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[ox] Manuel Castells auf dem World Social Forum 2005



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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