[ox] Manuel Castells auf dem World Social Forum 2005
- From: Hans-Gert Gräbe <graebe informatik.uni-leipzig.de>
- Date: Fri, 22 Jul 2005 12:27:08 +0200
Den Text
Open source as social organization of production and as a form of
technological innovation based on a new conception of property rights
von Manuel Castells finde ich ganz spannend:
http://www.informatik.uni-leipzig.de/~graebe/projekte/Texte/2005-wsf-Castells.pdf
Ein kleines Exzerpt aus dem Text:
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The context that surrounds the development of open source, as a social
phenomenon, a political phenomenon, and an economic phenomenon includes
at least four major features:
1) The Internet transforms the nature of the process of work, enhancing
interactivity and distribution. Network organization becomes effective,
particularly with increased telecommunications bandwidth. In the open
source form of production as important as the code itself is the process
by which it is built.
2) Open source expresses the development of new relationships between
community, culture, and commercial activity. The open source community
is based on a set of rules and shared values. In addition, from this
cultural autonomy the community relates to the rules of the capitalist
organization that characterizes the broader context. In fact, as in the
history of industrial organization, ideas create institutions, that set
up production processes. Thus, the ideas behind open source are at the
roots of a new logic of production.
3) Open surce exposes the new logic of organization of production in a
knowledge intensive economic process. The development of software is
made up of digitally encoded knowledge that combines from the bottom up
in the process of production. Furthermore, as mentioned above, open
source is an experiment in production built around a distinctive notion
of property. The traditional notion of property is based on the right to
exclude the non owners from the use of something that is owned by
someone. On the other hand, open source property is configured around
the right to distribute, not the right to exclude. This is in fact in
the tradition of "fair use" of intellectual products that are used
without securing their property. Under an extended notion of fair use,
no individual´s fair use will be permitted to constrain subsequent fair
use by another individual and for any purpose. (On "fair use", and the
transformation of the notion of intellectual property rights see the
definitive analysis by Lawrence Lessig "Free Culture”, 2004)
4) Open source is a broad social phenomenon, not limited to the field of
software, but applicable to the production and distribution of knowledge
in a variety of domains.
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Es folgt eine recht detaillierte und bewertete Geschichte von Open
Source Movement/Practice
Insbesondere bewertet er die Kontroverse Free vs. Open Source Software so:
Linux 2.0, released in June 1996, marked the maturity of the technology.
It also expressed the departure from the ideological stand taken by the
Free Software Foundation. The Linux community was, by and large, not
interested in undoing capitalism or challenging conventional property
rights. The common purpose was to develop good software, and make sure
that the conditions of free access to the source code would be respected
because that was the key for good quality software. Besides, a growing
number of business-oriented people, such as Tom O´Reilly, were trying to
make compatible the freedom of knowledge with the business applications
of Linux and other programs originated by the free community of
developers. ... they proposed the word "Open Source", that was endorsed
by the free sotware summit in April 1998. The new Open Source definition
was based on GPL, but also could incorporate other forms of license,
inspired by the practice of another open source company, Debian. BSD
could also be accommodated under the new definition. ...
The compromise on the principles allowed the open source movement to
expand into the mainstream of social and business practice.
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How open source works
Open source is a knowledge production process undertaken by a community
that has harnessed the communicative and collaborative power of the
Internet.
Open source raises four challenges in contrast with the usual form of
organization of production in a capitalist economy:
a) The motivation of the individuals. Why skillful programmers
contribute their time and effort without compensation?
b) What is the economic logic that departs from conventional market logic?
c) Coordination. How hundreds of individuals cooperate freely in a
project without a central hierarchy that organizes the division of
labor. How coordination is implemented outside market mechanisms of
hierarchical decision making?
d) Management of complexity. The development of software is a highly
complex endeavor that is not solved simply by adding manpower. In fact,
the classic study by Frederick Brooks shows that increasing the number
of programmers increases the problems in successfully completing the
program. This is because with an increased number of programmers, the
work that gets done scales linearly, while complexity of the process and
vulnerability to mistakes scales geometrically. Under such conditions,
the question is: what is the procedure of governance that enables the
community of programmers to achieve the quality of the expected program
in such a complex process of work?
Diese vier Punkte werden dann noch weiter beleuchtet.
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The generalization of open source to other domains of activity, is based
on the implementation of four principles:
a) Empower people to experiment, and provide them with the appropriate
technology, and the required social incentives
b)Find an engineering solution for bits of information to find each other
c)Structure information so it can recombine with other pieces of
information (modularization)
d) Create a governance system that sustains the process (the GPL logic
is an example of institutionalization of new property rights)
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Enjoy reading, HGG
--
Prof. Dr. Hans-Gert Graebe, Inst. Informatik, Univ. Leipzig
Augustusplatz, D-04109 Leipzig, Raum 5-53
tel. : [PHONE NUMBER REMOVED]
email: graebe informatik.uni-leipzig.de
Home Page: http://www.informatik.uni-leipzig.de/~graebe
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