OccupyAsABusinessModelTheEmergingOpenSourceCivilisation
This page is for discussion of
http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2012/03/2012361233474499.html
I have three points to make regarding this topic:
- Open source is not clearly outcompeting closed
- The decision-making structure of many open-source projects is very different from that of Occupy Wall Street
- I agree 100% that a good next step would be to create legal structures which structurally support commons values
In more detail:
> Because shared innovation makes an enormous difference in costs (give a brick, get a house), and it is also hyper-competitive. A recent study by the makers of the Open Governance Index, which measures the openness of software projects, confirms that more open projects do much better in the long-run than more closed projects. In other words, it makes sound business sense: open businesses tend to drive out business models based on proprietary IP. So it doesn't matter whether you are a "commonist" free software developer, or a capitalist shareholder of IBM. Both sides benefit and they outcompete or "outcooperate" traditional proprietary competitors.
> They sell their labour and consulting prowess, training and integration. IBM, for example, managed to overcome its long-term decline by transforming itself from a hardware company into a giant Linux consulting firm.
I don't think it is clear that open source makes business sense for software companies. It's true that companies like Red Hat and Ubuntu open-source their core offerings, but there are many more (and larger, and faster-growing, and more profitable) companies that don't. For example, look at Apple, Github, Google, Dropbox, Twitter. The general trend is to open source peripheral projects and close source the projects at the core of one's offering. The Open Governance Index study only compared open projects against one another, not against traditional proprietary competitors.
Open-source-on-the-side seems to be a viable model for companies whose core business offering is not software, such as IBM. It is not clear if the open-source economy will be able to displace most companies who do focus on software and who choose to close-source it. Hence my effort to find a licensing structure that would maximize the amount of open-source produced in the long-term but serve for-profit interests in the short term (my current proposal: [[1]] ).
> The second player in open-source software production are the so-called FLOSS Foundations, such as the Apache, Gnome, Eclipse, Perl Foundation and the Wikimedia Foundation. These non-profits do not manage or "command and control" the production process, but enable it. In other words, they maintain the infrastructure of co-operation, just as the provisioning Working Groups enable the occupation to continue to operate.
I'm not sure how you are defining command-and-control, but my sense is that, at least in the case of Perl and Wikimedia, that there are decisions which need to be made, where the community is not in consensus, and that these are made by committees of people at the top of those organizations, although there may be a democratic process with partial control over who gets onto those committees. There is certainly an effort to be make as few decisions as possible in this manner and to be welcome to initiatives which originate in the larger community, but this does not mean that there is not a traditional hierarchical decision-making structure which is invoked "when push comes to shove". Both Perl and Wikimedia have benevolent dictators. For another example of this, consider Linux (see the discussion on Cathedral_and_the_Bazaar). However, I am not involved with any of these organizations, so my "sense" may be incorrect.
This is a very different decision-making structure from that of Occupy, in which "when push comes to shove", the status quo wins (e.g. contentious issues are brought before the general assembly, which cannot pass a motion without a strong supermajority).
> "Yes, Linus Torvalds and his lieutenants decide which patches will ultimately make it into the kernel, but the Red Hat, IBM and Novell employees who work on the Linux kernel don't take their orders from them. They work on whatever they (and their respective clients) think is most important, and Torvalds's only authority is deciding whether the patches they submit are good enough to make it into the kernel."
I think this is a key point. The freedom enjoyed by the community members is the freedom to work on what they want -- not surprising, since the open-source organization is not paying them. The community does NOT enjoy the freedom to control project decisionmaking. In places where a decision must be made, Linus makes it, or he chooses to delegate it to someone else (certainly if there were near-unaminity the community could threaten to walk out, but short of that Linus has a lot of power).
Even the freedom to work on what they want is attentuated for the majority of contributors -- I would expect that many of the Red Hat, IBM and Novell employees who work on the Linux kernel are not free to choose to work on whichever part of Linux they want, but must work on something that is acceptable to their bosses within Red Hat, IBM and Novell. The reason that I am working on Open Companies is that I see a clear path to changing this aspect and giving the workers more freedom; namely, if workers are willing to take on a lower salary or no salary, then the company can afford to allow them to choose what to work on, and compensate them later if they produce something that brings revenue and/or profit to the company. In other words, in any Open Company, the workers would bear greater risk and in return would have greater freedom (and presumably greater financial rewards than they otherwise would, realized in the case when they find something profitable to do with their time that traditional management would not have foreseen).
However, putting Open Companies aside, back to Linux: the old power structure is not so different from this one; the technical lead controls the project, and the people paying the workers control their time. The difference is just that in this case, the technical lead is not employed by the people paying the workers.
> But in peer production, we need a further hack as well. Instead of associating with shareholding companies, why not create our own entities: ethical company structures, in which the commons values are embedded within its legal structure, and do not have to be imposed from the outside?
agree 100% here
> At the core of value creation are various commons, where innovations are open for all to share and to build upon;
> These commons are protected through non-profit civic associations, which empower that social production;
> Around the commons emerges a vibrant commons-oriented economy comprised of ethical companies, whose legal structures tie them to the values and goals of the commons communities, not to creating private profit.
I guess my model is a lot like yours but inside out:
- at the core of value creation is a vibrant economy comprised of ethical peer-production companies, whose legal structures tie them to the values and goals of the commons communities, in addition to creating private profit
- note the "in addition to"; the creation of profit is a sine qua non for a company in capitalist society; like the human need for food, it may not be the goal of a company's existence, but it is a necessary condition for continued existence (technically only avoidance of loss is required, but even in that model you must profit sometimes to offset unexpected losses at other times). Also note the "peer-production" qualifier for the ethical companies.
- Everything produced by the ethical peer-production companies is eventually deposited into the commons (within a reasonable timeframe, e.g. 90 years is too long to wait)
- Around the commons emerge various non-profit civic associations, which help to organize, advertise, and distribute it.
-- BayleShanks