It’s the business model, stupid.
The open source business model is better for the economy. Selling services and support, showing your source code and giving it away, works. You can make money that way.
But you don’t make as much money. The economy grows but you, the maker of the software, don’t make as much money. You become Linus Torvalds (right), not Bill Gates.
The same will be true in the areas of an open Internet and open spectrum. The economy will benefit from a weaker copyright regime, and from having more spectrum available for unlicensed use.
But many businesses will lose. Hollywood won’t make as much from their pictures, and will lose control of their talent. Phone and cable and cellular companies will earn less selling bits than they can selling services.
This is the reality.
We have to choose between the interests of the economy as a whole and the interests of major players in that economy.
This is the economic and political implication of open source. This is what makes it dangerous. This is why it is being fought.
This is why, in America, it is losing.
America is not a perfect democracy, and never has been. Its chief economic interests have always held sway over its politics. All the industries threatened by the rise of open source are big political hitters in Washington, and in state capitols. The beneficiaries of open source are not.
The threat, the danger, of failing to move toward an open source economy is that our economic rivals are doing so. Brazil is doing so. India is doing so. China is doing so. We can complain all we want about "piracy" — of software, or movies, or patents — but the fact is these economies are doing to us just what we did to Europe in the 19th century. They are paying official lip service to our IP regimes, and ignoring them in fact. They are embracing the principle of open source.
As a result, they are catching up to us. They have caught us in broadband. They will catch us in software. They will beat us in services. They will bury us.
Unless we change. Until we change. Until we unshackle our economy and our people from those who demand constant, rising taxes to the past, on and on into the future.
It is fortunate, then, that the battle is being played out against the
backdrop of enormous political ferment. In such a time of excess, the
popular will really does come into play. The "greater good," as seen by
the voters, wins out. Every time.
- The Union beat the economic power of slavery.
- Progressivism beat the economic power of the Trusts.
- The New Deal defeated the economic power of the banks.
- The Nixon revolution beat the Business Roundtable.
In times of political ferment, when a generational excess is perceived,
when the old ways cease to work or be relevant, the interests of the
economy as a whole take precedence, for a time, over the individual
players in that economy.
Open source has become partisan, and it has become partisan on the
winning side. There is no way, short of a coup, for Republicans to
maintain control over the American people for more than three years.
History tells us that much.
The more the principles of open source are insinuated into the
‘Netroots,’ the more power those principles will have come the
political revolution that is now brewing.
I remain an optimist.
