Open Source Could Learn from Capitalism

ukhackster writes to tell us that Sun's Simon Phipps challenged many open source ideals at a recent open source conference in London. Urging the open source community to look to the lessons of capitalism, Phipps called for "volunteerism" to be replaced with "directed self-interest" and denounced the perceived legal issues surrounding open source. From the article: "Phipps took time out to take a swipe at some of the exhibitors at the conference who were selling professional advice on negotiating the open source 'legal minefield'. 'I disagree with those who say who say open source is a legal minefield,' he said as he threw from the stage a brochure from one firm of lawyers. 'If you think open source is a minefield you're doing it wrong.'"

Comments

Missing the point

[Cleon]

Whether FOSS is "capitalist" or "communist" or "volunteerist" is completely irrelevant, and quite frankly I think anyone who constantly tries to hammer the FOSS square peg into one of those round holes is doing so for their own purposes.

FOSS is what it is. In some ways, it's capitalist, in others, it's communist, in others, it's volunteerist. That's really the beauty of the movement; you get out of it what you want to get out of it, and you put into it what you want to put into it.

Maybe that's anarchy. Or maybe that's just another way of saying "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need." The question is, why does it matter?

Re:Missing the point

[spun]

It matters because ideology trumps everything to some people, and they won't get involved in open source if they think it is in some way "communist."

Re:Missing the point

[anaesthetica]

On the other hand, there's something to be said for adopting ideals and sticking to them. After all, if you don't set out with a general direction, you may end up aiding something abhorrent in the end. Ideals, principles, ideology, world-view, ethics--whatever you call it, it can be useful in keeping yourself on the right track. If Stallman wants to avoid capitalism, so be it. If you want to avoid collectivism, again so be it. But I wouldn't take a stance that rejects all ideological positions prima facia. Instrumental pragmatism is just as bad, and in many cases worse.

Re:Missing the point

[CptPicard]

You are very correct. Why is it that some people are seeking to dogmatize some other people's way of doing things to fit their own world view -- so it could serve some "purpose" according to their ideals -- is beyond me. One shouldn't always seek to see everything through some-color-coloured lenses...

On broader terms, this sort of developments in society worry me in general. Certainly the market is good at some things, and people are at least partly motivated by self-interest, and it's fine with me. However, I am getting the feeling that more and more we are being shoe-horned into mandatorily self-interested behavioural models, simply because some powerful people believe that this is the way things "should" work. This kind of thinking can eventually become a self-fulfilling prophecy -- people will eventually forget that alternative models of behaviour actually EXIST, even though they may be perfectly viable choices. Thus higher ideals like altruism and advancing the general good get edged out "just because" and because you have to play by their rules if you want to play at all. This is nicely demonstrated by all the ad hominem attacks against co-operatively behaving people branding them as "Communists" who seek to destroy Western civilization. Soon basic decency is going to be a thought-crime as it reduces the competitiveness of a society and "is bad for the economy".

OSS is, to me, similar to the way science is done through open discourse. It's a joint, open effort to create something cool. No amount of money would actually help me do any better at writing the hobby code I write, because I don't believe that my talents and abilities increase with pay -- in the world of work it tends to be the other way around. The point is that most OSS people are motivated by the project they are involved, not the peripheral benefits they may derive from its commercial success... of course, this is beyond the grasp of all-monetizing bean-counters.

Re:Missing the point

[Bruce Perens]

I think what Simon is saying is Open Source needs to fit Sun better. But of course, the problem is that Sun doesn't fit Open Source well. Sun's forte' has always been systems programming, not hardware, and in their heyday they charged 70% margins for their hardware and could pay for all of the systems programming they wanted to do. No longer. Computers are commodities and Sun has to function in a commodity market that doesn't even like it when Sun differentiates through systems programming, because the customers don't want to be locked in by Sun's differentiation. On top of that, Open Source has driven systems programming into a commodity and thus killed whatever differentiation was working for Sun.

I don't see how Sun is going to survive this. My fear is that on the way down they'll become the next SCO, because they have been talking the way Caldera did on its way down.

Bruce

Re:Missing the point

[SatanicPuppy]

Yea, because we all know that religious states are models of tolerance, liberty, and peace.

The truth of it is, that the problems arise whenever someone tries to mandate a religion, be it christianity, islam, or atheism. The excesses you attribute to communisim are no worse than those found in many theocracies.

Re:Missing the point

[spun]

I'll say the same thing to you I said above. You still have to evaluate and decide which systems to adopt as your own. How do you do that? What tools do you use to decide what tools to use?

I am advocating a position of cynicism, in the ancient Greek school of philosophy context, not the modern context where it is closer to nihilism. Do not believe or disbelieve anything, merely weight the possiblities based on all the other ideas one has considered. Doing this, one can take the best parts from all philosophies and moral systems one encounters and discard the garbage.

Re:Missing the point

[drinkypoo]

Ah, true, but one can not go blindly accepting them. One must still evaluate them and decide for oneself which to adopt, that's my point.

Amen to that. It is not necessary for us to create unique and genuinely new philosophies in order for us to make our own decisions. Accepting someone else's philosophy wholesale is never healthy. You must always think critically, or you are not really thinking at all. Blindly adopting someone else's beliefs doesn't make them your beliefs, even if you act like it does. It makes you a sheep.

Re:Missing the point

[anaesthetica]

Ah, true, but one can not go blindly accepting them.

It doesn't appear that Mr. Phipps is advocating blind acceptance of capitalism. Instead he's saying, look at the lessons of capitalism and capitalists and take the positive lessons from that. It's right in the article.

Re:Missing the point

[SatanicPuppy]

Shrug. I'm not a fan of any of them. People who "know" the answer get under my skin.

Re:Missing the point

[Angostura]

Actually, the fireman would evaluate the fire. If it was an oil fire he (she?) would not use the water. A more likely response would be to discard the water and place the upturned bucket over the fire to exclude oxygen.

I'm sure this contributes something deeply insightful to the debate, but I'm damned if I can work out what.

Re:Missing the point

[Angostura]

Wasn't the new testament based on the teachings of a Jewish Communist?

Freedom

[nadamsieee]

Free Software is about securing freedom; keeping yourself free is a self-interest.

Whining capitalist ....

[willtsmith]

Any good capitalist will trumpet their value based on supply and demand. Then when someone decides to give something away they'll cry like babies. Remember the banks suing the credit unions.

Yes absoluetly people have the right to make free software. And as long as dedicated hobbyists are willing to give it away for the sake of personal satisfaction and being able to control their tools, the corporate guys are going to have to work harder.

Open Source is not communism

[jdavidb]

Last time I checked, many open source people were pretty capitalistic. I guess the rumor keeps floating around that everybody's a commie or something, but it simply isn't true. I'm a laissez-faire capitalist, and therefore I love open source.

Phipps called for "volunteerism" to be replaced with "directed self-interest"

When you really get down to it, there's no difference. People "volunteer" because they get something out of it, whether it be financial, utility, entertainment, or the satisfaction of simply "making the world a better place."

Re:Open Source is not communism

[XxtraLarGe]

Even if OSS was "communist", I don't think most real capitalists would have a problem with it. In fact, if free OSS is good enough to draw people away from commercial software, then the commercial software has to offer something above and beyond what OSS does just to compete. That makes all consumers better off.

Also, there's nothing about Capitalism (a term made up by Marx, BTW...) that says people can't do things for free or out of the goodness of their hearts. In fact, in Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith says that beneficence is an important aspect of a successful free market environment. Currently, the U.S. has a mixed-economy that a lot of people like to call Capitalism, but is actually much closer to the Mercantilism that Smith was writing against. In a free market society, you're welcome to live on a commune if you choose, but you're not free to buy & sell as you wish under Communism...

Scratching an itch...

[Anonymous Coward]

...does not qualify as directed self-interest?

"Directed self-interest"

[ThousandStars]

Phipps seems to misunderstand OSS on a variety of levels, as other posters have pointed out, but I'd focus on how he divides volunteerism from "directed self-interest." Most OSS projects are created out of "directed self-interest" in that someone needs to do something (run an OS on esoteric hardware, word processing, whatever) and then writes a program to do it. In return for making it OSS, the original author collects feedback from the community and may ultimately attract patches, other maintainers, etc. If he wants his program to become better, it's often in his "directed self-interest" to make it so.

The same applies to companies - Sun didn't make OO.org open-source out of the goodness of its heart; it did so to strike back at Microsoft.

There shouldn't be the firm line Phipps draws between volunteerism and "directed self-interest" - they're interelated. They always have been. They probably always will be.

Here's the facts on capitalism.

[Anonymous Coward]

In the last twenty years, the real wages for college educated US workers have barely
kept up with inflation. Outside the US, the situation is even worse in the majority of cases in those countries that have followed the so-called free market solutions to economic and social problems. Meanwhile, as the majority hang out to dry, the profits for those involved in capitalism proper, eg capital instensive ventures, have doubled dozens of times over. The only lesson capitalism seems to offer is that under a capitalist system, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. How long does it take this guy to get that lesson?

Err, correction

[bcat24]

I meant to say that open source should be about writing software, *not* making money or protecting freedom.

(O/T: You would think the Slashdot maintainers would eventually catch on and let people edit posts.)

it's not about capitalism

[Arthur B.]

It's about freedom, and yes it's about liberalism. Although it might be clear for most people I'd like to stress that the threat to open source software is not capitalism but corporatism, and the state. They're responsible for patents, the DMCA etc.
Now the kind of pressure found in a market economy completly apply to open source. Developpers will migrate from one project to another as interest and popularity shifts etc. There is an evolutionnary process very similar to the one found between businesses in market economy, only it is much faster and smoother due to the conditions guaranteeing freedom. Indeed capitalism could learn from open source.

He may be right

[stinerman]

This comes down to which side of the F/OSS coin you're on. Do you use GNU/Linux, *BSD, OpenSolaris, etc. for ideological purposes or because you like it better? Do you define success of F/OSS as having many users or simply having many free software libraries and programs to choose from? (yes, that question is not an either/or)

The open source people are pragmatists. They actually do, for the most part, rely on self interest to get the job done. IBM doesn't really care about the politics behind free software; they just care that it does the job at the lowest cost. There is nothing wrong with this.

For the most part, this distinction doesn't really matter. Those of us in the free software movement who work towards the volunteerism and ideals can work in harmony with those who are directed by self-interest. The only thing that we need to agree on is the license the code is using. The license doesn't require you to buy in to any politics to use the code. Stallman doesn't make you buy into his rhetoric before you get a copy of binutils. This is the great thing about F/OSS; anyone can contribute for any reason, and we all gain from the contribution.

Linux is capitalistic

[riversky]

I switched my small consulting business to Linux for very little cost, can expand rapidly, don't have licensing fees, and can find low cost IT labor....This means MORE PROFIT for me and my investors....Low cost input, high value output, nothing is more capitalistic.

Re:got that backwards....

[AuMatar]

Unfortunately, we live in the real world, and perfect information doesn't exist (which is one of many reasons why people talking about the free market need to shut up- without perfect information it can't exist). As such, real world capitalism doesn't really care wether you took advantage of a persons lack of information or not.

As an aside- anti-fraud laws predate Adam Smith and the idea of perfect information. SO no, its not the reason we have anti-fraud laws.

Pretty ideas that are completely beside the point

[monoqlith]

and also miss the point...Phipps is trying to impose a conception of how open source should function inside a capitalist system by making open source itself part and parcel of that system. From the article:

"For open source to prosper, people need to stop thinking of it as "free" and instead think of it as "connected capitalism", delegates at an open source conference in London were told on Tuesday."

We disagree on what the definition of open source "prosperity" is. Phipps, as a executive, is thinking entirely in terms of financial prosperity.But what's valuable for Phipps isn't necessarily valuable for open source. In other words, open source's value lies not in the revenues it earns(though that may be what makes it valuable to the private sector), but in the degree to which it is truly open. It is valuable because its sole concern is making available useful products that anyone - not just companies - can modify to suit their needs. As such, it doesn't obey any rigid economic rules or favor any particular economic entity. It is agile, and adapts to many different market circumstances.

I'm not entirely sure, but I think that Phipps' argument here is dangerous for open source. "Connected self-interest" is not something that easily preserves openness. If we take his advice, I see open source gradually being appropriated by private entities to the extent that it becomes indistinguishable from a proprietary product to the outsider. Most corporations tend towards proprietarizing - it fits into a basic principle of capitalism(ownership). This has always been the case, and it runs in direct opposition to the openness which open source seeks to preserve. In any case, until intellectual property and licensing laws are revised, it will be very difficult to achieve the vision for open source of "connected capitalism" that Phipps has, since he seems to be ignoring the whole element of market *competition* and why it creates concerns over what constitutes private property.Open source may be a part of how companies make revenue, but open source *itself* should remain mostly independent and non-profit. That's the only way to preserve its openness, IMHO.

Nothing to do with capitalism

[asuffield]

Read the article carefully. He isn't saying that "open source" can learn from capitalism. He's giving the usual speech from corporations that don't get it: we want you to stop being idealists and do things our way instead, because that will make us richer.

...Simon Phipps, said that open source had been focused for too long on sharing code instead of what he called "the enrichment of the commons"

He clearly means that it should be okay to not 'share' code as long as the commons is 'enriched'. This is an argument for proprietary software, thinly cloaked. My bet is that he's thinking of licenses that say "You can look at the source code and modify it to fix bugs for your use, and even distribute those bug fixes, but you may not use it to produce a product that competes with ours" - sure, it's better than what they used to offer, but it is just not good enough. It's not free software, it's slightly less painful proprietary software. It's Java - join their developer program and you can see the code, and submit bug fixes, but you can't share the code with anybody.

Expanding on his message, Phipps said that the message of open source was that "creating and maintaining a completely independent code base was ultimately self-defeating".

Instead, the future was in co-operation and in organisations preserving what was ultimately of value to them.

Here he's arguing that people shouldn't be reimplementing Java (as kaffe, sablevm, etc), but instead 'cooperating' with Sun and working on Sun's proprietary implementation of it. That's what this is probably all about. Sun don't want to release Java as free software, they just want the community to help them develop it.

The message here is: free software is bad, stop doing it because we don't want to play and that means competing implementations which is bad for everyone.

Even the anti-freedom 'pragmatists' would have to admit that it's not really a very convincing message. Creating and maintaining a completely independent code base is, all else aside, ensuring that there is always competition so Sun will continue having to work to stay ahead of them.

Horrible description.

[SanityInAnarchy]

This guy wasn't telling open source people to become more capitalist, he was telling capitalist people to do more open source. What he said was to stop thinking of open source as volunteerism and start thinking of it as self-interest -- that is, don't release source because it makes you feel good, release source because it's in your best interest.