Open Source as Culture - Culture as Open Source

Open Source as Culture Culture as Open Source SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN (CC-Lizenz siehe Seite 463) The Open Source model of peer production, sharing, revision, and peer review has distilled and labeled the most successful human creative habits into a techno- political movement. This distillation has had costs and bene ts. It has been dif cult to court mainstream acceptance for such a tangle of seemingly technical ideas when its chief advocates have been hackers and academics. On the other hand, the brilliant success of overtly labeled Open Source experiments, coupled with the horror stories of attempts to protect the proprietary model of cultural production have served to popularize the ideas championed by the movement. In recent years, we have seen the Open Source model overtly mimicked within domains of culture quite distinct from computer software. Rather than being revolutionary, this movement is quite conservatively recapturing and revalorizing the basic human communicative and cultural processes that have generated many good things. The Open Source way of doing things is all the rage. Companies as powerful and established as IBM boast of using Linux operating systems in servers. Publications as conservative as The Economist have pronounced Open Source methods successful and have pondered their applicability to areas of research and development as different from software as pharmaceutical research (see Economist 2004, Weber 2004). It is striking that we have to employ phrases like Open Source and Free Software at all.1 They are signi cant, powerful phrases simply because they represent an insurgent model of commercial activity and information policy. They challenge the entrenched status quo: the proprietary model of cultural and technological production. But this has only recently been the case. The Open Source way is closer to how human creativity has always worked. Open Source used to be the default way 1 Throughout this essay and in all of my work I intentionally con ate these two terms while being fully aware of the political distinction that Richard Stallman emphasizes in his defense of Free Software . Stallman's point that Open Source invites an emphasis on convenience and utility rather than freedom and community, was important to make in the 1990s. He lost the battle to control the terms, just as he has had to concede the rhetorical convenience and ubiquity of Linux instead of the more accurate GNU/Linux . I am con dent that anyone who peers into the history or politics of the Open Source movement will encounter Stallman's persuasive case for freedom and the GNU project's central contribution to the growth of the operating system we now call Linux (see Stallman 1999). Siva Vaidhyanathan of doing things. The rapid adoption of proprietary information has been so intense and in uential since the 1980s that we hardly remember another way or another time. However, throughout most of human history all information technologies and almost all technologies have been open source . And we have done pretty well as a species with tools and habits unencumbered by high restrictions on sharing, copying, customizing, and improving. We have become so inured by the proprietary model, so dazzled and intimidated by its cultural and political power, that any common sense challenge to its assumptions and tenets seems radical, idealistic, or dangerous. But in recent years the practical advantages of the Open Source model of creativity and commerce have become clear. The resulting clamor about the advantages and threats of Open Source models have revealed serious faults in the chief regulatory system that governs global ows of culture and information: copyright. The Rise of Proprietarianism Copyright gets stretched way out of shape to accommodate proprietary software. Copyright was originally designed to protect books, charts, and maps. Later, court rulings and legislatures expanded to include recorded music, lm, video, translations, public performance, and nally practically all media that now exist or have yet to be created. Software is special, though. It's not just expression. It's functional. It's not just information. It's action. In some ways, the inclusion of software among the copyrightable forms of creativity has complicated and challenged the intellectual property tradition. Copyright and proprietary software have metastasized synergistically. The proprietary model of software production arose sometime in the 1970s, when mainframe software vendors like AT&T and Digital started asserting control over their source code, thus limiting what computer scientists could do to customize their tools. This was an insult to and offense against these scientists who were acclimated to the academic and scienti c ideologies that privilege openness and non-monetary reward systems. In a much more precise sense we can date the spark of the con agration between the then-insurgent proprietary model and the then-dominant hacker culture (Open Source, although this term did not yet exist) to Bill Gates' 1976 open letter to the small but growing community of personal computer hackers. Gates warned them that his new company, then spelled Micro-Soft, would aggressively assert its intellectual property claims against those who would trade tapes carrying the company's software. Since that date, despite frequently exploiting the gaps and safety valves of copyright protection on its rise to the heights of wealth and power, Microsoft and Gates have worked in correlation if not coordination with the steady valorization of intellectual property rights as the chief locus of worldwide cultural and industrial policy (see Vaidhyanathan 2001, Wayner 2000, Raymond 1999). According to the proprietary ideology, innovation would not occur without a strong incentive system for the innovator to exploit for commercial gain. Fencing off innovations becomes essential for rms and actors to establish markets and bargain 360 Open Source as CultureCulture as Open Source away rights. Because innovation so often concerns the ephemeral, trade regarding innovation concerns excluding other from using, exploiting, or copying data, designs, or algorithms. The Clinton, Bush, and Blair administrations in the United States and the United Kingdom embraced the proprietary model as the key to thriving through the de-industrialization of the developed world, thus locking in the advantages that educated, wired nation-states have over those that have been held in technological and economic bondage for centuries. Proprietary models of innovation policy and market relations can be powerful: witness the remarkable success and wealth of the global pharmaceutical industry, or, for that matter, Microsoft. But these models can be just as powerful with limitations that allow for communal creation, revision, criticism, and adaptability: witness the culture of custom cars or the World Wide Web (see Vaidhyanathan 2004, Lessig 2001, 2004). In fact, as economist Richard Adkisson argues, the veneration of forceful intellectual property rights as the foundation of innovation and creativity above all other forms has promoted an unhealthy cultural and social condition, once which can generate suboptimal levels of investment, asset allocation, and policy choices. Adkisson indicts the widespread belief that intellectual property rights are the best (perhaps only) of all possible arrangements for innovation by alerting us to the ceremonial status these rights have assumed. Ceremonial encapsulation occurs when ceremonial values are allowed to alter or otherwise limit the application of technologies instrumental in the process of social problem solving, Adkisson writes. Speci cally, Adkisson warns that blind faith in high levels of intellectual property protection is of the future-binding type, in which technology and mythology act synergistically to legitimize elite control over technologies or other innovative or creative processes (Adkisson 2004). The Return of the Jedi Richard Stallman took a stand against the proprietary model long before the rest of us even realized its power and trajectory. A computer scientist working in the 1970s and 1980s for the Arti cial Intelligence project at MIT , Stallman grew frustrated that computer companies were denying him and other hackers access to their source code. Stallman found he was not allowed to improve the software and devices that he had to work with, even when they did not function very well. More importantly, Stallman grew alarmed that he was becoming contractually bound to be sel sh and unkind. The user agreements that accompanied proprietary software forbade him from sharing his tools and techniques with others. As a scientist, he was offended that openness was being criminalized. As a citizen, he was concerned that freedoms of speech and creativity were being constricted. As a problem solver, he set out to establish the Free Software Foundation to prove that good tools and technologies could emerge from a community of concerned creators. Leveraging the communicative power of technology newsletters and the postal system, Stallman sold tapes with his free (as in liberated) software on them. By the time enough of his constituency had connected themselves through the Internet, he started coordinating projects and conversations among a diverse and distributed set of programmers (Stallman 1999, Williams 2002).