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Re: [ox-en] Re: Governments using Free Software



Stefan Meretz wrote:
On 2007-11-28 20:25, graham wrote:
I now see instead that
it is so poisonous that it is rejected before it is swallowed. Unless
it has a fully capitalist form (eg. produced by IBM employees for
wages and distributed with their equipment, in IBMs original
commercial model from the 60s) it disrupts capitalism too much. IT
managers' power depends too much on the money they spend, on the
contacts they have exclusively with particular companies, for them to
accept it. It blocks the flow of capital and power within the firm,
and within government departments.

I don't understand what the poison is and how it works. Blocking the 
flow of capital? Where does a commercial OS approach blocks capital? 

I meant to write that UNLESS it's a commercial OS approach, the flow of
capital is blocked.

I share your observations, but I want to understand, what is happing 
there, and I don't.

Could you explain?

I am trying to generalize on the basis of some very limited personal
experience, so this may well be wrong (if I write 'often', it's a guess..).

Organizations have a formal hierarchy. In my experience this often does
not have a very close relationship to the actual power relationships
involved; or maybe better, it is a necessary but not sufficient basis
for actual power. Power over subordinates is often actually maintained
by restricting the flow of information, so subordinates are unable to
make sensible decisions about their own work because they do not know
the full context. But this is not sufficient to maintain power relative
to other people at the same level in the hierarchy. In capitalist
organizations this is often done through control over money and budgets.
Someone who controls a large budget has more power than someone with a
small one. For IT to maintain a large budget is difficult, because IT is
perceived as a deduction from revenue, an expense rather than an
investment [oops, back to the value argument]. So the IT manager needs
to be able to justify this large budget through restricting information
flow 'sideways' as well as downwards. The IT manager has personal
contacts with (say) Microsoft - who make this an integral part of their
business plan by inviting such people to become part of numerous
'councils' or other impressive and influential sounding bodies. Other
managers do not have these contacts, allowing the IT manager a) to sound
like an expert acknowledged by the outside world and b) to announce
apparently magnificent 'deals' on new software arranged through his
personal contacts, implying that if anyone else took his place the
budget would have to be even bigger.

Now, say there is an instruction to replace Word with OO in the
organization. Of course there are likely to be technical issues over
this. But, if successful, it reduces the managers power in a number of
ways:
- it may reduce his power over subordinates, who may know more about
this software than he does.
- it may reduce his budget, through reducing licence fees (which are
recurring; any additional training for the transition is a one-off)
- he has no special relationship with the suppliers he can use to
impress his colleagues with his unique connections

Managers are therefore likely to resist this. If forced to move to free
software (and I believe this was the Venezuelan experience in the first
phase) they will try to find companies which give them the same benefits
as proprietary software. Rather than a switch essentially from
proprietary software to free software, a switch essentially from
Microsoft to IBM, or Novell, allows them to replicate the original
situation, after some work. They can make the same connections with the
IBM salesmen they had with the MS salesmen. They can make sure there are
no 'hobbyists' working on the software, and so that they have no
subordinates who have greater knowledge of the software than the company
contacts. They can keep their large budgets. The switch to free software
is then really a switch to open source, in the most limited sense. I
believe this is part of the meaning behind the Novell/MS alliance.

So just as there is a constant tendency for the subordinates to
introduce free software on a small scale 'from below', thereby enabling
them to do their job better and bypass the control from above, there is
a constant tendency for managers to subvert any attempt to impose a free
software policy 'from above'. Policies are announced by governments,
which then find they can't impose the policies because the resistance is
capillary, it's completely embedded in the system; and after a while,
the policy is quietly forgotten, the web site announcing it is left to
become out of date, and everything reverts to the way it was..

This all sounds like something unique to the IT department, but I don't
think it is.

I used to think of capital as something external to firms: temporarily
materialized in raw materials, or warehoused stock, or (less
temporarily) in productive equipment, or in it's monetary form sitting
in a company bank account. Or if flowing, then flowing through the
productive process. Pretty much the variations on the M-C-M' schema in
Marx, and without any knowledge on my part of accounting or the way
companies really work.

Now I think that capital must flow through the company as a whole for
capitalism to work, and not just through the bank account or physical
production. And the way it flows through is via the budgets of
individual departments, which are the power base of the managers in
those departments. The turnover of a department is just as much the
measure of its importance as the turnover of a company is. So the
internal flow of capital provides the power base which allows a
capitalist organisation to work. Without it there would always be the
risk of the collapse of hierarchy, where hierarchy is no longer
supported by tradition. No hierarchy, end of system: so attempts to do
anything that would reduce it are treated as attacks. Fully free
software within a company reduces the flow of capital and endangers
hierarchy (mind you, so in a different way does the use of IM without
authorization by all the staff...)

That went on way longer than I meant it to... It obviously can't be
completely right, because then you can't explain Munich, Extremadura,
etc (except to the extent that these are political moves, and I haven't
heard anything to make me think that is the case. The Venezuelan case is
an exception, because it is 100% political, not economic). But I would
like to hear why it isn't right, based on others' experience.

best
Graham


Ciao,
Stefan



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