Talk:Software freedoms and Parecon values

From ZWiki

Here you can discuss, comment, criticize the ideas exposed in the article. For English corrections (this is not my native language :-) don't hesitate to edit the article. --PoGo

[edit] First Round

Contribution by Michel Bauwens, indented responses by Patrick Godeau.

Thanks for offering this space for discussion. Since the subject matter is close to my own preoccupations, I would like to offer some additional perspective. I propose to work my way through the different paragraphs, one at the time, starting from the original text. I've put the original text in italics, my responses below. The same text is also available at the P2P Foundation blog [1], where I added a number of links to explanatory encyclopedic entries. [2]

Thanks for joining. I'll put responses indented below. --PoGo

I suppose you take the point of view of free software as a commodity or service with certain characteristics. If we take free software as just one instance of what Yochai Benkler calls commons-based peer production, the perspective changes a little bit. On the output side, we have free and universal accessibility, guaranted by forms of 'peer property' such as the GPL and some versions of the Creative Commons, and the other similar instances. On the input side, we have the free cooperation of individuals, and during the process, we have new modes of governance, which I'd like to call peer governance. In this ideal-type, it really resembles what Marx called communism and anthropologist such as Alan Page Fiske call Communal Shareholding: everybody gives what he can, everybody takes what he needs. It's a form of non-reciprocal exchange. But this ideal-type is embedded in a capitalist society and this creates all type of frictions. However, if we are coherent in this understanding of what peer production and free software is about, the lack of remuneration is not dramatic a problem. If you were to insist on direct exchange or remuneration, we'd no longer have peer production ,but some kind of reciprocal exchange or market. Is this what we really want?

I don't want or claim a salary for every free software developer. On the contrary I believe in the superiority of voluntary free cooperation over wage slavery. My intent here is to emphasize the inequity of remuneration, in cases when sales occur.

If we want to keep the autonomous creative unfolding, undetermined by the power structure of the market, undeterred by the lack of social reproduction which the system now offers, we have to ask, not remuneration from the capitalist, but rather a general universal income, divorced from the actual work. Only this retains the full freedom of this mode of production. Of course, I agree with your point, that when remuneration occurs, it is not equitable, but still a few caveats. A lot of people, and if you extend it to the generalized cooperative content production we are talking about millions of people, are producing this way, out of the surpluses of their existence, excess creativity (general intellect, mass intellectuality that cannot find full expression in the private economy), direct accessibility to their own means of production through surplus computing cycles, etc.. They get all kinds of benefits from it: creative expression, cooperation with others, learning. This is why most practicioners, for example in the free software movement, do not mind this inequity. In true non-reciprocal spirit, they are happy that some are benefiting, I think not so much through the sales of free software, but from the added value in terms of services, that these private companies are creating. In turn, these companies support, in modern forms of the patronage economy, the free software ecosystem: by paying some programmers (a few thousand), without micromanaging them; by supporting some of the Foundations that govern the projects, etc.. Compared to the cognitive capitalist section who live off monopolistic rents through IP protection, these new 'netarchical capitalists' live in a certain kind of symbiosis with the system.

Concerning open content in general, where use value and service don't have the same relevance as for software, authors are not so willing to let anyone make private profit off their work. Statistics for Creative Commons show that more than 70% of authors choose non-commercial licenses.

Non-reciprocity is no more true from the moment there is a commerce, at least when the payer is treated as a customer (or a tax payer) rather than a donor. When a price is fixed by the vendor, even if the content is available gratis elsewhere, payers can't choose or even know where their money will go. Even if companies are desirous to support free content, they're forced to compete with other companies, and their interest is in conflict with both clients and authors. So I wouldn't say that cooperative and competitive systems live in symbiosis, but rather in parasitism.

This is why Commons-advocate Philippe Aigrain, in his book Cause Commune, argues for a two-pronged strategy: de-monetising the cognitive capitalists (big pharma, microsoft, the bio-pirates, etc...), and find strategies to monetise the commons-sphere of open content production. This would create an intermediary sector between the sphere of pure peer production (which could be enhance by the universal income, but is still some way off, and in the meantime can survive and even thrive through the distributed surpluses of the current system), on the other hand a purely private sphere, but in between we can imagine a sphere of cooperative production. This sector would answer your problematic: different means can be thought of, such as traditional cooperatives, trusts (Peter Barnes), and Limited Liability Partnerships (which work with eternal proportional shares, as advocated by Chris Cook in Open Capital). Of course, this would not be the totally marketless and stateless society that Parecon advocates, but if you believe, as I do, that is not feasible, then the kind of situation I describe here is the next big thing in society reform: a commons-based political economy, centered around freefrom peer production, surrounded by a cooperative sphere, and surrounded by a dwindling private sphere.

I haven't studied in detail all the mentioned strategies, but I'm rather skeptical. On the general economic level, I don't see the private sphere dwindle, but extend instead. On the creative level however, we have a very effective tool to prevent private appropriation: it's copyleft. A strategy would be to forge a kind of similar tool on the economic level, that could help to fulfill what you call commons-based political economy, managed by and for the public. I believe that people would be more prone to donate to projects where bookkeeping is open, as for example the success of Wikipedia donation campaigns, or the Blender release funding. But a "copyleft economy" would be more than that, it would allow people to participate in economic decisions, which is by no means revolutionary but the normal operation (at least in theory) of any association or cooperative entity.

If our aim is to carry the Commons values into the sphere of physical production (from where they originate) then this economic copyleft would be a very powerful tool, since intellectual property invades about any physical product nowadays, from ABS to GMOs and medicines.

Concerning Parecon, I don't know if it's a feasible scheme, but I suppose it's more realistic to implement Parecon values on the small scale of a cooperative (it has been done already) than to expect a general universal income on all society scale.

<However, anyone is able to start a business selling the free software, so the profits on its selling can't be too high, which is another incitement not to pay authors in a market environment. This also means that investment in free software is discouraged, from capitalists (which is not bad in a Parecon perspective), from customers (who are reluctant to fatten intermediaries), and from authors.>

From a capitalist perspective, free software results in dramatically lower infrastructural costs, access to the diffuse innovation of the social factory, therefore, an increasing number of big firms are transferring their internal software development budgets to the free software community, and venture capitalist are presently massively supporting the 'open source everything' paradigm. In terms of content, not software, an increasing number of derivative income strategies are being developed.

Some details about supporting the 'open source everything'. Capitalists very seldom develop open source from scratch. They only invest expecting profit, and so their strategies are: 1) Use non-copylefted open source developed by others and sell it in closed-source proprietary software, e.g. BSD code in Windows and Mac OS X. 2) Open the source code of a previously closed-source software to compete a monopolistic rival, e.g. Netscape to Mozilla, or StarOffice to OpenOffice.org. 3) Develop a non-copylefted open source platform on which is built proprietary (and expensive) software, e.g. Eclipse. 4) Package copylefted software mostly written by volunteers, and combine it with proprietary elements such as trademarks, certifications, and patents, e.g. Red Hat Linux.

Again, if we expand our view to the totality of peer production, then this paragraph severely underestimates the magnitude of the phenomena, it already involves millions of individuals (more than half of Chinese white collar workers have a blog), and is just massively expanding. This expansion is predicated on the emergence of distributed networks throughout the social field, which creates a peer to peer relational dynamic that is conducive to the expansion of peer production, peer governance, and peer property modes. It is a result of the distribution of intellect, of fixed capital (computers), of finance (through the emergence of peer exchanges, the lowering of capital costs through desktop manufacturing, etc...). In other words, it's not a fragile development at all.

This development may not be fragile, but it's based on a fundamental inequality which you also seem to underestimate. Millions of Chinese may have blogs, but there's still 91.5% of China population who don't have any access to the Internet. I wouldn't qualify as equitable a system based on surpluses of capitalist exploitation. It's not peer to peer, but peer to poor :-p

The whole question then becomes: how do we combine free cooperation with capitalist competition, how do we strengthen the one in relation to the other. How do we change the latter, possibly into 'P2P-influenced' non-capitalist market modes (of which fair trade is an example).

I agree, this is the whole question, and the purpose of the IANG license.

One more thing concerning Mark Shuttleworth. Peer governance is usually market either by the ideological leadership of the founders, and the competence-based leadership of participants. If you operate outside the salary-based sphere of dependence, this is the only authority you can have. If a former entrepreneur decides to become a patron and do something positive, I think we should rather applaude it than deplore it. Why is this important: because the old divides between capital and workers, producers and consumers, have been blurred for some time. Many knowledge workers are entrepreneurs of some kind. They cannot possibly identify with an alternative which condemns this part of their being. Rather what should be done is assist them in their desire for free cooperation outside the market sphere.

I certainly don't condemn Mark Shuttleworth for anything. On the contrary I'm eternally grateful to him, all the more so that I'm using Ubuntu right now. But I regret that other less fortunate people don't have the chance to practice their talents full-time. For example, Guido van Rossum had to find a job to feed his family and he's not able to work full-time on Python, even as the language is used by millions of programmers. Also, Spencer Kimball and Peter Mattis who created GIMP while they were students, were forced to stop working on it when they had to find a job. Even Linus Torvalds, who created Linux as a student in 1991, had to supervise its maintenance during his spare time while he was a teacher, then an employee. It's only since 2003 that he was hired to work full-time on the kernel. --PoGo

Michel Bauwens, Foundation for P2P Alternatives, [3]

[edit] Second Round

PG: Non-reciprocity is no more true from the moment there is a commerce, at least when the payer is treated as a customer (or a tax payer) rather than a donor. When a price is fixed by the vendor, even if the content is available gratis elsewhere, payers can't choose or even know where their money will go. Even if companies are desirous to support free content, they're forced to compete with other companies, and their interest is in conflict with both clients and authors. So I wouldn't say that cooperative and competitive systems live in symbiosis, but rather in parasitism.

MB: The non-reciprocity lies in the free community of producers making software for use value taking the form of universally accessible services. When such a producer gets paid, or when a derivative version of such software is sold or bundled with services, we enter the world of the market. But, having spoken with programmers about this issue, there is little or no opposition among the non-reciprocal peer producers about the use by business and the selling of services. They see it as part of an ecology of support needed for the movement to continue its expansion. That some will be eventually paid and not all can be seen as a source of inequity, from a non-reciprocal point of view, or can be seen as a good thing, as enabling the continued existence of free software, from the non-reciprocal point of view. I think it is more productive to say that the cooperative and competitive systems are in tension,rather than use either symbiosis or parasitism. Free market liberals could after all claim just as easily that free software is a result of the surpluses created by the market, and therefore parasitic.

PG: : I haven't studied in detail all the mentioned strategies, but I'm rather skeptical. On the general economic level, I don't see the private sphere dwindle, but extend instead. On the creative level however, we have a very effective tool to prevent private appropriation: it's copyleft. A strategy would be to forge a kind of similar tool on the economic level, that could help to fulfill what you call commons-based political economy, managed by and for the public. I believe that people would be more prone to donate to projects where bookkeeping is open, as for example the success of Wikipedia donation campaigns, or the Blender release funding. But a "copyleft economy" would be more than that, it would allow people to participate in economic decisions, which is by no means revolutionary but the normal operation (at least in theory) of any association or cooperative entity.

MB: Both the process of commodification, of the capitalist market, and the sphere of de-commodification are expanding, at the same time. Aigrain's strategy is aimed at slowing down the expansion of commodification-with-inequity (the cognitive capitalist strategy of monopolistic rents based on the state-protected surplus profits from the information core of their products), and expanding the ecology of cooperative production by enabling it to generate funds for its expansion. Some details about Aigrain's vision are here [[4]]

PG: This development may not be fragile, but it's based on a fundamental inequality which you also seem to underestimate. Millions of Chinese may have blogs, but there's still 91.5% of China population who don't have any access to the Internet. I wouldn't qualify as equitable a system based on surpluses of capitalist exploitation. It's not peer to peer, but peer to poor :-p

MB: I agree with you: the emergence and expansion of peer production takes place within the context of a highly unequal world, and it doesn't solve the problems of this context by itself. But the emergence of such a field on non-commodity based production, of bottom-up governance modes, and of universal property regimes remain highly significant, and reveal the potential for social and political change, and hence should be part of any coherent political strategy.

[edit] Third Round

Put your comments here.

Retrieved from "http://wiki.zmag.org/Talk:Software_freedoms_and_Parecon_values"

Talk:Software freedoms and Parecon values

From ZWiki

[edit] First Round

[edit] Second Round

[edit] Third Round

Views

Personal tools

Navigation

Search

Toolbox