[OS:N:] RE: Open Source as a form of Anarcho-Communism?

["Paul Fitz" <pfitz dodo com au>]

Hi,

Firstly, sorry about the bad netiquette I had no intention of disrupting the
mailing list protocols.

Thanks everyone for the great sharing of ideas/feedback, some interesting
views, particularly on the actual existence of intellectual property.

Brendan,

Fortunately or unfortunately (depending on your viewpoint) the legal
concepts of copyright and intellectual property do exist in the United
States and most liberal democracies.

The fact that the supreme court has denied the existence of copyright in the
US is very interesting, and slightly puzzling because, for all intents and
purposes, it is still a valid legal notion in the US (IE. I can be
prosecuted by sony for dupliating digital information owned by them).

I was just working under the assumption that intellectual property is a
by-product of the lockean notions of the protection of individual rights to
own personal property.  The entire notion of liberalism/capitalism is to
protect those individual rights.

Opposing those concepts could be seen, as a rejection of part of the
capitalist doctrine, but at the same time, as you pointed out :) it isn't a
rejection of locke if intellectual property doesn't exist.  Looking at the
current legal system, I've gone with the assumption that intellectual
property is a valid notion, one protected by/attached to capitalist
philosophy.  (de-bateable I know, but there are always underlying premises
and assumptions with any theory).

>> "By attempting to neutralise the anti-competitive elements of copyright
you can characterise the community as opposing government intervention in
the content/software industries. On this analysis they're not communist,
they're capitalist - and extremely so." <<

Given the assumption that intellectual property rights exist, I see the
anti-competitive elements of copyright as a by-product of the capitalist
concept of individual property rights.  When seen from that perspective, a
rejection of copyright is not a capitalist movement, but something else.
The rejection of capitalist government intervention... anarcho? lol, see
where I'm coming from? :)

>>  "I think you need to think more about it"
definitely!  Thats why it's good to hear from knowledgeable guys like you, I
had no idea about that supreme court ruling! :)
I agree with you as far as the lack of validity of intellectual property
rights (particularly when it benefits the few over the many)  I've just used
it as a perfectly valid (I think, as it exists as an absolute legal argument
at the moment) premise for this paper.

---------------------------------------------------------------

Marco,

Yes, I will chase down a copy of that stallman text, I've read a couple of
essays, but you are right, I haven't cleared up the difference between open
source and free software very well.

I would consider projects like Linux, Apache, PHP, Perl, MySQL to be open
source and free software because they are literally free and the source-code
is made available.  Would I be correct in that assumption?  Perhaps I should
change to the free software which is ALSO open source.  I was not referring
to mandrake or red hat distributions at all.

>> "Last but not least general advice: I think that you should make very
clear, first to yourself, and then in the very first lines of you paper, if
you want to discuss the Free SW / OSS community and *nothing* else (ie only
its internal dynamics), or how it impacts the real world, and why people
with real, non-sw problems join or support it (ie the impacts that Free SW /
OSS has outside its own community)"

Absoloutley !  As I mentioned in the first email ( ithink I did) I'm looking
at the Internet based open source/free software community as existing within
another structure (the internet) - as you said the internal dynamics of the
community.  I am examining wether elements of behaviour exhibited withon
those communities shares a similarity with the philosophy of
anarcho-communism ! :)

I'm not saying anyones a red blodded commie lol  I know some people find
that offensive.

>> Open sourcers reject capitalist ideology of supply-demand economics, open
>> source programmers actively give their Intellectual property away - to 1
or
>> 10'000'000 people.

You said: "Free SW / OSS goes hand in hand with a truly monopoly-free
market,
where consumers can chose a much higher variety of products, can
really ask that something is produced to meet exactly their real
needs, and producers can compete with each others, with equal
opportunities, to get the business of those customers. Can it get more
capitalistic (in the original sense) than that?"

That may be true of commercial open source product..
But free software is not in private hands and being sold for a profit to
others - it is available for the good of the entire community.
I'm working from this definition of capitalism -

"An economic system in which the means of production and distribution are
privately or corporately owned and development is proportionate to the
accumulation and reinvestment of profits gained in a free market." Source:
Dictionary.com

It is absolutely a free market, but I see the access to free software like
Apache and PHP as a method of providing the means of production to everyone.
A publicly owned means of production.


> Communist belief endorsing Good of the all over the few - All can benefit
> from open source product, only relatively affluent can afford to even use
> microsoft and even then, the source code is copyrighted intellectual
> property

YOU SAID: "False. Please read the RULE project home page, and its FAQ (URL
in my
signature). Apart from that, I repeat, OSS was defined for
corporations, who could not care less about less affluent people. The
comments already made about "there is no such thing as intellectual
property" also apply."


I'll check it out, thanks for the info :)


> In ideal anarchist communities, the collective creates enough material to
be
> independent from the states, open source is actively creating enough
> electronic material to be free of capitalist endorsed proprietary
software.

YOU SAID: "There are quite a lot of governments and politicians, of the kind
who
considers Bush just a bit less communist than Castro, who think that
*in* *order* to become really capitalist (pursue mazimum profit, cut
unnecessary expenses, get really deregulated market...) they cannot
depend by overpriced foreign software"


Yes, Bush is interesting insn't he..  When you say "quite a lot of
governments and politicians,", are you refferring to neo-liberalists (I
think people call bush a neo-con, not sure what the difference is..)?  Which
countries are pursuing this agenda?  I guess countries listening to the
world bank and IMF would have to !


>
> However, open source communities are also technocracies (to an extent -
> governed by technicians: a social system in which scientists, engineers,
and
> technicians have high social  standing and political power).
>
> The open source commnity appears to be a 'gift economy' - where giving
away
> code/ideas/advice is highly desirable and valuable. The more code and
> information the user creates/reproduces and gives to others, the more
valued
> they are in the community.
>
> It seems that, if the open source community is a mini-anarcho-communist
> community, it co-exists within a larger capitalist owned structure called
> the Internet.  It actually depends on it for it's existence to an extent -
> would Linux be where it is today without the Internet?  It is unlikely -
the
> net has allowed hundreds of thousands of motivated
programmers/testers/users
> to help develop and refine many forms of open source software.
>

You said: "Free SW created the Internet, and wouldn't exist without it. Yes.
The
monopolies (not necessarily the capitalist) are trying to own it"

I'm not sure if it was initially free SW. ARPA was a government institution,
I'm sure the initial software technologies were classified proprietary
programs.  I guess the real free SW/internet symbiosis occurred late 70's
with USENET and UNIX info swapping?

Can you tell me more about the monopolies trying to own the net?  I suppose
thats why I like OS/FSW so much, it seems to be opposing the monopolistic
giants like SUN and Microsoft, an alternative to the corporate :)

Thanks for you help!
I'd love to hear more odeas and concepts.
:)
Cheers,
Paul