Re: [ox-en] Fwd from Martin Hardie
- From: "Florian v. Samson" <fsamson unix-ag.uni-kl.de>
- Date: Tue, 28 Mar 2006 12:36:54 +0200
Hello Markus,
On Sat, Mar 25, 2006 at 11:59:28AM [PHONE NUMBER REMOVED], Markus wrote:
regarding willingness of a community to finance: i dont have any real
world examples but i believe the majority of people are willing to pay a
fee provided it is
*) reasonable
*) (a big part) goes directly to the people who do good work (especially
if it allows for the funding of specific actions that the person thinks is
of value)
(http://www.vodes.net/revstartshere/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=397&Itemid=116)
and the
*) use is transparent
*) fair and
*) can to a large degree be influenced by the community.
Oh, this sound quite close to the often heard explanations, why
"RAND"-Licensing ("Reasonable and Non-Discriminatory") is a good thing.
This has been discussed over and over in the field of standards and
standardisation comitees/organisations (e.g. W3C).
IMO, it is "RAND"-Terms are defintitly no good for F/OSS.
- A "reasonable"-fee for a large organisation usually is unbearably high
for a small firm, a single person or a Free Software-Project.
So: Who decides what is "reasonable"?
- I will not bring up the minor points agaist "RAND"-Terms here, as the
above mentioned one is the crucial one.
Actually, Patent Law also fulfills your most of your conditions, except
for the last one "influence".
Then, I do not believe, that that "influence"-point bis too important:
The chance for everybody to get involved in the process of developing
software or a standard (= "influence it") turns out to be the chance to
rectify things which are going in the wrong direction, for ones point of
view.
IMHO, if one cannot do anything about it ("influence it") and that poses
a problem, drop it.
I discussed that peronally with many people in the field of standards:
A standard is an Open Standard, if it can be taken and implemented as Free
Software. "Taken" does not include fees, individual licensing /
contracts, etc.
As a bonus, the development process can be open to everybody
("influence").
Ah, and a classic one: What is that "community" you are talking about in
"influenced by the community"? (Try to give a good, precise definition
;-)
BTW, I do know many FOSS-Projects and their members, some even have a
"community" of adopters, I do know some people in the Microsoft Developer
"community", I know FOSS-Evangelists and -Followers, but I have not found
anything such as a FOSS-Community. And where is the Proprietory
Software Community then? Additionaly the term "FOSS-Community" is well
suited to be misused by Anti-FOSS strategists/marketeers.
people are paying one can discuss little "cheapie icons" on forum profiles
for people who have not paid their contribution. the cheapie icon might
have an impact if people are looking for help in a forum. social law
enforcement that is. other benefits for paying members depend on the
specific community but it should not be impossible to give them enough
incentive to pay a fee that fulfills the criteria above.
generally i believe there is a core of "rationality" in most people; in
other words, i believe that most people are willing to pay if one explains
them in an honest and open manner the advantages and disadvantages and let
them partcipate in the governance. and the benefits of membership fees
(imo) tremendously outweigh its disadvantages. certainly, there will
always be people who believe in extremes and dogmas and believe open
source should be free of money. i, for one, want open source to prevail
(in the marketplace) and to deliver outstanding quality for the benefit of
most people. and im convinced that money is a core element to achieve all
this.
im the reason why you didnt understand it because im quite bad with
writing things down and explaining them to outsiders. but (slowly) i think
ill get there. :)
regarding the word format, generally, the structure of the vn digital
license provides for a maximum of two excluded rational uses. in the case
of scientific publications of the vn foundation, one of the two excluded
uses is conversion into the .doc format. here
(http://www.vodes.net/revstartshere/index.php?option=com_docman&task=doc_download&gid=46&Itemid=122)
is, however, a published version of the letter in .odt format. you are
free to do with it whatever you want. formally, you would need to be a
community member, but you wont hear from our laywers if you dont register.
;)
regarding more literature on the role of the foundation: see the link
above. interested institutions can directly steer research (with no
overhead costs in employing me) in casting their capital vodes for the
production of papers (and vode/allocate funds for answering specific
research questions) which they think is most interesting. details will be
announced in about one month. and, in the spirit of open source, when i
say one month i mean at least two. right now our focus is on the practical
aspects and the organisation of the first matchmaking party
(http://www.vodes.net/revstartshere/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=399&Itemid=123)
in stockolm at the stockholm university. if anyone is here...feel free to
drop by. :)
PAPER Proposal:
if you know some research insitutions who are interested in funding and
having those thoughts below written down in an user-friendly paper and
under the - very liberal and standardised (advantage to CC) - VN DL (in
.odt format), please let us know.
generally, contrary to mozilla, one goal is to minimise the powers of the
foundation vis-a-vis community members by:
1) limiting flow of internal capital vodes/money through the foundation;
e.g. from Beta Tester directly to VN People, Artists, Open source
developer/wikipedian; to the largest extent possible directly p2p (people
to people);
First practical Example
(http://www.vodes.net/revstartshere/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=397&Itemid=116):
collective management of vn and direct funding of full-time employed
ctvn-g (mgs); allows also for testing how a collective governance scheme
works where the community (512 interested Beta Tester to be precise) vodes
for/invests in/allocates money for actions of management which they think
are of most value to vn. this direct funding scheme could easily be
applied for core developers who offer to write a couple of lines for
adding functionlities or do other actions they are interested in doing.
people can than vode for the functionality that (s)he wants the most.
as a side note, there is also another big advantage of this p2p funding
scheme as it pretty much does away with investment loss in the case of
organising real world events (e.g. concerts):
http://www.vodes.net/revstartshere/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=402&Itemid=66
2) minimising asset vodes (physical goods) belonging to the foundation
as another means to limit the powers of the foundation vis-a-vis its
members, the reversed leasing agreement aims to limit ownership/control of
physical items. basically, the foundation leases certain assets from team
offline members which they privately own (e.g. video camera, CD-Printer,
etc.). another example are t-shirts which vn people/staff wear at vn
events. they buy the t-shirt themselv in advance, but get an extra
remunerated for each event they come with the t-shirt and help organising.
one can discuss whether (and to what extent) they should be able to make
some money on the purchase of the t-shirt.
apart from distributing costs for the foundation over a longer period and
allowing private persons to make (pocket) money on their private items,
from a psychological perspective, people who own things tend to treat them
better.
3) fair distribution of capital vodes within the foundation
last with respect to the role of the foundation, while one function of the
vn foundation is to generate (external through corporate donations) money
and to focus the goodwill and administer the investments of labour vodes
and to co-ordinate actions by thousands of individuals to achieve the
goals (just as mozilla) it does not stop there; rather the foundation is
only a means to achieve the goal of a fair (as defined by the collective
decision making body team beta tester) distribution of wealth. yes, vn
wants to generate money - in order to distribute it among artists, vn
people (mainly students) and open movement (open source/wikimedia)
individuals.
difference to mozilla: there is a re-transfer of capital vodes - the money
is given back to the community (and not kept within the foundation) and
distributed to according to what the collective Team Beta Tester deems
"just". i cant resist to mention the - almost insulting - prize for the
best firefox extension of the mozilla foundation: it was a - corporate
sponsorship (alienware computer). yet, the foundation sits on a pile of
more than 50 000 000 in cash. had i done a single action (i.e. cast a
labour vode) for mozilla before, i would not do any single thing for the
foundation until they are opening up the books and are willing to let the
community participate in the distribution of wealth. what 50 million can
do for essential projects like openbsd, gimp, openoffice, inkscape is
obvious.
it seems quite strange that the mozilla foundation does not believe in
openness and transparency when it comes to the income and money that the
work of the community generates. ive contacted and send the idNCC letter
to the mozilla foundation but have not heard from them. on the other hand,
it does not surprise me - in the light of the founders of the foundation
and the incentives of those people/institutions. therefore, we have also
put down the spread firefox logo. as soon as there is a viable and
altruistically driven alternative on the horizon we do our best to promote
this browser (unless mozilla is giving the community a say in the way
money is distributed). in this respect, initially our "target group" is
students (in europe alone there are 17 million).
markus
On Thu, 23 Mar 2006 01:18:48 +0100, Michael Bouwens
<michelsub2003 yahoo.com> wrote:
[Converted from multipart/alternative]
[1 text/plain]
Markus:
have you seen how the user community (see comments) actually supports
such financing? (this is conssistent with the non-reciprocity inherent
in peer production)
Linking income to effort changes peer production into a hybrid format
based on forms of reciprocity, which is not a bad thing.
Your link to the vodes.net document is very interesting, and actually,
I'm only now starting to understand how the thing is working, for some
reason, I just couldn't get it before. I'd like to quote from it in P2P
News, is it possible to have a Word version of it?
Any more literature on the role of foundations would be very welcome?
Michel
Markus <markus vodes.net> wrote: interesting article. regarding
unilateral governance and use of funds:
http://digg.com/technology/Mozilla_made_$72_million_from_Firefox. the
winner of the best extension got an alienware computer (which is most
likely also a donation). an open source projetc which lives from ll the
investment of people around the world does not even have transparency as
regards the money they make thx to the supporters. seems to be quite
contrary to the open source spirit.
here
(http://www.vodes.net/revstartshere/index.php?option=com_docman&task=doc_download&gid=43&Itemid=122)
is an excerpt of how we are going to govern the - nascent - vn online
community.
On Tue, 21 Mar 2006 08:22:04 +0100, geert lovink wrote:
http://beta.kainx.org/journals/view/content/729
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