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.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.