[via Boing Boing]
James Boyle’s article in Financial Times addresses what he is calling a “cognitive bias” in our culture against “open” systems, like open source software development, Wikipedia, and other commons-based intitiatives and resources.

Boyle’s article actually shows how two different ways of solving problems collided in the digital medium over time. The “closed”, proprietary way of solving problems was the dominant way until the people started to systematize the “open” way, back in the 1980’s and early 1990’s. Once usage of personal computers combined with internet access became wide spread, “open” ways of solving problems began to evolve even more. And, people began retrieving and refactoring ancient “commons” based paradigms for use as economic models in open systems.
I’d like to propose one reason why there may be an apparent cognitive bias: People with this bias are thinking about and solving problems of existence, framed through cognitive lenses that bring them to a conclusion that proprietary and closed systems are better than open and commons-based ones.

A bias against “open” or “commons-based” systems the result of a “lens” on reality that focuses on materialistic gain and control. This “lens” doesn’t allow the person in question to see the benefits of sharing knowledge and IP. This lens views humans and all other living things and their creations and by-products as “resources”, or units to be bought, sold, traded, or disposed of at will.

The mind creates, accepts, and works with the “open” and commons-based paradigms does so largely in reaction to the “closed systems” property view. By joining up with like-minded people, and leveraging their human-centric and sustainability-centric approaches, they are able to build many-to many networks around and through more hierarchical systems.

Suggested Reading:

P2P Wiki:

The Open and Free Paradigm

1. Tags on the open paradigm: A2K Access to Knowledge, Open Access, Open Archives, Open Biology, Open Business, Open Content, Open Courseware, Open Design, Open Education, Open Educational Resources, Open Hardware, Open Knowledge, Open Money, Open Organization,Open Politics, Open Source, Open Source Disaster Recovery, Open Standards, Open Textbooks

The Participatory/P2P Paradigm

1. Tags on the P2P paradigm: Peer to Peer, Peer to Peer Theory , Peer Production, Peer Production – Immanence vs. Transcendence, Peer Governance, Peer Property, Peer Banking, Peer to Peer Exchanges, Panarchy, the Sharing Economy, the Gift Economy, P2P Capitalism, P2P Microfinance
2. Tags on the collaborative paradigm: Co-Counselling, Co-Intelligence, Co-production, Co-Research, Collaboration, Collaboration Theory, Collaborative Defense, Collaborative Filtering, Collaborative Moderation, Collaborative Photojournalism, Collective Intelligence, Communities of Practice, Community Supported Manufacturing, Community Wireless, Cooperation Studies, Cooperative Capitalism, Cooperative Content Distribution Model, Cooperative Inquiry, Coordination Format, Coordination Theory
3. Tags on the participatory paradigm: Participation Capture, Participative Epistemology, Participatory Culture, Participatory Democracy, Participatory Journalism, Participatory Panopticon, Participatory Spirituality, Participatory Urban Planning, Participatory Video; see also Citizen Dialogue and Deliberation, Customer-Controlled Networks, Customer-build Network Infrastructures, User-centered Innovation, Web 2.0.; and also: Citizen Engineers, Citizen Journalism, Citizen Ownership, Citizen Science; and finally: Social Capital, Social Commerce, Social Economy, Social Entrepreneur, Social Knowledge; Social Media, Social Physics, Social Software, Social Software Culture, Socialization of Innovation

The Commons Paradigm

1. Tags on the Commons paradigm: The Commons, the Tragedy of the Commons, the Tragedy of the Anti-Commons, the Cornucopia of the Commons, the Circulation of the Common, Commons-based Political Production, the Global Integral-Spiritual Commons, Information Commons, the Public Domain, Enclosure, General Public License, Creative Commons, Trust, Social Dilemmas, Wireless Commons, the Book Commons, the Genome Commons, the Science Commons

The Network Paradigm

1. Tags on the Distribution paradigm: Desktop Manufacturing, Diffuse Innovation, Folksonomies, Mass Amateurization, the Pro-Am Movement, the Long Tail, Prosumers, Smart Mobs, Swarming, User-Capitalized Networks, User-driven Advertizing, Viral Communicators, Distributed Computing, Mesh Networks

Cooperation Commons Weblog:

Tragedy of the Commons

Technologies of Cooperation

Open Source/Open Access

Cooperation Commons Related Documents:

capitalism, civil society, evolutionary psychology, group forming networks, intellectual property, norms, open source, peer production, privatization, property rights, public goods, reputation, sharing economy, value systems

CommunityWiki:LiteracyOfHumanNature

Social Synergy Weblog:

• Open Business
• opendata
• opendesign
• Open Funding
• Open Futures
• openknowledge
• Open Knowledge
• Open Money
• knowledgecommons
• cooperation
• Epistemology

Social Synergy Bliki:

CommunityWikiBankExperiment, CrowdSourcing, EntreprenuersOfCooperation, MassCustomization, OpenBusiness

TeleCommunties:

WebAssistant Telecommunity Exchange, Enriching Project TeleCommunity Exchange, 4U TeleCommunity Exchange: Search through related research, or register and add your own.