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02 Nov 08

Free, as in Beer, by Lawrence Lessig - Wired 14.09: Posts

www.wired.com/...posts.html - Preview

business innovation opensource technology LAWRENCE-LESSIG

"Think free," the movement's founder, Richard Stallman puts it, "as in free speech, not free beer." You can charge whatever you want for free software. But what you can't do is lock up the knowledge that makes it run. Others must be allowed to learn from and tinker with it. No one is permitted a monopoly on the teaching that stands behind it.
The short list of these books is led by MIT professor Eric von Hippel's Democratizing Innovation.
2 more annotations...
- Yochai Benkler's The Wealth of Networks places this commercial practice in a larger and perhaps more significant social context: Although peer production is profitable for business, writes Benkler, "we are in the midst of a quite basic transformation in how we perceive the world around us and how we act, alone and in concert with others."
- And a few of those may then think a bit more about what helps innovation flourish. It's not any magic word, like free or open. It is instead a practice that encourages the widest range of innovators. Superflex has inspired this practice with beer. And perhaps with much more as well.

11 Mar 07

Rough Type: Nicholas Carr's Blog: Calacanis's wallet and the Web 2.0 dream

www.roughtype.com/...jason_calacanis.php - Preview

collaboration economics gift-economy opensource

It just is not so easy to assume that

because people behave productively in one framework (the social

process of peer production that is Wikipedia, free and open source

software, or Digg), that you can take the same exact behavior, with

the same exact set of people, and harness them to your goals by

attaching a price to what previously they were doing in a social

process.
- yochai benkler
  THE BOTTOM LINE - on 2007-03-11
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Calacanis's wallet and the Web 2.0 dream

July 19, 2006
21 more annotations...
- "What we are seeing now," writes Yale law professor Yochai Benkler in his techno-anarcho-utopian magnum opus The Wealth of Networks, "is the emergence of more effective collective action practices that are decentralized but do not rely on either the price system or a managerial structure for coordination
- ... As computers become cheaper and as network connections become faster, cheaper, and ubiquitous, we are seeing the phenomenon of peer production of information scale to much larger sizes, performing more complex tasks than were possible in the past for nonprofessional production."
- We have now, on the other hand, almost
  
  two decades of literature in experimental economics, game theory,
  
  anthropology, political science field studies, that shows that
  
  cooperation in fact does happen much more often than the standard
  
  economics textbooks predict, and that under certain structural
  
  conditions non-price-based production is extraordinarily robust.
- what is
  
  $1,000 a month relative to the millions Calacanis would make if his
  
  plan in fact succeeds? At that point, the leaders are no longer
  
  leaders of a community, and they turn out to be suckers after all,
  
  working for pittance, comparatively speaking
- What Calacanis is doing now with his posts about the
  
  top contributors to Digg is trying to alter the cultural
  
  interpretation of what they are doing: from leaders in an engaged
  
  community, to suckers who are being taken for a ride by Ross. Maybe
  
  he will succeed in raining on Digg's parade, though I doubt it, but
  
  that does not mean that he will succeed in building an alternative
  
  sustained social process of peer production, or in replacing peer
  
  production with a purely paid service.
- The reason
  
  is that the power of the major sites comes from combining large-scale
  
  contributions from heterogeneous participants, with heterogeneous
  
  motivations.
- It is just too
  
  simplistic to think that if you add money, the really good
  
  participants will come and do the work as well as, or better than,
  
  the parallel social processes.
- While it is possible that there will be a price-based
  
  player there, I predict that the major systems will be primarily
  
  peer-based.
- Posted by nick at July 19, 2006
- As buyers and sellers come into this market, we'll see whether large-scale social media can in fact survive outside the price system, or whether it's fated to be subsumed into professional media. Which is mightier - Benkler's dream or Calacanis's wallet?
- By changing "the way we create and exchange information, knowledge, and culture," he concludes, "we can make the twenty-first century one that offers individuals greater autonomy, political communities greater democracy, and societies greater opportunities for cultural self-reflection and human connection."
- Calacanis, whose company Weblogs was one of the first to pay bloggers, is an unbeliever in the gift economy, and yesterday he in effect called Benkler's bluff. He offered to put the elite diggers and taggers that do most of the work at sites like Digg on his payroll - if they'd come and work for him instead of the competition. He offered, in other words, to bring the social mediators into the price system.
- They have, in other words, a price, even if they're not currently charging it. The question, then, is simple: Will the "amateurs" go pro? If they have a price, will they take it?
- One thing that has become clear is that the success of social production collectives hinges on the intensive contributions of a very small subset of their members.
- But what about the ability of those efforts to exist outside the price system? Here, Benkler's string seems a bit stronger.
- Open-source software, too, has been successful not because it lacks a management structure but because it has a very good one. I won't rehash these points again - you can look here, here and here - but I think that Benkler's belief that large-scale efforts to create cultural goods will succeed without management structure is dubious, at best.
- Wikipedia has been steadily wrapping itself in an ever more elaborate and hierarchical management structure as it has pursued its goal of improving its quality.
- So how strong is Benkler's string? Will the decentralized web collectives be able to operate successfully outside "the price system" and without "managerial structure"? The fact is, it's too soon to know for sure. We should be skeptical, though. For one thing, in the past we've seen a pattern of amateur activity springing up in the wake of the invention of a new communication medium, only to be followed by increasing professionalization and commercialization.
- What Benkler argues is that the Internet will allow the model to "scale to much larger sizes, performing more complex tasks than were possible in the past for nonprofessional production." Teams of amateurs, working for free and without managerial oversight in technology-mediated collectives, will be able to do what up until now has required formal and usually for-profit organizations manned and managed by professionals who get paid for their work. The amateur collective will thus supplant the professional institution as the engine of common culture.
- (Whoa. I'm starting to speak in tongues, like Kevin Kelly's evil twin.)
- I think that what Calacanis is getting at is that the reason "social media" has existed outside the price system up until now is simply that a market hadn't yet emerged for this new kind of labor. We weren't yet able to assign a value - in monetary terms - to what these workers were doing; we weren't even able to draw distinctions between what they were contributing

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eyal matsliah's Library tagged opensource → View Popular

Free, as in Beer, by Lawrence Lessig - Wired 14.09: Posts

Rough Type: Nicholas Carr's Blog: Calacanis's wallet and the Web 2.0 dream

Calacanis's wallet and the Web 2.0 dream

July 19, 2006

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Groups interested in opensource

Free and Open Source Software (Windows OS)

sensemaking

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