Category: Opensource

Musing about Digital McCarthyism and Digital Nonviolence

While researching aspects of the lives of Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr, I was reminded of the works of Richard B Gregg. While I had come across Gregg while reading Economics, I hadn’t appreciated quite how influential he’d been on King, or for that matter just how dedicated he’d been in seeking to understand Gandhi. If you don’t know about Gregg, do take a look at his Wikipedia entry.

I’m currently reading a 1938 Gregg pamphlet titled What is The Matter With Money? It’s a reprint from the Modern Review for May and June 1938. In it, Gregg spends a lot of time looking at trust, and some of the things he says jell with me.
I quote from Gregg:

…A money economy makes security depend on individual selfish acquisitiveness instead of on trust. Trust grows when men serve first and foremost the community and the common purpose. There has sometimes been an element of service and community purpose in the making of private fortunes, but it has not often been predominant. Money splits up community security and plays upon men’s fears, — fears of the future and of each other’s motives, fears that compel them to compete with one another to a harmful degree.

Gregg concludes the paragraph with an interesting assertion:

Money has worked on us so long that it is now hampering the further development of science, art and technology.

At reboot last year I spoke about the things that had to die before we can regain some of the things we’ve lost, in keeping with the conference theme of renaissance and rebirth. [Hey Thomas, what’s happening with reboot this year?]
Gregg’s words have served to remind me that concepts like identity and trust are fundamental parts of community and not individuality; culture too is a community concept, be it about arts or sciences or even forms of expression; community itself is a construct of relationships at multiple levels. Maybe the reason why much of what is now termed IPR (and its cater-cousin DRM) is abhorrent to me is that these things focus on the individual and not the community.

I am all for making sure that creativity is rewarded, in fact I believe that any form of real value generation should be rewarded; but not at the price of stifling the growth of culture and of community. This, I believe, is at the heart of what Larry Lessig speaks of, what Rishab Aiyer Ghosh speaks of, what Jerry Garcia believed in, what opensource communities believe in, what democratised innovation is about.

Culture and community before cash.

I recently bought a book by Gregg called The Power Of Nonviolence. When describing the book, the bookseller noted that it [the particular copy I was buying] was signed by Gregg; unusually, the recipient’s name had been erased and carefully at that; the bookseller surmised that it may have had to do with fears about McCarthyism.

You know something? At the rate we’re going, the battles about IPR and DRM are going to get uglier, to a point where we’re going to see something none of us wants. Digital McCarthyism. What we’re seeing in the software and music and film spaces already begins to feel like that.

We need to find a better way to work it out. And it makes me wonder. What’s the digital equivalent of Gandhian Nonviolence?

7 seconds of fame: a parable for our times

There’s a lovely little story going around, about a band called 7 seconds of love.

Ninja KittenThey’re very today, they even have a myspace site;
They’re very yesterday, they play ska;
They’re very tomorrow, they’re unsigned.

Somehow a 2005 hit of theirs got copied lock stock and barrel. Seriously plagiarised. Not just the tune, but the characters and costumes in the video as well.

They were not happy. They complained to the head office of the company that did the plagiarising. And the company gracefully apologised and settled out of court. The band gave some of the proceeds to charity, and said they would spend the rest on themselves.

So far so good. What makes this a parable for our times?

The plagiarism apparently took place in Argentina, where the theme and the tune were used for a TV ad.

So how did the band find out? Fans of theirs, fans they didn’t know they had, left comments on the YouTube clip.

Wow.

Linus’s Law in operation. Given enough eyeballs……

[An aside: Their music might not be to everyone’s taste, but do take a look at their web site. Why? Here’s an extract from their “bio”

At the dawn of the new millennium a revolution was underway which would change the world for ever.

Joel and Alex Veitch from rathergood.com were men on a mission. Men wild-eyed with the crazed pursuit of their obsession. Men who loved the moon, U-Boats and Zeppelins. But above all else, men who loved kittens. Kittens.. OF ROCK!

Their mission to subjugate the world to the utopian kitteny vision of the future was well underway, but there was one ingredient missing. And that missing ingredient was…… the unstoppable, unbelievable power of rocksteady skanking ska punk pop beats.

Unbeknownst to them, at the same time four battle-hardened, bloodied and weary gaijin Warriors Of Rock staggered from Japan to the shores of Great Britain. Exactly like the Seven Samurai, but with less Samurais.

And less swords

And more musical instruments. (And also they weren’t actually Japanese like the 7 Samurai were)……

Nuff said.

One million dollars and counting

How often do you visit Wikipedia? If you’re like me, you probably go there three or four times a day. In which case you’ve probably noticed the “thermometer bar” at the top of the page for the last month or so.

The Wikimedia Foundation ran its recent month-long fundraiser from 16 December 2006 to 15 January 2007; in typical open-and-transparent fashion they’ve now released a report on the fundraiser, and in Web 2.0 time as well. It’s definitely worth a read, you can find the entire report via this link. My thanks to Chris Locke for pointing me at it.

One million dollars in one month. Without counting the matching contributions.

  • Donations primarily between $10 and $50
  • Average donation appears to be around $30
  • Around a thousand donations a day

When it comes to building out infrastructure on a commons basis, we may need to look at approaches like this. I know that raising a million dollars in a month doesn’t sound like much….. when you take into account the global nature of the donations (albeit US-dominated, much like the early internet), the relatively low-key campaign, the purpose for which the campaign was run, the level of anonymity, and the absence of matching contributions in the figures, a million dollars isn’t too shabby.

I think we’re heading towards a time when many infrastructural projects are funded from four sources:

  • A seed from individual subscriptions, much like the campaign above
  • Matched funding from more affluent individuals
  • Another level of matching from the public purse, multi-government, multi-location
  • A final level of matching from truly global large corporates

EU Study on impact of opensource

I’ve spent some time reading a recent study titled Economic Impact of Open Source Software on Innovation and the Competitiveness of the Information and Communications Technologies (ICT) Sector in the EU. Don’t worry, you won’t think the title is too long when you see the document, all 287 pages of it. And no, I haven’t finished reading it yet. I’ve given it a quick skim, am now on pass 2, which is where I take notes and doodle; it looks like I will stay on pass 2 for a week or more.

doubling every
18-24 monthsIn the meantime, any of you who’s vaguely interested in the impact of opensource should take a look at it. I know it’s big and cumbersome, but you don’t have to print it. I know it’s detailed and tedious, but life is not always about soundbites. I know it’s full of figures and charts, some of them dating back to 2002, but a lot of it is largely new and interesting.

You can find the study via this link, which also takes you to the press release announcing the publication of the study earlier this week.

By the way, Rishab Aiyer Ghosh is one of the authors. I first came across Rishab when I started reading First Monday, and he quickly became a must-read for me. One of the books he edited, called CODE, or the Collaborative Ownership and the Digital Economy, is for sure one of my top ten business books of the decade. I think everyone who has even a modicum of interest in the DRM and IPR discussions should read the book, even before they read Lessig or Fisher.

Here’s a sample of the things I learnt in the skim

  • There appears to be a Moore’s Law of sorts operating upon the FLOSS codebase, with a doubling every 18-24 months
  • The FLOSS codebase today represents over 130,000 person-years of effort
  • FLOSS-related services will represent 32% of all IT services within the next 3 years

Also, you may find these three diagrams of interest, showing the FLOSS committer population in the context of overall population, connected people and the rich. I’ve never seen this sort of information, so I think we owe the authors something.

200701181326200701181325200701181326-1

One of the more intriguing observations in the study, which comes across in the summary as well as in the body of the document, is the following:

  • That the current battles about DRM and IPR are having an undesired effect, and that is to deflect creatives resources towards “defensive” innovation.
  • That FLOSS activities give us an opportunity to correct this blemish

Read it for yourself. Let me know what you think.

Musing lazily about identity

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. Who you are is a function of:

  • what you stand for
  • what you belong to (both blood as well as thunder)
  • what you like (and what you dislike)
  • what you’ve done (and what you’d like to do)

Sure there are many other things. Ways to contact you. The size of your wallet. All kinds of things that other people use to “define” you: your age, gender, marital status, number of dependents, address.

Interestingly, these mattered when “socio-economic groupings” meant something, when “marketing” could predict your propensity to buy something based on all the boxes they put you into. [If you’re interested in hearing a worthwhile rant on this subject, try and spend some time with Professor Richard Scase, “Futurescase” as he gets called. I’ve relished the privilege.]

Today, the marketers are in trouble. Socio-economic groupings mean jack when it comes to predicting purchase propensity. Long tails weave their equalising ways across class and gender and hirsuteness, or lack of.

In the meantime, everyone else (bar the marketers) is into biometrics. And maybe that’s acceptable. Was a shibboleth an early form of biometric identification? Well, at least the shibboleth identified someone as a member of a group (or not, as the case may be). You see, one of the problems we face with modern definitions of privacy and confidentiality is deeply connected to this need for a protected need for individuality.

No man is an iland.

We are going to have villages and towns and cities where the computing device is communal. Where that communal device uses opensource software and open standards and open platforms and open open open.

And we’re going to have to work out what identity means there. Not identity from a narrow financial-transaction point of view. But identity in the context of sharing information. Digital information. Letters. Photographs. Films. Music. Books. Whatever.

Communal devices. Communal devices that work when the local power grid goes down. Communal devices that don’t go obsolescent in 18 months. Communal devices that do their bit about global warming.

Communal devices.

Hey, let’s be careful out there. This is why I am so concerned about the garbage that gets one in the name of DRM and IPR. Have you really tried to use a “family” PC after Windows 95? One that three or four people use regularly, who are happy to share their files. If only they could.

An aside, still about identity. When I look at startups, one of the things that I check out very carefully is how the core team got together. Did they grow up in the same neighbourhood? Hang out in the same places? Know the same people? Go to the same university?

I’ve always felt this is important. Unless the core has some independent grounding, some reason to be together, they’re going to come apart when trouble comes their way. And every startup will hit trouble sometime in the early years.

In similar vein, I tend to check out what makes a group come together. Take America. The folk rock band, I mean, the ones who gave us Don’t Cross The River and Ventura Highway. [And Horse With No Name and Sandman, but those are not my favourites…].

Do you know how they got together? They were all sons of US GIs stationed west of London, in Ruislip, Middlesex. Their mothers were all British. They attended the same school. They broke up before they really got started, in 1969. And then came together in time to savour their success.

Just goes to show.