We continue our publication of the remarks by Richard Stallman, the blockqoutes are from our essay:

Richard Stallman:

I read the rest of http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=499 , and here are my comments. They focus on details and side issues because the main points seem basically right to me.

Peer production is highly dependent on the market for peer production produces use-value through mostly immaterial production, without directly providing an income for its producers. Participants cannot live from peer production,

The expression “live from” carries a few implicit assumptions which are inaccurate. For instance, it equates lack of income with death, which is not generally true in the US or the UK. So it is better to say “get income from”, which is literally true and avoids the implicit assumptions.

However, the support of free software and open sources by business poses an interesting problem. Is corporate-sponsored, and eventually corporate managed, FS/OS software still ‘P2P’: only partially. If it uses the GPL/OSI legal structures, it does result in common property regimes.

Once again, the strange juxtaposition of the GNU GPL (a license) with the OSI (an organization for open source). I am practically certain that there is some specific misunderstanding
about the GPL, the OSI, or the relation between them, which makes it seems that the juxtaposition makes sense. I can’t guess, on my own, what it is. But if you explain why you think the juxtaposition is appropriate, I think I would spot it, and then I could clear it up.

If peer producers are made dependent on the income, and even more so, if the production becomes beholden to the corporate hierarchy, then it would no longer qualify as peer production.

Is that a problem? I don’t think it is one. Respect for other people’s freedom is an ethical question. Making a program proprietary means denying the users’ freedom, and that is evil. So if commercial support implies making a program non-free, it is a bad thing.

By contrast, the choice between peer production and other systems of production is not an ethical question. It is just a practical one. Peer production is a useful method, but other methods can also give good results. Thus, if commercial support causes some other method
of production to be used, that is a phenomenon to be noted, but not inherently a problem.

The massive use of open source software in business

Would you be so kind as to say “FLOSS” instead of just “open source”?

while Skype and VoIP will drastically redistribute the telecom infrastructure.

“Skype and VOIP” is redundant, since Skype is one company that implements VOIP. I should point out that Skype only works with non-free software, which makes it a decidedly bad thing to promote. There are other VOIP methods that work with free software.

If cognitive capitalism is to be defined by the primacy of intellectual assets over fixed capital industrial assets, and thus on the reliance of an extension of IP rights to establish monopolistic rents,

The term “IP” is a misleading and incoherent overgeneralization, so other concepts defined in terms of it tend to be incoherent too. There is nothing particularly “cognitive” about trademarks, or geographical designators such as “Bordeaux”, or the use of a certain
person’s face in an add (limited by “publicity rights”). So it appears that the term “cognitive capitalism” is an example of the confusion induced by the term “IP”.

If you want to talk about that concept, please say it is an incoherent overgeneralization that was probably inspired by the incoherent overgeneralization “intellectual property”. Anything else will tend to legitimize the incoherent overgeneralization “intellectual property”, and that does a lot of harm.

However, although these companies may rely on IP rights for the occasional extra buck,

That’s a terrible thing to say, because it lumps together issues that are totally different–such as copyrights, patents, and trademarks. For instance, all of these companies rely on trademarks to ensure people can identify them. There is no harm in that at all.

Meanwhile, Amazon has sued competitors using software patents, which is very nasty, and we boycotted them for a time for this.

Describing these different phenomena as “relying on IP rights for the occasional extra buck” obscures what’s important about each one, and hinders efforts to teach people that software patents are bad. Would you please help this effort, by distingiushing them?

P2P could be expanded and sustained through the introduction of universal basic income.

That is true, and I am in favor of such a system. However, given that such a system would be hard to establish given the corporate empire and its system of low-wage treaties, I think it is most crucial to emphasize that peer production already does wonders and that such a difficult political change is _not needed_ for it.