Franz´ intro for Paraflows 09, to a showing of a video on the Open Source Ecology, summarizes some of the critiques addressed to the move towards Openness:

Franz Nahrada:

“There is a discussion that runs pretty exactly since 10 years what the social consequences of Open Everything might be, what are the changes it might bring to our lives. Or rather if there will be substantial changes at all. Will it alter human relations, will it contribute to reduce poverty, will it help us to deal with the ecological disaster, will it empower people, will it change our habitat. etc. Thats the kind of question that some ask at conferences, while others prefer to tackle with this question practically. I will talk a bit about such a practical attempt – namely the FactorEFarm project of Open Source Ecology – but before I do that let me shortly return to the big picture.

One can still deny the assumption that opening the intellectual commons for all kinds of human endavours has decisive affects or even is a germ form of a new social contract, a new society.

One could categorize people who participate in such projects as hobbyists, as people who open up a tiny and insignificant space of personal freedom in an otherwise not so free world. One could say: OK, there are those who collect stamps, those who work in their garden and grow roses, some who spend their time in the shopping center or at Bauhaus, and this one has a RepRap in the basement. Well if you can afford to create and indulge that tiny little personal space its just the same that most people do to make this world bearable for themselves. What the hell does this have to do with changing society?

Or even worse, there are reproaches that this is an even less harmless form of addiction that can be used and capitalized upon. If things are really tricky to produce, lets say a car or a pair of skis, and most things that we use are tricky to produce, than the outcome ist hat some company will grab the designs, throw products on the market and entertain a community as a cheap development department.

We have heard many stories how that works already. A good example would be emporis, frormer skyscaper.org, that has grown into the worlds finest real estate database, powered by the work of hundreds of voluntery photographers and researchers, who simply were addicted to the idea of providing more and the best contributions. Many of those even travelled on their own money to other cities and worked 18 hours a day to meet the quality standards of the evaluators _ all for free. Subsequently the whole common work represented an enormous strategic market value. So yes, the organizers of such a community can sell it or incorporate it and get rich while the many contributors are left-out loosers.

One can say that economy ever since design and automation has been accessible to more and more people is transforming from a productive endeavour to a kind of strategic pokergame how to capitalize on efforts of producing people. In fact we already have two economies: an economy of millions of small sweatshops that produce material goods like car parts, and another economy that controls the right to produce, by license, logo and networking.”