1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
|
Bruce Perens:
In The Cathedral and the Bazaar [16], Eric Raymond attempted to explain Open Source as a gift economy, a phenomenon of computer programmers having the leisure to do creative work not connected to their employment, and an artistic motivation to have their work appreciated. Raymond explains excellently how programmers behave within their own private subculture. The motivations he explored dominated during the genesis of Open Source and continue to be effective within a critically important group of Open Source contributors today.
Raymond edited The Cathedral and the Bazaar, then a year old, to replace the words Free Software with Open Source.
Neither Microsoft software nor Linux and Open Source can help you differentiate your business for long, because they are available to everyone. They differentiate against each other, they just don't differentiate your business. One or the other can save you money or make you more efficient, but in general they don't make your business more attractive to your customer.
The companies that join Open Source collaborations are seeking to use the software in a non-differentiating, cost-center role. It's not important to these companies that Open Source does not in itself produce a profit. Their profit-centers are things other than software, and software is for them an enabling technology. In order to continue to operate their profit-centers, they must make some investment in their cost centers. In the case of differentiating software, they have little choice but to make use of the in-house or contract development paradigm, because they need to prevent their differentiators from falling into the hands of their competitors. For their non-differentiators, they have the choice of the retail or Open Source paradigms. But which is more efficient?
Eric Raymond proposed that the volunteer's motivation is mainly intangible, and that a particularly important motivator is participation in a community of respect in which developers are recognized by their peers for the quality and innovation in their work. The FLOSS study surveyed Open Source developers regarding their motivation, found that many of them are motivated by technical curiosity and the desire to learn. I feel that their motivation is similar to that of an artist: just as a painter wants people to appreciate his paintings, a programmer wants to have users who appreciate his software.
---
Free software was the gift that made the world as we know it possible. It was an astounding gift to give, one that perhaps even the givers did not understand the significance of, but it was a gift nonetheless.
There is almost nothing in our daily lives that Free Software has not made possible and which would not disappear if that gift had never been given.
Free Software did not have to happen, arguably it should not have happened. The historical forces aligned against it were significant. And it did not happen randomly, it grew out of particular people, with particular beliefs, and today, in this world built on free software, we have lost sight of those beliefs, and if we do not regain our vision of them, our understanding of where Free Software came from, where it is leading us, and how we can keep it going, we risk losing all that we have built.
That might seem like overstating the case somewhat, but consider for a moment what is built on free software and what would disappear without it. Ninety-eight percent of servers of the internet run Linux, an OS kernel, a piece of Free Software which is built on hundreds, possibly thousands of other bits of code, all free software.
This notion of free software as a commons though requires some clarification lest someone trot out the tired old "tragedy of the commons" analysis, which has, in most fields of analysis, been long since abandoned.
The notion that free softwareo
The “Commons Clause” is a nonfree license because it forbids selling copies of the program, and even running the program as part of implementing any commercial service. Adding insult to injury, it also twists the words “commons” and “sell.”
We urge people to reject programs under this license and to develop free replacements. Where a previous version was available as free software, continuing development of that version is an option.
“The Lord God in a particular way desired that the earth be common possession of all, and produce fruit for all; but greed produced property rights”
In fact this hostility of the church to the private property, sustained by the franciscans (led for example by Duns Scoto and William of Occam) , was oposed by the scholastics, with Thomas Aquinas using the argument using by Aristotle in the “Politics”:
“What is common to a very large number of people gets minimal care. For all are especially concerned with their own things, and less with the common ones, or only to the extent that they concern one”
It seems to me that Mr. Garrett Hardin attributed to himself the “Tragedy of the Commons” but this is a very old argument in societies where the market forces has detroyed the real communities, and the view of the world is that of individual people grabbing as much as possible of the common pie, as was the case in the ancient Greece
There are thousands of text and quotes around the injustice of private property (or property rights), for example San Ambrosius in the IV century said:
“The Lord God in a particular way desired that the earth be common possession of all, and produce fruit for all; but greed produced property rights”
In fact this hostility of the church to the private property, sustained by the franciscans (led for example by Duns Scoto and William of Occam) , was oposed by the scholastics, with Thomas Aquinas using the argument using by Aristotle in the “Politics”:
“What is common to a very large number of people gets minimal care. For all are especially concerned with their own things, and less with the common ones, or only to the extent that they concern one”
It seems to me that Mr. Garrett Hardin attributed to himself the “Tragedy of the Commons” but this is a very old argument in societies where the market forces has detroyed the real communities, and the view of the world is that of individual people grabbing as much as possible of the common pie, as was the case in the ancient Greece
In this layer, however, both community and resource boundaries are multiplied. Every single community that forms around specific instances or projects
of free software counts as a different commons, with its particular (even though
in some cases similar) rules, boundaries and systems of governance. In other
words, each group of people who not only use a certain free software, but also
help to support or develop it (in the expanded sense outlined previously), can be
seen as a commons in itself.
|
