<nettime> Open Source, Open Society?

[Felix Stalder <stalder@fis.utoronto.ca>]

[A few weeks ago I was asked to speak briefly at a session on "Open Source,
Open Society?" which was put up by my friends at tao.ca. With some time on
my hand now, I decide to write it down. Felix]

As far as I can see, there are two characteristics of the development
process of "open source" software [1] that are likely to influence the
resulting products in ways that go beyond strictly technical questions: the
heterogeneous developer base, and the particular licensing structure.

Open source software is the result of a collaborative effort of different
people who each pursue diverging personal and collective agendas when
participating in this process. By "agenda" I mean simply someone's
reason(s) to do a certain thing. Some of the reasons to engage in open
source development are peer recognition, efficiency, aesthetic pleasure,
financial gain or a particular social/political belief.

Proprietary software is also developed by a number of different people, who
arguably work on it for many different personal reasons (being paid is but
one of them). However, there is--and this is the difference to open source
process--a single dominant collective agenda: the agenda of the company
that owns the software and hires the programmers. For a publicly traded
company, this agenda has to be to maximize value for its shareholders. At
the end of the day, this single collective agenda overrides all others. The
combination of a single agenda that lies outside of the software itself and
opaque source code makes it easy to put features into the software that are
controversial, or even unpopular, but serve the agenda which dominates the
developmental process. If Microsoft (or Sun, or Oracle, or Apple, or...)
reaches the conclusion that its interests are best served through by
entering into a secret partnership with, say, the NSA  (US National
Security Agency) then the terms of this partnership will be implemented by
the programmers, no matter if they personally belief this to be a good
thing or not. Examples of controversial, hidden features are abound: back
doors in encryption software, such as the  controversial "NSA key" recently
discovered in Microsoft NT stations, or the audio software "realplayer"
which sends data about the user back to the software company, real.com.
Both features reflect overarching agendas of the developers which are
unchecked, and cannot be checked, by other developers or users.

Open source software is very unlikely to contain such hidden features. Not
only because it is open, hence the features would be visible to literate
users, but also because the agendas of the people working on the
development of the software are very diverse. Even more important is that
in the open source development there is no mechanism by which someone could
force someone else to adopt something against his or her own personal
conviction, no matter what this convictions is. Given the impossibility of
imposing an overarching agenda it is unlikely that there will be features
embedded in the code that clearly promote any particular non-technical
goal, such as gathering data for marketing purposes, or improving relations
to government agencies.

Open source software represents an original model of ownership. This model
is based on the GNU license agreement developed by Richard Stallman [2].
This license mandates "that anyone who redistributes the software, with or
without changes, must pass along the freedom to further copy and change
it." [3] Effectively, this guarantees that once a piece of software is
protected by this license, its current code and  its later versions cannot
be taken out of the public domain anymore.

The traditional model of software licensing we all know well. The developer
licenses the software to the user under conditions which usually include
that the user cannot distribute or modify it, nor use any pieces of the
source code for other products. Hence the code can never be put into the
public domain.

The result of this open source license is not only that many different
people can work on the software for many different reasons, but also that
the software becomes much cheaper because its impossible to produce an
artificial scarcity. With the Internet as distribution mechanism this
software tends to become gratis because one single freely available copy is
infinitely reproducible at basically no costs.

These two characteristics of "open source" software development process
tends to result in software that is "cleaner" and cheaper than proprietary
software.

Does this matter? It does.

Software needs to be clean. Computers and software can be thought of as
amplifiers. They amplify the user's agenda by giving her access to means
of, say, communication that she would not have otherwise. But computers and
software also amplify the agendas of their makers. For example, the
realplayer allows 16 million users to listen to whatever they personally
find worth listening to, the software amplifies their power to gain access
to recorded sounds that are stored on-line. On the other hand, all these 16
million players also promote the agenda of their developer, real.com, which
now has 16 million 'agents' in the field reporting back in the users
listening habits. Effectively, the realplayer amplifies 16 million user
agendas once, and one company agenda 16 million times. Hence it empowers
each user a little bit and the developer tremendously. The same can be said
of the Windows operating system.

Open source software reduces this imbalance. The various agendas of the
developers cancel out one another as they meet on a relatively restricted
common ground: the development of technically superior software.
Consequently, open source software empowers the user vis-à-vis the
developer for the simple reason that the nontechnical motivations of each
individual developer become less important because they are checked by
others who can not be assumed to share these motivations. Checked from a
wide ranges of angles, the software becomes not only more stable, but also
more clean or neutral. Paradoxically, this political neutrality is a
radical political feature in a context where software that is biased
towards the developer is the normality.

Software needs to be cheap. While clean software addresses the imbalance of
amplifying power between the developer and the users, cheap software allows
more social groups to use that power than simply those with money. At the
centers of technological development this is not such an important point
because the connection between knowledge and money is more direct. The
situation is different in developing countries where knowledge is more
abundant than money. Open source software, because it is much cheaper,
allows more people to use the amplifying power computers. The decision of
the Mexican government to use Linux and not Microsoft in its schools was,
at least partly, motivated by the fact that the lower software costs made
it possible to install more machines. For the time being, the low costs
which increase its accessibility is offset by the still very high knowledge
necessary to make use of the much of the software. However, it might be a
temporary issue as we can expect the software to become more
"user-friendly" and the required knowledge to become more distributed.

The more ubiquitous computing becomes, the more important is it that the
software is clean, that is, free of unchecked special interests. The best
way to achieve this is to make very diverse interests have access to the
same code. At the same time, the more essential computing becomes for the
conduct of everyday life, the more is it important to widen the access to
the basic tools.

Making the software freely available and opening up its code for inspection
and change transforms the character of software from a commodity into
something more like an environmental resource of the Internet similar to
air in the physical environment. Everyone has access to it and everyone is
allowed to check its contents. Such a  transformation is in itself positive
as it helps to reduce the imbalances of power between the developer and the
user, and between the rich and the comparatively poor. However, what the
effects of this leveling of the playing field will be on other areas of
society is more ambiguous. What seems likely is that it contributes to
accelerate the much more general shift from a commodity to a service
economy. Those who focus on services can do very well, even if they do not
own the software which they service, as the case of Red Hat, Inc.
indicates. In a limited sense, open source code is like the legal code. The
code is openly published and accessible to everyone. Nevertheless due to
its complexity, most people do need to rely on a professional who can
interpret the general rules in the light of their own unique situation.

What seems unlikely, though, that open source software represents in itself
a new production paradigm--a "gift economy"--which can transform the
fundamentally capitalist character of the (new) economy [4].



[1] I use the term open source software of all types of software allows the
user to modify and freely pass on its source code.
[2] http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html
[3] http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/copyleft.html
[4] http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue3_12/barbrook/index.html





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