I would hope that the way to dismantle the ‘privileged and unaccountable and unelected’ cabals that run these communities is to diversify their membership and democratise their practices. Cabals with similar characteristics tend to wield the most power in all of society’s institutions, including the state and market that you seem to be advocating for. The comparative accessibility and transparency of the open-source cabals at least gives me reason to believe they’re a better bet than the capitalists and oligarchs 🙂

and now complains that I’ve yet to see you cite *an actual work of value* made by the rip-off burn mix-up mashup method.

Moving the goalposts Cathy – tsk, tsk. And not thinking too hard – one of the world’s top ten websites is Wikipedia – and others in the top ten include a lot of random and commercial fluff (e.g. Yahoo sites) so it’s fair to say that the largest and most widely read informative work in history is this open licensed work. Wikipedia early on used works in the public domain (including an old Britannica and a Catholic encyclopedia), and has been augmented at times by various sources of open data.

An individual who creates a work owes a debt to a lot of things. His mom and dad and his fourth grade teacher Mrs. McGovern and his entire hockey team who saw him through. That’s the sort of nonsense that obscures the normal and lawful desire to couple copyright with commerce that your sect here seems so unwilling to acknowledge, although most people have no trouble whatsoever doing that.

Furthermore, to charactize people as “not making actual value” is wrong, merely because they wish to enable authors to make a living, and the businesses that give them advances and help advertising and distribution and such a profit motive which is a totally normal thing in a free and democratic society. Of course they make value, and ascribe to it the metric that in part gives it value. You can natter on about eternal values and art and fine literature, but people need to get paid for their work, unless, of course, Big IT or Mom’s Basement or the Government are paying for their time hacking around with code.

I’ve yet to see you cite *an actual work of value* made by the rip-off burn mix-up mashup method. Well?

Er, I’ll try to contain my, um, rage about the works of William J. Oswald on wastewater being locked up behind evil copyright walls that have kept his wisdom from the masses.

Not so – I was rejecting the question as silly. But if you insist I go along with it: Small is Beautiful by Schumacher, The Road to Serfdom by Hayek, and pretty much any of the many technical works by William J. Oswald on the subject of wastewater.

It’s only partly about creating, remixing, etc. It’s also about:

1. Recognizing that the work of an individual owes a debt to the society that gave them their start in understanding. While it makes sense to acknowledge their rights, it doesn’t make sense to extend those rights far beyond what will benefit the creative individual.

2. ensuring access to knowledge to as many people as possible. Some of us are lucky enough to have access to a fantastic library – most of us are not, especially those born into poorer communities who cannot afford a good education. When there are past works in public health, sanitation etc, where the author is no longer alive, or is making a negligible amount from continued sales, there is an enormous potential benefit in releasing these works for use by the global community. This is very much inline with my own vision for what we’re doing at Appropedia – working with an online community to create a kind of free, online, Library of Alexandria for human development & sustainability – not just an encyclopedia, but collections of exhaustive textbook material and case-studies.

No one can really demonstrate anywhere that “rip, mix, burn strategies” (crime) in fact “creates economic value”. Where? How? Not a single model can be cited, except, again, tiny, tiny handfuls of one-off experiments…

We’re talking actual value, rather than money changing hands. They often occur together, but they are not necessarily the same thing.

Again, it is the Big Lie; it cannot stand.

Well, let us know when you’ve defeated it. Perhaps you can exchange strategies with Don Quixote – the brave fellow defending the land against invading giants (that were actually windmills).

You’re the one defying common sense by continuing to use circular reasoning: “opensource is good because we say so”. That’s the tyranny of opensource — it’s illogic and self-referential cheerleading.

There’s nothing demonstrably good about opensource. I can cite numerous examples of the negativy aspects of opensource around Second Life and OpenSimulator (theft, stalking, harassment, etc.). I don’t see a single opensource project that in fact created something new; I see only clones of existing proprietary software (Gimp); I see numerous ideologically-driven projects that brook no dissent and upon which millions are wasted in geek consulting fees to keep trying to “get it right” (Drupal); I see completely hobbling and stupid projects that are unusable but that keep inflicting themselves on the public as if they worked (OpenID) — there’s no good experience to site. We’re told — actually, harried and harrassed and bullied into believing — that “the Internet” supposedly “depends on” or “is made up of” opensource, and whatever the truths there, we quickly see they are exaggerated. The worst thing about opensource is that for all its infantile insistence on “openness,” it can’t tell the truth — the truth that is self-evident to those outside the magic circle.

The biggest shill — the Big Lie, really — is that opensource somehow creates wealth despite fostering free giveaways, voluntary and exploited labour, and destruction of private property. It doesn’t. It is stone soup. Nothing “profoundly transforming” is happening when you destroy book stores, newspapers, and record companies and pretend by liberating and ripping and distributing content for free that you have created a model to sustain the businesses needed to support artists. Absolutely nothing. The destruction is visible everywhere, and yet still, the geeks keep claiming that somebody can even make a buck off this — but of course a very tiny handful of them can, by selling consulting services to be able to operate their obscure, wonky programs.

As for mash-ups, that’s a total chimera. I challenged chris here to come up with a single work that was “locked up” by the evil 70-year-copyright that was preventing some, um, “profound” work of art. He couldn’t. Nor can you. You can only keep insisting in agitprop fashion that “transformation” has occurred and cite your own gurus.

Socialism is when “we pretend to work and they pretend to pay us”. Socialism *is* the liberation of property and destruction of private property and nothing of value put in its place — actually, it’s called “communism,” and that’s why I call it technocommunism as it is accomplished with technical means, as if it can be done “better”.

No one can really demonstrate anywhere that “rip, mix, burn strategies” (crime) in fact “creates economic value”. Where? How? Not a single model can be cited, except, again, tiny, tiny handfuls of one-off experiments that are mainly about paying lecture fees to gurus to lecture about this supposed “money-making” criminal act that in fact is merely agitprop to incite others to crime. Artistic innovation? Um, you’re going to cite the didactic and mediocre novels of Cory Doctorow?! Opensource is Lysenkosim and Zhdanovism and all the isms of the Soviet Union perpetuated online. Again, it is the Big Lie; it cannot stand.

All you have tossed out here is name calling and gross overstatements. A tiresome display of punditry at best, one that hardly merits attention of serious consideration. Nonetheless, here is one of many bits of research that fly in the face of your largely baseless claims:

“Digital technologies are profoundly transforming the production and consumption of culture products. We describe the emerging digital remix culture as an open source approach where content products in the arts and entertainment industries are increasingly rearranged, manipulated, and extended in the process of creating new works. We develop a first unified theoretical framework for open source culture that explains the process and the forces that promote or impede the reuse of previously recorded materials. Using multiple perspectives from economics, design sciences, and arts and culture, our theory suggests that “rip, mix, burn” strategies based on reuse and recombination of content components can create significant economic value, stimulate artistic innovation and spur creativity and growth in the culture industry.”

Abstrat from Open Source Culture and Digital Remix: A Theoretical Framework by
Jerald Hughes and Karl R. Lang, Department of Computer Information Systems, Zicklin School of Business.

This is hardly socialism, dear. OS is sound economics and good social policy.

Dr. Strangelove

Could you cite an actual work, that is “locked up under copyright” that is preventing you from, um, a glorious spurt of creative mash-up if you could “unlock” it?

Any work relating to human development – as for “a glorious spurt of creative mash-up”, those are your own facetious words.

I’m bowing out of this conversation – these opinions are just not very interesting or (IMO) very relevant to anything that is actually being done in the world. Cathy Fitzpatrick, you can consider it a victory if you like. I’m more interested in building something than arguing – we will all have more perspective on this after a few more years of building.

Could you cite an actual work, that is “locked up under copyright” that is preventing you from, um, a glorious spurt of creative mash-up if you could “unlock” it?

Wikipedia isn’t achieving anything “far beyond” but the dumbing down of culture and the purveying of mediocre and unexamined content to millions of people. I’m surely not alone in this critique and you can read Nicholas Carr on the subject or Andrew Keen. This is hardly a “debate” on Internet collectivism if you can’t accept that there is a growing school of thought that seriously challenges Wikitarianism and wiki-culture — a culture that is brutally dismissive of dissent and is more arcane and occult than the Magisterium in its numerous little rules and procedures for clearing content.

People should not be frog-marched into “constructive work” all the time — that’s another artifact of wiki-culture which is deadly to science and to art. Genuine feedback, even negative, and criticism, even if it is not “constructive” should be tolerated in any open system. Otherwise, it’s not an open system. If everybody has to go on Mr. Roger’s Neighbourhood and be Happy People Eating Noodle Salads to work on a project, it’s a cult, not science or editorial work. When you work in the hard sciences, when you work with reason in the humanities, you can’t have the smug luxury of being only “constructive” and screening out anything that makes you feel threatened or bad or is “negative”. You have to look at all facts.

The increasing encroachment of the opensource culture everywhere, even into to the U.S. government, with wikis and supposedly open opensource software increasingly being used on public web pages is of grave concern. No Congress got to decide whether this was a good thing or not, it was stealth-marched in. It is all controlled by a tiny and unaccountable cabal of coders, with a very tight network of digital Beltway consultants and big IT in Silicon Valley — is a serious threat to democracy. You have only to watch the social media-mediated “Tech President” fluffball news conferences that Obama has given lately, set up by a tiny group of insiders massaging prefabricated questions for “hundreds of thousands of Internet users” to understand the real threat here to free media and to democracy ultimately.

Just like a typical OS forum or IRC convo, a group of concerted citizens expressing their will on an issue (in this case, marijuana legalization, something I myself don’t favour) are described as “trolls” and their questions removed and ridiculed. No serious questions of foreign policy were let through the tekkie filters. Only those “fitting the problem” come through as if it’s the Kremlin. These are truly serious matters, and the negative developments are happening at a frightening pace, and happening precisely because of the increasing blanketing nature of wiki culture, and the attitudes of supposed scientists on forums like this one. So indeed it *is* a problem of totalitarianism.

Wikipedia and wikis like it are not free, they are not open, they are not what they claim to be. They are indeed a cult.

Open source is a religion. You’re a religious believer in WordPress. You’re dismissive of the religion you don’t like, Drupal. Both are wonky and inconvenient for end users, and both or any should be able to be freely criticized. But your remarks here about Drupal would get you clobbered on some forums and in some offices.

Er, I don’t need to comment at all or be “inciting” someone’s “back up” to make the point that any conscious reader can see from any opensource forums or indeed any beta-testing forums of any software anywhere — insular and cynical insiders, “code as law,” brutal rejection of dissent. Opensource pioneers themselves have written of this very phenomenon, it doesn’t take me to explicate it, look at Nikolai Bezroukov, for example:
http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/708/618

Freedom of choice is sometimes mouthed by OSS adherents, but usually repudiated along the way as you continue to debate them, because they are heavily ideological, selecting one social system (communism) over another (capitalism).

It’s convenient to think that OSS totalitarianism is “a myth” because it’s a question of power, and it is about coders wishing to take power for their class and themselves; therefore, they are wilfully blind to all critiques of it.

I don’t think you’ve answered a single point of mine. Note that my real identity is easy to find, if that’s relevant.

your silly hard leftist sectarian notion of “state-enforced IP monopolies”.

Do you try to be offensive, or does it come naturally? Many people other than “leftists” think that “death of the author plus 70 years” or whatever is ridiculous.