Last week, I met Graham Seaman while in London and we talked about
Oekonux, Hipatia, and lots of ideas about extending principles of Free
Software beyond the IP sphere. I finally got around to reading the
transcript of Graham Seaman's talk from last year's Oekonux
conference -- of which I'd heard a lot of hype.
The talk covers a lot of ground but, in large part, it is a response
to a number of the conversations within Oekonux about the production
of material goods under models of free software in major
society-changing sort of way. My personal interest (of course) is in
the production of non-software knowledge based products but I still
find the question interesting.
Like a lot of work in Oekonux, Graham's piece looks into the future --
way into the future. It not only looks at Free Software's effect on
the economics of a particular industry -- say, the recording industry
-- but at major changes to the way that our world's economic system
works. These sorts of questions are intriguing -- and certainly fun to
think about -- but I think they tend to focus so much on some much on
the major points that they ignore some of the steps along the way that
will shape the way that the everything works.
Personally, I tend to prefer focusing on the more immediate questions
like "how do we go from the current situation of highly proprietized
production of, say, fiction to free production of fiction." That said,
I think this talk is of the best treatments and I think Graham's
analysis goes into depth about the way that Free Software actually
works. I think it includes observation, analysis, and critique in a
way that -- if nothing else -- can teach us a good deal about the
nature of Free Software production.
So Graham's talk is all about how the world could be reshaped by the
principles of sharing and cooperation that are in a germ form in Free
Software. HE first goes through two proposed alternatives (I assume
from the Oekonux list before I joined it) and talks about what he
thinks can work, what he likes and why. He covers:
- The idea of using "fabbers" or all purpose production machines.
- The idea that material goods will become so cheap and easy to
produce that nobody really cares about them and all the important
issues in society will be about producing immaterial goods.
Graham thought that the idea of fabbers was more science fiction than
anything else -- and I tend to agree. I've read a couple papers that
are all about the philosophical and economic consequences of a world
when fabbers and nanotechnology turn material goods into information
and I, like Graham, just find it implausible. I think Graham does a
pretty good job of deflating this idea.
In terms of the second proposal, Graham found the idea believable in a
very long-term (hundreds of years) sort of way but still found it
unpleasant. He ties that sort of change to mass-poverty, migration and
worse and doesn't feel comfortable going down this path.
Graham's talk is about a third social solution based on some serious
observation of Free Software practice and some deep thinking about the
way that the economy of the future will look. Graham says:
It's becoming increasingly hard for the old system to produce
software products. There are many products - especially ones that
require cooperation of some kind, that require some kind of sharing,
even commercially, that simply can't be produced under commercial
constraints.
Basically, Graham describes a system where Free Software is created
and fostered by a system that will undose itself. I'm not totally
convinced of his conclusions but I definitely think there is something
there.
Even if you have no interest in his conclusions or discussion of the
way that Free Software can or will reshape the world. As just one
example, Graham talks a connection he saw between Free Software and
the business cycle:
Free software is not totally independent of the business cycle. I
thought it might be. I went to Freshmeat and got all the stats for
Freshmeat of the projects that were added over the life of
Freshmeat, to see whether it reflected the current downturn in the
economy and in IT and commercial IT in particular, hoping that it
would show a line like that. But it didn't ... Now this is very odd
for me, because the FLOSS survey said unemployment plays no part in
free software. Basically, people in free software don't get out of
work; and my guess, especially for people I've noticed, is that
people who are out of work treat it as temporary. And the first
thing they do is to put more time into writing free software
anyway. But it appears that that's not the case, that free software
is still, somehow, dependent on the business cycle.
It's not totally clear to me -- or to Graham -- whether or not his
data is representative. I think the issue deserves a good hard look.
There's a lot of good stuff in the article. It's definitely worth
checking out in the Oekonux archives:
