[ox-en] Re: Graham Seaman * The Two Economies; Or: Why the washing machine question is the wrong question

• From: Stefan Merten <smerten oekonux.de>
• Date: Mon, 19 Jul 2004 19:27:33 +0200

Hi lists!

15 months (475 days) ago Stefan Merten wrote:

The Two Economies
=================

Or: Why the washing machine question is the wrong question
----------------------------------------------------------

Joel made a transcript from this talk (from the 2nd conference!)
several months ago and I finally got around to integrate it. Sorry for
the long delay. Many thanks to Joel for this contribution. Especially
for this talk a transcript is useful because it contained a lot of
discussion which is at least transcribed from Graham's side.


						Mit Freien Grüßen

						Stefan

--- 8< --- 8< --- 8< --- 8< --- 8< --- 8< --- 8< --- 8< --- 8< --- 8< ---
The Two Economies (Transcription)
=================================

Graham Seaman [graham opencollector.org]

Or: Why the washing machine question is the wrong question
----------------------------------------------------------

Transcription based on the audio recording by Joel R Schlosberg
---------------------------------------------------------------

Note: There is also the paper of the talk [Seaman.html].

Announcer: That's Graham Seaman, one of the most prominent members of
the English Oekonux list, and one of the persons who is wading through
all the German stuff on the German list, and he will give us a talk
called "The Two Economies". Actually, I didn't read very much of his
abstract, so I can't say very much about that, but...

Seaman: I don't know how many of you were in the last talk as well,
but the last talk kind of ended with the speaker saying that the
behavior he was talking about was typical of the Internet and it was
something that didn't translate outside it. Well, what I want to talk
about in this talk is how it might translate outside into the rest of
the world. The last speaker was coming from a traditional economic
background; his talk was all based on those terms, rationality and so
on. My background is more Marxist, so I tend to use those terms. I
don't think my argument is specifically tied to that, I think you can
present it in other terms as well, but it's what I'm used to and it's
what I find natural, so those are the terms that I've been using.

The second thing I should say is I had a too-fancy presentation
arranged on the laptop, and it only worked with one version of the
software. We don't have the same version here, so I'm going to be
doing everything on the board and it's going to be very low-tech. But
I don't plan to write very much on the board, so unfortunately you
won't get, for non-English speakers, you won't have much written help
with the talk.

So if I'm talking too fast, or not making any sense, please stop me. I
would rather have interruptions in the middle than have all the
questions at the end in one block. Part of the reason for this is:
when you give a talk, you have to present it as though you have an
argument, there's a thesis, there's a beginning, there's a middle,
there's a conclusion. So I've done that. But in fact, what I have is a
series of questions, where there are things that I'm not sure about,
and I'd like the chance to ask other people what they think about the
same problems. These are particularly things that relate to questions
that have come up on the Oekonux list, so some of them will be very
familiar to Oekonux people; there's questions that have been argued
about before. I read the German list a little, but not very much, so
it may well be there are questions that are being settled on the
Oekonux list in German that I don't know.

So, looking at the way most things, most of the economy is organized
at the moment, the production of material goods, you have most
material goods being made by people working for a wage. They're being
paid to do the work. They have to work for a wage, because in general,
people don't own the things to make other things with, they don't own
the means of production. Somebody else owns the means of production.
The reason for making things is directly to make a profit. The things
may be useful, but the immediate motive for making something is
because the owner of the means of production can make a profit. And it
is made by actually selling the product, so the product isn't
available for everybody to take unless they have money to exchange for
it. And finally, producers coordinate things by one another, not by
talking to one another. So if I'm a bread manufacturer and you're a
bread manufacturer, I don't say, "I'm making so much white bread, will
you make so much white breads, brown breads", and together we satisfy
everybody. We both produce whatever we're going to produce, and all
the communication is indirect, through money, through prices. If I
produce too much white bread, then the price of white bread goes down,
and I know that's a signal to reduce my production of white bread.

Okay, so that is the standard capitalist mode of production, it's what
I consider the essential parts of it. You can take every single point
on that and match it against the way things can be done, in production
of non-material goods. Not the way things have to be done, or they're
always done, but can be done, and are done for some things, free
software in particular. So people producing free software don't have
to be working for a wage. They can be working just because they want
to. No more reason than that: they want to do something. They are
generally people who own the means of producing software themselves;
most people, not everybody, but most people producing free software
are working on their own computer they have sitting at home. I realize
that's not the rule, but it's possible, and it's quite common. The
reason they're making it isn't to make a profit, it's to produce
something which is useful for them, or useful for somebody else, or
just because it's pleasurable. And, other people can use it if they
choose to. There is no payment involved with it. Finally, people
communicate with one another, not via money - people don't decide
whether to produce this piece of software or not to produce this piece
of software according to the price of software of a particular type of
software; they decide whether or not to through communication with
other people. The communication is not mediated by money, it's mostly
mediated by technology. Mostly, you do not have people sitting in a
room and discussing with one another; there is still mediation going
on there, and this type is technological rather than financial.

So described like that, you could say that's two very simplified
descriptions of two different modes of production. But one of them is
a complete mode of production, one of them englobes everything, you
can have an entire society; we have an entire society that has been
run for a long time the first way. We have a fragment of a society
that is run the second way. It's not complete. It applies to a very
limited range of goods: immaterial goods, and not even all of that. So
the question is, "Is this the kernel of something new, that can expand
to grow out and take over the rest of production? Is it possible for
it to expand into other types of production, or not?" And, this
question on the Oekonux list, I think, is sometimes called "the
washing machine problem" it's sometimes called "the bread roll
problem": "Can you produce things like washing machines, which are
generally not interesting to make, made on a large scale with very
repetitive work? Can they possibly be produced on those principles?"

To which there are at least two answers which I don't like, and one
which I think is possible, but I have a lot of questions about it. Two
I don't like: the first temptation is to say, "Well, what makes it
possible to have this new mode of production for immaterial goods?"
and it's some of the things I have listed: communication with large
numbers of people mediated by technology; the fact that it's possible
to actually own your own means of production; you're not dependent on
somebody else to get access to a computer most of the time. So there's
a temptation to say, "Well, if that works for immaterial goods, how
about material goods, can we have some kind of magic technological
jump that will give us something in every home that will turn out a
washing machine, or a bread roll, or whatever we like." So there's one
answer to this question which talks about fabbers, which are, as far
as I know, machines generally used purely for prototyping, but in
computer control you may have an import which is plastic and which is
shaped by laser and so on. So there are possible glimpses of
technologies that might give you the ability to break other kinds of
production, apart from production of immaterial goods, break them free
of this kind of unpleasantness associated with repetitive factory-type
work. I might want to design my own machine, I design my own machine
using a fabber.

To me that's magic that I don't believe in, and I don't believe it's
going to happen. I want to know who's going to make the fabbers, I
want to know how it is that they're not going to be incredibly
wasteful compared with mass production. Similar things apply to
energy; there are people on the list suggesting that maybe there is
something, some kind of perpetual motion machine that will give us
free energy that doesn't cost anything. I think that once you get into
this kind of discussion, there is a real temptation to look for magic
solutions. So that's one answer that I don't believe in.

The second answer that I don't believe in - I think it's possible, but
it's, well - Look what's happened before: there was a time when the
economy was almost entirely agricultural. Everything centered on who
owned the land, how much food was produced. Now it's obvious that
people need to eat, so that's going to be permanent; that's always
going to be the case. It turned out not to be the case, because when
factory-machine production arose, it started to dominate the economy
in such a way that the farming side of it became almost irrelevant.
Farming gradually became influenced by the same techniques, so that
farming products became cheaper and cheaper. So that it's no longer
the case that who owns farming land is something that decides policies
of government. Obviously, it has an effect, especially in the moment
with the Socialist discussions on the common agricultural policy, and
so on. But it's not the central issue the way it once was. So there is
a second argument that says the same thing will happen with immaterial
goods. Material goods will become secondary: they'll become so cheap
and easy to produce that nobody really cares about them; and all the
important issues in society will be about producing immaterial goods,
about ideas, about designs, about software, and so on. That idea I
kind of maybe find believable in the very, very long-term, hundreds of
years; but I find it unpleasant.

[Audience member speaks]

Seaman: That work in immaterial goods.

[Audience member speaks]

Seaman: I still find it unpleasant. Maybe I'm wrong, but looking back
at what happened: What happened to the people who used to work on the
farms? What happens now in most of the countries that are outside the
old capitalist developed countries whose families have been working on
farms in the past? You have extreme poverty; you have mass migrations
to slums in cities; you have desperation; you have complete
non-adaptation to the new way of doing things, and it takes several
generations before people fit into that and have steady jobs and
steady incomes, and the nice car and so on. It just seems to me that
if that's a solution, I don't like it. I can see that it's possible.

[Audience member speaks]

Seaman: Yes. I'm saying out of the possible solutions, how does this
spread? The first is technological, the fabber idea. The second is
social, and it's a social idea I don't like. The third possibility is
the one that I want to talk about, which again is social, but it means
free software somehow going outside itself and finding allies in new
areas. Obviously, this is not a complete answer to the question in any
way, but it's an opinion about directions that it's possible to prefer
things to go in.

Looking at how things have changed from one means of production to
another - sorry, one mode of production to another mode of production
in the past, I don't think anybody really understands what happened
with the end of the Roman Empire, and how that went into feudalism. So
the only real example we have is what happened in England in the 16th
and 17th centuries and other countries at slightly different times:
transition from there to the situation we've been in for the last
couple of hundred years. I'd say that there are a few elements there
you can look at there that I think are repeating themselves now. I
hope there are no historians in this audience, because it's an
incredibly distorted view of history, but I think that given a couple
of hours I could probably justify it a bit more, but I try not to go
on for a couple of hours. The first thing is: you had production,
non-agricultural production, dominated by the guilds; guilds producing
large numbers of apprentices who were supposed to go on to become
journeyers, who were supposed to go on to become masters, and so on.
That gradually separated itself out until you had rich guilds and poor
guilds. You had people dealing purely with money buying the produce,
who became almost completely independent of the guilds. The end result
of that was that by the early 17th century in England, you had large
numbers of people who were working outside the guilds who were small
employers, who were making things outside the guilds, which was
illegal. They were evading guild inspections. When people came to see,
"Where you were getting your raw materials from, are you buying them
from authorized guilds?", they would be arrested if they were found
doing it. The system was producing people who had done
apprenticeships, people who had become journeyers, people who found
their way blocked. They couldn't go any further. So there were people
who couldn't survive in the old system, who were trying to make new
ways of surviving. A lot of those people in England then became
supporters of the Levelers, the extreme faction of the left during the
English Revolution. A large proportion of them were from East London,
Suffolk in particular, were small employers who were working
completely outside the guild system. And saw that the only way forward
for them personally was destruction of the guild system.

So I say that's the first prerequisite - that you have people, that
you have the old system actually producing the situation where there
are people who need to get out of it, people who do not "fit" with the
old system. Secondly, once these new people exist, they start
perfecting the old system. The people with money, the traders, the
merchants, didn't really care where the products came from; they knew
that technically they shouldn't be buying from anybody but the
authorized guilds, but as soon as money is involved, then you have
some element of a market, you have people trying to buy things as
cheaply as they can; and if the person who is selling things most
cheaply is the person who's outside the guilds, then they're not going
to care about the law. So, you have the old system also starts getting
infected by the new one. And as the new economy grew, the old economy
found it just couldn't keep up with it. Those small employers who
started out in the early 17th century - by the next century, there
were some of them quite large employers of the first factories,
needing factory workers. Now, if you have a factory with even 100
workers, which is not a very big factory, the people in there cannot
be apprentices who are going to go on to become journeymen, who are
going to go on to become masters. It's just impossible. So the whole
guild system could not compete with them; the whole guild system could
not adapt itself to factory work. You had new technologies which could
not be used by the old system.

Now I claim that there are bits of elements similar to that in the
present as well. You have the old system becoming, the old system
first generating the new one. It's becoming increasingly hard for the
old system to produce software products. There are many products -
especially ones that require cooperation of some kind, that require
some kind of sharing, even commercially, that simply can't be produced
under commercial constraints. And you see attempts at organization of
standards bodies purely by software companies with one another, and
the things break down. [some words are hard to hear] They are just
inherently very, very bad at doing anything that requires real
cooperation with one another. So you have some kinds of products, and
I think this is software products and I think it's going to increase
in the future, that will exist as free software that do not exist as
proprietary software, and won't ever exist as proprietary software.
Second, and this is especially for Stefan here, I would say that as
software industries become the leading sector of the economy, in many
ways they're a sector which is not really producing profits; they're a
sector which is taking profits from other parts of the economy. When,
say, you have a company which is using something simple like Word on a
large scale in their offices, the more they pay for Word, the more
their profits are reduced, the more the software houses' profits are
increased; but it's just the reshuffling of profits from one sector to
another. It's not, on the whole - commercial software, I do not
believe, is on the whole, a large-scale creator of profits in itself.
It's a reorganizer, redistributor of profits held by monopoly and the
law of copyright, though this is not the standard Oekonux opinion, and
I know Stefan disagrees totally with this point. I said I wouldn't say
much.

[Audience member speaks]

Seaman: Well for example, if have a factory, if I own a factory making
washing machines and I have offices that need standard software: I
have spreadsheets, I have Word, I have et cetera, I have Windows
itself, which I've paid the licenses for. That washing machine company
makes a profit. The part of the profit that goes in overheads - I have
to spend so much on my administration, on my staff costs, and part of
that is going to software. If you've gone back, say, 30 years, I would
have had a typing pool that sat there; I would have employed maybe 50
women - if it's a large factory, I employ 50 women - who sit there and
type all day. Okay. So a proportion of my profits is being subtracted
to go there. Somebody comes along and says, "Oh, you can do that with
software: you can get rid of your staff who have been employed just to
do that; you can spread the job out so that everybody does a bit of
it; and you can save yourself money." Because the software would cost
less than it costs to employ the typing pool. So, I have a kind of
upper bound on the price of the software; if the supplier says "I'll
charge you so much it costs - I'll charge you as much as it costs to
employ your typing pool", I won't pay. So the price has got to be
lower than that. It's got to be less than it would cost me, say, to
employ somebody to write my own software to do it. So there are a
series of bounds, limits on how much the price can be. But it's not
completely limited;

[Audience member speaks]

Seaman: So my washing machine company is making profits from selling
washing machines; part of that profit is going to Microsoft or
whoever. If that's within one country, what is also happening is you
have entire countries which do not produce software. So in that case
you have the profits coming from an entire country being moved out
into the States or into parts of Europe and so on. So that's where the
profits are coming from.

[Audience member speaks]

Seaman: It's similar but it's not - I don't know. Can I spend five
minutes on this and add it to the end of my allowed time?

[Audience member speaks]

Seaman: Yes, it's similar, but it's also different. If I buy a machine
to help, say the computer itself; I've bought two things in my office;
I now have - instead of my typing pool I have 10 computers and I have
Word, et cetera, or these computers. Now, not allowing for Moore's
law, just saying I could potentially keep the computers for the next
20 years - eventually they'll wear out, the cathode ray tubes will
break down; the chips will start overheating and so on; they'll need
to be replaced. You can handle that perfectly conventionally in terms
of Marxist economics by saying, "that's fixed capital; the value of
the fixed capital bit by bit has been lost". It's not actually being
transferred to my profit though, because it's still part of my office,
it's not...

[Audience member speaks]

Seaman: Yeah.

[Audience member speaks]

Seaman: In production. I'm not talking about production. I'm talking
about the administrative office. This is something that is only
necessary to keep the accounts because I have to sell it, my washing
machines for a certain price.

[Audience member speaks]

Seaman: Well, yes. It's the combination of the two things that go
completely together. That it doesn't wear out and that it's always
reproducible. So I could just make another copy any time I need
another copy. That's the core part of my argument, yeah. I realize
there are complications with this, but I'm not really capable of
dealing with the whole thing about what is productive labor, what is
non-productive labor in the office without writing a book about it; I
don't know if anybody is. Yeah, sorry...

[Audience member speaks]

Seaman: Personally - and this is, again, pretty much the same in
spirit - I think that the value of that software is the value of the
CD that it's on, it's the value of the work that went into copying the
CD, and so on; and is absolutely minimal. So, in my opinion, nearly
all of the price of that comes purely from laws which allow monopolies
over software, it comes from copyright laws and so on. That's what
gives firms the ability to charge any price over the cost of the CD.
If you go to Russia, you could go to Moscow and look around the
markets. You'll find software - I don't know if this is still true,
but the last time I was there was a few years ago - people really did
not care about laws on copyright and so on. So they would freely copy
software, and you would find whatever piece of software you wanted in
the market very, very easily: perfectly good, no problems with it; and
it would sell for a price. The price was quite small. Maybe it's fifty
Euros, or a hundred - do I mean 50 Euros? - no, not fifty Euros, sorry
- converting from pounds to Euros. Maybe a Euro for a CD, or 5 Euros
for a CD, something like this. So I think that, yes, there is an
actual price, and that was it. That's the price of the true market,
the market where copyright laws and so on have been taken away. As
soon as you add copyright laws in, then the prices goes back up to 500
pounds for a piece of software. Yeah, Stefan's...

[Stefan speaks]

Seaman: I think that there's two separate things there. First, I
disagree with the second thing; I don't think that's the reason for
most software industry in Russia. I think there is a software industry
in Russia, and that it's just not that kind of software industry. The
first thing is a real problem for me. In my opinion, which I cannot
justify very, very well, but my guess is that producing software is
something like, say, designing this tap. Writing software is something
like designing this tap. When I buy the tap, I really do not expect to
be taking much account into the work that went into creating this
design. Sure, there was work that went into creating this design, but
it's quite a small thing, compared with what... I mean, for me as a
consumer, what I think I'm buying is, I am buying the matter that went
into this, somebody's work in the mine to dig out the metal that went
into this; I'm paying for the cost of the machines that stamped this
out; I'm paying for the wages that were paid to the man who has to
stand by the machine stamping these out all day; and for me the
design, I think, is going to be a very small part of this cost. And I
think, for me I think the same thing applies to software. The CD, the
labor that goes into ... for me, it's more of a miracle the labor that
goes into creating the CD, because I have this piece of complex
chemical, stamped in an incredibly intricate pattern, that is produced
by machines which are so easy to use you can just set it. I don't need
to do anything; I can send the electronic part of the machine that
produces the CD. For me, that's the miracle: the fact that that can be
done so cheaply, for so little money. I don't find the fact that the
value of the design of something is so small surprising.

[Audience member speaks]

Seaman: I'm only talking about commodity software. I don't mean the
majority of software is written for a specific purpose; it's written
to do something by somebody who's paid a wage to do that. That is not
what I'm talking about; I'm talking about software that is sold on the
market. So I'm talking about things like Word, which is sold millions
and millions and millions of times. I'm not talking about something
that one author [words that are hard to hear] package which only makes
sense for my firm, and no other firm, that was written by my employee
for my firm. That's a separate issue that I...

[Audience member speaks]

Seaman: Okay, so...

[Audience member speaks]

Seaman: Okay. I'm happy to talk after that. As you can hear, I'm not -
I don't have something completely coherent to say in answer to those
questions, just a set of opinions.

[Audience member speaks]

Seaman: Okay, so you have a market; you have some elements of the old
system being unable to actually continue making a profit in the
leading sector of its economy without the help of quite repressive,
and increasingly repressive laws, that as far as I can see are going
to go on to become even more repressive and interfering in ever-larger
areas of peoples' lives, that go well beyond these non-material
products themselves. You have people working completely outside that
system producing products which become very difficult for the old
system to produce and you have the old system being forced by standard
economic reasons to take up the new products. You have free software
working its way into the old economy, spreading throughout it at quite
a high rate, not just people; partly this is because firms are,
especially over the last couple of years, have been forced to reduce
their IT costs, so there is a big temptation, especially for the
bigger firms, to say "Well, why can't we use free software instead of
paying for the new Microsoft licensing system?" So that's happening.
You have companies that are starting to say, "How can we as a small
company compete with the big software houses?" One way to do that is
to use free software as a kind of tool for competition. So you have an
increasing amount; and this applies to IBM, which in a sense is an
absolutely enormous company, and in another sense, compared to
Microsoft, in one specific market is quite a small company. If they
want to compete with Microsoft in that area, then using free software
is a useful tool for them. But in doing so, they bring free software
practices inside their own companies; they start to lose control. This
gets to a point where, to some extent, managers just can no longer
make arbitrary decisions about the form of software, about the
contents, about the way it's developed, because they can't alienate
the external people who work with them; they have to conform to their
ideas, practices of free software developers. So you have the new
system spreading back into the old, and starting to affect it.

But the new system is still very, very much dependent on the old one,
because the new system is still only a fragment; it's only affecting
immaterial goods at the moment, not material goods. For each one of
those points that make free software a different mode of production or
a fragment of a different mode of production, different from the old
one, you have a dependence. You have people working without wages for
those people: they need to eat. They need money. They need food, they
need an income from the old system. That is the most obvious, biggest
dependence. The second one is, it depends on people owning their own
means of production, having their own computers. Now that means mass
production; that means the computers have to be so cheap that I can be
paid, I can take the price of the computer out of my wage without
really suffering from it. So that means that either somebody,
somewhere else in the world, is working for very low wages, or you
have production on a very, very large scale to reduce the costs, and
that means maybe somebody not working for low wages, but somebody
probably doing quite a boring job creating them. So that's the second
dependence. The third one is communication, is mediation by
technology. I don't own the technology. If I want to talk to you over
the Internet, then I'm going over wires that we don't own together,
which means there's always potential for somebody else in the middle
to say, "Let's interfere with this communication in some way. Let's
not allow encryption on it". Or "Let's charge people so much that they
can't afford to use it." Or whatever. It's an aspect that is not under
our control.

[Audience member speaks]

Seaman: No, what I want to do is, I should have said in the beginning:
this is in three parts. That was the introduction. The next thing I
want to do is to look at those dependencies and finally suggest some
things that are happening to change the situation. Out of those
dependencies, I'm going to talk mainly about work. But the other two -
the second two dependencies - the manufacturer and the networks -
aren't stable. The networks are the smallest of our problems in a way
because the solution is already potentially visible and it is
wireless. In an emergency we have FidoNet. There was FidoNet before.
We can create something to bypass it. If they really, really somehow
mess things up for us in the existing physical infrastructure, we have
ways around it. And we may have ways around it even without doing
that. We may be able to create our own through wireless. You want to
talk to [person's name that is hard to hear] about Consume, which is a
London-based organization who are trying to network London in a
wireless way, independent of the commercial Internet, then okay, fine.
Then you have two people who are really - one person who's really
involved with that at the moment here so ask them about it.

Okay, so the first of the dependences is what I want to talk most
about, is work, and how that affects free software. This is one point
where having the overhead would be really a help. There's a chart in
the FLOSS survey which shows what people working in free software do.
And they - I guess everybody knows the free software - the FLOSS
survey; some of you were here this morning when Richard Ghosh was
talking about it. This was a survey of software developers which
included some questions about what people did for a living. And, in my
opinion, was, I think, confirmed that this morning, that people who
write free software, writing free software is strongly correlated with
both working in the software industry and working in the parts of the
software industry which uses free software to some extent. It's not
100% correlated, and there are a small minority of people who are not
in that situation, but generally, creating free software correlates
with working in the software industry. So how to [some words that are
hard to hear] the free software writers? [Sound of writing on a board]
They surveyed, they had employed 65% who were so small I missed it,
unemployed 2%, students, this chunk, and "I do not work, but I'm not
unemployed" was another 2%, and the remaining - the second percent
were self-employed, which was 14%. Now that is a very large proportion
compared with most; if you took - I'm not sure what it is exactly,
especially here in Germany, what the proportion of self-employed
people there is taken over the economy as a whole. It is not going to
be 14%. This survey was mostly Europeans: they had 12% of American
respondents; I think if they had gotten the equivalent American jobs,
I would guess the self-employed fraction would be even larger than
this. There are a very large proportion of developers who move between
programming for a company and becoming consultants, and back into
programming for a company, to doing freelance to having small
companies of their own, people setting up companies who have 2 or 3
people, and so on.

[Audience member speaks]

Seaman: At the moment it's not self-sustaining. Yes, I agree with you
[on] that and I think that a big problem is to make it
self-sustaining. At the moment, I'm saying that it's not
self-sustaining. Because it's not self-sustaining it's dependent,
heavily dependent on the old system, and in ways that affect it quite
strongly. So what I want to talk about now is how it affects it, and
this I think is one of the ways. Now this is something that I think,
again, you may very well disagree with this, but I don't know, I
wanted to ask people what they thought about this idea.

So you have free software developers [sound of writing on a board].
You have employed people. A subset of that are free software
developers. A subset of that are programmers; a subset of those are
free software developers and you have - whoops, this... This one
should be smaller than that one. Maybe I'll take [sound of erasing and
rewriting] Now, [sound of writing] So now programmers, and in there is
a subset of those producing free software. So there's at least two
different groups involved. People producing free software generally
feel themselves to be a kind of unity. We are a group in ourselves.

Looking at self-employed generally - the politics of the
self-employed, small businessmen, this is, if you were really going to
go to town on Marxist terminology, we'd say "petit-bourgeoisie". What
the typical political, general ideologies of the petit-bourgeoisie is
probably going to be fairly conservative on the whole. We do have some
radicals, but the kind of radical ideas you get from that area were,
traditionally I'd suppose, Proudhon, to give an obvious 19th-century
example coming from that area of the coppers, the ideologies of the
coppers and so on. Ideas of, "We want complete freedom from state
control. We don't want to be paying taxes for these scrounges. We
don't want the state interfering with our goods. We can survive on our
own, thank you very much". You get these on the radical end of this,
this social group, you tend to get quite anarchist ideas of a very
particular type which I guess nowadays, especially in the States would
be described as Libertarian and usually with the word capitalist
added. Libertarian capitalist ideas of freedom, freedom from taxes in
particular, but freedom in general, the freedom from state
interference. This is supposed to be self-employed, small, very small
businesses, people working freelance, surviving on their own.

[Audience member speaks]

Seaman: Okay, yeah, okay, forget this. This was - I don't care what we
call these people, I'm saying that I think that you can treat it as a
social group. It's not a coherent social group, but it's not the same;
taking that group as a whole, you tend to have different political
attitudes from people in steady jobs, especially people in State
employment, people in the universities and so on, who tend to have
different political attitudes. In the States, you get people on this
side, maybe if they're on the left they tend to be liberal in the
American sense of "liberal", and - say you've got people working in
MIT like Chomsky, or Stallman and so on; you tend to get fairly
left-wing - not necessarily radical, but fairly left-wing in general
type of attitude, which is not anti-state in the way that the groups
on the other side are often anti-state, even though they're not rabid
anarchists who go around throwing bombs or anything, there is just in
general attitude against State interference which isn't necessarily
present here.

[Audience member speaks]

Seaman: I work for a company with four employees. We used to have
nearly twenty; now we have four. We worry an awful lot about profits
and how the company will survive, how to pay our wages next month. I
would classify my particular company in this group; although I'm an
employee, I think it's very small and that my employer works with me.
He programs as well; we generally work together; but he is my
employer. He pays me a wage, and if we're not making a profit he
doesn't pay me a wage. And that's happened; that why we're four and
not twenty. So that's one person, so I don't know how... I do know
personally quite a large number of people in similar situations, so...
OK, this is slightly... can I ask how many people know people working
in programming in that kind of situation: very small company, but...
How many people know programmers working in small companies is what
I'm asking. Ten, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, right, thank you. How
many people know programmers working in places like IBM and so on,
places where programmers have to turn up every morning in a tie, who
work in a big office in a cubicle-type system? One, two, three, four,
five. Okay, so in this random selection we have a slight majority for
that side. I don't know if that means anything.

[Audience member speaks]

Seaman: Do you think that my description of Libertarian capitalist
ideas is going more with this kind of group, including your completely
free-lance guy applies, or not? Do you think that the completely
free-lance guy is just not in this picture?

[Audience member speaks]

Seaman: Yes. So there's definitely a left and a right side to here. I
would say there is [sound of writing on a board] on this side labor
traditions of all times. Unemployed, liberal as a central, and there
are also conservative traditions. So there are range on both sides. I
think - in my opinion, my guess is that free software producers are
generally pushed towards the more left-wing of... that's that; that's
a big question. Why it goes that way, and not that way. I don't know.
Maybe, I think, this is also very biased, but a lot of my impressions
of what I read about what's happening in the States rather than in
Europe, just because more is published.

[Audience member speaks]

Seaman: People move; this is in no way rigid. People move across
between the boundaries back and forth all the time. The thing that I'm
trying to get to with this, though, is to say that, "Is it possible
that this then reacts back, [sound of writing on a board] not here?"
Now this is no way; these free software and open source in no way no
way coincide with Libertarian capitalism and liberal MIT-type ideas,
but they have some kind of relationship with... they are... These are
independent ideas; these are ideas of the free software movement. I
would guess that they're affected by having - in fact we have large
numbers of Libertarian capitalists, or we have large numbers of
Richard Stallman types around, not that there are large numbers of
Richard Stallman [laughter]... say "Thank God!"... but there are
people sort of working in universities and so on who have similar
ideas about other parts, other aspects of life, not the free software
side.

So, at the risk of being even more ridiculous than saying that these
people are petit-bourgeois, saying this is an alliance of two
fragments of a class. It's a "workers and peasants" alliance. But it's
an alliance of a sort. It's an alliance between people who are making
their incomes from two slightly different sources. Although they're
both working within software, they're making their incomes from
slightly different sources. But it's an alliance that holds together.
It has a permanent tension in it, because of the influence of the
ideas from outside. This tension between open source and free software
is there, and it's going to stay there, because it's renewed by its
dependence on their jobs, and people [making a] living through
actually slightly different situations from one another, outside free
software. The tensions is going to stay there. There's no point in
saying, "Let's destroy the idea of open source because it's wrong, and
we all know that free software is the true savior". There is no point
in saying, "Free software completely destroys the possibility of
making a living out of open source software, let's kill Richard
Stallman". Neither is going to go away. There's permanently reproduced
as part of this alliance between two slightly different groups which
holds together in spite of it. And that alliance that these two ends
of the spectrum reflect the fact that this is an actual working
alliance of two groups. It's possible that it will get pushed too far,
and at some point, it will split. And I really hope that doesn't
happen. I don't think it's particularly likely to happen. This - I
said at the beginning that a lot of this is reflected in the arguments
with Oekonux - this is partly an answer to the Lessig argument. Not an
answer but a question. It's this possible valid, other way of looking
at it. Not saying, "These people are right and those people are
wrong," but "This relates two slightly different ways of making a
living, of surviving, and still managing to produce free software".
And it's going to stay there, so there's no point in one side trying
to kill off the other. It doesn't mean that it can't - if Richard
Stallman stops arguing for free software, then we have a major
problem, because that would also kill off this alliance. If Eric
Raymond gets shot by some idiot on the farther right... [laughter]
Well, maybe not so much [words that are hard to hear]. Anyway, so
that's one impact of the fact - as you were saying - this is not
self-sustaining, it is dependent on the old economy. So the old
economy has an impact back on it, even into the ideology of the free
software.

The next thing I wanted to point out - this one I can't really draw on
the board, I'm afraid, so I'll just tell you what I did. Free software
is not totally independent of the business cycle. I thought it might
be. I thought it might - well, I wanted to - when I originally started
this, I thought I'll do something to show that although there is a
dependence, free software does not suffer from a business cycle;
that's already something to show that it's a slightly different mode
of production. To me, that's the key, recognizing thing about
capitalism: it has this weird business cycle which nobody at all seems
to be able to explain properly, but it's there. So what I did was, I
went to Freshmeat and got all the stats for Freshmeat of the projects
that were added over the life of Freshmeat, to see whether it
reflected the current downturn in the economy and in IT and commercial
IT in particular, hoping that it would show a line like that. But it
didn't. The first thing I did was, I looked at free software, just
entries into Freshmeat. There's a period, going up to 1999, where it's
very low and it suddenly goes up; that's just Freshmeat; they had a
change in the layout and in doing so they destroyed a lot of their own
data, the time stamps on their database entries, that's my guess. So
there's the first part of the data which is rubbish, and then from
late 1999 to now, it's flat, almost flat; a round, steady 500 new
projects added per month. A lot of rubbish on Freshmeat; there are
things that get on there that never get updated; but this was already
taking out anything that didn't have a free software license. And the
other things - although when you read Freshmeat you think there's an
awful lot here without a free software license, in fact when you count
them, it is actually a very, very small proportion. So I'll remove
those anyway. So the next thing I did was say, "Well, how alive are
these projects? Let's only count projects that are being put on
Freshmeat and have been updated at least once since they've been on
there". I don't care when; it could have been put on there and then
updated a week later. It's a sign that somebody used it, got back and
said "You've got a bug in that. Didn't work. Please change it". So, at
least once is a criterion.

And what happens is, you look at that, you have 2000, the first half
of 2000 is fairly flat, the second half of 2000, beginning in 2001, it
nosedives. It goes from 450 down to 200 entries above; and over the
last [year], over 2002, it's stabilized again slightly, very slightly,
which to me reflects my experience of what's happened with the general
software industry. Now this is very odd for me, because the FLOSS
survey said unemployment plays no part in free software. Basically,
people in free software don't get out of work; and my guess,
especially for people I've noticed, is that people who are out of work
treat it as temporary. And the first thing they do is to put more time
into writing free software anyway. But it appears that that's not the
case, that free software is still, somehow, dependent on the business
cycle. Freshmeat is not the most reliable source of data so I'm sure
there would be better ways of looking at this. I would like to know if
anybody knows of any other surveys that have tried to look that kind
of thing, whether it has broken free of the business cycle or not.
Yep.

[Audience member speaks]

Seaman: I think if the question was something like, "Are you finding
it easy to make a living at the moment?" Then you might find that the
people who said, "No, it's difficult, because I had one contract for 3
days last week and I've got something I might do for a week next
month", and so on, would actually be quite high at the time when
unemployment generally for other people is high but, yeah, it depends
on the question I think you're right.

[Audience member speaks]

Seaman: Freshmeat doesn't keep that information; you can't get it. Or
if they keep it they don't distribute it. So, I didn't...

[Audience member speaks]

Seaman: There are other very silly things about looking at Freshmeat,
for your data on this. One is, that for example, Linux is on
Freshmeat; it's one entry. So is a tool to visit a particular website
and download a page, download an IDF [?] thing that displays in a box,
that's also one entry. You can't compare those two things. But just
counting them like I did compares them. So it's not a good way of
doing it. I think maybe the research that some, I forgot his name, but
this morning... Robles the Spanish speaker this morning what they're
doing. I think that maybe it might be possible to get more sensible
answers because they're looking at lines of code and lots of other
measures. If they include data information, as well, then it would be
possible to go back to that for this kind of information, then.

Okay, one other thing. I think I've taken too long, I'm going to skip
some bits. So, for instance, there is this big dependence there, and
clearly it's something that is going to stay there, but the ways that
we may find a way around parts of the dependence, like for example
wireless, things that may help to make free software stronger. They're
not things in themselves that are going to spread free software, from
being free software to being free everything. So we still have the
question, "How do we get from free software to free everything?" In
other words, "How do you get ways that people produce free software
reproduced in creating other things, in creating material goods?"

Now I would claim that it has been done before, that people have
produced material goods on free software principles before, and quite
regularly, but for very short periods of time. Basically, during every
left-wing revolution this century, there has been a period where it's
happened. It doesn't happen for very long: if the revolution loses, it
gets squashed; if the revolution wins, it's being squashed; but it
happens for a short period. There is an enormous amount of creativity,
of wanting to do things, that is in people. So this is something that
does not seem to get documented. I thought this would be so easy to
find out about, getting lots of examples of from books. I found it
very hard to get many examples of this from books, but I'm quite
certain it's something that happened. I can tell from my own
experience where I have seen, for example, people working in a Persian
car factory that was under worker's control and were getting poor
quality input parts coming from a French factory; communicated with
the French factory and telling them, "We're running this now. Please,
we're having major problems because you're sending us bad parts". And
they got good parts, fixed it. Those same people then found that
Persia didn't want anything to do, after a few months with the
factory, with worker's control. They went around the area and said,
"What is most in demand here?" And this was a city on the edge of a
farming area. And they got the reply that there was a real shortage of
fridges, so they converted - especially for people who were in the
local farms that found fridges too expensive to buy - there was a need
for fridges. They converted the car plant to fridge production. God
knows how they did that. I knew people who worked in there, but I
don't know anything about how the thing actually worked. All I can say
is, during that time, people were working on what I think of as free
software principles: they were cooperating with one another to do
things, asking one another what they wanted. I have no idea what the
techniques are involved. I know a little bit about software, I know
absolutely nothing about fridge manufacture. The fridges were a
complete coincidence; it really was fridges, not washing machines; but
it was very, very close.

I couldn't tell them how to do that; people find their own solutions;
people in that situation find their solutions. Yep.

[Audience member speaks]

Seaman: Sorry.

[Audience member speaks]

Seaman: I'm sorry, that's my fault, because I asked for the talk to be
mixed with the questions, so I was expecting no questions at the end.
I thought I could have longer.

[Audience member speaks]

Seaman: Okay, so I'll carry on, let me see how it goes.

So, another example which I have seen more of - I should say this, to
give this some context, this was in Portugal in 1975 - people building
their own houses, people living in slum areas, with cooperation from
architects, getting together, and on a really large scale, actually
building housing estates. Very good housing estates, housing estates
that I have found - I have relations who are living in one of these
houses still. It's very solid; they built it very well. But it was
built by local people; it was built with the design that was done
together with architects. So there were people who came and gave their
skills as well. But it wasn't somebody coming in from outside and
saying, "I'm doing a bit of slum clearance here. I'm gonna give you
new houses." People actually built the houses themselves.

So, I mean these things can be done; but, I've said, that has been
happening in the middle of revolution. We have here a group of people,
mostly with slightly to the left end but fairly conventional ideas.
You tell people in free software, "You are gonna go out and spread
these ideas to other sectors of the economy; the way you do that is by
joining your local ultra-left party" [laughter] "and start a
revolution." Yes? Maybe 2% of these people will go, maybe, if you're
very lucky. Or you make a lot of noise about it and break this splint.
It's too big a jump. You can't get there from where we are now. Not
only that, but I think the whole idea would be completely against free
software principles. For me, the big part about free software
principles or the kind of principles that were described in the talk
before this, which was talking about music sharing, is that people
decide for themselves how they're gonna do things. They don't have
somebody coming in from outside to tell them how to do things. And
that concludes: they don't have free software developers going into
factories and saying, "You change the way you do things; we know how
to do it better." It's not that. Whoever does it, that is not the way
things work.

So, what you have to be talking about instead is some way of actually
spreading from this small social group here, to larger social groups.
Now these are gonna be - if you're starting to talk about spreading to
other groups, and they're probably still gonna be in these circles of
unemployed, self-employed still, although not in the programming
sector. You're talking about people who don't necessarily know how to
program, or have any interest in programs, programming, or want to
become programmers. If there's going to be a world based on free
software principles, it will not be a world which is entirely composed
of programmers. Most people find it incredibly tedious and boring and
don't even want to understand it. So you have to talk about spreading
in stages from this; you have to talk about defining, how is it
possible to get to other groups? Eventually, you hope it will have
spread far enough that the ideas and practices become commonplace for
people. And then, the person stuck in the factory making washing
machines can say, "Well, yes, but in the factory I do this, but when
I'm outside here I want to listen to some music, I do something quite
different. And if I need a program for my computer and it doesn't
work, I ask somebody and they tell me. Why is it in here that I do
everything by orders?" And once large chunks of people's lives have
become the other way, then there's the possibility that they might
start to think, "How do I organize this other stuff that I'm doing
differently?" But it's not going to come all at once. So...

[Audience member speaks]

Seaman: I'm talking about the third one. I agree with - both of those
are possibilities, but I'm talking about - the examples I want to give
are two other things. So, I'm gonna stick to my examples and then
maybe if it doesn't answer you ask again in the end.

Okay, so there's a question of spread. How does it spread to new
groups? Well, to some extent I would say the work is being done for
us. The kind of things that Alan was talking about yesterday with the
law, for example, you talked about Brazil and the law in Brazil; and I
had an email about a year ago from a guy in Brazil; I'll read you the
chunk of the email. "The police have been implacable here lately. They
come in with their foot in the door, a 765 in the hand, and get
everybody up against the wall. Next they get the IT staff, search
them, and take all the software. Then they very politely call the boss
and ask about the licenses. If there's even one missing, he gets a
charge of violation of author's rights, illegal profiteering, and God
knows what else. In this government, they want to get rid of the image
of Brazil as a pirate's haven. And there's a lot of money in it for
the lawyers and the BSA, and the police get a cut as well." And what
you were talking about was Sklyarov and so on, you were talking about
individuals. That's what's happening here, in America, in the rich
countries. What's happening in places like Brazil is mass repression,
because of Microsoft. And the reaction of those particular people -
this was somebody in a group of small engineering companies in an
industrial state - most [some words are hard to hear] engineering and
electronics. What they've done, is they've started working with free
software to produce their electronics stuff. They have given a real
big boost to one of the main EDA software tools, gEDA, they've been
producing standards. They've been more concerned because they're
immediately involved in manufacturing. They've been much more
concerned with sticking to standards for things like layout,
footprints for electronic devices and so on, than the original authors
were. They've internationalized it, because a lot of them can't speak
English, and so they needed it in Brazilian. Because they
internationalized it, it's in Brazilian; there are now also Polish,
and other versions. But the actual basic work of putting inside the
possibility of localization in place was done by them. And there is
now a small movement, a fairly thriving small community of people -
their own websites, their own communication and so on in the small
industrial states in this part of Brazil. And that's just one example.
This kind of thing is happening. The fact that to maintain their
profits they have to keep up with these kind of repressive laws has
such bad effects on so many people that it's absolutely forcing them
into this kind of situation where they have to start doing things.
Then again it's still on the edge of software, but it's moving
slightly further from pure software, to a situation which is more -
and this is small companies; it's the edge of engineering companies.
It's not a radical jump, but it's an illustration of a move towards
something more different, something further from traditional software.

Another example of the way they are actually doing work for us. This
is a quote from a Microsoft survey, so this is a Microsoft press
release from April the 16th this year. "Microsoft commissioned IDC to
conduct in-depth examinations of the IT industries in 28 countries and
regions. From 1995 to 2001 IT spending grew in each of the 28
countries and regions at compound annual rates ranging from 4.1% in
Japan to 43.7% in Venezuela. Latin America's IT spending was
particularly significant. In addition to Venezuela, Mexico, Colombia,
and Costa Rica were in the top five countries in the world with a
highest percentage of growth. The fifth country was China." Okay, so
this is spending on IT in countries which do not have a native IT
industry. 90% of that growth, that money is going outside the country
- mainly to Microsoft, some to HP or a few other companies, but I
would bet that most of that money has gone to Microsoft.

So from that list of countries, if you look what's happened, the
topmost spending one, Venezuela. Venezuela is a poor country. It has
significant political problems at the moment. They can't afford to be
spending that kind of money. It is the only country in the world where
the Minister of Technology has announced that their technology plans
for the future are to be based on free software. Okay, I don't know
how realistic that is, but the fact that they've been pushed to that
situation certainly says something about the importance of this level
of profits being shifted out of the country.

Okay, where else was on the list? Mexico. Mexico was the first country
to have a law of the use of free software. It was badly implemented;
it was done from above; they hadn't yet learned that these things have
to be done with local Linux User Groups and so on from below, at the
same time; and Vincente Fox is now - this year he was Chief Guest of
Honor at Microsoft's International Statesman Award - I can't remember
exactly what the meeting was called. So in Mexico things went forward
and then went back. But the fact that they were the first country that
I know of with a free software law of some kind is still significant.
They're in the top five list, the top five spenders.

Colombia, the next one, they have a law on the use of free software by
the State pending at the moment. It's not - I don't know whether it
will be passed, but it's a very developed law. It's not a rabid thing
that a few local people have thrown together. It's something that has
come out of long discussions in Latin America, and long attempts with
other groups, particularly coming from Argentina, on what the best way
to get together laws on use of free software by the State are. It's an
extremely practical law, but that doesn't necessarily mean it will be
passed.

China: China, as far as I know, doesn't have any laws on free software
but they've certainly been making moves to use Linux on a larger scale
within the State. The only one out of that list of top spenders that,
as far as I know where it's had no free software effect is Costa Rica.

So, the pressure on a lot of countries is to move towards free
software, use of free software in the State, partly on purely cost
grounds. That's the immediate push. There are a lot of ethical grounds
that they can justify it on as well. In particular, that citizens have
a right to be able to get at State information without having to buy
copies of Word or whatever. Things should be in accessible format;
it's a duty to the taxpayer that where there is information, whether
of processes that citizens have a right to control, that things need
to be in a transparent format. That's been applied to vote-counting
and I think has been used in Mexico, not as a general rule about using
free software, but as a specific thing where the vote-counting
software was actually made open to the public and actually looked at;
and people said, "Yes, there's nothing in here to rig the vote in this
particular software." And there are arguments about the information
being shipped out of countries, whether there are back doors in
software, and Microsoft has back doors in software, and that software
is running in a government department, does that mean that Microsoft
can then look at what's happening in the government department. And
that also applies to things like Word which keep hidden records of
information and so on.

So there are a lot of other arguments apart from the argument with
money. And one of the main ones being, "How do these countries develop
their own software industry?" They're not going to produce a local
Word which sells as a proprietary product. Brazil will not produce
Word. Well, Brazil's a bad example; it might be big enough to do it.
Colombia is not going to produce its own version of Word which sells
worldwide and will compete with Microsoft. They can't create a
software industry that way. They can have the government which needs
free software for its own purposes, which appoints local firms to
create that free software, which has people who know free software
well and have a worldwide reputation; which has consulting firms which
people come to from other local countries that people cross the border
from other Latin American countries if they want to hire people and so
on. There is a visible way of creating local software industries
through free software that is really closed to a lot of countries
through the proprietary software route. So that's another incentive
for them to do this.

Now, that in itself doesn't magically bring free software principles
to peoples' lives. If the government - if my government adopts a law
saying, "Everyone working in local government offices must use free
software," it would be a complete imposition of everybody, and it
would be a complete disaster. People have spent quite a lot of time
learning to use Word, and they're quite proud that they can. In a lot
of cases, people who do not otherwise have any interest in computers
and have to use them for work should not be treated like that. They
cannot suddenly be told, from above, "You must do this". And in fact,
they can't be told, "You will do this", because what immediately
happens is you are gonna have breakdown. That to some extent is what
happened in Mexico, as I'm told with the school system where the
schools were suddenly sent out huge stacks of Red Hat CDs and told,
"You have no IT budget this year, you're using Red Hat instead, these
copies are free". There were no - there weren't the people with Linux
experience in the schools to actually use it, so it backfired, and
that was one of the reasons that Microsoft could very easily take
advantage of that situation to come in, and Microsoft now uses Mexico
as their standard argument why free software use by States is a bad
thing. I don't have detailed personal knowledge of this, so there may
be that I'm mistakenly mis-repeating some of the things that Microsoft
said that aren't true. But this is my impression of what happened
there.

So for this to work, you need it to come from below; and the most
successful cases where free software is now in use by the State are
actually on much lower levels than national. They're not national
laws. In fact, there is - at the moment, most of the national laws
look like they're fairly unlikely to pass. There are about thirty
countries with laws, national laws on the use of free software by the
State but I don't think that most of them, most of those laws will
pass. What has passed are laws on the local level, at provincial
level. In Brazil, there is Rio Grande del Sur, which is a largish
province which uses free software by policy. In Spain, there is
Estremadura, which is one of the poorer areas in Spain, which has a
policy of using free software. Now in those cases - also in Venezuela,
there's a similar situation where the change has been very closely
tied in with local Linux [User] Groups, and local Linux Groups have
been largely responsible for saying what's possible and what isn't,
and working with local people to work out how to make the transition
from one type of software to the other without causing major problems
for everybody. The Estremadura example, they have a localized Debian
distribution in the local dialect, which as I understand Microsoft was
not prepared to produce any versions of anything, because the dialect
is not that different from Spanish and it's not used by huge numbers
of people. There's been a big argument in Spain over this, especially
in Catalonia where the government paid Microsoft to develop localized
versions of the things, but Microsoft didn't do it. And then the free
software bill was presented to Parliament; then three weeks later,
Microsoft produced a localized version. But this is a big issue of
localization in some of these smaller areas, which is something that
is so natural to free software, because free software people, [if]
they're living locally, they'll do it. It's a useful thing, it's an
easy thing, and it's a good way of getting people involved who are not
full-time programmers as well.

So in Estremadura they have their own localized Debian, and they have
- at the moment have installed 4,000 - have installed this in 4,000
machines with a target of 80,000. They're combining it with a push for
computer education in schools, where in a lot of cases they're
installing computers for the first time in many of them. These
schools, I think the target is one computer for each two students. So
they're starting from scratch, and that's the situation. They don't
have people who have to relearn large amounts. They have free access
to it; there are - they've linked it with alphabetization campaigns -
I don't know, does that make sense in German, alphabetization? -
literacy campaigns. They teach the old people who don't know how to
read and write and also don't have computing skills. There is free
training for them for Linux-based. And they used entirely local firms
for development, the idea being they were going to encourage the local
economy. And so anything specific, anything that they need that's not
avaliable generally as free software, they will try and get local
companies to cooperate with it and so on, and they're training the
teachers in using it. I have a photo of the teachers sitting there
training. They don't look very happy to me, but I think that the
difference comes after. Not the fact that they've got yet another
thing to learn - and teachers generally have too many new things to
learn, anyway, imposed on them - but at the moment they have another
thing to learn. After six months, they're going to be saying things
like, "I really need a better program to do the register", or "I would
like something that would test this particular thing that's on. How do
I find it?" The answer is, you go and ask people, you go and look
around these places where it's available for you. You do not have to
go through catalogs and rely on Microsoft and try and find out, "Can I
buy it and can I afford it?" You go and look for it; and maybe there's
somebody in the school who knows a bit better than other people, who
can actually say, "Well, I know this is not exactly what you want, but
I can change this thing to work the way you want."

So this is one of my examples of new social groups. [sound of writing]
Teachers who are maybe not going to be, mostly never going to be
full-time programmers are being brought into this. There are other new
groups within local governments who will be in the same situation.
This - the change in the law - this change in the law in some of these
countries - I think will have quite big effects if it's successfully
creating larger industries, larger software industries within those
countries. It may change the balance of software industries within
those countries. It may change the balance of it, in the number of
developers which come from the States in the First World, and the
number of developers who come from other parts of the world. But it
probably also will also continue to reproduce this split, if this
argument is correct, because there will be this same mix of some
employees, particularly some government employees, there will be some
people working in small local companies and so on. That is not going
to go away.

So should I stop there? I think I've gone on for long enough. The
other thing I was going to talk about was universities and the change
of ideology in the universities. The universities where they used to
talk about academic freedom; now people in the most diverse subjects,
including the last Nobel prize winner in biology, are talking about
sharing. They've adopted the rhetoric of free software, and it's yet
another group that's being pulled into the fold. Eventually, as the
number of groups that move in expands, eventually this will get closer
enough to the real key problems, the really difficult things -
manufacture - that people would start to say, those people themselves
will start saying, "How can we change this to work better? How can we
change this to work like everything else does, and not this way which
is broken. It's obviously broken, because everything else works, and
this doesn't."

Okay, that was a very optimistic ending. [Applause]

Announcer: So, at this point we have about twenty minutes for
discussion.

[Audience member speaks]

Seaman: Would you rather have questions or a discussion now? Because I
think I've answered everything I can say; I rather see a discussion
than...

[Audience member speaks]

Seaman: Don't I need the mine, as well? What about raw materials? Does
that argument work all the way back down the chain of parts? To the
oil that goes into the plastics? To the metal that goes into the
chassis, and so on? Does that actually apply all down the way down the
line?

[Audience member speaks]

Seaman: So you reply that we could very easily go from where we are
now to complete automation of everything, so there is not...

[Audience member speaks]

Seaman: Okay, the reason - I'm going to argue with it and you can come
back to me if I'm wrong. One of the things I'm interested in is open
source electronics. Now we have a problem with manufacture. We can
design chips - we have problems with mass production [?] but generally
we can design chips - but we can't get chips made; because to get them
made we need the volume to get the price down. Now to get that kind of
volume we need millions of pounds. There is no way for us to get that
kind of money whatsoever, although technically we know that everything
could be done. In fact, socially we can't, because money is the
barrier, but if you think you can jump around this...

[Audience member speaks]

Seaman: I'd like the URLs afterwards of anything to do with the things
you're talking about; I don't know if anybody else is interested in
it. Anybody else?

[Audience member speaks]

Seaman: I think that that's exactly the kinds of things Stefan was
talking about in birds of a feather. If you can get something together
to do a short presentation, stick it on the birds of a feather list
outside and try to get something going tomorrow.

[Audience member speaks]

Seaman: I'm idealistic on the issue that we have a world revolution
that changes absolutely everything, at which point patents become a
minor problem; but at the moment in the real world, yes. Patents,
changes to copyright law, and so on are absolutely one of the biggest
problems there is.

[Audience member speaks]

Seaman: I focus very much on people who are free software developers.
There are also - something I didn't talk about is free music, or any
other kind of culture; but I didn't talk about people like Lessig and
so on who are not developers, but are working on the legal front with
exactly the same thing, exactly the same laws. I think that most
definitely they are out there. I talk about free software because it's
what I, personally, am more into. I don't know the details of the law.

[Audience member speaks]

Seaman: This is free hardware, the electronics part of that is really
going to test the law and they don't know what's coming. They have the
same problem with the guy that I was talking about, with trying to
present a way music sharing works to businessmen; businessmen don't
understand. The same thing with patents, with designs for free chips
that are going onto the Open Cores site. Companies are looking at
those; they don't know if it's good or bad. They are not actual
production of the chips, so they're not distribution, but they enable
other people to distribute them. Should they distribute them? And they
possibly enable somebody in Taiwan to take it and run off huge numbers
of copies in their factory. Should the companies sue them? Sue Open
Cores? They'll look really bad going after a little group of people
without money. Should they encourage them? Because if people do copy
them, then it will increase the stake of their particular product,
even though they're a minor manufacturer. And that's something that's
also happened, and some people are actually encouraging it. They're
all over the place. It's not only our site that has weaknesses; they
also don't know exactly what they're doing. And they're in a much
stronger position because in theory, the law is behind them, but the
law isn't yet set up to deal with exactly this situation. And there is
going to be - I think that in the next couple of years, in a lot of
maneuvering and a lot of possibly room to outmaneuver them to some
extent.

There are also things that are not patented for other reasons, like,
for example, the only GPL processor that's around that's actually an
existing physical processor, the whole design of which is under the
GPL, is the SPARC processor. Now, the reason that's possible is
because Sun was trying to compete with Intel, and very early on before
free software really got well known, certainly before free hardware
designs, the idea got well known, SPARC thought the only way to
guarantee to get these devices second sourced is by saying, "We will
disclaim any patent rights over this architecture, we will let anybody
copy it". Now there are always going to be smaller firms in that
position as well, and that's a traditional capitalist tool for small
companies to gain entry to a market. They're not going to stop using
that. That's another point; they have this set of weak points, these
identified weak points, and we're finding ways to use them. I don't
think it's totally black. Yes, patents are a major, major problem,
much more than copyright. It's not all society...

[Audience member speaks]

Seaman: I think it's possible that it will be crushed. If it's
crushed, I think the world will be a very, very unpleasant place. Not
only for people who want to write free software, but for other
reasons. The best way not to let it be crushed is to try to carry on
with it, to try to spread it, to try to make it stronger. So yes, I
agree that it's a theoretical possibility but I don't see much to gain
in discussing it, really. Anything could go wrong. We all know that,
but...

[Audience member speaks]

Seaman: So you have two parts to what you said. The first was a
question of individuals. I'm sorry if I gave the impression I was
talking about individual things. For me, one of the important parts
about free software is that it shows that it's possible for large
numbers of people to cooperate in a very practical way to make things
together, without having a centralized authority that is imposed from
outside. And that's what I'm talking about extending it to other
things. That's what I think of with other things as well, as a core
part of it. I'm not talking about every individual going into their
own home and having some way to push a button and out comes a new
Porsche, or... I'm talking about people working together, firstly. So
I don't believe it's going backwards in terms of division of labor. I
think it's going forwards. I think it's showing that people can
cooperate without a need for an imposed authority, in very effective
ways. And that it's self-maintaining. It's more efficient. It doesn't
need a whole layer of supervisors and other people to make your life
unpleasant to force you to do it. It's a more efficient division of
labor than the old way.

The second thing, the question about politics. No, I don't think you
can avoid politics, but I think that the politics of the people
involved in the free software movement, at the moment, it's about
issues, like - particularly - law. Law is incredibly important to us
for all kinds of reasons at the moment. It's both copyright and patent
law; the thing that I was talking about in Latin American countries
isn't done by people being apolitical. It's done by people being very
political. What I don't think at the moment is, there is room for
people to say, "Let's go and try and persuade all free software
developers that they should become Marxists, or Communists, or
something". That is just, seems to me so unreal that I don't - it's
not only unreal, but I don't think it's - I can't see any way it could
be constructive or helpful, or lead to anything much.

So, I think there is a real role for politics, and if what I'm talking
about is all extremely utopian, and in the end things need a world
revolution to do it, it's just what the important thing is at the
moment. At the moment, I think the important things are things like
copyright law, patent law, and laws governing free software. That's
for me, for people looking at music; looking at, I don't know, Wi-Fi;
or looking at a whole range of other things; that may be more pressing
issues for them, but they are along the same kinds of lines. They're
not rushing out to join, to create the World Revolutionary Party.

[Audience member speaks]

Seaman: I can't think of an example. Can you explain? [Laughter]

[Audience member speaks]

Seaman: I think it's a very interesting idea; it's one I hadn't really
thought of before, but I'll go away and think about that, because...

[Audience member speaks]

Seaman: I haven't read it, but it's very much in line with what
Microsoft is doing. I wouldn't be surprised if that means that Nigeria
has a law planned [laughter]. Seriously, at the moment it's their
first reaction. Let's give money to schools because they can do it
very quickly... for doing that. As soon as they hear about the need
for free software in a country they give money to schools. Not money,
but they give software, and if they're lucky, the arrange for somebody
else to donate the equipment. They talk to somebody else, sort of like
HP, into providing the hardware, and they give what they say is
millions of dollars worth of software, which in my argument is
worthless software. [Laughter]

[Audience member speaks]

Seaman: I was trying desperately to remember this. There was an
example in The Economist where - it was an article about companies
that were trying to get together to organize, I think it was the
picture management, and they could not agree upon a standard with it,
because - this was, I think, camera companies - they couldn't agree on
standard formats for it. I don't remember the details of it. It's a
real problem. At the time I wrote that part of the talk, I had two or
three examples in my head, and they're all gone now. And generally
cooperative stuff, things like Jabber, for example, is a more general
example. You are not going to find, as far as,

[Audience member speaks]

Seaman: But the original idea of Jabber, I think that would be
developed by - because it's a protocol; the design standard would
carry any of the protocols, would carry Q board or Microsoft. That
would be in a commercial software product, and beginning with it, but
it's not those companies. Now, I'm sorry, it's something I've said. I
think it's probably true, but I haven't got a convincing example of it
at all. I think if I go away I could find one, possibly.



_________________________________
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Organization: projekt oekonux.de

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  • Graham Seaman * The Two Economies; Or: Why the washing machine question is the wrong question (was: [ox-en] Conference documentation)
    • From: Stefan Merten

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