Re: [ox-en] What if the designs of everything were free?

• From: Stefan Merten <smerten oekonux.de>
• Date: Mon, 25 Aug 2003 17:44:07 +0200

Hi Rich and all!

I had another thought on this.

Last week (13 days ago) Rich Walker wrote:

Of course, this already happens - see the OHGPL for an example, and
there is a lot of other stuff under opencores.org and other places in a
similar vein. However, there may still be a difference between what can
be done by a disparate diffident group of contributors, and what can be
done by a highly-resourced focussed team. The issue we need to address
is how to generate the equivalent of highly-resourced focussed teams
without the current model of producing them.

Well, Free Software shows what disparate - while not diffident ;-) -
groups of contributors can come to. However, you mentioned the point
the high amount of resources needed to make some things happen.

This is something where Free Software has the advantage that the means
of production necessary for producing Free Software in many Western
households are standard devices today. I think this is one of the main
reasons why Free Software was able to take off at all.

So the question comes back to the old socialist question of the means
of production. However, in Free Software we see how the movement
builds its own means of productions part by part. I mean the `gcc' -
may be the root of everything - is one means of production. Emacs is
another and so on. Continuing this thought would mean that the means
of production necessary are built by the movement. I could imagine
this may happen.


						Mit Freien Grüßen

						Stefan

_______________________
http://www.oekonux.org/

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