Eben Moglen on business and the commons
Interesting article in LinuxWorld about the future of free software by Eben Moglen.
I’m excerpting a passage which clearly explains the reciprocal relationship between an open commons and the businesses that profit/benefit from it.
Eben Moglen:
“One of the things that everybody now understands is that you can treat software as a renewable natural resource — like forest products or fish in the sea. If you build community, if you make broadly accessible the ability to create, then you can use your limited resources not on the creation or maintenance of anything, but on the editing of that which is already created elsewhere.
All of these companies are coming to depend heavily in profit-making business on nonprofit supply chain [the open-source software they are using]. They are each discovering that there are nonprofit supply-chain elements which are crucial to profit-making success. Now, in 20th century economic organizations, if you had discovered at General Motors that 30% of the value of each of your cars was coming from a nonprofit down the street, you’d have gone and bought the nonprofit. [But] because of GPL and the copyleft, a large portion of that nonprofit supply chain is unpurchaseable. You can’t own it. It was designed to be a commons.
If you’ve become dependent on a commons for whatever role in your business, then what you need is commons management. You don’t strip-mine the forest; you don’t fish every fish out of the sea. And, in particular, you become interested in conservation and equality. You want the fish to remain in the sea, and you don’t want anybody else overfishing. So you get interested in how the fisheries are protected.
I train forest rangers to work in a forest that some people love because it’s free and other people love because it produces great trees cheaply. But both sides want the forest to exist pristine and undesecrated by greedy behavior by anybody else. Nobody wants to see the thing burn down for one group’s profit. Everybody needs it. “