machine-envy

This fortnight’s column for openDemocracy tries to add something useful to the commentary surrounding Novell’s recent Faustian pact with Microsoft. In particular, it asks whether either the deal’s nod to non-commercial developers or Moglen’s threat to legally fork FLOSS with GPL v3 are predicted by Lawrence Lessig’s recent, controversial, “two economies” theory. My thanks to oD’s operations manager Felix Cohen for advice and additional research:

“The Novell/Microsoft deal could divide the FLOSS community into those who code for profit, and those who code for fun. In their 2 November statement, Novell and Microsoft stated that “Microsoft will not assert its patents against individual non-commercial open source developers”. Read this statement closely and it speaks to a future where FLOSS code development is split down the middle, where amateurs tinker and professionals profit.

“Interestingly, this same future has recently been hinted at by another figurehead of free culture, Lawrence Lessig. On 28 September this year, the Creative Commons pioneer wrote a short blog post entitled “On the economies of culture”. In it, he argues that “the Internet has reminded us that we live not just in one economy, but at least two”. One was the common or garden “work for pay” economy, the second that embodied in Wikipedia, which went by a variety of names, including “amateur” and “non-commercial”. These were “separate spheres”, argued Lessig, but ones that could and should be linked, in order “to inspire the creative work of the second economy, while also expanding the value of the commercial economy”.”

Read it in full here.