From 3533ff61cced709cdcf049408f8256facbf93a2a Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Silvio Rhatto Date: Fri, 6 Oct 2017 09:29:30 -0300 Subject: Books: CATB: reviews and ideas --- books/tecnopolitica/cathedral-bazaar.md | 77 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ 1 file changed, 77 insertions(+) (limited to 'books/tecnopolitica') diff --git a/books/tecnopolitica/cathedral-bazaar.md b/books/tecnopolitica/cathedral-bazaar.md index 4089a7e..5701981 100644 --- a/books/tecnopolitica/cathedral-bazaar.md +++ b/books/tecnopolitica/cathedral-bazaar.md @@ -6,6 +6,79 @@ * ISBN: 978-0-596-00108-7 * Publisher: O'Reilly +## Review + +While Raymond has inumerous insights on the dynamic of the free software +communities, he got political economy wrong, including, but not only by: + +* Chosing to focus on Lockean philosofical considerations. +* Putting altruism as a mode of appearance for an egotistical reward strategy. + +Reading this book years after the "Open Source Revolution" has begun, the whole +"Open Source X Free Software" debate looks even more important than what sometimes +were put as a metaphysical, esoteric dispute. Going beyond the requirement that +a software work is made available giving the "four freedoms", this debate puts +basic questions about the underlying production process all how societies chose +to divide labour and share wealth. + +More than ever before this debate has huge importance and implications, given +our current state of affairs where economic models such as "freemium", +"opencore" and [siren servers](/books/sociedade/who-owns-the-future) are +privatizing and concentrating the notion of property, i.e, transforming even +personal property in a "service": you don't own your gadget or content like +music you purchase, because of DRM, EULAS and the inability to repair your +stuff, see the iRepair movemnt. + +Raymond assumes that "the veredict of history seems to be free-market capitalism +is the globally optimal way to cooperate for economic efficiency" which, besides +being an "end of history"-type fallacy -- as we didn't tried yeat many, many +possible economical systems, but only very few --, has wrong assumptions about +what is "optimal", "cooperation" and "efficient": just look about resource +depletion, absurd wealth concentration by the extremelly rich and lack of +basic dignity for most of human population, not to mention animal/nature rights. + +Capitalism is based in the need that something is scarce, if not naturally then +let make it artificial scarce. So there's no way a capitalist business will +sustain itself by giving everything free as in software -- as it's anyway out +of question that it will give anything free as in beer. + +So while the bulk of Raymond ideas are revolutionary in the sense that capitalism +needs to constantly revolutionize itself, fade away in diminishing returns or +go to war mode -- when accumulated production is fanatically destroyed, it does +not offers insights for the main issue of how to replace capitalism which by +the previous definition is inequality-producing machine. + +Embracing open source as a capitalism moto sounds like being a hacker until +page two, which is a prevailing ideology of the Silicon Valley elite, which +sounds much more a meritocracy than hacker culture. We should question things +instead of taking assumptions for granted. + +That's curious, because Raymond cites Buckminster's Fuller "ephemeralization" +concept in the opening words of his "The Magic Cauldron" essay, which could +be explored to a new dimension if economics and politics are understood also +as technological apparatus we use to live better. An ephemeralization, as +Raymond explains, is "technology becoming both more effective and less +expensive as the physical resources invested in early designs are replaced +by more and more information content" (page 115). + +So it's clear when Raymond makes assumptions he is actually making a choice on +capitalist markets and conservative politics (I don't like to use the term +libertarian: it causes confusions as it means different things on different +cultures). + +If we change the assumptions, we can build different, new economies and +politics with other different emergent properties, like those based on values +of emancipation and solidarity. There are other Magic Cauldrons for the Free +Software spell. + +## Ideas while reading the book + +* Hipothesis: sunstainability of "Open Source" economic model in Brazil was mostly embraced + by the government, by an army of free lancers and by a small number of business; while + open source is widely used in the country, it's mostly on the free rider mode: everyone + using an open stack but develops unpublished code (either closed source os lazilly left + out of public sight) or "poor gifts" in the expression of Raymond himself. + ## Phenomenology * Linus Law: "Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow" (page 30); @@ -135,3 +208,7 @@ What about Linus behavior, then? version, I'll use it''—and to give credit where credit is due. -- 91 + +## References + +* [Homesteading the Noosphere](http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/). -- cgit v1.2.3