Re: [ox-en] Free Software and social movements in South America
- From: graham <graham theseamans.net>
- Date: Fri, 08 Jun 2007 10:04:44 +0100
Hi Michael
I'm playing devil's advocate below...
Michael Bauwens wrote:
But two things are likely to happen:
1) for profit companies will increasingly face for
benefit production companies beating them at
asymmetric competition
2) this will drive the adoption by for profit
companies themselves of non-proprietary software (and
designs generally), of partially open, free ,
participatory, commons oriented strategies as an
adjunct or key part of their strategies. Quite a few
will shift to attention market strategies, built only
capitalism modes, and commons oriented derivatives
modes
the new will partially destroy the older models, but
can also create a crisis of accumulation as lots of
the new practices are not fully monetizable
OK. For example, wikipedia competing with Britannica, Britannica's
attempts to counter by putting some material on line for free,
for-profit wikipedia clones competing with both but clearly achieving
tiny revenues, etc. So maybe a crisis of accumulation in the
encyclopedia business, and others like it. But a crisis of accumulation
big enough to effect the whole system? Seems unlikely..
Or even taking one company: Microsoft becoming a distributor for Suse
and Xandros - will that really have a negative effect on overall
software revenues?
3) peer production communities will continue to arise,
but its members facing precarious circumstances,
leading to social tensions and demands for reform
Programmers barricade the streets? Again, the numbers of people involved
relative to the whole system seem too small. System-affecting social
tensions like that still seem more likely to be coming from say the
Chinese factory workers than a coalition of programmers, graphic
designers etc..
4) the miniaturization/distribution of physical
production leads to a situation where the kind of
centralization of capital may become obsolete and does
not require wage relationship types of capitalism.
Social innovation compliments and replaces
entrepreneurial modes of innovation,
putting capital
out of the a priori picture but putting it in the a
posteriori picture,
I don't understand that phrase, could you explain it?
note the capital requirements of
internet companies have fallen by 80% in 10 years,
venture capital is only minimally present in web 2.0
and is slowly deserting open source influenced
software industry because of lack of a clear business
model
Cheers
Graham
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