huridocs-tech Open Source, Open Society?

Edited/Distributed by HURINet - The Human Rights Information Network
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## author     : stalder@fis.utoronto.ca
## date       : 17.12.99
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[A few weeks ago I was asked to speak briefly at a session
on "Open Source, Open Society?" which was put up by my
friends at tao.ca. With some time on my hand now, I decide
to write it down. Felix]

As far as I can see, there are two characteristics of the
development process of "open source" software [1] that are
likely to influence the resulting products in ways that go
beyond strictly technical questions: the heterogeneous
developer base, and the particular licensing structure.

Open source software is the result of a collaborative effort
of different people who each pursue diverging personal and
collective agendas when participating in this process. By
"agenda" I mean simply someone's reason(s) to do a certain
thing. Some of the reasons to engage in open source
development are peer recognition, efficiency, aesthetic
pleasure, financial gain or a particular social/political
belief.

Proprietary software is also developed by a number of
different people, who arguably work on it for many different
personal reasons (being paid is but one of them). However,
there is--and this is the difference to open source
process--a single dominant collective agenda: the agenda of
the company that owns the software and hires the
programmers. For a publicly traded company, this agenda has
to be to maximize value for its shareholders. At the end of
the day, this single collective agenda overrides all others.
The combination of a single agenda that lies outside of the
software itself and opaque source code makes it easy to put
features into the software that are controversial, or even
unpopular, but serve the agenda which dominates the
developmental process. If Microsoft (or Sun, or Oracle, or
Apple, or...) reaches the conclusion that its interests are
best served through by entering into a secret partnership
with, say, the NSA  (US National Security Agency) then the
terms of this partnership will be implemented by the
programmers, no matter if they personally belief this to be
a good thing or not. Examples of controversial, hidden
features are abound: back doors in encryption software, such
as the  controversial "NSA key" recently discovered in
Microsoft NT stations, or the audio software "realplayer"
which sends data about the user back to the software
company, real.com. Both features reflect overarching agendas
of the developers which are unchecked, and cannot be
checked, by other developers or users.

Open source software is very unlikely to contain such hidden
features. Not only because it is open, hence the features
would be visible to literate users, but also because the
agendas of the people working on the development of the
software are very diverse. Even more important is that in
the open source development there is no mechanism by which
someone could force someone else to adopt something against
his or her own personal conviction, no matter what this
convictions is. Given the impossibility of imposing an
overarching agenda it is unlikely that there will be
features embedded in the code that clearly promote any
particular non-technical goal, such as gathering data for
marketing purposes, or improving relations to government
agencies.

Open source software represents an original model of
ownership. This model is based on the GNU license agreement
developed by Richard Stallman [2]. This license mandates
"that anyone who redistributes the software, with or without
changes, must pass along the freedom to further copy and
change it." [3] Effectively, this guarantees that once a
piece of software is protected by this license, its current
code and  its later versions cannot be taken out of the
public domain anymore.

The traditional model of software licensing we all know
well. The developer licenses the software to the user under
conditions which usually include that the user cannot
distribute or modify it, nor use any pieces of the source
code for other products. Hence the code can never be put
into the public domain.

The result of this open source license is not only that many
different people can work on the software for many different
reasons, but also that the software becomes much cheaper
because its impossible to produce an artificial scarcity.
With the Internet as distribution mechanism this software
tends to become gratis because one single freely available
copy is infinitely reproducible at basically no costs.

These two characteristics of "open source" software
development process tends to result in software that is
"cleaner" and cheaper than proprietary software.

Does this matter? It does.

Software needs to be clean. Computers and software can be
thought of as amplifiers. They amplify the user's agenda by
giving her access to means of, say, communication that she
would not have otherwise. But computers and software also
amplify the agendas of their makers. For example, the
realplayer allows 16 million users to listen to whatever
they personally find worth listening to, the software
amplifies their power to gain access to recorded sounds that
are stored on-line. On the other hand, all these 16 million
players also promote the agenda of their developer,
real.com, which now has 16 million 'agents' in the field
reporting back in the users listening habits. Effectively,
the realplayer amplifies 16 million user agendas once, and
one company agenda 16 million times. Hence it empowers each
user a little bit and the developer tremendously. The same
can be said of the Windows operating system.

Open source software reduces this imbalance. The various
agendas of the developers cancel out one another as they
meet on a relatively restricted common ground: the
development of technically superior software. Consequently,
open source software empowers the user vis-à-vis the
developer for the simple reason that the nontechnical
motivations of each individual developer become less
important because they are checked by others who can not be
assumed to share these motivations. Checked from a wide
ranges of angles, the software becomes not only more stable,
but also more clean or neutral. Paradoxically, this
political neutrality is a radical political feature in a
context where software that is biased towards the developer
is the normality.

Software needs to be cheap. While clean software addresses
the imbalance of amplifying power between the developer and
the users, cheap software allows more social groups to use
that power than simply those with money. At the centers of
technological development this is not such an important
point because the connection between knowledge and money is
more direct. The situation is different in developing
countries where knowledge is more abundant than money. Open
source software, because it is much cheaper, allows more
people to use the amplifying power computers. The decision
of the Mexican government to use Linux and not Microsoft in
its schools was, at least partly, motivated by the fact that
the lower software costs made it possible to install more
machines. For the time being, the low costs which increase
its accessibility is offset by the still very high knowledge
necessary to make use of the much of the software. However,
it might be a temporary issue as we can expect the software
to become more "user-friendly" and the required knowledge to
become more distributed.

The more ubiquitous computing becomes, the more important is
it that the software is clean, that is, free of unchecked
special interests. The best way to achieve this is to make
very diverse interests have access to the same code. At the
same time, the more essential computing becomes for the
conduct of everyday life, the more is it important to widen
the access to the basic tools.

Making the software freely available and opening up its code
for inspection and change transforms the character of
software from a commodity into something more like an
environmental resource of the Internet similar to air in the
physical environment. Everyone has access to it and everyone
is allowed to check its contents. Such a  transformation is
in itself positive as it helps to reduce the imbalances of
power between the developer and the user, and between the
rich and the comparatively poor. However, what the effects
of this leveling of the playing field will be on other areas
of society is more ambiguous. What seems likely is that it
contributes to accelerate the much more general shift from a
commodity to a service economy. Those who focus on services
can do very well, even if they do not own the software which
they service, as the case of Red Hat, Inc. indicates. In a
limited sense, open source code is like the legal code. The
code is openly published and accessible to everyone.
Nevertheless due to its complexity, most people do need to
rely on a professional who can interpret the general rules
in the light of their own unique situation.

What seems unlikely, though, that open source software
represents in itself a new production paradigm--a "gift
economy"--which can transform the fundamentally capitalist
character of the (new) economy [4].

[1] I use the term open source software of all types of software allows the
user to modify and freely pass on its source code.
[2] http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html
[3] http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/copyleft.html
[4] http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue3_12/barbrook/index.html



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