>On Behalf Of Scott Martens
> > 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.
>
> 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.
At the level of code, it's a good idea; at the level of over-arching design, it is wrong, anti-democratic and plays into corporate hands, since they have the market power to control it despite the protestations of open source folks.
I don't agree with Lawrence Lessig on a lot of his views, but his basic argument that code is equivalent to regulation in the new economy is on target. And for that reason, it should be subject to exactly the democratic political controls we demand in any other area of social power.
And if you want the public to fund open source software, the democratic quid pro quo is a public role in the design-- not in the details but in the social goals that the output should serve. This is nothing radical, since this is exactly the model that shaped the Internet from the 1960s onwards as public agencies like ARPA and the NSF defined broad goals they wanted served by the new technology, provided funding and coordination, marvelled at the new ideas and possibilities produced by the coders, then encorporated these possibilities into the next round of public goals and funding specifications.
In the name of full disclosure/self-promotion, I should note that I have an article coming out on this history of public support and regulation of public-oriented software in the next issue of THE AMERICAN PROSPECT, which will have a number of articles about open source and technology. The point of a number of the articles is to refute the libertarian self-delusion that the computer industry was built without government support and regulation or that various forms of regulation (often the wrong ones) are not pervasive today.
There is actually plenty of public money going into various computer projects, but there is little connection between that funding and a sane and concentrated set of public policy goals around the evolution of the current industry. If the government coordinated existing technology funding, its own purchasing contracts and its active regulatory powers, it could shape the whole industry to serve more public goals that the industry-dominated mess we have entered.
-- Nathan newman