- MarissaBrand
- gordman
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- Ralph Waldren
[US] Open Source Society
Submitted by Willy Smith on 20 October, 2003 - 03:07.
Original Kuro5hin article submission (English)
More rejection comments (English)
My notes: I'm posting the original article because the Kuro5hin site doesn't come up very often in Costa Rica, so I imagine it may be a problem for some of you also. I didn't duplicate the embedded links in the articles, so if you are interested please visit the Kuro5hin pages.
There were a few positive comments, but the more common ones were negative, and included:
"The Soviet Union collapsed", and
"you marxist folk love to hold on to those crazy ideas. now that communism has utterly failed, you try and replace it with new buzzwords. But its still the same tenuous grasp on reality..."; or,
"Dear Idiot, we have already tried this. it was called 'communism'. go on groups.google.com and search the archives for what soviet HVAC was like.", and finally:
'..."post-capitalist" really means "post-Christian". You geeks just don't want to work, you want to lie around living off of government handouts writing "free" software rather than compete in the market like good, honest, Americans do. Open source is just another work for socialism, and good Christians will resist your 5th column the same way we resist teaching evilution to our children and your attempts to tax us to feed and cloth charlatans and layabouts! "I knew my god was bigger than his. I knew that my god was a real god and his was an idol." Lt. Gen. William G. Boykin' New ideas are always threatening. I think it's amusing that some people try to label FLOSS as being "communist" in order to try to discredit it. But, the vehemence of the attacks on the ideas presented should tell you how threatened people are by them.
My own attitude at present is one of curiosity and excitement; we are at the beginning of something new in our history, which we as mere mortals cannot hope to comprehend or make too many predictions about. Certainly it's fun to make guesses and predictions about the future of FLOSS and its further applications, but I know that it's most likely that I can't see well from my viewpoint of being an ant crawling through the carpet.
Willy Smith reporting from Costa Rica
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GPL Society: Applying free/open-source software model to goods production in general (Diaries)
By atreyu42
Mon Aug 25th, 2003 at 11:22:39 PM EST
Project Oekonux discuss "whether the principles of the development of Free Software may be the foundation of a new economy which may be the base for a new society", called "GPL society". Some questions arise from this:
How can the free/open-source software model be applied to non-digital things?
How can physical things be easily replicated like free/open-source software?
How can this affect the economy?
Is this anti-capitalist?
How is a GPL society?
How can the free/open-source software model be applied to non-digital things?
Some examples:
Opencola soft drink is perhaps the most known non-digital open-source project. The instructions for making Opencola are freely available and modifiable.
Opencores.org develops hardware in the same spirit of free/open-source software movement. They created the OHGPL (OpenIPCore Hardware General Public License).
Simputer is a small low cost handheld computer, intended to bring computing power to the poor people of India and other impoverished countries, ensuring that illiteracy is no longer a barrier.
OSCar (Open Source Car Project).
Adbusters have an example of open-source industrial design.
Google Directory - Computers > Hardware > Open Source.
More examples at Oekonux website [in German] (Authomatic translation to English).
How can physical things be easily replicated like free/open-source software?
With fabbers:
A fabber (short for "digital fabricator") is a "factory in a box" that makes things automatically from digital data. Fabbers generate three-dimensional, solid objects you can hold in your hands, submit to testing, or assemble into working mechanisms. They are used by manufacturers around the world for low-volume production, prototyping, and mold mastering.
Fabbers come in three varieties:
Subtractive: They remove material from a solid block.
Additive: They build up the object one particle at a time.
Formative: They press on opposing sides of a mass to contort it into the desired shape.
With versatile machines like fabbers, transporting and storing solid objects becomes as easy as transporting and storing digital data. Marshall Burns, president of Ennex Corporation, which develops fabbers, predicts that within 15 years fabbers will be inexpensive enough to have at home.
Fabbers will be able to make fabbers. And some day we will have copylefted/open-patented fabbers.
How can this affect the economy?
Free markets, if they are really free (not regulated by governments or Wold Trade Organization's abusive agreements/laws on patents), will allow the expansion of this copylefted and decentralized method of production, where consumers will be able to be also producers. Oekonux maintain that this could lead to a economy with no scarcity in goods.
Is this anti-capitalist?
On one hand it doesn't oppose to capitalism defined as:
theories [...] meant to justify the private ownership of capital, to explain the operation of such markets, and to guide the application or elimination of government regulation of property and markets.
But, on the other hand, this model could change the society because:
Means of production will be decentralized.
Scarcity will be reduced, and therefore, speculation on goods.
Big corporations will see their power reduced with the arise of small or medium enterprises (like Red Hat) and non-profit (like Debian) producers.
The key is that this is the crystallisation of a post-capitalist mode of production from late capitalism. Capitalism isn't defeated, but transformed from inside.
If this model isn't capitalist and isn't anti-capitalist, what is it? It's a model of production, economy and society where the main source of power is knowledge and information. To say it in a word: it's informationalist.
How is a GPL society?
Stefan Merten of Oekonux describes the GPL Society utopia:
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.
[...] 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.
[...]
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.
StarTrek-TNG concepts?
This last paragraph makes me think of StarTrek and, most specifically, TNG. The Federation was not "in it for the money" and most other peoples they met weren't either. When there was someone in it for the money they were generally the bad guys.
I don't think this social commentary in StarTrek was an accident. A lot of fiction writing (Ecotopia by Ernest Callenbach comes to mind) is a way to get people to think about alternative approaches to how you can interact with others. We have already tried Capitalism, Socialism, Communism and a few more -isms. They all have advantages and disadvantages. Even if a GPL Society (a name I hate, by the way) is not the answer it is a chance to do some thinking free of all the -isms we currently have.
Re: [US] Open Source Society
I think that there is a good premise, but a poor logical conclusion (though, in defense of the author, I think the spirit was otherwise):
...making money is the dominant aim. Because a GPL Society would not be based on exchange, there would be no need for money anymore.
Yes, making money is the dominant aim for most things, but people often forget that money itself is a form of 'credit'. It was as radical to the barter system as credit cards are to the financial system. Consider that if I had milk, and you wanted milk, you would have to have something I was interested in having for us to trade. Money removed that. You could pay me money so I could go purchase what I need. It would be unlikely that I would need something that everyone who wanted milk could provide.
So - we may have to accept money as necessary.
A GPL society, however, could be a good thing for other reasons. Instead of profiting off of the lack of knowledge of others, profiting off of the sharing of knowledge could reduce costs by deinflating the costs of many things. Software is, to date, the best example. In time, software may be the reference for other concepts.