Excerpted from Eric Raymond:

“Perhaps the most serious error, ultimately, is the way Rifkin abuses the notion of “the commons”. This has a lot of personal weight for me, because I have lived in and helped construct a hacker culture that maintains a huge software commons and continually pushes for open, non-proprietary infrastructure. I have experienced, recorded, and in some ways helped create the elaborate network of manifestos, practices, expectations, how-to documents, institutions, and folk stories that sustains this commons. I think I can fairly claim to have made the case for open infrastructure as forcefully and effectively as anyone who has ever tried to.

Bluntly put, I have spent more than thirty years actually doing what Rifkin is glibly intellectualizing about. From that experience, I say this: the concept of “the commons” is not a magic wand that banishes questions about self-determination, power relationships, and the perils of majoritarianism. Nor is it a universal solvent against actual scarcity problems. Maintaining a commons, in practice, requires more scrupulousness about boundaries and respect for individual autonomy rather than less. Because if you can’t work out how to maximize long-run individual and joint utility at the same time, your commons will not work – it will fly apart.

Though I participate in a huge commons and constantly seek to extend it, I seldom speak of it in those terms. I refrain because I find utopian happy-talk about “the commons” repellent. It strikes me as at best naive and at at worst quite sinister – a gauzy veil wrapped around clapped-out collectivist ideologizing, and/or an attempt to sweep the question of who actually calls the shots under the rug.

In the open-source community, all our “commons” behavior ultimately reduces to decisions by individuals, the most basic one being “participate this week/day/hour, or not?” We know that it cannot be otherwise. Each participant is fiercely protective of the right of all others to participate only voluntarily and on terms of their own choosing. Nobody ever says that “the commons” requires behavior that individuals themselves would not freely choose, and if anyone ever tried to do so they would be driven out with scorn. The opposition Rifkin wants to find between Lockean individualism and collaboration does not actually exist, and cannot.

Most of us also understand, nowadays, that attempts to drive an ideological wedge between our commons and “the market” are wrong on every level. Our commons is in fact a reputation market – one that doesn’t happen to be monetized, but which has all the classical behaviors, equilibria, and discovery problems of the markets economists usually study. It exists not in opposition to monetized trade, free markets, and private property, but in productive harmony with all three.

Rifkin will not have this, because for the narrative he wants these constructions must conflict with each other. To step away from software for an instructive example of how this blinds him, the way Rifkin analyzes the trend towards automobile sharing is perfectly symptomatic.

He tells a framing story in which individual automobile ownership has been a central tool and symbol of individual autonomy (true enough), then proposes that the trend towards car-sharing is therefore necessarily a willing surrender of autonomy. The actual fact – that car-sharing is popular mainly in urban areas because it allows city-dwellers to buy more mobility and autonomy at a lower capital cost – escapes him.

Car sharers are not abandoning private property, they’re buying a service that prices personal cars out of some kinds of markets. Because Rifkin is all caught up in his own commons rhetoric, he doesn’t get this and will underestimate what it takes for car sharing to spread out of cities to less densely populated areas where it has a higher discovery and coordination cost (and the incremental value of individual car ownership is thus higher).

The places where open source (or any other kind of collaborative culture) clashes with what Rifkin labels “capitalism” are precisely those where free markets have been suppressed or sabotaged by monopolists and would-be monopolists. In the case of car-sharing, that’s taxi companies. For open source, it’s Microsoft, Apple, the MPAA/RIAA and the rest of the big-media cartel, and the telecoms oligopoly. Generally there is explicit or implicit government market-rigging in play behind these – which is why talking up “the commons” can be dangerous, tending to actually legitimize such political power grabs.”