[-empyre-] Intellectual property: hacking communities and traditional knowledge

[Aymeric Mansoux]

Hi David,

David Golumbia said :
> It is correctly noted that the figure most directly responsible for the
> F/OSS movement (although it is not one movement), Richard Stallman,
> considers himself a mildly left liberal, and the differences between Free
> Software and Open Source do fall specifically long lines that look like
> Left vs Right (indeed, Open Source was specifically started as a means for
> making Free Software material more useful and less scary for corporate
> capital). Yet at the bottom of FS is a curious assertion that people should
> not own the products of their labor, and that labor should not be
> compensated. Whatever one thinks of these principles, it is hard--in fact,
> I'd argue it's impossible--to find them in Marx, or even less radical Left
> thinkers, because they seem directly contrary to the notion of unalienable
> labor that Marx and Marxists think is interrupted by capitalism.

It's true that trying to read a political intention behind the free
software movement can be quite confusing. I think that saying that "at
the bottom of FS is a curious assertion that people should not own the
products of their labor, and that labor should not be compensated" is
a misreading of how free software operates.

In practice free software licenses, like any copyright based contracts,
whether they are so called hacks or not, relies on the existence of a
copyright holder. The individual or groups holding the copyright of a
free software are the ones controlling it. Yes, there is the copyleft
principle found in some free software licenses (like the GPL), but the
copyleft principle does not give as much control as holding the
copyright of the said software. The later allows for the relicensing,
dual-, triple-licensing, or specific contractual exceptions and
agreements of the software as product. This is why the Free Software
Foundation (FSF) is usually asking free software authors to transfer
their rights to the foundation, so that it can act as its safe keeper.
This is also, at the opposite, for the same reason that corporations,
startups, and whoever using free software as part of a business model,
will open its development to external contributors most of the time via
either a full copyright transfer agreement, or by only accepting
non-copyleft permissive, also know as copyfree, free software licenses
(for instance BSD licenses). This is done so that the contributed work
can be integrated for instance into a non-free version of the software
right away or in the future, or be part of the company assets, even
though another version or the same software is available under a
copyleft license.

If anything, mastering free software licenses is the best illustration
of very tight production ownership and control in the context of
copyright and contract laws.

As for the question of labour that is not compensated, I would decouple
this from free software itself. It has more to do with the recent
influence of gratis/freemium services/products business models that give
the impression that free software should also be gratis, like everything
else in the world. In the context of free software itself, this is
particularly problematic, not just because of its infamous deictic
nature (free as in ...), but mostly because of the influence of 60-70s
proto-free software history, when software was effectively free and
gratis because computer corporations made money by selling very
expensive hardware running machine specific software, otherwise nearly
useless without the hardware, and software being distributed as source
code so that customers could fix it themselves. As a matter of fact, the
first community of computer users was called SHARE and directly funded
by IBM, in a clever way to outsource customer support to the users
themselves. Android and Ubuntu "fauxmunities" models are nothing new.
Yet, the fact that labour is not directly compensated in such systems,
is neither simply black and white, nor can it be generalised for free
software production as a whole. Anyone is free to sell free software,
including free software for which you are not the copyright holder, as
long as the license is respected. For instance the DAW Ardour project
makes available its GPL'ed source code for gratis, but sell the compiled
binary, that is the executable application the user actually need to run
to use the software on their operating system. This way the software
author can be compensated for their labour, and the GPL is respected as
the source code is made available for others to compile and tinker with
it themselves. Similarly a free software source code of an Android app
can be directly cloned from a GitHub repository and compiled into an app
by someone with the necessary skilled, or purchased right away in its
app form in one of the many software markets of the platform. Of course
things get tricky when we are talking about labour contributed to a
directly or indirectly commercial free software project, in which the
contributor is not hired for that, is not the main copyright holder or
has been asked to transfer their rights. But even then, to assess such a
situation other parameters need to be taken into account to realise that
if there has been no financial transaction involved, that does not mean
that there were no transactions at all. In that sense we need to look at
this question of labour also through the lenses of affect,
individuation, existentialism, investment, cooperation, game theory, and
many others to help us understand what is going on. That does not mean
these transaction are fair in the end, they are not always, but I
believe it is very much necessary to move away from the free labour
argument and look closer at these transactions and get a better
accounting overview of what is being exchanged before jumping to
conclusions.



> I believe that much of the Left has been sold a bill of goods regarding
> Open Source and Open Access. Yes, there are egregious corporate exemplars
> who make a good story and whose abuses should be curtailed (Disney on the
> one hand, Elsevier on the other). But it's a far cry from saying Disney
> abuses copyright to saying copyright should be abolished.
> 
> One scholar has gone to great lengths, including interviewing Stallman in
> detail, about the connections between free software and Left politics, and
> found the connections almost nonexistent. I strongly encourage anyone,
> especially academics, who support F/OSS for political reasons to read this
> work carefully, as it leaves almost no connections tenable between those
> movements at all, even on Stallman's own terms.

While I agree that it is important to depart from a superficial
interpretation of free culture, it is also important that the one
clearing of one misunderstanding does not lead to another. It would be
quite sad if yet another incomplete understanding emerges from that
debate, literally turning a fashionable pro-free/open into an equally
fashionable anti-free/open. In that regard I would try to take with a
pinch of salt, well at least put in perspective, whatever is said by
Stallman and other free software supporters for the following reasons:

First, to understand the personality disorder of the free software
movement, one must look at the dysfunctional family it came from, most
specifically the post-war era in which liberal ideas such as central is
evil, decentralisation is good, have been infused with genuine socially
rooted efforts of collectivism and empowerment as found in the paradoxal
1973 Community Memory project, but also in telecommunication research
labs where operating systems, such as UNIX, have been seen from its
author as a software around which a fellowship can be formed, literally
building upon the notions of common libraries and democratisation of
computation outside of academic computer sciences, that started after
the 60s time-sharing breakthrough. 

Second, much of the philosophical and political discourse around free
software has emerged in its appropriation in other domains, which can
loosely be gathered today under the name free culture. Here free
software is only one but specific view on the matter. Even though
Stallman has absorbed part of what others have interpreted from his
work, he has and still resists some of its extended view (for instance
on the topic of free hardware, free art, etc). A lot of the legwork and
left political discourse surrounding the possibilities of free software
are coming from others, very often Latin American and southern Europe
countries, who have welcome the copyleft principle as a very concrete
way to access and protect the distribution of knowledge and technology
(See the 2001 Manifiesto de Hipatia for instance). Similarly key free
software projects like the Debian operating system, have their root in a
specific interpretation of free software, namely anti-commercial
software, despite being completely intertwined today with third party
commercial interests (Canonical, Valve, etc). All these interpretations
and appropriations are as legitimate as the one that sees openness
solely as an exploitation mechanism.

In the end, it's the context of production and distribution of free
culture that matters the most. No matter how it is done or protected,
exploiters gonna exploit, and generally free culture supporters think
it's an acceptable price to pay in comparaison of the benefits it can
bring to their communities and sometimes society in general. YMMV ;)


a.
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