Re: [ox-en] Open Source Projects as Voluntary Hierarchies
- From: Stefan Merten <smerten oekonux.de>
- Date: Wed, 24 May 2006 19:54:44 +0200
Hi list!
Last month (57 days ago) Stefan Merten wrote:
Last week (11 days ago) Geert Lovink wrote:
Weber, Steven (2004) The Success of Open Source. Cambridge, MA,
Harvard UP
ISBN: 0-674-01292-5, pp. 311
Sounds like a *very* interesting book and a really bright author :-) .
Indeed I think Weber understood a lot of Free Software.
I just started reading the book and from the first few pages I'm
*amazed*.
Allow me a few citations.
In the Preface:
By experimenting with fundamental notion+s id what constitutes
property, this community has reframed and recast dome of the most
basic problems of governance. At the same time,m it is remaking
the politics and economics of the software world. If you believe
(as I do) that software constitutes at once some of the core tools
and core rules for the future of how human beings work together to
cerate wealth, beauty, new ideas, and solution to problems, then
understanding how open source can change this processes is very
important.
In Chapter 1 "Propery and the Problem of Software":
I explain the creation of a particular kind of software - open
source software - as an experiment in social organization around a
distinctive notion of property. The conventional notion of property
is, of course, the right to exclude your from using something that
belongs to me. Property in open source is configured fundamentally
around the right to distribute, not the right to exclude. If that
sentence feels awkward on first reading, that is a testimony to just
how deeply embedded in our intuitions and institutions the
exclusion view of property really is.
Yes! Yes! Yes! :-) This guy really has the courage to *think*!
What would a broader version of this political economy really look
like? This book uses the open source story as a vehicle for
proposing a set of preliminary answers to that very large question.
Sound really familiar :-) I'm keen to know his answers.
Ultimately the success of open source is a political story. The open
source software process is not a chaotic free-for-all in which
everyone has equal power and influence. And is is certainly not an
idyllic community of like-minded friends i which consensus reigns
and agreement is easy. In fact, conflict is not unusual in this
community; it's endemic and inherent to the open source process. The
management of conflict is politics and indeed there is a political
organization at work here, with the standard accouterments of power,
interests, rules, behavioral norms, decision-making procedures, and
sanctioning mechanisms. But it is not a political organization that
looks familiar to the logic of an industrial-era political economy.
I'm really amazed. If the book keeps what the first few pages promise
this book seems to me like a must-read for people interested in
Oekonux :-) . (No I don't get provisions ;-) ).
Mit Freien Grüßen
Stefan
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