User Owned organizations contrast with Worker Owned in that the Consumers are in control.

See also the related category on Source Freedom: http://p2pfoundation.net/Category:Sources

User Ownership is a mode of production and ownership designed to generalize the concepts of the GNU General Public License into the realm of Physical Production.

Introduction

Richard Stallman's Ideas

The GNU GPL is very clear in it’s goal to insure the virtual Means of Production (source code) should be in the hands of the CONSUMERS.

When RMS speaks of freedom it is always about the User (consumer), not developer, author, producer, worker or owner.

For instance, http://GNU.org/philosophy/freedom-or-power.html says “‘Proprietary software is an exercise of power. Copyright law today grants software developers that power, so they and only they choose the rules to impose on everyone else—a relatively few people make the basic software decisions for everyone, typically by denying their freedom. When users lack the freedoms that define Free Software, they can’t tell what the software is doing, can’t check for back doors, can’t monitor possible viruses and worms, can’t find out what personal information is being reported (or stop the reports, even if they do find out). If it breaks, they can’t fix it; they have to wait for the developer to exercise its power to do so. If it simply isn’t quite what they need, they are stuck with it. They can’t help each other improve it.’”

And the recent interview “Three Minutes with Richard Stallman” at http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,137098-c,freeware/article.html says “‘With free software, the users are in control. Most of the time, users want interoperability, and when the software is free, they get what they want. With non-free software, the developer controls the users. The developer permits interoperability when that suits the developer; what the users want is beside the point.’”

If a Mode of Production is defined by who controls the Means of Production, then the GNU Mode of Production is one in which the Consumers and NOT the Producers are at the helm.

Patrick Anderson's proposals

The GNU General Public License relies upon initial investing owners (developers) choosing to retain Copyright so they may apply the constraint: Virtual Sources must be made available "at cost" to any User with whom you share or trade Objects. This Inter-Owner Trade Agreement is then perpetually held in place by Instance owners (anyone owning a copy of that Object).

The physical realm is much different, but a variation of these concepts can be applied using regular private property law.

The GNU General Public Law would similarly rely upon initial investing owners (often called developers by the way) to choose to add a constraint to any Object (whether physical or not) of: All Profit (and in fact any amount of Price Above Cost) must be treated as an investment for that paying customer in more Physical Sources for the future production of that same kind of Object so that competition is perfected and democracy becomes direct. Wages are one of those costs. Wages are not profit, they are payment for work as arranged between current owners and potential workers.

See our entry on the Inter-Owner Trade Agreement.

Description

User Ownership is a special case in economics that has some interesting properties:

• Abundance and real solutions are goal and never thought 'destructive'.
• Scarcity is not sought and those physical sources are real insurance.

• Unemployment is not a problem, it is the second goal.
• Work is to be eliminated as a hurdle on the road to riches.

• Low prices are always good and tend toward cost.
• Profit is meaningless except as consumer growth.

• Entire production chains are finally localized.
• Development is solved instead of being sustained.

As an example, when you pay for the costs of copying an apple, which would you say is better:

1. An arbitrary, non-working group of Owners control the care (they may spray the orchard with dangerous chemicals) of those Sources, and can charge a price above cost to profit limited only by other competing Owners.
2. The Owners are the collective Workers that plant, water, maintain and harvest the fruit. They control the Sources similarly to the Owners in #1, but at least they can pay themselves a higher Wage. The consumer still has little control, is not allowed to do any of the work himself, and is still at the mercy of those who Own.
3. The perfect* Mode where the collective Owners are the Consumers themselves. They can make the copies themselves (tend their portion of the orchard in the manner they see fit - and within the constraint of realistic divisibility), or they may hire others to work for them, but either way we (the users/consumers) are in complete control. Such a mode also causes Price to be the same as Cost, as Profit has no meaning when the consumer Owns the Sources - or in other words, if the Consumer did pay profit it, he would be paying himself.

(*)Option 3 is not achievable in a perfect or static manner (especially during the initial growth period) because the consumer may not yet Own the Sources that were used during the round of production that created that exact object, but this Mode can always be "approached" by Owners who choose to apply an inter-owner contract that requires any profit paid by consumers be an investment in more sources, or toward paying-off some current investments, and that that those shares become the semi-divisible property of that very same consumer."

Discussion

Patrick Anderson: It is the difficulty in organizing large collective investments that keeps Users (Consumers) from Owning the Physical Sources of Production that would allow us to then have "at cost" access and full control of the Objects of that Production.

The idea is: An initial group of potential Users joint purchase some physical Sources and voluntarily put that property under a contract that requires Owners treat all Profit each object trade be an investment for that new user into User Ownership of more physical Sources in that same corporation.

This causes growth to wax and wane according to the demand of those consumers.

• User demand includes covering the costs of the last round of production.
• User demand also contains the desire to grow represented as profit.
• User lack of demand is the user's desire to shrink or sell by not paying costs.

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