I’m reading Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything. The authors, Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams, have managed an impressive feat: they’ve translated Yochai Benkler’s The Wealth of Networks into marketing copy. Well, OK, that’s a little bit unfair. But their book is definitely unlike I’ve read about peer production. To my knowledge, it’s the first book on the subject that’s pitched toward business leaders rather than academics or techies. Accordingly, it stays at the treetop level and focuses on business implications wherever possible, explaining what peer production is, why businesses should care, and how businesses can use peer production to their advantage.
The authors are extremely enthusiastic about the phenomena they describe. They’re positively effusive in their predictions that mass collaborations will revolutionize industries, empower consumers, and democratize markets. Yet despite the gee-whiz tone, this is not a shallow book. They do a good job of summarizing the thesis of Benkler’s “Coase’s Panguin” without getting bogged in academic formalisms. They discuss the various controveries surrounding Wikipedia (such as this one), mostly coming down on the pro-Wikipedia side of the arguments. And they introduce the reader to a variety of programs, companies, and concepts–blogs, Linux, Apache, Flickr, Boing Boing, Second Life, etc. Obviously, few of these are new to TLF readers, but for the business people who are the book’s target audience, this is likely to be a welcome introduction to the concepts.
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Cool! I just stumbled across this 4-year-old post at Catallarchy making a point that I’ve mentioned a few times in the past: peer production isn’t an assault on the principles of a free society, but an extension of those principles to aspects of human life that don’t directly involve money. Jonathan Wilde offers the blogosphere (and specifically, technorati) as an example of the same phenomenon:
One of the things that undoubtedly adds to Technorati’s success is that Sifry knows blogging. He runs a blog himself. He has likely had to spend a late night tinkering with Movable Type. At one time or another, he probably has wanted to know who is reading his blog, or has wanted a way to search other blogs. He has, in the words of Friedrich A. Hayek, “the knowledge of the particular circumstances of time and place”.
What inventions like Technorati do is give structure to the blogosphere. And Technorati is not the only tool that does this. The Truth Laid Bear Blog Ecosystem acts as a filtering mechanism to display the blogs that are most frequently linked by other blogs. Blogrolling can create a useful, easily manipulated directory of blogs to visit regularly. The Trackback feature in Movable Type and Typepad has made it easier to see which other bloggers are commenting on your posts on their own blogs. The comments feature allows interactive discussion to take place without interfering with the media look of a blog. Archiving by category, date, and author allows readers easy ways of browsing the past material. RSS feeds allow delivery of blog content to newsreaders so that readers can organize their favorite blogs in a single window.
Each of these implementations were created by different individuals, such as Sifry, pursuing their own ends. There was no central authority barking out orders or making grand designs. The inception of a solid anatomy to the blogosphere was an entirely peripheral phenomenon.
This is an excellent point, and one that Jim Harper and I are hoping to expand upon in the near future: a lot of the intellectual tools that libertarians use to analyze markets apply equally well to other, non-monetary forms of decentralized coordination. It’s a shame that some libertarians see open source software, Wikipedia, and other peer-produced wealth as a threat to the free market rather than a natural complement.
Based on my prior post that analyzes Section 6 of the European Commission’s FLOSS report, we know that there is a growing and in many cases strong private and public sector demand for certain FLOSS applications. This leads the authors to the question of supply? Where are the FLOSS developers?
Based on two developer surveys (MERIT/FP5 and FLOSS-US
Stanford), the report argues that more than three fifths of the worldwide
FLOSS developer community live in the EU. One fifth live in North America and another one fifth live in other countries (p.37). The report relies on this and other data to persuade the EC to adopt an industrial open source policy.
While the authors may be overstating the point for effect
(the different data sets do not always show Europe leading and many Asian
developers are not counted), it is pretty clear that Europe is a leader in global community of FLOSS developers.
However, as I say below the fold, the authors gloss over some important developer community distinctions that may harm their later conclusions:
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Here’s another installment of my analysis of the voluminous Free/Libre/Open Source Software (FLOSS) report issued by the European Commission. In my last blog post, I discussed how the EC’s
report is a call to action for Europe’s policymakers. The ambitious proposals in the report aim to do for Europe’s ICT industry what the Airbus project did for Europe’s aeronautics industry.
This realization makes the report less about open source software, and more about industrial policy (not necessarily in a bad way).
If you’re going to have industrial policy, however, you need the industry. In Section 6–FLOSS Role in the Economy: Market Share and Geography–the authors argue that Europe has both parts of a successful FLOSS industry equation: developers and users. This section is not a “build it and they will come” proposition; rather, the
authors proclaim to policymakers “build FLOSS apps because FLOSS developers are
already here.”
In the first of two posts about Section 6, I analyze the report’s discussion of the kinds of FLOSS use in Europe and the rest of the world.
How Popular is FLOSS?
It is an undeniable fact that the use of free and open source software is growing rapidly throughout the world and in Europe. In some cases, FLOSS software applications are even outpacing all of their proprietary competitors. Section 6 provides statistics and data from dozens of sources to back this up.
Read my full analysis over at the ACT blog.
Last week, my organization, ACT, announced its intention to scour the European
Commission’s FLOSS
report and read and analyze this lengthy (and heavy) 287 page study. The goal: go beyond the executive summary and provide an in-depth analysis of the report, and in the process initiate a real conversation about the paper and its conclusions. As the recent
disputes over the report suggest, informed analysis is still sorely needed.
In a nutshell, the authors of the UNU-Merit report argue that an aggressive commitment to FLOSS – Free/Libre/Open Source Software – will provide an innovative spark for the EU. Using what the authors suggest is Europe’s competitive advantage in open source developers, the European ICT industry will be able to better compete with America’s tech leaders.
It is a provocative and ambitious strategy. But is it sound? If the EU desires to adopt FLOSS as its competitive advantage in ICT, would the data and proposals presented in the UNU-MERIT study help? How do they authors support their strategy in the 274 pages that follow the executive summary?
Those are some of the key questions I hope to answer in the coming weeks. Starting with Section 6 next week, we’ll analyze the report section by section, identifying the value but also the pitfalls of the report.
I’m also looking forward to constructive feedback from TLF readers. The report implicates software licensing models, market analysis, innovation, immigration, antitrust/competition policy, interoperability, and even society/culture. It’s impossible to be an expert on everything! But the long and the short of it is that the paper and its policy implications deserve to be topics of conversation, not just bits of rhetoric.
Full commentary on sections 2 through 5 of the study (essentially the paper’s introduction and reason for being) is here.
I’ve noted before that there’s been a trend recently of left-of-center academics citing great libertarian thinkers in their writings about copyright and patent law, peer production, industrial organization, and related topics. Tim Wu and Yochai Benkler cite Hayek and Coase, respectively, in their writings. The latest example is Cass Sunstein’s (relatively) new book, Infotopia: How Many Minds Produce Knowledge. I haven’t read it yet, Patti Waldmeir of the Financial Times says:
Sunstein, one of the biggest of America’s internet big thinkers, has written an intriguing new book in which he argues that Hayek’s insights about the genius of markets are equally true of the internet. Sunstein argues, for example, that sharing scientific information online would cure some of the worst problems of the US patent system and foster innovation much more efficiently than costly patent litigation. Sunstein recognizes all the potential flaws of such collaborative projects. Groupthink can be dangerous. But, says Sunstein, the wisdom of the many is a great thing, and sharing knowledge online can lead to remarkable advances for companies, for governments and for the rest of us
Now, obviously, many libertarians (and perhaps Hayek himself) would take exception to some of the details of Sunstein’s argument. But I still think it’s a positive development that the problems Hayek and Coase focused on–how do we organize our economy and society to optimize the dispersion and use of knowledge–are increasingly recognized as central to high-tech policy debates.
Are there other examples of non-libertarian academics citing applying the insights of Hayek, Coase, or other libertarian thinkers to tech policy issues?
Via Mike Linksvayer, the Mozilla Foundation has reported that it took in $52.9 million in revenues in 2005, mostly from “our search engine relationships,” which I think mostly means payments from Google to have their search engine be the default in the FireFox toolbar. This more or less confirms rumors that were reported last year on Mozilla’s revenues.
This is fantastic news, and given that the search engine wars show no sign of abating, I have to imagine they earned similar revenues in 2006. This provides a big pot of money they can use to promote further improvements to FireFox and Mozilla’s other products, or to spend helping to support the work of open source developers working on other projects.
I occasionally see critics of open source software complain that their lack of revenues proves that “the market” has rejected open source software. But here we have a pretty clear counter-example. The Mozilla community has created a product that’s so valuable that they’ve stumbled upon a “business model” for it–almost by accident–that’s worth $50 million. And given that this is a product that’s given away for free to tens of millions of users, it’s a safe bet that if you could put a dollar figure on the total wealth created by the Mozilla project, it would be a lot larger than that.
Prof. Vaidhyanathan has left a gracious comment in response to my post last week about his MSNBC article. He rightly takes issue with my characterization of his position as “knee-jerk leftist and old fogeyism.”
As I point out in a subsequent comment, think his article illustrates a couple of interesting ideological divides. One divide is that Prof. Vaidhyanathan is more concerned than I am about the impact of corporate control over the means of communications. But the more interesting divide, in my estimation, is an individualist/communalist divide. Prof. Vaidhyanathan seems to feel that it’s only a revolution if people are able to “forge collective consciousnesses” and tackle big social problems. I’m more inclined to think that individual, incremental, spontaneous social organizations are at least as important.
What’s most fascinating about this is that it doesn’t seem to have any correlation with the traditional left-right divide. Vaidhyanathan clearly hails from the left-hand side of the political spectrum, as does Seth Finkelstein, but you can see similar sentiments from Nick Carr, who I’ve never thought of as a left-winger, and from our friends at the libertarian-leaning Progress and Freedom Foundation.
And of course, there’s yet another axis concerning copyright and patent law, in which Seth, Prof. Vaidhyanathan, and I would generally find ourselves on the same side, with PFF and most of the Washington establishment on the other side.
This is one of the things that makes writing about tech policy so interesting. On most issues, there is a distinctively “conservative” position and a distinctively “liberal” one, with libertarians usually lining up squarely with one side or the other, depending on the particular issue. But in tech policy, the battle lines seem to be more fluid.
Related to the previous post on online communities’ supposed narcissism, a reader emailed me the following:
What’s particularly delicious is that just before I read this post I was browsing Penny Arcade, which seems like exactly the kind of shallow commercial endeavor Siva is decrying–it’s a webcomic about video games, after all. And what do I see on PA’s front page but this, by the comic’s writer:
“As of today, Friday, December the 29th, your efforts with Child’s Play have amassed $963,160(!!!). This is by no means the final figure, nor is it the final post on the subject – there is still a tremendous amount of tabulation to occur, new checks, community initiatives, last minute rushes, and perhaps even New Year’s Epiphanies. I have faith that we will reach a million straight up in donations, and if we do not, I am steeling myself to make a financially debilitating charitable contribution.”
It’s not a cure for AIDS, but that’s still a cool million to make life better for hospitalized children. Communities linked by shared interests, even ones that seem shallow, are wonderful things.
Civic republicanism can be an attractive vision, but not when it turns into elitist hectoring.
Indeed.
Siva Vaidhyanathan has a puzzling article up at MSNBC complaining about–well, I’m not actually sure what he’s complaining about:
Google, for instance, only makes money because it harvests, copies, aggregates, and ranks billions of Web contributions by millions of authors who unknowingly grant Google the right to capitalize, or “free ride,” on their work. Who are you to Google? To Amazon? Do “you” really deserve an award for allowing yourself to be rendered so flatly and cravenly? Do you deserve an award because media mogul Rupert Murdoch can make money capturing your creativity via his new toy, MySpace?
The important movement online is not about “you.” It’s about “us.” It’s about our profound need to connect and share. It’s about our remarkable ability to create among circles– each person contributing a little bit to a poem, a song, a quilt, or a conversation.
So it’s not about your reviews on Amazon. It’s about how we as a community of Web users choose to exercise our collective wills and forge collective consciousnesses. So far, we have declined to do so. We have not harnessed this communicative power to force the rich and powerful to stop polluting our air and water or to stop the spread of AIDS or malaria. We have not brought down any tyrants. We have simply let a handful of new corporations aggregate and exercise their own will on us. And we have perfected online dating.
He seems to be drawing a distinction between “good” social production, which apparently has the power to cure aids and bring down dictators, and “bad” social production, which merely gives people better ways to communicate, and allows companies like Google and MySpace to profit in the process. But neither side of this dichotomy makes a lot of sense.
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The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.