The Differences and Commonalities Between Shared Code for Immaterial Production and Shared Design for Material Production

Proposed by Magius:

“Let me make some theoretical considerations about open production. Imho the two big differences between immaterial production (ip) and material production (mp) now are:

1. design/product

1.1 in ip, the design and the product are the same (code is an “executive design”)

1.2 in mp the design and the product are not the same (code need a material productive system – industry – to be transformed in a product).

2. designers/producers

2.1 in ip cause design and product are the same, is possible to create a community of designers/producers (coders) that share freely products, in which members have an “implicit agreement” to use the shared knowledge to improve continuously the product, for the benefit of all the community members. members can earn income from services related to the product (i.e. software customization) continuously improved by community.

2.1.1 basically software coding is a pre-industrial system! coder is an artisan, because product design and product production are not separated (work alienation in marxism)

2.1.2 the role of money is not significant in such community (apparenty..the knowledge sharing tools – the internet – are apparently free, but their existence is based on material production of products – computers – needed to make working the infrastructure)

2.2. in mp cause design and product are not the same, is possible to create a community of designers but to be effective as the ip communities, you need to have inside also producers (industry). in such community can be shared the design but imho members cannot earn income from services related only to design, cause the value is made by product.

2.2.1 the role of money is significant, it’s related to investments needed to start a material production to transform projects in products

2.2.2 in mp the community will change his meaning only when will start massively the self-replicating personal industry (reprap), so design and product will be the same.”

More Information:

You’ll find more articles discussing these distinctions here:

# Key Arguments for the Benefits of Shared Designs
# Summary by Kevin Carson: Expanding Peer Production to the Physical World
# The economics of open hardware (Liquid Antipasto blog)
# Can we shift from open software to open hardware? a) Can peer production make washing machines?. Graham Seaman; b) Open Source outside the Domain of Software. Clay Shirky; c) Why Open Hardware? by Patrick McNamara.
# In peer production, the interests of capitalists and entrepreneurs are no longer aligned
# Dave Pollard on the fallacy of the Economies of Scale argument, i.e. that bigger is better.
# What are the specific difficulties for Open Hardware?
# Design for sustainability is inherently participatory
# Can we design our economic policies and politics for developing abundance? See Roberto Verzola on Undermining vs. Developing Abundance
# David A. Mellis: How Open Source Hardware differs from Open Source Software?

And of course, my own take, that despite these differences, the new industrial ecology will be remarkable similar, is here in my article on the New Open Industrial Model.

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