Open source is not seen as a political philosophy because the issues followed by those who understand it are seen as "geek" issues. (That’s Adam Smith to the right.)
These are some of the issues I’m talking about:
- Copyright fairness
- Defining networking at the edges rather than at the center.
- Opening up more unlicensed spectrum
How in the world are you going to build a political philosophy on that?
In fact, you build one the way Marx did, by looking at how the economy works, and what is needed for it to work more fairly. Marx was working within a growing industrial system, mass consumption and mass production, which was limiting the need for an educated "proletariat" and separating the interests of the workers from those of their immediate supervisors, the bourgeiosie.
Today’s economic reality is quite different. Nearly every job defined as "proletariat" is now subject to being replaced by a machine. Most aren’t, yet, because labor is so cheap and robotic replacements remain expensive. But that’s the way we’re moving.
In this environment, a society’s equity lies in its human capital, nothing more. The best thing a government can do for its people is to develop that human capital. All of it. And give it the best possible tools with which to work.
The old left-right argument says nothing about any of this. The so-called "choice" between capitalism and communism has been made. Capitalism won.
But as with the fall of the Berlin Wall, the question for economists and political philosophers should be — now what?
And this is what.
The real choice facing the world is who owns what comes from our minds, and when.
The real question is what best drives the economy forward. Competition will continue, between people, between companies, between nations. How can we produce the most winners in that competition?
And here the history of open source fairly screams its answer.
A Commons. (That’s a view of the Olmsted Park in Buffalo. NY.)
A common, basic code base enables more businesses to be creative, on a higher level, than a proprietary code base. Open source is better for everyone. It’s better for programmers, who hold more power in an open source world. It is better for the users, who get more higher-level projects faster. And it is better for the companies involved, because they have lots of people looking for bugs and improvements and opportunities, not just their own staff.
Open source, in other words, is better for capitalism.
What is true for software is also true for patent and copyright generally. The faster work goes into the commons, the more quickly it can be used to create new and better work. The Founders saw copyright and patents as limited rights, granted for a limited time, primarily to individuals, and designed to encourage the creation of more, and better inventions.
In our time, this has been perverted into a corporate right, the past holding the future hostage with demands for money. Well, Walt Disney is dead. The incentive for creating Mickey Mouse has been paid, as anything other than a trademark.
We don’t need to change the system, simply adjust it. The reason China is beating our butts is because our Copyright Absolutism is simply ignored over there. We assume that, after they become our overlords they will begin enforcing copyright and patents, as we did in the 20th century. But by that time it will be too late to compete.
The same principle applies to spectrum. Consider how much use unlicensed spectrum gets, as opposed to licensed. Open spectrum is better for capitalism. Instead, our policymakers are turning the commons spectrum into a corporate preserve. It is not only bad policy, but it is inefficient economics.
So change it.
Open source, in other words, answers most of the questions our economy is asking right now. And as you’ll soon see, it does even more than that.
