The Creative Commons approach of giving artists choices ranging from mostly proprietary to copyleft lays a foundation for dialogue on the subject, but is inherently agnostic about the practical or theoretical advantages of choosing copyleft over the other options they provide.

The creators of free art and other cultural works need systems of principles and tools similar to FOSS programmers, but they aren’t exactly the same.

For example: a branch system for Wikipedia might be useful for those big projects which create their own forks of Wikipedia, but the current system is great for individual edits. In a version control or content management system authorities are tasked with choosing which patches to apply and which submissions to accept. In a wiki they only have to decide whether to revert or edit changes that they object to.

Torvald’s understands this greatly. The Linux kernel has no official mainline, by convention Torvald’s own kernel is considered ‘the kernel’ but there are a whole range of relevant kernels out there and most distros maintain their own branch. Linux development breaks down to a graph where each developer (and hence kernel) is a vertex and each vertex naturally has a narrow range of edges to other trusted developers. When you have this graph, development can go ahead as freely as possible, society will eliminate bad branches and appoint the appropriate person as the de facto leader largely by a Darwinian process (as it stands Linus has done a good job in the past so remains ‘in charge’).

There are countless examples where the current authorities on various projects have simply been wrong and others have taken their work in a different direction to eventually be considered correct. GCC is an obvious project where the original work was entirely displaced by a fork. The meritocracy part isn’t that important, let people get on with things and reality will decide who has merit and who doesn’t.

The largest problem with Wikipedia is that it isn’t a branch scenario. There is one Wikipedia and any idiotic edit is visible to us all. In a branch system each person would have their own Wikipedia with their own articles and then by whatever method the most appropriate branch would be considered mainstream. The current system of experts is at best a fudge, they should have gone further into open sourced methodology. Perhaps a more appropriate system would be a Wiki based around a distributed version control system like Git.

Of course all of this still requires freedom but there is real merit to the bazaar model.

Dmytri Kleiner would have us believe that the ideological content is “corporate co-option”, but this is laughably backwards. The “open source” label is not a tool that allows corporations to co-opt us, it is a tool that allows us to co-opt them. Here’s where that rubber meets the road: thousands of developers are now paid to do open-source programming, and even Microsoft (Microsoft!) is now coming to the community asking to participate and requesting license certifications.

The term “open source” has ideological content, all right — it’s all about rational-choice theory and consequentialism, and about what you learn a posteriori from doing the process of open source (as opposed to what you believe a priori theorizing or deontic moralizing about it). The lessons are: if you’re seeking efficiency and production, decentralism wins over centralism, liberty wins over coercion, and peer networks win over hierarchies.

Certainly ideologies, like the “free software” one, can coexist with the implicit ideology of “open source”. But vacuous it isn’t.

http://www.telekommunisten.net/CopyjustrightCopyfarleft