Interesting. Recently I've seen a growth in the number of 'Open Source' publishers. My feeling at this stage is that they are largely:
1) Publishing documents which came into existence (in electronic form) without being specifically destined for formal publishing - e.g. the GIMP Manual.
2) Don't necessarily have a viable 'business model' and might well go bust in the future.
3) Target at a techno-savvy audience - more techno-savvy than the various (mostly abortive) 'E-Book' vendors that have been around for the last couple of years.
We might see a lot of hype about this in the future, but I kinda doubt it, since Open Content seems to me to have less potential for being a weapon in the inter-capitalist war than Open Source was (Open Source allowed a set of capitalists to break free from the monopolistic hold of another set of capitalists, thus moving profit from one group to another - there was an interesting case study of this on kuro5hin recently. The discursive shift from Free Software, which was a (moderately successful) attempt of programmers to fight to maintain control of the organisations of production, to Open Source, was a shift which pretty consciously moved the discourse from one useful only within a worker vs. manager fight to one useful in the inter-capitalist bunfight.).
Anyway, from my position in the belly of the beast (the company I work for is planning to leap into the open source fracas in the future), I tend to think that we're seeing a new kind of capitalism, which will give us a new kind of infrastructure, with its own potentials for subversion.
If industrial capitalism gave us abandoned warehouses which could be used for squatted social centres, what can we expect from informatic capitalism? The Internet is one clear result - I'm keeping my eyes out for other things to filch / re-use. Negri might be over-hyping a tad, but there's going to be something there.
Peter -- Peter van Heusden <pvh at egenetics.com> NOTE: I do not speak for my employer, Electric Genetics "Criticism has torn up the imaginary flowers from the chain not so that man shall wear the unadorned, bleak chain but so that he will shake off the chain and pluck the living flower." - Karl Marx, 1844 k*256^2+2083 OpenPGP: 1024D/0517502B : DE5B 6EAA 28AC 57F7 58EF 9295 6A26 6A92 0517 502B