about Ideas are not for owning

http://www.hero.ac.uk/inside_he/archive/ideas_are_not_for_owning1348.cfm?&archive=yes

Below is an edited version of Graham Lawton’s article, The Great Giveaway, published in The New Scientist, 2 February 2002.

IF YOU’VE BEEN to a computer show in recent months you might have seen it: a shiny silver drinks can with a ring-pull logo and the words “opencola” on the side. Inside is a fizzy drink that tastes very much like Coca-Cola. Or is it Pepsi?

There’s something else written on the can, though, which sets the drink apart. It says “check out the source at opencola.com”. Go to that web address and you’ll see something that’s not available on Coca-Cola’s website, or Pepsi’s – the recipe for cola. For the first time ever, you can make the real thing in your own home.

OpenCola is the world’s first “open source” consumer product. By calling it open source, its manufacturer is saying that instructions for making it are freely available. Anybody can make the drink, and anyone can modify and improve on the recipe as long as they, too, release their recipe into the public domain. As a way of doing business it’s rather unusual – the Coca-Cola Company doesn’t make a habit of giving away precious commercial secrets. But that’s the point.

OpenCola is the most prominent sign yet that a long-running battle between rival philosophies in software development has spilt over into the rest of the world. What started as a technical debate over the best way to debug computer programs is developing into a political battle over the ownership of knowledge and how it is used, between those who put their faith in the free circulation of ideas and those who prefer to designate them “intellectual property”. No one knows what the outcome will be. But in a world of growing opposition to corporate power, restrictive intellectual property rights and globalisation, open source is emerging as a possible alternative, a potentially potent means of fighting back. And you’re helping to test its value right now.

The open source movement originated in 1984 when computer scientist Richard Stallman quit his job at MIT and set up the Free Software Foundation (FSF). His aim was to create high-quality software that was freely available to everybody. Stallman’s beef was with commercial companies that smother their software with patents and copyrights and keep the source code – the original program, written in a computer language such as C++ – a closely guarded secret. Stallman saw this as damaging. It generated poor-quality, bug-ridden software. And worse, it choked off the free flow of ideas. Stallman fretted that if computer scientists could no longer learn from one another’s code, the art of programming would stagnate (New Scientist, 12 December 1998, p 42).

Stallman’s move resonated round the computer science community and now there are thousands of similar projects. The star of the movement is Linux, an operating system created by Finnish student Linus Torvalds in the early 1990s and installed on around 18 million computers worldwide.

What sets open source software apart from commercial software is the fact that it’s free, in both the political and the economic sense. If you want to use a commercial product such as Windows XP or Mac OS X you have to pay a fee and agree to abide by a licence that stops you from modifying or sharing the software. But if you want to run Linux or another open source package, you can do so without paying a penny – although several companies will sell you the software bundled with support services. You can also modify the software in any way you choose, copy it and share it without restrictions.

This freedom acts as an open invitation – some say challenge – to its users to make improvements. As a result, thousands of volunteers are constantly working on Linux, adding new features and winkling out bugs. Their contributions are reviewed by a panel and the best ones are added to Linux. For programmers, the kudos of a successful contribution is its own reward. The result is a stable, powerful system that adapts rapidly to technological change. Linux is so successful that even IBM installs it on the computers it sells.

To maintain this benign state of affairs, open source software is covered by a special legal instrument called the General Public Licence. Instead of restricting how the software can be used, as a standard software licence does, the GPL – often known as a “copyleft” – grants as much freedom as possible. Software released under the GPL (or a similar copyleft licence) can be copied, modified and distributed by anyone, as long as they, too, release it under a copyleft. That restriction is crucial, because it prevents the material from being co-opted into later proprietary products. It also makes open source software different from programs that are merely distributed free of charge. As FSF puts it, the GPL “makes it free and guarantees it remains free”.

Open source has proved a very successful way of writing software. But it has also come to embody a political stand – one that values freedom of expression, mistrusts corporate power, and is uncomfortable with private ownership of knowledge. It’s “a broadly libertarian view of the proper relationship between individuals and institutions”, according to open source guru Eric Raymond.

But it’s not just software companies that lock knowledge away and release it only to those prepared to pay. Every time you buy a CD, a book, a copy of New Scientist, even a can of Coca-Cola, you’re forking out for access to someone else’s intellectual property. Your money buys you the right to listen to, read or consume the contents, but not to rework them, or make copies and redistribute them. No surprise, then, that people within the open source movement have asked whether their methods would work on other products. As yet no one’s sure – but plenty of people are trying it. …

Encyclopedias, for example, look like fertile ground. Like software, they’re collaborative and modular, need regular upgrading, and improve with peer review. But the first attempt, a free online reference called Nupedia, hasn’t exactly taken off. Two years on, only 25 of its target 60,000 articles have been completed. “At the current rate it will never be a large encyclopaedia,” says editor-in-chief Larry Sanger. The main problem is that the experts Sanger wants to recruit to write articles have little incentive to participate. They don’t score academic brownie points in the same way software engineers do for upgrading Linux, and Nupedia can’t pay them.

It’s a problem that’s inherent to most open source products: how do you get people to chip in? Sanger says he’s exploring ways to make money out of Nupedia while preserving the freedom of its content. Banner adverts are a possibility. But his best hope is that academics start citing Nupedia articles so authors can earn academic credit.

There’s another possibility: trust the collective goodwill of the open source community. A year ago, frustrated by the treacle-like progress of Nupedia, Sanger started another encyclopedia named Wikipedia (the name is taken from open source web software called WikiWiki that allows pages to be edited by anyone on the Web). It’s a lot less formal than Nupedia: anyone can write or edit an article on any topic, which probably explains the entries on beer and Star Trek. But it also explains its success. Wikipedia already contains 19,000 articles and is acquiring several thousand more each month. … Over time, [Sanger] reckons, thousands of dabblers should gradually fix any errors and fill in any gaps in the articles until Wikipedia evolves into an authoritative encyclopedia with hundreds of thousands of entries. …

And so the experiment goes on. … To my knowledge this is the first magazine article published under a copyleft. Who knows what the outcome will be? Perhaps the article will disappear without a trace. Perhaps it will be photocopied, redistributed, re-edited, rewritten, cut and pasted onto websites, handbills and articles all over the world. I don’t know – but that’s the point. It’s not up to me any more. The decision belongs to all of us.

Relevant Information
The source code of this article plus details of the conditions can be found at
www.newscientist.com/hottopics/copyleft


For a selection of copylefts, see
www.eff.org/IP/Open_licenses/open_alternatives.html