Tim Lee

Free Software and “Whip-Cracking Authority”

Reader Timon has a comment that’s worth highlighting:

The other, and for me one of the foremost innovations from the freedom perspective is that Open Source is a real-world demonstration of how people can accomplish huge complex tasks without the involvement of any whip-cracking authority. That may or may not be conservative but it is definitely libertarian. Whether it is sufficiently technically ‘radical’ it is organizationally unprecedented in history, truly revolutionary in that sense.

During the 20th Century, policy debates often centered on power struggles between governments and corporations. The capital-intensive nature of a lot of industries meant that in many cases, policies that reduced government power often meant that corporations had a large influence over peoples’ lives. As libertarians, we pointed out the advantages of this arrangement: first and foremost, you have a choice about which businesses to patronize, but no choice about whether to deal with the government. It’s much better to allow the big companies that own papers liks the New York Times and the Washington Post compete for your readership than to put the government in charge of the newspaper industry. And of course, the government is a couple of orders of magnitude bigger than the largest corporations, so even if raw “bigness” is your only concern, concentrations of government power should concern you a lot more than concentrations of corporate power.


But increasingly, 21st century tech policy debates are not about power struggles between business and government. They’re often about policies that use the power of the state to shift power from individuals to large corporations. The DMCA, for example, shifts power away from individuals and small businesses wanting to produce competing media products, and toward large companies with the resources required to develop a DRM scheme of their own or jump through the hoops of a licensing authority like Microsoft or the DVD-CCA. Similarly, software patents shift power away from small software developers who lack the resources to hire lawyers toward larger companies who do. And the evisceration of the first sale doctrine would shift power away from customers and toward publishers.

In these cases, the “anti-corporate” side isn’t seeking more government regulation, more government spending, or any other increase in the size or scope of government. To the contrary, they’re seeking the removal of government restrictions on the behavior or private individuals. The practical effect of their preferred policies would not be to empower government at the expense of corporations. It would be to empower individuals.

For a long time, libertarians have extolled the free market as an example of the way individuals can cooperate without the benefit of a central planner. What open source software helps to highlight is that the free market isn’t the only example of successful cooperation without a central planner. Linux, Firefox, and dozens of other software projects are all examples of successful cooperation without government help. Like the success of the proprietary software market, they’re arguments against government meddling in the software industry.

Braden says that I “sound like a central planner” when I write about free software. But regardless of what he thinks about my rhetoric, the important point is that the open source development process doesn’t require a coercive central planner. If anything, the hierarchical, bureaucratic process that Microsoft used to develop Windows involved a lot more “central planning” than the Linux development process. I would certainly oppose any proposals for the government to interfere with Microsoft’s software development process, because government planning of the software industry is the worst possible outcome. But I also think that the same Hayekian considerations that cause libertarians to prefer the market to government planning would predict that Steve Ballmer’s centralized, “whip-cracking” software development process is likely to be less efficient than Linus Torvalds’s decentralized one.

January 6, 2008 | Comments |

  • Tim, really, your idealized notions of the open source development process are charming but deeply inaccurate. Software projects are all managed more or less the same way, whether they take place within the walls of one capitalist institution or as collaborations between many.

    Open Source has plenty of government help, primarily by purchasing policies that mandate it, and plenty of corporate control, as most of the bodies that produce the code are paid to write it by Red Hat, IBM, HP, et. al.

    The point that Timon and I were discussing on that other thread was whether open source promotes innovation, and my claim was that it promotes conformity. The history of open source software leads to the conclusion that it's a powerful barrier to technological change, not an instigator, despite the lavish claims made by its supporters. Open Source has produced nothing but rehashes of old software.

    On the DRM front, you've surely noticed that the market as delivered yet another powerful statement recently such that that discussion will soon be relegated to the history books.

    But just to amplify how silly that "no whip-cracking" claim is, look at how bureaucratic and insular the Wikipedia establishment is, it's something that would make Stalin salivate.
  • Richard,

    If I want to add content to Wikipedia, I click "edit this page" at the top of the article I want to contribute to, type my contribution into the little text box, and click "Save Page." There's nothing insular or bureaucratic about it.

    A tiny subset of Wikipedia contributors do, in fact, get embroiled in petty political arguments from time to time. But those arguments are incidental to the overall Wikipedia project. Thousands of edits get made without a controversy for every edit that ends up before Wikipedia's arbitration committee. Of course, in a massive project like Wikipedia, the absolute number of controversies is inevitably going to be pretty big. But as a fraction of the total work that gets done, the Wikipedia editing process is astonishingly efficient.
  • Timon
    No, Richard, we did not stipulate that Open Source only meant little kids re-implementing rcp in their basement for shits and giggles. If Sun Microsystems writes something like ZFS and releases it as Open Source before putting it in a product (and getting many useful community contributions), that is still Open Source development. If Apple contributes to the GPL'd CUPS and then incorporates it into OSX, that is not proof that only corporations can really be trusted with this stuff. It is a major vote of confidence in the Open Source development idea that many great companies participate. (And get sued and lobbied against by all the right people.) It is also cool that a couple of kids in a dorm can use this stuff for free to make commodity supercomputers that index the entire internet and turn it into a $200 billion company. You also have an idealized notion, except that your ideal is closer to Richard Stallman's, whereby something is not truly free unless it is covered by a hard copyleft and written by bearded radicals. No one except you said that it had to be.
  • Right, Tim, anybody can edit a Wikipedia page, and many of the edits are promptly deleted, especially if they challenge the worldview that Wikipedia promotes. Try it sometime and see what happens to your edits over the course of a month or two. That's because the appearance of free, democratic, unconstrained process is an illusion. The persistent essence of the project is a core of dedicated editors and bureaucrats who each spend upwards of 40 hours a week working over other people's edits to make sure they involve no "original research."

    And that's what happens in Open Source projects in general: conformity rules, and that's a powerful barrier to fundamental, radical change. That was Lanier's point, you see, and nobody has successfully addressed it.
  • Timon, Google is not an Open Source project.
  • Anonymous
    That is a fascinating insight, Richard. You should share it with Guido van Rossum, Andrew Morton, Jeremy Allison, Bram Moolenar, Greg Stein, Ben Goodger, Robert Love, and Sean Egan, just to name a very few of those with good wikipedia entries. (Or, good luck searching on Britannica.)
  • Richard, I've contributed dozens of changes to Wikipedia, and hardly any of them have been reverted. Maybe when you did it it was obvious that you had an a axe to grind?
  • Guido is described as the "benevolent dictator for life" of Python.

    I rest my case.
  • And of course, the government is a couple of orders of magnitude bigger than the largest corporations, so even if raw “bigness” is your only concern, concentrations of government power should concern you a lot more than concentrations of corporate power.


    There are three developments that change this observation:

    1. raw "bigness": "Of the 100 largest economies in the world, 51 are corporations; only 49 are countries. Wal-Mart--the number 12 corporation--is bigger than 161 countries, including Israel, Poland and Greece. Mitsubishi is larger than the fourth most populous nation on earth: Indonesia. General Motors is bigger than Denmark. Ford is bigger than South Africa. Toyota is bigger than Norway."

    2. Globalization has given corporations a virtually unlimited domain of action; they can operate globally while governments are normally limited in their jurisdiction by national boundaries. If they don't like the environmental, or labor rules is country A they just pick up and go to Country B. That's why all the agreements like the Kyoto Protocol have to be international in scope, to be effective. That it appears doubtful that even the global environmental catastrophe that is now unfolding will be enough to adequately galvanize the opposition to corporate hegemony that now exists should tell us who is really in power now: large corporations.

    3. The line between large corporations and large governments is becoming increasingly blurry, with governments basically seeing their duty to align themselves as closely as possible with the goals of the corporations, against the interests of their own people. A prime example of this would be present day China, and therefore it is no surprise that the IP Central crowd fawn over China, and heap criticism on India. But our own country is becoming more and more like China every day: a state run for corporations, not for people.

    The question then is, given these three factors,
    "Why are libertarians almost totally incapable of finding fault with the actions of any corporation, however bad or freedom depriving that action is?"

    This is especially troubling because libertarians say they value individual freedom, yet much of what is done by large corporations destroys that individual and his freedom.

    I had asked that question some time ago, and found a very convincing answer in the wonderful book Development as Freedom by Amartya Sen, in his description of the "informational exclusions" made by libertarians. Basically they want so very much to believe that the simple extension of procedural freedoms will solve all the big problems, that they are unable to process information which contradicts this. Such information does not exist, can not exist, and is of necessity excluded.
  • Woodstock.
  • Timon
    Another solid point, Richard. Just the other day I got a knock on the door from the Python secret police, who informed me that dear leader was not happy with my excessive use of 'os.system'.
  • Did you ask them what Guido was smoking when he decided to use indentation as a control structure? I think it's cute, mind you, but you have to admit it's quirky.
  • Timon
    I would expect cannabis, given his dutch origins. Mind you, the rank amateurs over at Google think it's so cute you need a special exemption to write anything for internal use in other than C++ or Python (and they bend the rules for network people for Perl.)
  • It's nice that so many closed-source shops use Open Source tools, but it has to make Stallman jealous.
  • It's nice that so many closed-source shops use Open Source tools, but it has to make Stallman jealous.

    Have you ever actually heard Stallman speak? I don't think you have, as he comes across as quite a arm hearted person, and although he has a bit of a goofy sense of humour, he's not mean spirited as you seem to want to make him out to be.

    At his talk at the University of Missouri, St. Louis last year, someone had asked him a question along that line, and he didn't mind at all, as long as they abide by their commitments under the GPL.

    But, the whole point, richard of the GPL is fredom Richard, and you don't seem to understand that--that freedom means someone can, even if they release closed source software, use GCC to compile it.

    Of course Stallman, and all people who care about free software, would much prefer that those who produce software would make a moral decision and produce free software.
  • Timon
    If your definition of closed is anything short of the Affero license, then yes, Google is a closed shop. That would put you to the left of Stallman, and unfortunately for your case, we are talking about Open Source software, whose model has always been collaborative development of fundamental tools and monetization on the basis of services. Google is the archetypal open source company, and none of the free software icons in that list a few comments back have any conflict between their current jobs there and their previous work.
  • Dear Tim Lee,

    I'm trying to understand what you are saying here.

    The first three paragraphs of your post seems a bit disconnected from the rest of your post, in any case let me ask this question, what's the big deal here? do we really need philosophical interpretations of software?

    isnt software at the end of the day a product - like your TV, microwave or sliced bread ?

    Isnt it also true that people use software use it by applying the same consideration as any other product, and doesn't really give much about whether its open source or closed-source per se, but more to do with how much does it cost and what can it do for me?

    I'd think open source software is a result of the free market dynamics, a set of people not liking the products on offer in the market (closed-source-software) and creating a new brand altogether, which caught on with others. Kind of like sliced-bread or wireless keyboards?

    Your major contention seems to be that closed-source software would be less efficient than open source because the latter is more decentralized..

    but arnt' you really talking about a management style here? I think its completely plausible for a closed-source software to have a very decentralized development process.. isnt that how google seems to do stuff? i dont know about microsoft.

    Does this have anything to do with the source being open? i dont think so.

    Any product development seems to need a degree of centralization, with teams, firms n so on. the degree of centralization depending on the relative cost/benefits of the management decision.

    So i don't see the point really of having a debate on open source vs closed source software. or to the fact that what's efficient at creativity n so on, as libertarians i thought we'd trust the market to make those kind of decisions, on a product by product basis.

    Also many political philosophies be it communist, libertarian or otherwise seems to work best when applied to governments and the general society rather than anything specific as done here.

    either that or i haven't read the Road to Serfdom - Refrigerator edition.

    Looking forward for responses,

    Cheers
    Deane.
  • Google is the archetypal open source company

    OK,so where's the source code to their search system?
  • Deane, excellent questions! I've addressed them in a new post.
  • Timon
    Richard, it's on their computers, and in the open source world, what is on your computers is always your and only your business, which is sadly not the case with some commercial outfits.

    Other commercial outfits like the freedom of adding proprietary products to mostly free bundles, and that is an important part of open source, too. (For example, the original OSI's Perens' and Murdock's Debian Free Software Guidelines #9 reads: License Must Not Contaminate Other Software - The license must not place restrictions on other software that is distributed along with the licensed software. For example, the license must not insist that all other programs distributed on the same medium must be free software.")
  • Jessica
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