The two economies of free software
The free software community has recently been up in arms against a deal between Novell and Microsoft, and recent threats of Microsoft indicating that Linux users are using Microsoft patents and may be sued.
These are very complex issues that I won’t attempt to summarize. Instead, read Open Democracy’ excellent summary of the whole issue.
The two economies referred to in the title of this entry, the for-profit and the for-benefit, refer to a analysis by Lawrence Lessig, discussed here:
“On 28 September this year, the Creative Commons pioneer wrote a short blog post entitled “On the economies of culture“. In it, he argues that “the Internet has reminded us that we live not just in one economy, but at least two”. One was the common or garden “work for pay” economy, the second that embodied in Wikipedia, which went by a variety of names, including “amateur” and “non-commercial”. These were “separate spheres”, argued Lessig, but ones that could and should be linked, in order “to inspire the creative work of the second economy, while also expanding the value of the commercial economy”.
Creative Commons already offers different licenses for those who wish to share content on a non-commercial basis, and those who are happy to share with profit-making entities who may go on to gain financially from their work. Indeed, I have often been quizzed by free culture enthusiasts as to why openDemocracy opts for a non-commercial Creative Commons license (the answer is we want to profit from syndication to newspapers, to compensate poorly paid contributors and to earn money we can invest back into our work).
In his post, Lessig dismisses anticipated objections to his theory from advocates of total freedom as “simply ignoring an important reality about the difference between these two economies”. Perhaps this is because what both Lessig’s argument and, more importantly, the Microsoft/Novell deal appear to ignore, is that many opt for Creative Commons or GPL licensing as a means to object to intellectual property regimes currently in place.
The “important reality” of the commercial economy is one that many would like to subvert, not graduate into, whether they object to the cultural homogeneity of Big Media, or the anti-competitiveness and creative stagnation of Big Software. Furthermore, the distinction between commercial and non-commercial is not at all clear cut: as Lessig himself admits, FLOSS has shown that what starts out as the non-commercial work of “amateurs” can move into a professional, commercial setting without giving up on its copyleft principles.”
