Re: [ox-en] Free Software and social movements in South America
- From: Stefan Merten <smerten oekonux.de>
- Date: Thu, 26 Apr 2007 09:32:00 +0200
Hi Michel and all!
I put some excerpts to the Wiki page I mentioned. I'll do this without
further notice from now on.
Last month (38 days ago) Michael Bauwens wrote:
* What kind of connection is there between social
movements and Free
Software exactly? What is the nature of this
connection? How strong
is it really?
[...]
If this is so, then the use of free software, which
creates new social relations, creates a new 'reality'
through its usage, and embeds new values such as
sharing and nonproprietary relationships, seem to be a
natural fit.
Yes. However, I'd like to emphasize that this type of sharing and
nonproprietary relationships exist since the birth of mankind and in
former societies certainly played a major role. So I'd say that the
practice of Free Something at least partly relates to this type of
relationships. Yet capitalism turned out to be stronger than these
relationships.
What is new today that with the digitized Free Somethings for the
first time we see a realistic chance to find a model which refuses the
proprietary model *and* is stronger than it.
* Why in contrast is there no strong connection
between Free Software
and social movements in more industrialized
countries?
[...]
So far, every techno-social revolution has been
started in the countries dominant from a former cycle,
but revolutions erupted in the periphery, this has
been true for both bourgeois and worker's revolutions.
Where they often didn't find the conditions to grow :-/ . The Russian
revolution for instance should have happened in Germany instead...
But ok. AFAICS the bourgeois revolution largely grew in the US which
formerly belonged to the periphery. However, germ forms of the
bourgeois revolution also flourished in Britain for instance.
Probably the relationship between periphery and center is a bit too
complex to be expressed in simple statements...
A recent study already showed that blogs are 'much
more important' in Asia than they are in the Western
countries. This is already an example.
Another example: what is the intensive for relative
rich capitalists and workers to adopt free and open
design for physical production, compared to the same
in the South, where the attraction of a built-only
model of production is much higher (and already
massively practice using illegal IP)
But that is true also for rich capitalists: If they can save a Euro
because of using Free Digitized Goods they tend to use it. (May be I'm
pre-occupied by my employer where license costs are regularly an
argument to employ Free Software ;-) ).
A general remark that you are familiar with. As
compared to the usual stress of Oekonux on free
software, I would extend the argument to peer
production generally, and so there is an interest for
the open/free (input), participatory
(process/governance) and commons-oriented (output)
solutions more generally, not just for FLOSS.
See my remarks above and this question:
* Does this phenomenon relate to the things we
learned about Free
Culture in South America / Brazil and if so how?
Mit Freien Grüßen
Stefan
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