Openness: October 2003 Archives

How big brother and big media can put the Internet genie back in the bottle

The Digital Imprimatur (via Open Access News):

John Walker, The Digital Imprimatur, September 13, 2003 (revised October 9). The co-founder of Autodesk pulls together the grounds for pessimism about the future of the openness of the internet. Excerpt: With the advent of the internet "[i]ndividuals, all over the globe, were empowered to create and exchange information of all kinds, spontaneously form virtual communities, and do so in a totally decentralised manner, free of any kind of restrictions or regulations....Indeed, the very design of the Internet seemed technologically proof against attempts to put the genie back in the bottle....Earlier I believed there was no way to put the Internet genie back into the bottle. In this document I will provide a road map of precisely how I believe that could be done, potentially setting the stage for an authoritarian political and intellectual dark age global in scope and self-perpetuating, a disempowerment of the individual which extinguishes the very innovation and diversity of thought which have brought down so many tyrannies in the past."

I think this is the most irrational nonsense yet to come out of the SCO camp. SCO attacks open-source foundation reports on SCO as stating:

"The GPL violates the U.S. Constitution, together with copyright, antitrust and export control laws," SCO Group said in an answer filed late Friday to an IBM court filing. In addition, SCO asserted that the GPL is unenforceable.

Are they (SCO folks) out of their mind? When did it become a violation (of any sort) to share for free your knowledge, expertise and any other product that may derive from it?

Such sharing could certainly reduce the profits of commercial companies when the open source products in question are Linux, Apache, OpenOffice, etc. But, how does that violate the "U.S. Constitution, together with copyright, antitrust and export control laws"?

Apparently SCO is going for all or nothing, and this route they have taken will get them faster to nothing.

I've come across few various sites and some articles (blog entries, etc.) talking about social software. The phrase does sound interesting and the name (i.e. social software) appears to promise much more than what actually happens to be.

For example, in iCan for the Public the folks over at Many2Many state:

"The BBC's iCan is in public pre-beta, a social software project to foster social capital and democratic participation. I posted on M2M about the project back in May. (Just a little before that we were having the same power-law inspired discussion of weblog modalities we are today)."

After reviewing the iCan site, it appears to be a collaborative tool/portal where people from the UK can share personal opinions and learn from each other. A clear statement is made at the site that iCan can't be used for commercial purposes.

The common denominator of the tools termed 'social software' seems to be the ability to facilitate open collaboration among the publics or users of such software with the 'publishers/moderators' playing a facilitating role. According to this I would contend that a wide range of software packages that support collaboration have the potential to be used in a way that makes them 'social software'. For example, any software such as mailing lists managers, CMS/portals, blogging software, etc., fit the pattern. However, it is their use that makes them 'social software’ or not. Needless to say, those collaborative software packages that do not support open communication and sharing of ideas and thoughts can't be considered 'social software'.

Invest in open source, say the Danes

"The ordinary market conditions for standard software will tend towards a very small number of suppliers or a monopoly," the report says. "It will only be possible to achieve competition in such a situation by taking political decisions that assist new market participants in entering the market."

An interesting thought. Instead of the profits going to few big software companies, various organizations share their cost in developing opens source software. The potential profits (for the software firms) are turned into savings (for the users of the software). Isn’t this enough of an incentive for various governments and corporations to ‘invest’ in open source? This mode of thought also urges corporations to compete at the true level of their values instead of competitive advantage due to being able to afford the right software.

Open Source Everywhere by Wire's Thomas Goetz.

A must read article elaborating and explaining various aspects of the open source philosophy most widely apparent and spread in software development.

"We are at a convergent moment, when a philosophy, a strategy, and a technology have aligned to unleash great innovation. Open source is powerful because it's an alternative to the status quo, another way to produce things or solve problems. And in many cases, it's a better way. Better because current methods are not fast enough, not ambitious enough, or don't take advantage of our collective creative potential."

Check these open source efforts mentioned in the arrticle:

• OPEN SOURCE FILM
• OPEN SOURCE RECIPES
• OPEN SOURCE Π
• OPEN SOURCE PROPAGANDA
• OPEN SOURCE CRIME SOLVING
• OPEN SOURCE CURRICULUM

Some quotes:

"Software is just the beginning … open source is doing for mass innovation what the assembly line did for mass production. Get ready for the era when collaboration replaces the corporation."

"But software is just the beginning. Open source has spread to other disciplines, from the hard sciences to the liberal arts. Biologists have embraced open source methods in genomics and informatics, building massive databases to genetically sequence E. coli, yeast, and other workhorses of lab research. NASA has adopted open source principles as part of its Mars mission, calling on volunteer "clickworkers" to identify millions of craters and help draw a map of the Red Planet. There is open source publishing: With Bruce Perens, who helped define open source software in the '90s, Prentice Hall is publishing a series of computer books open to any use, modification, or redistribution, with readers' improvements considered for succeeding editions. There are library efforts like Project Gutenberg, which has already digitized more than 6,000 books, with hundreds of volunteers typing in, page by page, classics from Shakespeare to Stendhal; at the same time, a related project, Distributed Proofreading, deploys legions of copy editors to make sure the Gutenberg texts are correct. There are open source projects in law and religion. There's even an open source cookbook."

"Of course, for all its novelty, open source isn't new. Dust off your Isaac Newton and you'll recognize the same ideals of sharing scientific methods and results in the late 1600s (dig deeper and you can follow the vein all the way back to Ptolemy, circa AD 150). Or roll up your sleeves and see the same ethic in Amish barn raising, a tradition that dates to the early 18th century. Or read its roots, as many have, in the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary, the 19th-century project where a network of far-flung etymologists built the world's greatest dictionary by mail. Or trace its outline in the Human Genome Project, the distributed gene-mapping effort that began just a year before Torvalds planted the seeds of his OS."

Public Library of Science (PLoS) has finally published their first issue, Vol 1, Issue 1. Especially interesting is their first article/editorial Why PLoS Became a Publisher that provides the rationale for the open access to scholarly and scientific literature.

Quote:

"PLoS Biology, and every PLoS journal to follow, will be an open-access publication–everything we publish will immediately be freely available to anyone, anywhere, to download, print, distribute, read, and use without charge or other restrictions, as long as proper attribution of authorship is maintained. Our open-access journals will retain all of the qualities we value in scientific journals—high standards of quality and integrity, rigorous and fair peer-review, expert editorial oversight, high production standards, a distinctive identity, and independence."

From The Beginning of the End of the Internet?:

"The Internet as we know it is at risk. Entrenched interests are positioning themselves to control the network's chokepoints and they are lobbying the FCC to aid and abet them. The Internet was designed to prevent government or a corporation or anyone else from controlling it. But this original vision of the Internet may soon be lost. In its place a warped view that open networks should be replaced by closed networks and that accessibility can be superceded by a new power to discriminate is emerging."

Scary thoughts.... but indeed very real...

Democratizing software: Open source, the hacker ethic, and beyond

Abstract:
"The development of computer software and hardware in closed-source, corporate environments limits the extent to which technologies can be used to empower the marginalized and oppressed. Various forms of resistance and counter-mobilization may appear, but these reactive efforts are often constrained by limitations that are embedded in the technologies by those in power. In the world of open source software development, actors have one more degree of freedom in the proactive shaping and modification of technologies, both in terms of design and use. Drawing on the work of philosopher of technology Andrew Feenberg, I argue that the open source model can act as a forceful lever for positive change in the discipline of software development. A glance at the somewhat vacuous hacker ethos, however, demonstrates that the technical community generally lacks a cohesive set of positive values necessary for challenging dominant interests. Instead, Feenberg’s commitment to "deep democratization" is offered as a guiding principle for incorporating more preferable values and goals into software development processes."

Technology addiction makes us unwitting slaves is indeed somewhat philosophical but also a practical article with very pragmatic eye openers that touches on the contemporary issues of technological determinism vs. social constructionism discourse, especially as it pertains to the role of information technology in the information society.

The last bullet/paragraph in the story states: "Technology's promise and alluring capabilities are used to surreptitiously entrap and willingly imprison members of the information-age society instead of truly empowering them."

Perhaps the open source technologies which are usually not developed with profitability (i.e. bottom line in $$$) in mind can show that technology does not have to be entrapping and imprisoning. It is exactly this that I'm trying to argue in favor of open source software as an actor in the ecology of open source supported technology that manifests itself as an antidote to the claim that thechnologies "surreptitiously entrap and willingly imprison members of the information-age society".

Quotes from the article:

"Yet as we rush to embrace the latest and greatest gadgetry or high-tech service and satisfy our techno-craving, we become further dependent on these products and their manufacturers -- so dependent that when something breaks, crashes, or is attacked, our ability to function is reduced or eliminated. Given these frequent technical and legal problems, I'm wondering if we're as free and empowered as we've been led to believe."

"To make things worse, government practically has outsourced the oversight and definition of technology-based expression and community interaction to for-profit corporations and secretive industry-specific cartels such as the Motion Picture Association of America, the Recording Industry Association of America and the Business Software Alliance. Such groups have wasted no time in rewriting the rules for how they want our information-based society to operate according to their interests, not ours."

By far one of the best argued positions explaining the paradoxes and stupidities of SCO's claim that they 'own' Linux.

An open-source letter by Joe Firmage, a former vice president of strategy for Novell's Network Systems Group:

"OK, Sontag, fine. If you cannot inadvertently or accidentally assign your copyright, then there should be no problem in identifying exactly which portions of Linux allegedly violate SCO's rights. Simply issue a statement that identifies the offending code, stating clearly that the identification does not represent a release of rights into open source."

"The model of open science is "communistic" in the sense of community ownership--or rather community stewardship. But innumerable highly successful organizations and institutions in America are founded upon the ideal of community stewardship--including our democracy itself.
The downfall of communism was due to state control by totalitarians--an attribute embodied by today’s commercial software industry far more than by the emergent open-source science of information technology. "