On Fri, 10 Oct 2003, Stefan Merten wrote:
Yesterday Franz Nahrada wrote:
There are a lot of scientists within the university system that clearly
see that.
Yes. And there are even movements about that.
One more point: Free Software is often claimed to be modeled after the
scientific principles of openness and sharing.
I think that is simplifying a little. It seems to me there have been 3
main stages in the last few years (I've argued this before, but am
trying to get to a bit more detail...)
1. People in universities who wish to do work that may have 'difficult'
results argue for it in terms of 'academic freedom'. The ideology is one
based on a generic ideal of free speech, but specialised to research. The
main issue is being allowed to create knowledge. Dissemination of
knowledge is tolerated - eg. the paradise of the early web, where research
was just put on the web without question. Free software is a part of this
culture.
Clashes with people trying to block creation or dissemination of knowledge
are fought in terms of 'academic freedom', and are political issues.
2. Universities become more integrated in the commercial world. Creation
of knowledge is no longer the main issue (creation of awkward knowledge
may not be financed - if blocked, it is blocked for financial reasons
(no funding), not political reasons). However, dissemination of knowledge
is now blocked by university administrators who need to make money for the
university through patents or copyright.
Clashes with people trying to block creation or dissemination of knowledge
are still fought in terms of 'academic freedom', but since the issues
appear to be financial and not political, this fails.
Universities and free software drift apart: there is on the whole no
funding to create free software, and the ideal of 'academic freedom' is
not much use to free software developers in countering proprietary
software.
3. University researchers begin to pick up the arguments of free software
in favour of dissemination. A rhetoric of 'sharing' begins to replace the
rhetoric of 'academic freedom' which is no longer a useful strategy on its
own. University workers needing freedom to be able to do their work begin
to mimic the culture of free software. This process started in biology
(eg. John Sulston) as a frontal clash with commercial interests, and is
currently spreading to the educational process itself (eg. MIT).
This implies that the '4 freedoms' of the FSF need to be expanded
to '5 freedoms', subsuming the old 'academic freedom' :-)
Graham
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