> The Fading Altruism of Open Source Developmen Keith Hart nettime-bold@nettime.org Thu, 13 Dec 2001 13:51:18 -0500 This message is triggered by Felix Stalder's of the above header. Felix and I appeared together on a panel he organised from the wos2 conference in Berlin during October. It was entitled open_money, a subject I will return to below, as a way of introducing my own writing. But first I want to comment on his remarks about altruism and the law in relation to open source. I should say that I find us in broad agreement on the general issue of open source, the internet and democracy. The opposition selfish/altruistic is depressing because it speaks of a huge gap between the individual and society. This corresponds to our experience, where we are told on the one hand that each of us is a unique subjective personality, while society is a mass of remote objects governed by forces we neither understand nor can influence. The task of personal development and social organisation is rather to find way ways of integrating the two, the individual and the collective, self-in-the-world. And the most longlasting human arrangements do precisely that. We have to be self-reliant to a high degree and we have to learn to belong to others, to be connected at the same time. This is the human predicament and few entirely succeed. The issue therefore is not to be either selfish or altruistic -- each position is childish -- but to aim for what I think of as the human idea, to combine self-interest with recogniton that the interest of everyone else in society affects us too, thereby dissolving the contradiction between the individual and the collective. I would claim that this principle was independently invented twice, by Gautama and John Locke. But that would take us a bit far from what I want to say. I wish to take issue with Felix's argument that the law in contemporary western societies offers an unambiguous point of reference for assessing the value of open source software development. It is true that English common law is unusual in making public law the normative outcome of individual citizens exercising their rights, with a heavy reliance on judicial precedent over statutary law. It is also true that the body of case law is available to lawyers as a basis for their arguments. But I think it would be wrong to say that the law is therefore open in the sense that all citizens have free access to it. First, as Felix implies, the law in many cultures is dualistic in a way that English common law was intended not to be. In most European languages there are two words for law, not one (eg loi/droit), reflecting a sharp division between public and private law, between the state and the people. Second, for centuries the judges and the legal profession have operated with a jargon that is closed to the general public. Third, access to the law, never mind justice, has been highly stratified. I could go on. Michael Lewis's recent book on the astonishing achievements of kids using the internet (The Future Just Happened, 2001) includes the case of a 15 year old who became the most highly ranked legal adviser on an internet site heavily populated by professional lawyers.The medical profession likewise once offered little hope that people might win some measure of control over their own minds and bodies, a situation that th einternet may be changing. And surely one test of a civilisation is whether or not it helps its individual members to be self-reliant or autonomous. Ours does not. The law then is a bad example for arguing that open source software development can safely cross the border separating sharing without payment from commerce. The open source movement is split on the issue of exchange and money payment. Those who follow the Free Software Foundation appear consider that any hint of money and exchange, even of reciprocity, leads directly to unacceptable compromise with capitalism. Linux, on the other hand, is rapidly being integrated with big business. Feelings run high on both sides, but especially on the first, which I would call purist, if not puritan. At the same time, the controversy over Microsoft's monopoly and the attempts to break it have pushed the open source movement into the mainstream of political debate. It raises interesting questions about whether some software developers are at the cutting edge of a new democratic politics or perhaps are little different from lawyers and doctors, in that their arcane practices are beyond the grasp of the vast body of citizens. Does it matter if some of them do it without money payment? Perhaps a much bigger and related issue is whether the internet is fast losing the freedom of its early years. Here the case of writers like Lawrence Lessig (The Future of Ideas) is that private copyright, pushed by corproate capital and the legal profession, is breaking up the internet commons. The example of software development remains central to this case. It all seems to me an entirely healthy recasting of the political debate in terms that invite each of us to interrogate what we may have taken for granted. What is the commons and does it matter whether we lose free access to it? It means that the long argument about the social effects of markets and capitalism can be extended not just to software engineering, but to the street and parks, to language and literary traditions, indeed to the whole social infrastructure we live by. My interest is in exploring the possibility that money itself might become a commons to which all of us would have open access, open source money, if you like, a money that, instead of being supplied remotely by central agencies as a scarce commdity, might be something we could all make for ourselves. To this end, I have been working on community currencies for over a year now with Michael Linton and Ernie Yacub in British Columbia. We are writing a book called Common Wealth. The subtitle is less stable than the title. At present it is 'building community and economic democracy with open money'; but it might be 'open money as a commons' or something like that. I hope to share some of this writing in progress with the nettime list. But at this stage, I would point readers towards a website: www.openmoney.org. This is the second book on money I written recently. The first is Money in an Unequal World (Texere, 2001), first published as The Memory Bank (Profile, 2000). There is more about the book, including various downloadable items at www.thememorybank.co.uk. My concern there is with the conseqences of the communications revolution for the forms of money and exchange. i suggest that money and language are the two great vehicles of communication we have and that their development is converging. I also set out to disentangle the market from capitalism, in the belief that more humane and equal forms of exchange involving money are both possible and necessary. This is the broad basis for my underlying agreement with the position outlined by Felix in his message to the list. There is a lot more to be said, but this is my way of introducing myself to the conversation constituted by nettime. Keith Hart I never understood why people think of Open Source in terms of _altruism_. Perhaps, it's due to some confusion related to the "saintly" image of Richard Stallman, but it's the completely wrong approach and shows a very limited understanding of economic relationships where things are more varied than than selling things vs giving them away. To make a long argument short, altruism is, if anything, the effect of Open Source but not its cause. For Open Source to work, people do not need to be altruistic, or at least not all of them. As far as I can see, many of the developers who contribute to Open Source do so in the context of their professional work, be it as members of academic institutions -- where publishing and visibility has nothing to do with altruism but is a necessity of survival -- or in the context of companies who use and extend Open Source software in the work they do for clients. But let's forget for a moment software and look at another great Open Source project: the law. Nobody would claim lawyers as a profession to be altruistic, even though there are certainly individuals with altruistic motives. Many of them are highly paid and some are very much motivated by money. Nevertheless, they all contribute to a great Open Source project. The law and the court proceedings (ie. the code) are public and if you want, you can use an argument made in one case by someone else in your own case. In fact, this is standard practice and crucial to the efficient working of the legal system. This is how the system learns and evolves and how it avoids to be clogged with an endless numbers of identical cases. If lawyers could copyright their arguments (i.e. restrict other lawyers from using them), the system would break down, particularly the Anglo-American system of common law. In some ways, creating the law is similar to creating software. The first copy (i.e. deciding the first case in a new area) tends to be very expensive, but subsequent copies (i.e. deciding further similar cases) are much cheaper. The problem -- and the reason why lawyers make a good living -- is that there are rarely identical cases, or, at the very least, it is very hard to tell if a case is identical to one that has already passed through system. What you pay a lawyer for is her knowlegde of the relevant cases and her work to take whatever necessary from them and then customize it for your own context and needs. Sometimes this "customization" is relatively trivial, sometime this includes a significant contribution to the evolving public knowledge base. To some degree, the same model applies to Open Source Software development. What you pay, say, IBM for when they install a new server with Linux on it, is the service they provide to you for customizing what is out there (Linux etc.) to your own ideosynractic needs. And rarely, your needs are exactly the same than other people's needs. Many people who contribute to Open Source Software work in contexts that produce software but don't sell it. Be it that they are academics/students or be it that they sell services. Taking from and contributing to free code is in both cases a strategy that makes sense for very "selfish" reasons, even though they also contribute to the free knowledge base. 5.7 [Nettime-bold] RE: <nettime> The Fading Altruism of Open Source Developmen Kermit Snelson nettime-bold@nettime.org Fri, 14 Dec 2001 23:37:51 -0800 The open source paradigm should not be identified with altruism. This was Felix's main point, and I very much agree. I also agree that software developers, like lawyers, can make a good living by selling their time rather than licensing their product. This is hardly news, however. (And the example of US legal celebrities such as Alan Dershowitz and Melvin Belli shows that the path to true riches in the law lies not on billable hours, but on widely distributed and copyrighted product.) But then Felix goes on to call the law "a great Open Source project." Although it's clear to me that he intended this statement to serve only as a qualified analogy, I think it's politically important for the record to show that this is far from being the case in practice. The fact is that large amounts of the legal apparatus and of the law itself are copyrighted and commercially licensed. As Felix points out, the common law system requires that prior court decisions be published and indexed. This massive publishing task, however, is carried out not primarily by governments, but for profit by large commercial entities such as Thomson and Reed Elsevier. The actual practice of precedent-based law today depends on case, statute and authority finders, nearly all of which are the extremely expensive and copyrighted products of commercial publishing empires. Not only is the legal research apparatus licensed at great expense, but sometimes so are the statutes themselves. Building codes, fire codes and commercial codes provide many examples of laws that are written and copyrighted by private organizations and then adopted as public law by the legislatures. In the USA, this has resulted in counterintuitive (to say the least) situations in which state governments cannot hold copies of their own laws without paying large royalties to the private corporations that wrote them. Needless to say, US citizens in such cases are also obliged to pay these private organizations in order to learn the laws to which they are subject. In the UK the Crown asserts copyright on all laws, although it currently waives its rights with respect to legislation. But with respect to other public assets such as Ordnance Survey mapping, it vigorously exercises the Crown copyright with the express purpose of commercial exploitation. The assertion of Crown copyright on legislation makes it entirely legal for the Crown to do the same with the public statutes should it so choose. If the law holds a lesson for the open source software development paradigm, it is that it is becoming extremely difficult even for governments to finance the increasingly technical and massive task of creating and administering the law without resorting to copyright and other restrictive measures. Universities are in a similar situation with respect to research. Any political response to the threats posed by these developments to democracy, free inquiry and free software must be based upon an objective and accurate understanding of the economic and technical realities upon which this political situation is based. Kermit Snelson 5.8 [Nettime-bold] Re: <nettime> The Fading Altruism of Open Source Developmen jaromil nettime-bold@nettime.org Sun, 16 Dec 2001 19:26:43 +0100 On Wed, Dec 12, 2001 at 12:39:49AM -0500, Felix Stalder wrote: > I never understood why people think of Open Source in terms of > _altruism_. Perhaps, it's due to some confusion related to the > "saintly" image of Richard Stallman, but it's the completely wrong > approach and shows a very limited understanding of economic > relationships where things are more varied than than selling things > vs giving them away. On Fri, Dec 14, 2001 at 11:37:51PM -0800, Kermit Snelson wrote: > The open source paradigm should not be identified with altruism. > This was Felix's main point, and I very much agree. I also agree > that software developers, like lawyers, can make a good living by > selling their time rather than licensing their product. This is > hardly news, however. (And the example of US legal celebrities such > as Alan Dershowitz and Melvin Belli shows that the path to true > riches in the law lies not on billable hours, but on widely > distributed and copyrighted product.) By reading David Lancashire's article and by following this thread i still don't understand if you're voluntarily blurring differences between "free software" and "open source" or you are simply ignorant: in the latter case please refer to http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-software-for-freedom.html and http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/drdobbs-letter.html ; to be sure you have it clear, i quote here a brief statement from the second document: The GNU GPL embodies the firm philosophy of the free software movement; it doesn't come from the open source movement. I am not a supporter of the open source movement, and never have been. (Richard Stallman) Once cleared such a crucial difference for the discussion i'd like to add my point of view about free software: _it is_ altruism, it has a philosophical background which is a solid spark in a free software developer's mind; furthermore motivation is given as well by the possibility to learn from and reuse code of other experienced programmers willing to share knowledge and much is done also by a development framework which finally _works_ as it should (and it's free[1]! anybody here knows about the costs a programmer had to sustain to distribute bytecode produced with a reliable compiler, about 10 years ago? anyone ever read about the industrial revolution and the role property of production systems played into it?); it's about the pleasure to research into a field one is sincerely interested, about the craftmanship spirit of self production which is dramatically disappearing IRL substituted by mass-production omologation. Free software is about solidarity, quoting Richard Stallman in one of his first theorizations on free software: Why I Must Write GNU I consider that the golden rule requires that if I like a program I must share it with other people who like it. Software sellers want to divide the users and conquer them, making each user agree not to share with others. I refuse to break solidarity with other users in this way. I cannot in good conscience sign a nondisclosure agreement or a software license agreement. For years I worked within the Artificial Intelligence Lab to resist such tendencies and other inhospitalities, but eventually they had gone too far: I could not remain in an institution where such things are done for me against my will. So that I can continue to use computers without dishonor, I have decided to put together a sufficient body of free software so that I will be able to get along without any software that is not free. I have resigned from the AI lab to deny MIT any legal excuse to prevent me from giving GNU away. [...] "The GNU Manifesto", Richard Stallman Copyright (C) 1985, 1993 Free Software Foundation, Inc. Permission is granted to anyone to make or distribute verbatim copies of this document. and of course it's about reputation which i would'nt define "ego-boost": i see such a phenomenon much more present in other contexts which right here i see engaging the katartical exercise of blurring a different philosophy to make it easier to reach. enfin, to mark distances, i must state "je ne parle pas logique, je parle generosite" : this answer Andre Breton gave in an analog situation makes me once again comfortable in underlying the differences i see in our languages, and approaches. [1] Free software is a matter of freedom, not price; the word "free" has to be intended in this way here. Furthermore, referring to the wrong assumption by Keith Hart in this thread: > The open source movement is split on the issue of exchange and money > payment. Those who follow the Free Software Foundation appear > consider that any hint of money and exchange, even of reciprocity, > leads directly to unacceptable compromise with capitalism. refer to http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.html to have a clear point about the free-speech / free-beer issue. -- jaromil ][ http://dyne.org ][ GnuPG _key__id_ EDEE F1B9 DC92 76C0 6D46 D77A 58B0 82D6 (5B6E 6D97) 5.9 [Nettime-bold] RE: <nettime> The Fading Altruism of Open Source Developmen Felix Stalder nettime-bold@nettime.org Sun, 16 Dec 2001 14:56:56 -0500 Kermit Snelson wrote: >But then Felix goes on to call the law "a great Open Source project." >Although it's clear to me that he intended this statement to serve only as a >qualified analogy, I think it's politically important for the record to show >that this is far from being the case in practice. I entirely agree with your qualifications. Indeed, I intended the law analogy as a very partial one. Besides the limitations that you point out, there are obviously further aspects that make the legal system very different from Open Source. Perhaps the most important is that in many cases only members of a select group, e.g. barred lawyers, are allowed to practice the law. There is a clear, and vigorously maintained, difference between professionals and lay people. The same difference exists in closed source software. In the open source community, however, the boundaries between developers and users are sliding and primarily dependent on dynamic knowledge and commitment, rather than on static certification. This, I think, is a really important factor in the vitality of the movement. The reason why I brought up the shaky analogy to law is to highlight that there are other areas of our society that are based on a public knowledge base (with the qualifications you added) and that this does not preclude, for the better or worse, their inclusion into the main stream and nor their economic viability. Indeed, one could argue that many of the most sensitive aspects of a democracy are based on publicly accessible knowledge (at least in theory) and that it might be time to include the emerging information infrastructure into this category. What a democracy needs is transparency, accountability and participation, and open source can contribute to this on a technical level. Keith Hart wrote: >The opposition selfish/altruistic is depressing because it speaks of a huge >gap between the individual and society. This corresponds to our experience, >where we are told on the one hand that each of us is a unique subjective >personality, while society is a mass of remote objects governed by forces >we neither understand nor can influence. The task of personal development >and social organisation is rather to find way ways of integrating the two, >the individual and the collective, self-in-the-world. When I talked about 'selfish' versus 'altruistic' motivations of open source contributors, I took them as opposites which are usually regarded as mutually exclusive. What I meant was that the way the process is currently organized there is no real difference between the two, or, to be more precise, the difference is on the level of the personal input, rather than in the systemic output. In other words, no matter why you produce open source code, the result is always open source code, which someone else can you to whatever purpose she sees fit. Because the code is open, it is impossible to program a hidden agenda into open source code, in the way MS software is rumored to have hidden backdoors and secret keys. This, to some degree, keeps the software neutral and prevents personal motivations to be translated into code that would conflict with the motivations of other members of the community. There is a long-standing discussion over whether Open Source is left wing or a right wing movement which also crept up in this thread. Florian Cramer wrote: >Many Free Software developers I know have left-wing political views though >and see work on Free Software as unalienated labour for which they are >willing to make economical sacrifices. To which oliver frommel replied: > many software developers I know have right-wing libertarian views. And I'm sure there are many open source developers who are totally apolitical.... What I'm trying to understand is this: Does the shift from an impersonal commodity to a personal service relationship (on the economic level) combined with an abundant pool of resources and a task so complex that it is managed most effectively in a collaborative way, does this to some degree mitigate otherwise competing interests between the 'self' and the 'community'? It is certainly not a given, but perhaps the open source experience shows a way into this direction. Felix --------------------++----- Les faits sont faits. http://felix.openflows.org 5.10 [Nettime-bold] Re: <nettime> The Fading Altruism of Open Source Developmen Florian Cramer nettime-bold@nettime.org Tue, 18 Dec 2001 21:18:09 +0100 Am Mon, 17.Dec.2001 um 02:59:32 -0500 schrieb jaromil: > By reading David Lancashire's article and by following this thread i > still don't understand if you're voluntarily blurring differences > between "free software" and "open source" or you are simply ignorant: Yes, it is indeed disappointed that a term that was (quite consciously) coined as a depoliticized new economy marketing buzzword for Free Software has so widely been adopted in "critical" net cultures. The "Open Source FAQ" of the Open Source Initiave says: The Open Source Initiative is a marketing program for free software. It's a pitch for "free software" on solid pragmatic grounds rather than ideological tub-thumping. <http://www.opensource.org/advocacy/faq.html> > Once cleared such a crucial difference for the discussion i'd like to > add my point of view about free software: _it is_ altruism, it has a In fact, I argued along similar lines in my initial response because I had jaromil - a great hacker, btw. - in my mind, regardless the fact that much if not all Free Software development is coupled with commercial software enterprise or side-projects. The real amount of altruism in Free Software development may be debated, but any programmer who's mostly or even only in it for the money would be stupid to program anything but proprietary software (which, no doubt, is more profitable). Florian -- http://userpage.fu-berlin.de/~cantsin/homepage/ http://www.complit.fu-berlin.de/institut/lehrpersonal/cramer.html GnuPG/PGP public key ID 3200C7BA 5.11 [Nettime-bold] Re: <nettime> The Fading Altruism of Open Source Developmen Felix Stalder nettime-bold@nettime.org Tue, 18 Dec 2001 21:14:11 -0500 >> By reading David Lancashire's article and by following this thread i >> still don't understand if you're voluntarily blurring differences >> between "free software" and "open source" or you are simply ignorant: > >Yes, it is indeed disappointed that a term that was (quite consciously) >coined as a depoliticized new economy marketing buzzword for Free Software >has so widely been adopted in "critical" net cultures. I quite deliberately (con)fuse the two, though I'm sure I'm also ignorant. I think separating now FSF/GNU and Open Source/Linux is like trying to separate the ingredients of a meal after it has been cooked. It's pretty pointless. It's clear that Linux and other Open Source projects heavily built on FSF work, however, I think it's also clear that without Linux (and other projects) the great FSF would have remained a rather closed, albeit pure, medium-sized club. One of the most interesting aspects in this entire movement is the degree to which it has been able to absorb very different, even contradictory ideas. Any attempt to purify this heterogeneous beast (to use a semi-Latourian term) is pedantic at best, destructive at worst. So far, I think the politics are still in the code, not in the label, and I cannot see much difference between Open Source/Linux GPL code and FSP GPL code. But then again, I'm not a hacker. > but any programmer who's mostly or even only >in it for the money would be stupid to program anything but proprietary >software (which, no doubt, is more profitable). Which is not necessarily true. I guess John Gilmore is still quite wealthy (good for the EFF). However, this is totally besides the point. Whether someone makes money or not is not really the question, the question is the quality of the output and its impact on others. The rest, from my point of view, is a life-style question. Felix --------------------++----- Les faits sont faits. http://felix.openflows.org 6.0 [Nettime-bold] Free Software and the lack of cool artists and philosophers Florian Cramer nettime-bold@nettime.org Thu, 6 Dec 2001 13:14:03 +0100 >From Martin Schulze's writeup of the 8th Linux Kongress: [Note: The Linux Kongress which this year took place in Enschede/Netherlands is the traditional, hardcore-technical meeting of Linux system developers. - Martin "Joey" Schulze is an important developer of Debian GNU/Linux and guru in #LinuxGER (IRCNet) and #Debian (LISC). -FC] > Also, interesting discussions about Free Software versus proprietery > Software came up ending in the question "Does Free Software actually > use its power to come up with impressingly new ideas and use the > freedom to implement and try them?"(*) An amazing (or depressing, for > what it's worth) number of Free Software Projects target at > reimplementing software that is already known in the commercial and > proprietary market. > > Since Free Software isn't bound to marketing droids and company bosses > dictating the goals and features of a particular software, it should > be perfectly suited to implement new ideas and come up with drastical > changes. However, looking at many Free Software projects this doesn't > seem to be the case. New questions came ub as: Why are companies > required to come up with new ideas so often? Why are special design > centers needed for a new GUI to appear? Maybe the Free Software > Community lacks a number of cool artists and philosophers? [...] > (*) Some new ideas that were invented through Free Software include > BIND (internet nameserver, without it, the internet wouldn't be able > to exist), c-news and INN (Usenet news servers, electronic bulletin > boards etc.), themes (themable widget libraries, think of Gnome and > KDE), Enlightenment (even though some people may miss some > functionality, but it's look is definitively new), X11 (the ability to > export displays over the network), xiafs (who of you does remember the > filesystem Frank Xia designed?), HTML (of course, crediting Tim > Berners-Lee), Emacs (ever saw a lisp interpreter that can actually > edit files? Lacks a decent editor, but hey...), Languages like Perl, > Python and Ruby. [Full text at <http://www.infodrom.org/Debian/events/LinuxKongress2001/report.html>] Florian -- http://userpage.fu-berlin.de/~cantsin/homepage/ http://www.complit.fu-berlin.de/institut/lehrpersonal/cramer.html GnuPG/PGP public key ID 3200C7BA 7.0 <nettime> gentrification of hacking biella nettime-l@kein.org Sat, 15 Aug 2015 12:16:23 +0200 Hi, I want to chime in but can only do so briefly as I am at CCC camp and not online much. I found the essay provocative and it is undeniable that these processes are under way but two things come to mind: this cycle has long existed and in many quarters of the hacker community from the security industry to hardware (the Homebrew club went from an informal association of hackers building association to a capitalist gold mine). These processes are deeply cyclical and on going and I don't really expect them to go away given how central computing is to capitalism. What was ommitted was the rather expanisive politicization of hacking we have witnessed in the last five years thanks to the likes of Wikileaks and Anonymous (or as Julian Assange put it " The political education of apolitical technical people is extraordinary.") This is not to say we should not worry about cooptation/gentrification/recuperation. But it is as important to understand what has helped secure this flowering of political activisity today so that we can protect it in the future. I wrote a paper, Weapons of the Geek about the political turn in hacking. It is under review but am happy to share for those who want to see an early copy. I am also pasting a section of the introduction below. Biella Even as they attain to a social primacy alongside the global communications technologies they have helped steward, entrenched stereotypes have precluded serious studies of the contemporary politics of hacking. Peering past the caricatures, we can see that hackers have long used their skills for protest and overt political transformation (Jordan and Taylor 2004). Hacking itself has long exhibited a powerful, albeit latent, political sub-text (Soderberg 2012; Wark 2004).But in the past five years, activist-motivated hacking has significantly enlarged its scope and continues to demonstrate nuanced and diverse ideological commitments. Many of these commitments cannot be reduced to "libertarianism," that ideology universalized by many observers as the crux of hacker politics. For one, civil disobedience has surged in a varietyof formats and styles, often in relation to leaks and exfiltration. We see lone leakers, like Chelsea Manning, and also collectivist and leftist leaking endeavors, perhaps best exemplified by Xnet in Spain. Other political engagements, similarly irreducible to libertarian values alone, center around collective engagements at the level of software: hackers have recently coded up protocols (like BitTorrent) andtechnical platforms (like The Pirate Bay) to enable peer-to-peer file sharing and anti-copyright piracy (Beyer 2014; McKelvey, forthcoming); sincethe 1980s, free software hackers have embedded their collectively produced programs with legal stipulationsthat have powerfully tilted the politics of intellectual property law in favor of access (Kelty 2008; Coleman 2013); AcrossEurope, Latin America,and the United States, anti-capitalist hackers run small but well-functioning collectives that offerprivacy-enhancing technical support and services for leftist crusaders;Anonymous, a worldwide protest ensemble specializing in digital direct dissent, has established itself asone of the most populist manifestations of contemporary geek politics -- requiring no technical skills to contribute (Coleman 2014); and finally,on the more liberal front, civic and open government hackers throughout North and South Americahave sought to improve government transparency by creating open standards andapplications thatfacilitate data access and sharing (Gregg and DiSalvo 2013; Schrock, forthcoming). Julian Assange, one of the most prominent activist hackers, has recently highlighted the rather dramatic turn to activism and political engagement among geeky technologists. "The political education of apolitical technical people is extraordinary" (2014: 116), he noted during an interview. There are no obvious, much less given, explanations as to why a group once primarily defined by obscure tinkering and technical exploration now engages so frequently in popular media advocacy, traditional policy and lawmaking, and activism -- including forms of civil disobedience so risky that some in the community are currently in prison or living in exile.Working technologists are economically rewarded in*s*tep withdoctors,lawyers,and academics -- and yet these professions produce far fewer politically-active practitioners. Why and how have hackers who enjoy a significant degree of social and economic privilege managed to preserve pockets of autonomy? What historical, cultural, and sociological conditions have facilitated their passage into the political arena, especially in such large numbers? This does not mean hackers should be blindly celebrated or denigrated, (as has often been the case in the popular literature on hackers),but it does beg for analysis andexplanation. Ideally, thebeginnings of an answerwould deeply charthacker activity along two distinct vectors: thehistoricalandthe socio-cultural. However,an article of this lengthaffords only a single thread of analysis. While my article will gesture at historical events and circumstances, this article will foremost provide an introductory inventorya basic outline of an explanation -- of thesociological and cultural attributes most likely responsiblefor the unprecedented and multitudinous intensification ofhacker politics duringthe last five years. To begin, let's consider the idea of the "hacker" itself. Dear Brett, your essay is brilliant and obvious at the same time. I did enjoy reading it, but still feels like scratching the surface as it does not dig into other historical examples of cultural gentrification. <...> 7.1 Re: <nettime> gentrification of hacking Brett Scott nettime-l@kein.org Sun, 16 Aug 2015 20:58:32 +0200 Thanks Biella, You're much more of an expert on this than I am, so it's good to see this. My main objective was to stir up debate a bit to keep people on their toes, rather than necessarily believing in the 'death of the hacker'. A lot of my writing has an ambiguous relationship to factual reality, or I often deliberately mix together descriptive accounts of things with normative accounts of things I'd like to see, and sometimes they blend into one... well, perhaps this is a way of saying that I am less an academic than I am a shit-stirrer, and sometimes I will make things cruder than they actually are in order to push a political agenda. I want the politicization to continue, and pointing out the forces against politicization is one way I do that. Hope this makes sense Looking forward to seeing Weapons of the Geek when it comes out! Hope CCC camp is fun Cheers! Brett {AT} suitpossum On 15/08/2015 12:16, biella wrote: Hi, I want to chime in but can only do so briefly as I am at CCC camp and not online much. I found the essay provocative and it is undeniable that these processes are under way but two things come to mind: this cycle has long existed and in many quarters of the hacker community from the security industry to hardware (the Homebrew club went from an informal association of hackers building association to a capitalist gold mine). These processes are deeply cyclical and on going and I don't really expect them to go away given how central computing is to capitalism. <...> 7.2 Re: <nettime> gentrification of hacking John Young nettime-l@kein.org Sun, 16 Aug 2015 15:40:24 -0400 Gentrification of hacking is by those studying, reporting, historicizing, philosophizing, theorizing, aestheticing, curating (spit) it. As with gentrification in general, it reifies the reification, a deft academic opportunism, one might be so vulgar as to say the very product of nettime and every growing crowd of cohorts. Amazon-ian in intent. Gentrifiers dare not hack, but do inveigle their way into hacker havens, publish about hackers, testify against hackers, consult with governments about hackers, speechify hackerdom at security fora, advise film and media about hackers, produce hacker-derived aesthetic objects, even advise crude and obnoxious hackers about advancing careers as hacker, ex-hacker, hacker informer, undercover cop, covert agent academic with hacker cred, and if all goes well sign on to distinguished institutions, cybersecurity corporations, and duplicitous NGOs like In-tel-Q where PhDs are taxidermied for showboating at DefCons and CCCs, then on to global appearances via speaker bureaus and paid conferences, Gentrifiers are allegeric to jail themselves but do exploit the few hackers who get nabbed through the assistance provided to law enforcement by gentrifiers, not least by celebrifying hackers so that officials are induced to go after them for budget enhancement. So goes gentrification in all its vile piggish manifestations. Behold the origin of the term to cloak, deceive, defuse dissent, advance the interests of property holders. White hat hacker cartels are making a killling policing gentrification cyber real estate. 7.3 Re: <nettime> gentrification of hacking Gabriella \"Biella\" Coleman nettime-l@kein.org Mon, 24 Aug 2015 09:03:59 -0700 Hi, Sorry for the delay. Post camp life turned out to be far more complicated than expected but I managed to cobble together a bit of a short reply below.. But given how these discussions tend to metabolize rather rapidly, I realize I might be too late. On 15-08-17 06:00 AM, [1]nettime-l-request {AT} mail.kein.org wrote: Message: 1 Date: Sun, 16 Aug 2015 20:58:32 +0200 From: Brett Scott [2]<b.r.scott.06 {AT} cantab.net> To: [3]nettime-l {AT} kein.org Subject: Re: <nettime> gentrification of hacking Message-ID: [4]<mailman.6.1439805601.55365.nettime-l {AT} mail.kein.org> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Thanks Biella, You're much more of an expert on this than I am, so it's good to see this. My main objective was to stir up debate a bit to keep people on their toes, rather than necessarily believing in the 'death of the hacker'. A lot of my writing has an ambiguous relationship to factual reality, or I often deliberately mix together descriptive accounts of things with normative accounts of things I'd like to see, and sometimes they blend into one... well, perhaps this is a way of saying that I am less an academic than I am a shit-stirrer, and sometimes I will make things cruder than they actually are in order to push a political agenda. I want the politicization to continue, and pointing out the forces against politicization is one way I do that. Hope this makes sense It does, to a point. We clearly reside in the same camp: we want to encourage the processes of radicalization among the technorati. And your piece is provocative enough (and written well enough) so that people read it in large numbers and it ricocheted far and wide across many sites. You did stir the pot of conversation, which is a really good thing. Still as already stated, my worry, which is less academic and more pragmatic, concerns precisely how to most productively push a political agenda. The window of activist activity we are witnessing is both remarkable (and remarkably robust) but completely fragile--and again precisely due to the economic dynamics you lay out. Your piece may have identified a problem (one again that is more cyclical, and on going than new) but it also missed an opportunity to nudge those who harbor a political/activist sensibility toward the site of struggle. These are exciting times precisely because there is rich and active terrain of struggle with large numbers of hackers and geeks willing to enter fully into the political arena. A number of folks tweeting your piece made it seem like there was once possibilities and now they have have slipped through our fingers. That is a dangerous (and empirically wrong message) to send to the public at large. There is no need to belabor the point but I guess I raise it a final time for the sake of future writings. I just think you could have been more effective--as a shit-stirring provocateur--had you loudly and proudly pointed to those who have decided not to accept the path of gentrification for the sake of a better world so that others with a activist sensibility could join they rabble rousing party ;) Take care, Biella Biella 7.4 Re: <nettime> gentrification of hacking John Hopkins nettime-l@kein.org Mon, 24 Aug 2015 10:57:58 -0700 Biella -- some musings on your note: 7.5 Re: <nettime> gentrification of hacking Florian Cramer nettime-l@kein.org Wed, 26 Aug 2015 15:42:03 +0200 When Stephen Levy wrote "Hackers" in 1984, his description of hacker culture and his write-up of the hacker ethic were, to a considerable part, based on Richard Stallman. Already in that year, Levy called Stallman the "last of the true hackers". Stallman created the GNU Project in the same year out of frustration of what had become - or how little had remained - of the original M.I.T. hacker culture. Even the GNU Project itself involves "gentrification" in the sense that development of some of its subprojects (such as the GNU C Compiler, the GNU C Library and the GNOME desktop) has become largely corporate. GNU intentionally never imposed prohibitions on commercial and particular political/military uses of software licensed under its terms. This position continues to be criticized by other hackers, for example by Felix von Leitner from Chaos Computer Club. All this suggests that the "gentrification of hacking" is not a new phenomenon, but that it has been a part of hacker culture since its early days. -F 7.6 Re: <nettime> gentrification of hacking Erich M. nettime-l@kein.org Thu, 27 Aug 2015 02:11:17 +0200 On 2015-08-26 15:42, Florian Cramer wrote: > When Stephen Levy wrote "Hackers" in 1984, his description of hacker > culture and his write-up of the hacker ethic were, to a considerable > part, based on Richard Stallman. Right. And these hacker ethics are derived from the "ham spirit" of the early 1920ies. That was right after the first ever machine centric war "Gentrifiction?". Ladies and gents of nettime-list are you for real? cccamp2015 was like an amateur radio fieldday, but futuristic and steampunk as well. Can you imagine a five days outdoor event of 4.800 people in the midst of nowhere without any blue lights or uniforms ever visible? No fights none stone drunk, nothing. But 40 GBit local, 10 GBit uplink. 8 GSM stations, own SIMs, 2.700 fones on the DECT wireless network, all interconnected. Not to forget the military field 4 KM telephone system and the ham UHF repeater station. The latter technologies were really in use, when the nets were run down and +2000 people had to be evacuated temporarily because all these high tents, antenna masts were not grounded adequatly any more. 5 days of 37 C and a sandy ground, surrounded by water. An evil high power capacitor eye in the landscape facing a another pole in the troposphere potentially VERY evil.. Here is a report what happened... http://fm4.orf.at/stories/1761897/ This is all not about gentrification which is a ridiculously useless because purely ideologic term btw. cccamps have always been the breeding ground for projects presented at congress thereafter. You could not distinguish between hackers, hams or makers. Rather young families, even singles or pairs in their 50ies or 60ies. Wait what? gentrification? What about adding some field research to your free flow of hypotheses? 73 de Erich M. OE3EMB Post/scrypt: Jaromil, where the fuq are you when you are needed in a discussion? LOL <...> -- https://moechel.com/kontakt PGP KEY 0x2440DE65 fingerprint A564 1457 71C3 E907 6D78 429E 76F3 C66E 2440 DE65 --... ...-- -.. . . .-. .. -.-. .... --- . ...-- . -- -... 7.7 Re: <nettime> gentrification of hacking Antonio nettime-l@kein.org Thu, 27 Aug 2015 03:04:55 +0200 I am sure that many of your already read these articles or they know them by heart Nonetheless I feel like refreshing your memory: http://peerproduction.net/issues/issue-3-free-software-epistemics/peer-reviewed-papers/free-software-trajectories-from-organized-publics-to-formal-social-enterprises/ http://peerproduction.net/issues/issue-3-free-software-epistemics/debate/there-is-no-free-software/ Also, since "gentrification" is the key issue in here, I would like to quote this passage from Blake in his review of Richard Smith (2003) work which I think could fit the ongoing discussion: "In actuality, networks may contain ubiquitous actants occupying fluid positions, who like Deleuze and Guattari's (1987) 'journeymen' and 'monsters' operate in relation to mechanisms of control but also retain lines of escape of their own. This can be illustrated by Neil Smith's (1992) analysis of the position of artists in the gentrification process. In the Lower East Side artists can be seen to have a meditating influence in gentrification, since low rents and government subsidy may attract them to an areas, raising its cultural image enough to attract gentrification. Nevertheless they have a ubiquitous role in this process, since rising prices may finally push many artists out of the neighbourhoods and some may therefore support activities from original residents resisting gentrification. At the same time however, artists may benefit from new markets created by the gentrifiers, leading to the presence of oppositional art in mainstream galleries. In this sense artists can be seen to occupy a fluid position in the networks linking gentrifiers with the established community. Thus they may be seen as an example of the non-conforming identities described by Star (1991: 39), in that they operate "between the categories, yet in relationship to them"." a. 8.0 Re: <nettime> [Fwd: Re: [ox-en] Felix Stalder: Six Limitations to the Current Open Source Development Methodology] Florian Cramer nettime-l@bbs.thing.net Tue, 2 Sep 2003 17:06:03 +0200 Am Dienstag, 26. August 2003 um 17:07:02 Uhr (+0200) schrieb Felix Stalder: > These limitations refer to the kind of problems that can be addressed > through the current form of social organization developed in the Open > Source Movement. The way Open Source Projects are organized reflects > the specifics of problem -- developing software -- and thus they > cannot serve as a model to address problem with very different > characteristics. > > This does not mean that other problems, for example, the development > of drugs, cannot be organized in an open way, but this 'open way' will > have to look very different from the way Open Source Software projects > are organized because the problem of creating drugs is very different > from the problem of creating software. In other words, there is an > intimate relationship between the characteristics of the problem and > the social organization of its solution. A good example are "Open Content" licenses. They have departed significantly from Free Software/Open Source licenses wherever they allow to restrict modification and commercial distribution of a work. Therefore, the two major "Open Content" licenses, the GNU Free Documentation License (used by, among others, the Wikipedia) and the Open Publication License, are non-free or non-Open Source. As a consequence, the Debian project recently considered moving software documentation released under the GNU GDL into its non-free section. - The same is true, btw., for the 12 licenses "Creative Commons" <http://www.creativecommons.org> offers of which only 4 qualify as "Free" or "Open Source" according to the Debian Free Software Guidelines and the Open Source Definition. If "Open Content" needs other legal regulations than Free Software, then obviously because of the different social issues of writing, for example, books as opposed to writing software. (Which doesn't mean that these fields couldn't converge very soon - for example through the need for authors to write complex XML markup, use revision control and content management systems etc., so that the traditional distinction will get more and more blurred.) Nevertheless, this is a good opportunity to question the venerable copyright statement of Nettime: "distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission". In order to turn Nettime into a truly public and free resource, I suggest to change this line into "distributed via <nettime>; unless stated otherwise by the author, permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.1" -F -- http://userpage.fu-berlin.de/~cantsin/homepage/ http://www.complit.fu-berlin.de/institut/lehrpersonal/cramer.html GnuPG/PGP public key ID 3200C7BA, finger cantsin {AT} mail.zedat.fu-berlin.de 9.0 <nettime> Free Software as Collaborative Tex Florian Cramer nettime-l@bbs.thing.net Tue, 19 Sep 2000 11:39:31 +0200 (This is the manuscript of a lecture I held on the panel "Minor Media Operations" at the Interface 5 conference in Hamburg. I hope it's of some interest to Nettime subscribers. The text is also available in PDF and html format from my homepage <http://userpage.fu-berlin.de/~cantsin> -FC) Free Software as Collaborative Text Florian Cramer <cantsin {AT} zedat.fu-berlin.de> September 15, 2000 [1] What is Free Software? Why discuss Free Software in the context of net arts and net cultures? Since about two years, Free Software--or "Open Source"--has drawn increasing attention from artistic net cultures. The Wizards of OS conference, first held in Berlin in 1999, was the most prolific event to bridge the gap between the arts, humanities and social sciences on the one hand and Free Software culture on the other. The politics of copyleft and free distribution of code and knowledge soon turned out to be a common ground of discourse. In this paper, I will take a different aspect into consideration by reading Free Software as a net culture and its code as a multi-layered, collaborative text. Seen as a literary practice, Free Software development is an avant-garde of writing in digital networks, and even more: Since Free Software is at the heart of the technical infrastructure of the Internet, it has--to a large extent--written its own digital network. Definition of Free Software In this paper, "Free Software" does not refer to "Freeware", "Shareware" or other proprietary software given away at no cost--like Microsoft Internet Explorer, QuickTime and Real Player--, but is understood in accordance with the definitions of Free Software Foundation http://www.fsf.org as software which is "free as free speech, not as free beer". Among the best-known examples of Free Software are the Linux kernel, the GNU tools and the Apache web server. Since 1998, the term "Free Software" competes with "Open Source", a term launched by a group around the writer and programmer Eric S. Raymond. According to this group, "Open Source" is only a different name for the same thing to gain more mainstream acceptance in the world of computing.[2] The Open Source Definition [Opeb] therefore draws upon the older Free Software Guidelines [Deb] of Debian, a non-commercial GNU/Linux distribution made by volunteers.[3] The guidelines can be summarized as follows: 1. Free Software may be freely copied. 2. Not only the executable binary code, but also the program source code are freely available. 3. The source code may be modified and used for other programs by anyone. 4. There are no restrictions on the use of Free Software. Even if Free Software is used for commercial purposes, no license fees have to be paid. 5. There are no restrictions on the distribution of Free Software. Free Software may be sold for money even without paying the programmers. Since the same criteria apply to "Open Source", the two concepts indeed do not differ in technical terms. Yet each of both terms has its ambiguities: While "Free Software" tends to get confused with Freeware and Shareware,[4] "Open Source" is easy to be mixed up with "open standards"--like the HTML format and the http protocol--and with software like Sun's Java whose source code is publicly available, but only under a restrictive license. It is particularly important to differentiate "Open Source" and "Free Software" from open standards. While open standards are unified technical specifications set up by committees like the Internet Engineering Taskforce (IETF) and the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), "Open Source" or "Free Software" developers code whatever they like for their own fun, and they are free to split their projects and develop the code into separate directions if a consensus can no longer be reached.[5] Since misconceptions of "Open Source" are so common, I will stick with the less popular, but somewhat clearer term "Free Software". Free Software History It is not accidental that history of Free Software runs parallel to the history of the Internet. The Internet is built on Unix networking technology. Unix used to be free for academic institutions in the 1970s, and it has been either the base or model of the common Free Software operating systems BSD and GNU/Linux. Any ordinary E-Mail message still reveals the affinity of the Internet and Unix technology: E-Mail itself is nothing but the Unix mail command. An E-Mail address of the form xy {AT} z.com is made up of what's historically a user name on a multiuser Unix system and, following the " {AT} ", the system's host name. This host name is resolved via the free Unix software bind according to the Internet domain name system (DNS); DNS itself is nothing but a networked extension of the Unix system file /etc/hosts. Since the Internet has marginalized or even replaced proprietary computer networks like IBM's EARN/Bitnet, Compuserve, the German Btx and the French Minitel, Unix networking technology is standard on all computing platforms. In the 1970, Unix particularly attracted student hacker communities at the MIT and at the University of California at Berkeley. The concepts of open, decentralized computer networks and free Unix-like operating systems originated in the computer science labs of these institutions. By the early 1990s, the "hacker" software written there had evolved into 1. the BSD family of operating systems with the free versions FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD. All of them use a codebase that was originally developed in Berkeley under the project leadership of Bill Joy. 2. the GNU/Linux operating system. All major Linux-based operating system distributions--RedHat Linux, SuSE Linux, Turbo Linux, Debian GNU/Linux, Mandrake Linux, Corel Linux OS and Caldera OpenLinux, to name only a few--build on the GNU software written since 1984 by the Free Software Foundation (FSF) and on the Linux kernel written since 1991 under the project leadership of Linus Torvalds.[6] The FSF was founded and is still being led by former MIT hacker Richard M. Stallman. Open technology has been a key factor for the acceptance of computers and networking: The open architecture of the IBM Personal Computer made computers cheap and popular since the 1980s, and with the open architecture of the Internet, networking became popular in the early 1990s. Lately, Free Software has made high-end Unix server computing available to anyone willing to learn the technical details. Whether Free Software can become as popular on mainstream desktop computers and eventually de-commoditize all computer software, remains to be seen, but is not the question I want to investigate here. Free Software as a Net Culture In the middle of the 1990s, "net culture" became the keyword for artistic, art-critical and political discourse in the Internet. The term was closely identified with mailing lists like Nettime http://www.nettime.org and Rhizome http://www.rhizome.org, conferences like the one where I present this paper and print publications like the Nettime anthology [BMBB^+99]. "Net culture" used to be pronounced as a singular noun in these forums and media referring only to the discourse they created. Free Software is an outstanding example that there is not one, but many net cultures. It predates artistic net cultures in the Internet by roughly twenty years. The Free Software copyleft can be seen as the quintessential reflection of this long experience. Invented to preserve the traditional academic-artistic freedom of speech and citation in the digital realm, the copyleft has radically rewritten it nevertheless. The concept that code, i.e. text, may not only be freely copied, but even modified ("patched"), willfully recycled and commercially redistributed by anyone without the author's permit is foreign to the post-medieval Western arts and sciences. In print culture, such practices are considered plagiarism and theft. Even for the digital net arts, the copyleft remains an unresolved challenge. Many, if not most net artworks depend on proprietary authoring and display software,[7] and the distribution terms of their code are rarely clarified.[8] Yet Free Software has as subtly as significantly influenced the digitally networked arts. Without free E-mail server software like Majordomo http://www.greatcircle.com/majordomo/ and Sendmail http://www.sendmail.org--and the overall possibility to set up inexpensive servers using the GNU/Linux and BSD operating systems on stock PC hardware--, the artistic net cultures of Nettime et.al. hardly could have operated non-commercially and with free participation.[9] Friedrich Kittler's observation that artistic tools conceptually shape what is made with them [Kit85] also applies to the net arts. The fact that Majordomo and Sendmail became major tools of artistic net activity is an important--but of course not the sole--explanation why contemporary Net.art tends towards conceptual, discursive and text-heavy work instead of the immersive "virtual reality" environments many critics had expected them to deliver. The latter would have required expensive proprietary software for design and display, closed high-speed networks and, as a result, dependence on highly funded institutional infrastructures, limited community participation and top-down instead of bottom-up organization of this particular net culture. Free Software as Writing The relevance of Free Software for other net cultures is not limited to the tools it has created and the infrastructures it has made possible, simply because those tools themselves are the very object of Free Software culture: they are text, results of complex textual processing. Moreover, this text is being produced with tools which themselves are free code. While the phenomenon that text is being built with tools which are source text themselves applies to the proprietary software as well, there is an important difference: Free Software source text is not withdrawn from the public. It cannot be abandoned by company management and does not disappear when development has ceased. All Free Software builds up to a public repository of text-coded, free-to-use knowledge. It accumulates to an archive. Instead of being written from scratch, new Free Software can be built from whatsoever is in that archive. Free Software therefore is highly intertextual. Free Software development is the earliest and still most successful practice of collaborative writing in computer networks. With its system of textual production and politics of code, Free Software is by far the more advanced net literature than what is commonly understood as net poetry and net fiction.[10] Free Software may be seen simultaneously as * a freely accessible, ever-growing body of code--a text archive; * recursive (i.e. self-applied) text processing, since available text is used both as a source and as a building tool to create new code; * text processing even through the medium of text, because Free Software development infrastructures mostly depend on mailing lists and command-based version control systems. * a "hacker" culture which advocates freedom of information and codes its politics into the legal texts of the copyleft. The coded copyleft might be the clearest interstice between Free Software as a net culture and Free Software as net text. Both these aspects already come into play when Free Software is being written. Free Software development is typically achieved by self-organized volunteer projects whose members communicate and collaborate via the Internet. The development work consists of: 1. Writing program source text This involves evaluting of available Free Software source code for possible inclusion and adaption. It also involves picking--and compiling--the coding tools which themselves are Free Software source text. To accomodate its own needs, Free Software has developed the arguably most sophisticated writing tools for the distributed authoring of text. Particularly outstanding is the Concurrent Versioning System (CVS) [Ced99] which allows authors to take portions of text--regardless whether it is written in programming language or in natural language--over the Internet, work on them at home, and synchronize the changes with the revisions of other collaborators any time. CVS-based writing might be the technically most radical departure from the typewriter-and-mail paradigm in text editing to date. 2. Writing documentation text Documentation is both internal and external to the program source text when the latter contains annotations and separate reference documentation is being written. Free manuals remain a political issue within Free Software development. A number of companies base their business model on giving away the software under free licenses and charging for documentation and support.[11] In the ideal case however, a second textual recursion occurs within in Free Software which is common in all modern knowledge systems since Diderot's and d'Alembert's Encyclopédie:[12] The text teaches the reader all steps which were necessary for its creation so that all the information it contains may be re-applied to itself. 3. Communication over mailing lists, bugtracking systems and IRC Free Software development teams almost exclusively constitute themselves and communicate over the Internet, in mailing lists and on IRC servers. Interpersonal communication therefore is a third layer of text which regulates the design of both program and documentation source text. It operates as a cybernetic feedback loop for the development process. 4. Writing legal text Free Software is legally defined. It is software under certain licenses, i.e. legal documents. The most common types of copyleft include the GNU General Public License http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html, the BSD License and the Perl Artistic License. Whether program source text is free solely depends on whether it is copylefted. Legal text therefore is the fourth layer of text regulating the entire flow of text generated in Free Software projects. Free Software is thus a highly sophisticated system of recursive text generation for a public pool of knowledge. It is text code created from text code with text-coded tools and textual communication over networks. The types of texts processed in Free Software are extremely diverse: They include executable binaries,[13] text written in programming languages, text written in natural languages for documentation, text written in natural languages for communicating and steering development, and legal texts defining the fair-play rules of the recursive textual processing. Objections Both the Free Software engineering and the net artistic camps are traditionally skeptical about attempts to read Free Software in terms of the net arts. The objections were particularly voiced when the Linux kernel was awarded the Golden Nica in the "net" category of Ars Electronica 1999. At the Wizards of OS conference in the same year, the net artist Alexej Shulgin argued that Free Software is "functional" while Net.art is "non-functional", self-sufficient code.[14] I do not find this point viable from an analytical perspective, since the division between "functional" and "non-functional" is purely arbitrary and subjective. I/O/D's Web Stalker [I/O97], an experimental Web browser and well-known Net.art work, is arguably more "functional" than the teddy bear desktop emblem xteddy which is contained in all major GNU/Linux distributions. Moreover, the dinstiction between "functional" Free Software and "non-functional" Net.art falls back into late-romanticist notions of the absolute artwork versus lower craftsmanship. It also neglects that with its multiple self-applications of text, the development and use of Free Software is to a large extent its own purpose. No other operating system is as open and seductive to be used as an end to itself as GNU/Linux. Just as arbitrary as the distinction between "functional" and "non-functional" software is that between program source code and poetry. To date, all attempts to formally define poetry and poetic language have failed. The decision whether a text is poetry will always be up to the reader. The notion of "program code" versus "poetry" was first put into question by the French poet and mathematician François le Lionnais, who co-founded the Oulipo group with Raymond Queneau. In 1973, le Lionnais released a volume of poetry written in the programming language Algol. The practice has been revived in the 1990s by people who write poems in the Perl scripting language. Conclusion Read as a net literature and a net culture, Free Software is a highly sophisticated system of self-applied text and social interactions. No other net culture has invented its computer code as thoroughly, and no other net culture has acquired a similar awareness of the culture and politics of the digital text. Much Net.art, net literature and critical discourse about them has focused on the aesthetics and politics of desktop user interfaces. In its focus on code, Free Software shows that net cultures are about more than just what is between people and the network. To date, it remains a rare example of electronic literature which does not confuse the Internet with web browsers. (Acknowledgement: This paper was written using the Free Software programs LyX, LaTeX, bibtex, bibtools, pdflatex, latex2html, lynx, XEmacs and GNU Ghostscript on an office and a home PC running Debian GNU/Linux with reiserfs, XFree86 and larswm.) References [BMBB^+99] Josephine Bosma, Pauline van Mourik Broekman, Ted Byfield, Matthew Fuller, Geert Lovink, Diana McCarthy, Pit Schultz, Felix Stalder, McKenzie Wark, and Faith Wilding, editors. Readme! Filtered by Nettime. Autonomedia, Brooklyn, 1999. [Bos98] Josephine Bosma. Is It a Commercial? Nooo... Is It Spam? ... Nooo - It's Net Art. Mute, 10:73-74, 1998. [Ced99] Per Cederqvist. Version Management with CVS. Signum Support AB, Link oping, 1992-1999. http://www.lorai.fr/~molli/cvs-index.html. [Cra00] Florian Cramer. Warum es zuwenig interessante Netzdichtung gibt: Neun Thesen, 2000. http://userpage.fu-berlin.de/~cantsin/aufsaetze/netzlit eratur/karlsruher_thesen.pdf. [Deb] Debian Project. The Debian Free Software Guidelines. http://www.debian.org/social_contract.html [Hof99] Jeanette Hofmann. Der Erfolg offener Standards und seine Nebenwirkungen. Telepolis, 7 1999. http://www.heise.de/tp/deutsch/special/wos/6453/1.html. [I/O97] I/O/D. I/O/D 4: The Web Stalker, 1997. http://bak.spc.org/iod/. [Kit85] Friedrich Kittler. Aufschreibesysteme 1800 1900. Fink, München, 1985. [Opea] The Open Source Initiative. Frequently asked questions about open source. http://www.opensource.org/faq.html. [Opeb] The Open Source Initiative. Open Source Definition. http://www.opensource.org/osd.html. _________________________________________________________ Footnotes: 1 This paper was presented at the conference Interface 5 on the panel Minor Media Operations, Hamburg, Warburg-Haus, September 15, 2000 2 To quote from Raymond's Frequently Asked Questions about Open Source: "The Open Source Initiative is a marketing program for free software. It's a pitch for free software on solid pragmatic grounds rather than ideological tub-thumping. The winning substance has not changed, the losing attitude and symbolism have." [Opea] 3 Both the Debian Free Software Guidelines and the Open Source Definition were originally drafted by Bruce Perens, a Free Software developer and editor of the website technocrat.net http://www.technocrat.net. 4 I.e. binary-only software which can be downloaded freely and used without licenses fees (Freeware) or by paying comparatively small licenses fees (Shareware). 5 A prominent example is the XEmacs http://www.xemacs.orgtext editor which "forked" its codebase from GNU Emacs http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/emacs.htm. The same would be impossible in open standards development. The social dynamics and institutional control of open standards development is excellently described in Jeanette Hofmanns (German) essay Der Erfolg offener Standards und seine Nebenwirkungen [Hof99]. 6 There is an ongoing debate in Free Software culture whether operating systems based on the Linux kernel should be called "Linux" or rather "GNU/Linux". In order to be functional at all, a "Linux" setup relies upon the GNU C Compiler (gcc) to translate all program sourcecode into machine-executable binary software, the GNU C Library (glibc) as the interface between the Linux kernel and userspace applications, and the GNU tools for the basic user commands. Although it is possible to replace at least the GNU tools and the glibc with non-GNU workalikes, all common "Linux" distributions use the Linux + GNU software setup. I will therefore stick with the name "GNU/Linux" where I refer not only to the kernel, but to the whole operating system. 7 Such as Macromedia's Shockwave and Flash in "Net.art", Opcode's MAX in electronic music and Eastgate's Storyspace in hypertext fictions. 8 The artist group 0100101110101101.ORG http://www.0100101110101101.org put this issue up front when it mirrored and partially modified well-known Net.art web sites on its own web site. 9 Early artistic computer networks like the Thing BBS http://www.thing.net charged their subscribers (at least in Berlin) before they migrated into the Internet. 10 How net literature--"hyperfiction" and "new media poetry"--relates to poetic practices rooted in programmer's cultures is discussed in more detail in my (German) paper [Cra00]. 11 Among those companies are O'Reilly publishers, Sendmail Inc., VA Linux, Scriptics, Helix Code and Eazel. All of them are involved in the development or documentation of critical components of GNU/Linux operating systems. 12 I thank Wau Holland for pointing this out to me in a prepatory meeting for the first Wizards of OS conference. 13 Which can be read as "text" if text is linguistically and semiotically defined as a finite number of discrete signs chosen from a finite set of signs. In computing, "text" is rather colloquially understood as code from natural-language alphabets as opposed to binary code. Being a philologist, I refer to the prior concept of "text". 14 According to [Bos98], the label "Net.art" was coined in 1996 by the net artist Vuk Cosic. It has been associated with a particular generation of net artists since (involving, among others, Cosic himself, Heath Bunting, Olia Lialina, Alexej Shulgin, jodi and I/O/D). c/o Freie Universität Berlin, Seminar für Allgemeine und Vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft, Hüttenweg 9, 14195 Berlin -- Florian Cramer, PGP public key ID 6440BA05 <http://userpage.fu-berlin.de/~cantsin/> 9.1 Re: <nettime> Free Software as Collaborative Tex Ronda Hauben nettime-l@bbs.thing.net Wed, 20 Sep 2000 12:56:05 -0400 (EDT) Florian Cramer <paragram {AT} gmx.net> wrote: > Free Software History Good to see an effort to look at the history of the Internet and the connection with Free Software. > It is not accidental that history of Free Software runs > parallel to the history of the Internet. The Internet is built > on Unix networking technology. Unix used to be free for > academic institutions in the 1970s, and it has been either the Actually Unix wasn't free in its earliest days, when John Lion in Australia and Robert Fabry wrote and asked for the sources from AT&T. It was available at a "nominal fee". It was a token payment, I think $110 Australian ($150 US). That was in the 1974 period. I don't know what the situation when the Australians or the folks sending their tapes or Berkleley began sending out the BDS tapes. (There is some discussion of all this in chapter 9 of Netizens. http://www.columbia.edu/~hauben/netbook) > base or model of the common Free Software operating systems > BSD and GNU/Linux. > Any ordinary E-Mail message still reveals the affinity of the > Internet and Unix technology: E-Mail itself is nothing but the > Unix mail command. An E-Mail address of the form xy {AT} z.com is > made up of what's historically a user name on a multiuser Unix > system and, following the " {AT} ", the system's host name. This > host name is resolved via the free Unix software bind > according to the Internet domain name system (DNS); DNS itself > is nothing but a networked extension of the Unix system file > /etc/hosts. Since the Internet has marginalized or even > replaced proprietary computer networks like IBM's EARN/Bitnet, > Compuserve, the German Btx and the French Minitel, Unix > networking technology is standard on all computing platforms. Actually the Unix networking character was the bang symbol ! and an address might look something like utzoo!utcsrgv!peterr That was the path for the address on uucp. The agreement to use " {AT} " which was the Internet meeting came at a meeting in I thought the 1980's where people like Mark Horton and Jon Postel and others were there to figure out a common addressing mechanism. So the " {AT} " doesn't come historically from the UNIX side of all this Bernard Lang has an interesting article in the Feb 2000 issue of La Recherche which describes in a bit of a different way the connection between early Unix and the ARPANET, and he refers > In the 1970, Unix particularly attracted student hacker > communities at the MIT and at the University of California at > Berkeley. The concepts of open, decentralized computer > networks and free Unix-like operating systems originated in > the computer science labs of these institutions. By > the early 1990s, the "hacker" software written there had > evolved into Actually at MIT it was the AI labs and they used the pdp 10 machines -- one was the ITS (Incompatible Time Sharing). I didn't think these were UNIX machines at this period. Actually UNIX was only created at Bell Labs in 1969-1970's and announced in 1974. Chapter 9 in Netizens gives this background. (...) Also it is interesting to see your references to "open architecture". I recently wrote something for an encyclopedia on computers and computer history about open architecture and found very little has been written about it even though it is indeed the basis for the Internet's architecture. > Open technology has been a key factor for the acceptance of > computers and networking: The open architecture of the IBM > Personal Computer made computers cheap and popular since the > 1980s, and with the open architecture of the Internet, > networking became popular in the early 1990s. I thoguht the bbs culture also supported the spread of a free software in the 1980s. Perhaps also looking at the ARPANET tradition of the free spread of software would be of interest. And on early Usenet there were newsgroups dedicated to spreading software. Usenet was an early means of not only spreading Unix software but also dicussion about how to deal with the bugs. Chapter 10 in Netizens describes this evolution. That's all I have time to comment on now. Good to see the effort to take on such topics, and it is important to put them in their historical context as that gives an idea of what is being built on and hence helps provide a sense of direction forward and of the progress being made. Cheers Ronda ronda {AT} panix.com http://www.ais.org/~ronda/ http://www.columbia.edu/~hauben/netbook/ 9.2 Re: <nettime> Free Software as Collaborative Tex Florian Cramer nettime-l@bbs.thing.net Thu, 21 Sep 2000 13:24:25 +0200 Am Wed, 20.Sep.2000 um 12:56:05 -0400 schrieb Ronda Hauben: > Good to see an effort to look at the history of the Internet and > the connection with Free Software. And thank you very much for your valuable corrections! I will apply your bugfixes ASAP. > I thoguht the bbs culture also supported the spread of a free software > in the 1980s. The BBS culture I know from here (Germany) was rather commercial and inclined towards Warez. Most BBSs were run against subscription fees and frequently charged additional fees for their download areas. The software available on them were DOS, Amiga or Atari Shareware/Freeware binaries. Still in the early 1990s (i.e. between 1990 and 1993), the GNU, BSD &c. software was available in the academic computer networks (EARN/Bitnet w/ Internet gateway at the university where I first went online). Florian 10.0 <nettime> the ?Cathedral? and the ?Bazaar?? Holford-Lovell, Donna nettime-l@kein.org Sun, 1 Feb 2009 13:46:55 -0000 Dear All It would be great to get you opinion on the following: I am looking at open source and implementing this metaphor to a curatorial practice. What effect would this have on exhibiting artists? Would the audience benefit? Also anyone with an interest in Eric S. Raymond?s free software development model. I would like to know the following: 1. What are your personal views about the ?Cathedral? and the ?Bazaar?? 2. If you subscribe to one of these models how much of it applies to the whole of your life? 3. Do you jump from one to another to suit your needs? 4. Besides in a software engineering world, can the Cathedral and the Bazaar be seen any where else? or could it be applied to something else? I believe we need to get art out of its Cathedral ? could this metaphor work? Many thanks Donna -- The University of Abertay Dundee is a charity registered in Scotland, No:SC016040 10.1 Re: <nettime> the ?Cathedral? and the ?Bazaar?? Florian Cramer nettime-l@kein.org Sat, 7 Feb 2009 17:17:42 +0100 Hello Donna, > I am looking at open source and implementing this metaphor to a curatorial > practice. What effect would this have on exhibiting artists? Would the > audience benefit? There already is a rich tradition of applying Open Source/free software principles to art; "curatorship" seems a bit problematic as a term (which it is not only in this context), self-organization may be more appropriate. Examples can be found in the hack meetings which, particularly in Italy, were hybrids of activist and artistic events, and many related Internet art projects. But actually, the tradition is older than even the terms "Open Source" and "free software". Since Ray Johnson's New York Correspondance School in the 1960s, the Mail Art network had its own codified system of decentralized, international, open participation art exhibitions, events and publications, with the festivals and non-juried exhibitions of older avant-garde movements forming yet another historical pretext. > Also anyone with an interest in Eric S. Raymond?s free software development > model. He pitched it "Open Source" as a more business-friendly term, against the older, more activist term "free software". > I would like to know the following: > > 1. What are your personal views about the ?Cathedral? and the ?Bazaar?? Again, a lot has already been written about this (for example, in "First Monday" shortly after the Raymond's text appeared). Retrospectively, I think there have been many confusions and urban myths about this essay. Like Roland Barthes' "The Death of Author", it is a text that, polemically speaking, nobody seems to have read yet everybody has an opinion about. Among those urban myths are: - that Raymond pitches an Open Source "bazaar" model against a proprietary Microsoft-ish "cathedral" model of software development. But in fact, it is about the decentralized development of Linux, the operating system kernel supervised by Linus Torvalds [and not what is commonly referred to as the whole Linux operating system], versus the classical small, closed committee style of development that had been characteristic for GNU software, the free BSDs and the X Window System. On top of that, the text is not even literally about Open Source because the term did not yet exist when it was first published. - Looking back at the above point more than ten years later, it is probably fair to say that a clear-cut division of "bazaar"- and "cathedral"-style development methods no longer exists in Free Software development. The development of the Linux kernel has become more hierarchical, with several layers of developer hierarchies that a patch needs to go through in order to be accepted into the main line kernel, while on the other hand the development culture of GNU and BSD software has adapted itself better towards the Internet than in the 1990s. (The now-standard use of networked version control systems like Subversion and git is a clear empirical indicator.) - While not using the term "Open Source" in its initial version, the essay fully preempts the later Open Source-vs.-Free Software controversy by discussing open, distributed development processes as technically superior to closed processes. [There are striking similarities to Bertalanffy's earlier General Systems Theory with its claim that in nature and society, only open systems survive while closed ones die of entropy, and of course to Popper's theory of the open society as the counter-model to societies founded on philosophical idealism.] I remember an article from the German IT journal iX that, ten years after the manifesto, checked those claims and soundly disputed their black-and-white rhetoric. For example, Open Source and distributed development are clearly not a 100% cure against software bugs and security leaks (as opposed to Raymond's statement that "given enough eyes, all bugs are shallow). There have been terrible bugs and security nightmares - such as the recent Debian OpenSSL bug - even in high profile FLOSS software projects. And the dialectics is also true: If there are not enough eyes, bugs can be annoying, for example in FLOSS multimedia authoring software from Cinelerra to PD that thrive on very small and often amateur programmer communities (as opposed to the OS kernels, file systems, network stacks, database servers etc.). It is probably fair to put Raymond's essay into the context of other optimistic late-1990s Internet theories of "crowd wisdom", "smart mobs" etc., that promote a similar cybernetic vision of a self-organizing critical mass that is the magic solution to all problems. Linux and, more recently, Wikipedia show that these theories are not completely off and that networked collaboration can amount to critical mass. But none of these projects are without their own issues (such as conservatism: Linux reimplemented Unix instead of the arguably more advanced and interesting Plan9 or Lisp Machine kernel architectures because Unix kernel architecture is the textbook knowledge of every computer science student; Wikipedia nowadays insists, in its angst-ridden compliance to culturally conservative Wikipedia-bashing, on print publication references for everything that is claimed in a Wikipedia article), and "open collaboration" is not a magic bullet. Mail Art may again serve as a good example, because it was so obsessed with egalitarianism that participation implied to never reject other people's project contributions although the phenomenon of "junk mail" was common and deplored even in the 1970s and 80s. It should be noted, in case you're not familiar yet with Raymond's ultra right-wing libertarian political background, that he chose metaphors of the "bazaar" versus the "cathedral" quite on purpose - referring to a free market model versus regulated production. > I believe we need to get art out of its Cathedral ? It is certainly true that art, inasmuch we speak of the contemporary (visual) art system, is still feudalist in its structure. It is the only of the modern arts whose economy is firmly based on the notion of one material fetish object, with reproduction (unlike in books, music records, films, software) being merely a second-rate, plebeian illustration of the "original". Its sponsors are the modern successors to the old feudal authorities; back then, the church and the courts, nowadays rich people as the new aristocrats and, through its grants and subsidies, the state as the authority that has replaced the church. -F -- blog: http://en.pleintekst.nl homepage: http://cramer.pleintekst.nl:70 gopher://cramer.pleintekst.nl 10.2 Re: <nettime> the ?Cathedral? and the ?Bazaar?? John Young nettime-l@kein.org Sun, 08 Feb 2009 11:33:05 -0500 It should be noted that "open source" has been appropriated by the spy-media-education industry as an asymmetrical method for taking from open sources but not giving back, instead classifying putting within password-gated campuses the open source material in order to obscure that the filchers have a pecuniary interest in freely cultivated goodies. So say the SMEs and their beneficiary contractors in their openly proclaimed suck-you fuck-you policy to advertise for adjunct-academic and edu-start-ups to participate in (get bribe money for) in national security (spit) national patriomny (spit) endeavors, hand out a few contracts to the willingly witting desperately-seeking down but not out bazaarists, and shut-out the disfavored with cathredral-like secrecy (tenure) orders, learning from the churches and banks to profess unction for believers and tithers while gathering wealth for the belly laughers of TARP for the top. Bill Gates himself did that, preached that, as did Steve Jobs. It is the golden egg luring millions to the openly promise medals of freedom from merciless religion of higher pecking order education then reap the profits when the bloodsucked students are dunned for ursurous loan-repayments into the skyhigh-paid admins' baskets. Consider Wikipedia and a host of like openers savaging of contributed labor, abetted by herds of martinets enforcing just what can be reputably (spit) published. Net non-profits (spit) are no different than the others in bait and switch via oh so weary rules of engagement for the unruly. Extreme unctuousity is bedevilment with strapped-on angel wings. Now, for free my gang offers surefire immortality and depthless wisdom, PayPal us $100 for the top secret URL at golden-egg. domain. Don't believe anything else, motley fool.