I recently discovered an interesting text by Patrick Godeau, on Software Freedoms and Parecon Values, which examines the free software freedoms from the point of view of the values of equity, solidarity, diversity, and self-management. Patrick is also the conceptor of a very important proposed reform of the GPL license, which he calls the IANG License, and extends the GNU definition by adding three kinds of freedom: for everyone, to access the bookkeeping; for customers, to participate in economic decisions; and for authors, to participate in development decisions.

Below, I started a running commentary on his four values, starting with the first one, which I discuss today: Equity. The comments are also posted on his discussion page, where you are warmly invited to post your own.

Here’s my contribution:

Thanks for offering this space for discussion. Since the subject matter is close to my own preoccupations, I would like to offer some additional perspective. I propose to work my way through the different paragraphs, one at the time, starting from the original text. I’ve put the original text in italics, my responses below.

I suppose you take the point of view of free software as a commodity or service with certain characteristics. If we take free software as just one instance of what Yochai Benkler calls commons-based peer production, the perspective changes a little bit. On the output side, we have free and universal accessibility, guaranted by forms of ‘peer property’ such as the GPL and some versions of the Creative Commons, and the other similar instances. On the input side, we have the free cooperation of individuals, and during the process, we have new modes of governance, which I’d like to call peer governance. In this ideal-type, it really resembles what Marx called communism and anthropologist such as Alan Page Fiske call Communal Shareholding: everybody gives what he can, everybody takes what he needs. It’s a form of non-reciprocal exchange. But this ideal-type is embedded in a capitalist society and this creates all type of frictions. However, if we are coherent in this understanding of what peer production and free software is about, the lack of remuneration is not dramatic a problem. If you were to insist on direct exchange or remuneration, we’d no longer have peer production ,but some kind of reciprocal exchange or market. Is this what we really want? If we want to keep the autonomous creative unfolding, undetermined by the power structure of the market, undeterred by the lack of social reproduction which the system now offers, we have to ask, not remuneration from the capitalist, but rather a general universal income, divorced from the actual work. Only this retains the full freedom of this mode of production. Of course, I agree with your point, that when remuneration occurs, it is not equitable, but still a few caveats. A lot of people, and if you extend it to the generalized cooperative content production we are talking about millions of people, are producing this way, out of the surpluses of their existence, excess creativity (general intellect, mass intellectuality that cannot find full expression in the private economy), direct accessibility to their own means of production through surplus computing cycles, etc.. They get all kinds of benefits from it: creative expression, cooperation with others, learning. This is why most practicioners, for example in the free software movement, do not mind this inequity. In true non-reciprocal spirit, they are happy that some are benefitting, I think not so much through the sales of free software, but from the added value in terms of services, that these private companies are creating. In turn, these companies support, in modern forms of the patronage economy, the free software ecosystem: by paying some programmers (a few thousand), without micromanaging them; by supporting some of the Foundations that govern the projects, etc.. Compared to the cognitive capitalist section who live off monopolistic rents through IP protection, these new ‘netarchical capitalists’ live in a certain kind of symbiosis with the system. This is why Commons-advocate Philippe Agrain, in his book Cause Commune, argues for a two-pronged strategy: de-monetising the cognitive capitalists (big pharma, microsoft, the bio-pirates, etc…), and find strategies to monetise the commons-sphere of open content production. This would create an intermediary sector between the sphere of pure peer production (which could be enhance by the universal income, but is still some way off, and in the meantime can survive and even thrive through the distributed surpluses of the current system), on the other hand a purely private sphere, but in between we can imagine a sphere of cooperative production. This sector would answer your problematic: different means can be thought of, such as traditional cooperatives, trusts (Peter Barnes), and Limited Liability Partnerships (which work with eternal proportional shares, as advocated by Chris Cook in Open Capital). Of course, this would not be the totally marketless and stateless society that Parecon advocates, but if you believe, as I do, that is not feasible (in the foreseeable future), then the kind of situation I describe here is the next big thing in society reform: a commons-based political economy, centered around freeform peer production, surrounded by a cooperative sphere, and surrounded by a private sphere.
< However, anyone is able to start a business selling the free software, so the profits on its selling can’t be too high, which is another incitement not to pay authors in a market environment. This also means that investment in free software is discouraged, from capitalists (which is not bad in a Parecon perspective), from customers (who are reluctant to fatten intermediaries), and from authors.>

From a capitalist perspective, free software results in dramatically lower infrastructural costs, access to the diffuse innovation of the social factory, therefore, an increasing number of big firms are transferring their internal software development budgets to the free software community, and venture capitalist are presently massively supporting the ‘open source everything’ paradigm. In terms of content, not software, an increasing number of derivative income strategies are being developed.

< It might be argued that these authors give away their work voluntarily, which is true and good, but if solely an affluent elite with plenty of free time can fully devote to free software development (Ubuntu, one of the most popular GNU/Linux distributions, is managed by the multimillionaire Mark Shuttleworth), where’s the equity? Fortunately many computer science students can spend time on creating and improving free software while studying.>

Again, if we expand our view to the totality of peer production, then this paragraph severely underestimates the magnitude of the phenomena, it already involves millions of individuals (more than half of Chinese white collar workers have a blog), and is just massively expanding. This expansion is predicated on the emergence of distributed networks throughout the social field, which creates a peer to peer relational dynamic that is conducive to the expansion of peer production, peer governance, and peer property modes. It is a result of the distribution of intellect, of fixed capital (computers), of finance (through the emergence of peer exchanges, the lowering of capital costs through desktop manufacturing, etc…). In other words, it’s not a fragile development at all. The whole question then becomes: how do we combine free cooperation with capitalist competition, how do we strenghten the one in relation to the other. How do we change the latter, possibly into ‘P2P-influenced’ non-capitalist market modes (of which fair trade is an example).

One more thing concerning Mark Shuttleworth. Peer governance is usually market either by the ideological leadership of the founders, and the competence-based leadership of participants. If you operate outside the salary-based sphere of dependence, this is the only authority you can have. If a former entrepreneur decides to become a patron and do something positive, I think we should rather applaude it than deplore it. Why is this important: because the old divides between capital and workers, producers and consumers, have been blurred for some time. Many knowledge workers are entrepreneurs of some kind. They cannot possibly identify with an alternative which condemns this part of their being. Rather what should be done is assist them in their desire for free cooperation outside the market sphere.