The libertarian ideology of the open-source people is about as deep as Trotskyism was among hippies. Give them a little bit of time and money, and suddenly the ideology disappears. The contradiction of opposing intellectual property restrictions and supporting an anacronistic Austrian view of economics has already caught up with the smart ones, and the others will deal with it when they grow up.
> And, if there is no public economic support for its development, and, as Joy
> notes, there is no way for innovators to control or make money from their
> additions, it becomes unclear who will contribute to its development. Or
> rather, it is easy to suspect that those who contribute will be heavily
> self-interested actors pushing those "open standards" in directions that
> benefit their for-profit endeavors tied to its standards.
Read slashdot.org for a while, and you will see a lot of hard-core open-source people very unhappy with the corporatisation of their community.
> In the article posted, Eric Raymond upholds the banner of the "right to
> fork" standards, which is great for techie programmers looking for cool
> code, but sucks for consumers looking for standards that are compatible
> across the board. One reason Microsoft dominates is because, however much
> it sucks, people know that Bill Gates is forcing a wide range of programmers
> to be compatible together, which makes up for its sucky standard. Since
> most open source advocates like Raymond think any public regulation to
> encourage compatible standards violates their "right to fork", they
> contribute just as much to the capitalist competitive model of production,
> just in a different business model.
Open-source people are pretty divided over how they see standards. There is an aphorism among coders: "The best thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from." Standards organisations usually require some kind of cash contribution to sit on their committees, so they tend to represent corporate interests in some ways. Still, the politics of the standards process is complicated. Microsoft often defects by selecting a working draft of a standard, building a medicre product on it quickly, then coming back to the standards committee and claiming that their version of the standard ought to become official (no matter how flawed) because they already have a user base for it.
Besides, Eric Raymond is not universally loved. His politics alienate him to a large portion of the user community.
> I frankly am more impressed with Bill Joy's history in the 1980s of building
> Sun Microsystems while working with public authorities like ARPA, the NSF
> and government contracting authorities to create public standards that help
> spread compatible UNIX standards and Internet protocols across academic and
> industry computers. That broke down in the early 90s, but it helped set the
> stage for the Internet's growth. Of course, it made Sun wealthy as well,
> but it seemed as public-interested a model, if not more so, than the new
> open source IPO advocates who spurn a strong public sector involvement far
> more than Sun did in the 1990s.
Note my e-mail address. :^) (Also note that I can't speak for my employers in any capicity whatsoever.) Sun is one of the better shops for open systems, but yes, we're in it for the money.
> If there is going to be a real socialist oriented approach to computer
> standards, it will need a large component of non-programmers and community
> activists, since at this point, most of the major programming activists are
> too enmeshed in the whole range of business deals to be speaking for
> anything other than their own general "business model", as they often now
> say.
Here I disagree. The biggest problem open source has right now is a proliferation of people who have opinions, but who don't write code. Corporate software outfits have the same problem, in the form of non-technical managers. Letting everyone in on design decisions is the road to gridlock. The current system, for all its flaws, doesn't work so badly.
A better place to look for a more socialist software market might be to try to find a way of funding free software work, without creating what is usually called a moral hazard. A "software tax" levied on balnk media, which is redistributed to open source projects on the basis of some kind of public vote might be one approach. There ought to be others.
However, the general open source policy that if you don't code, you don't get to have a say, is a good policy and an important one.
Scott Martens