[ox-en] NewScientist: "The Great Giveaway"
- From: Stefan Merten <smerten oekonux.de>
- Date: Sat, 02 Feb 2002 21:05:10 +0100
Hi lists,
Someone pointed me to a great article at
http://www.newscientist.com/hottopics/copyleft/copyleftart.jsp
It contains a number of interesting points, we partly discussed on the
German list already. Because it's definitely on-topic I quote it in
full below. However, the OpenCola-recipe is on the original site only
;-) .
Mit Freien Grüßen
Stefan
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The Great Giveaway
Good ideas are worth money. So why are hard headed operators giving
them away for free? Join our experiment to find out says Graham Lawton
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. 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 License. Instead of
restricting how the software can be used, as a standard software license
does, the GPL--often known as a "copyleft"--grants as much freedom as
possible (see http://www.fsf.org/licenses/gpl.html). 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. In FSF's words, 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.
Take OpenCola. Although originally intended as a promotional tool to
explain open source software, the drink has taken on a life of its
own. The Toronto-based OpenCola company has become better known for
the drink than the software it was supposed to promote. Laird Brown,
the company's senior strategist, attributes its success to a
widespread mistrust of big corporations and the "proprietary nature of
almost everything". A website selling the stuff has shifted 150,000
cans. Politically minded students in the US have started mixing up the
recipe for parties.
OpenCola is a happy accident and poses no real threat to Coke or
Pepsi, but elsewhere people are deliberately using the open source
model to challenge entrenched interests. One popular target is the
music industry. At the forefront of the attack is the Electronic
Frontier Foundation, a San Francisco group set up to defend civil
liberties in the digital society. In April of last year, the EFF
published a model copyleft called the Open Audio License (OAL). The
idea is to let musicians take advantage of digital music's
properties--ease of copying and distribution--rather than fighting
against them. Musicians who release music under an OAL consent to
their work being freely copied, performed, reworked and reissued, as
long as these new products are released under the same licence. They
can then rely on "viral distribution" to get heard. "If the people
like the music, they will support the artist to ensure the artist can
continue to make music," says Robin Gross of the EFF.
It's a little early to judge whether the OAL will capture imaginations
in the same way as OpenCola. But it's already clear that some of the
strengths of open source software simply don't apply to music. In
computing, the open source method lets users improve software by
eliminating errors and inefficient bits of code, but it's not obvious
how that might happen with music. In fact, the music is not really
"open source" at all. The files posted on the OAL music website
http://www.openmusicregistry.org so far are all MP3s and Ogg
Vorbises--formats which allow you to listen but not to modify.
It's also not clear why any mainstream artists would ever choose to
release music under an OAL. Many bands objected to the way Napster
members circulated their music behind their backs, so why would they
now allow unrestricted distribution, or consent to strangers fiddling
round with their music? Sure enough, you're unlikely to have heard of
any of the 20 bands that have posted music on the registry. It's hard
to avoid the conclusion that Open Audio amounts to little more than an
opportunity for obscure artists to put themselves in the shop window.
The problems with open music, however, haven't put people off trying
open source methods elsewhere. 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
encyclopedia," 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. "People like the idea
that knowledge can and should be freely distributed and developed,"
says Sanger. Over time, he 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.
Another experiment that's proved its worth is the OpenLaw project at the
Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School. Berkman
lawyers specialise in cyberlaw--hacking, copyright, encryption and so
on--and the centre has strong ties with the EFF and the open source software
community. In 1998 faculty member Lawrence Lessig, now at Stanford Law
School, was asked by online publisher Eldritch Press to mount a legal
challenge to US copyright law. Eldritch takes books whose copyright has
expired and publishes them on the Web, but new legislation to extend
copyright from 50 to 70 years after the author's death was cutting off its
supply of new material. Lessig invited law students at Harvard and elsewhere
to help craft legal arguments challenging the new law on an online forum,
which evolved into OpenLaw.
Normal law firms write arguments the way commercial software companies
write code. Lawyers discuss a case behind closed doors, and although
their final product is released in court, the discussions or "source
code" that produced it remain secret. In contrast, OpenLaw crafts its
arguments in public and releases them under a copyleft. "We
deliberately used free software as a model," says Wendy Selzer, who
took over OpenLaw when Lessig moved to Stanford. Around 50 legal
scholars now work on Eldritch's case, and OpenLaw has taken other
cases, too.
"The gains are much the same as for software," Selzer says. "Hundreds
of people scrutinise the 'code' for bugs, and make suggestions how to
fix it. And people will take underdeveloped parts of the argument,
work on them, then patch them in." Armed with arguments crafted in
this way, OpenLaw has taken Eldritch's case--deemed unwinnable at the
outset--right through the system and is now seeking a hearing in the
Supreme Court.
There are drawbacks, though. The arguments are in the public domain
right from the start, so OpenLaw can't spring a surprise in court. For
the same reason, it can't take on cases where confidentiality is
important. But where there's a strong public interest element, open
sourcing has big advantages. Citizens' rights groups, for example,
have taken parts of OpenLaw's legal arguments and used them elsewhere.
"People use them on letters to Congress, or put them on flyers,"
Selzer says.
The open content movement is still at an early stage and it's hard to
predict how far it will spread. "I'm not sure there are other areas
where open source would work," says Sanger. "If there were, we might
have started it ourselves." Eric Raymond has also expressed doubts. In
his much-quoted 1997 essay, The Cathedral and the Bazaar, he warned
against applying open source methods to other products. "Music and
most books are not like software, because they don't generally need to
be debugged or maintained," he wrote. Without that need, the products
gain little from others' scrutiny and reworking, so there's little
benefit in open sourcing. "I do not want to weaken the winning
argument for open sourcing software by tying it to a potential loser,"
he wrote.
But Raymond's views have now shifted subtly. "I'm more willing to
admit that I might talk about areas other than software someday," he
told New Scientist. "But not now." The right time will be once open
source software has won the battle of ideas, he says. He expects that
to happen around 2005. And so the experiment goes on. As a
contribution to it, New Scientist has agreed to issue this article
under a copyleft. That means you can copy it, redistribute it, reprint
it in whole or in part, and generally play around with it as long as
you, too, release your version under a copyleft and abide by the other
terms and conditions in the licence. We also ask that you inform us of
any use you make of the article, by e-mailing
copyleft newscientist.com.
One reason for doing so is that by releasing it under a copyleft, we
can print the recipe for OpenCola without violating its copyleft. If
nothing else, that demonstrates the power of the copyleft to spread
itself. But there's another reason, too: to see what happens. 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.
Further reading:
For a selection of copylefts, see
http://www.eff.org/IP/Open_licenses/open_alternatives.html
The Cathedral and the Bazaar by Eric Raymond is available at
http://tuxedo.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/
Editor's comment
THE INFORMATION IN THIS ARTICLE IS FREE. It may be copied, distributed
and/or modified under the conditions set down in the Design Science
License published by Michael Stutz at http://dsl.org/copyleft/dsl.txt
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