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"Viral Spiral - How the Commoners Built a Digital Republic of Their Own" (2008) [en] BOLLIER, David
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The salience of electronic commerce has, at times, obscured an important fact — that the commons is one of the most potent forces driving innovation in our time. Individuals working with one another via social networks are a growing force in our economy and society. This phenomenon has many manifestations, and goes by many names — “peer production,” “social production,” “smart mobs,” the “wisdom of crowds,” “crowdsourcing,” and “the commons.” 3 The basic point is that socially created value is increasingly competing with conventional markets, as GNU/Linux has famously shown. Through an open, accessible commons, one can efficiently tap into the “wisdom of the crowd,” nurture experimentation, accelerate innovation, and foster new forms of democratic practice.
3.“Social production” and “peer production” are associated with the work of Yale law professor Yochai Benkler, especially in his 2006 book, The Wealth of Networks. “Smart mobs” is a coinage of Howard Rheingold, author of a 2003 book by the same name.“Crowdsourcing” is the name of a blog run by Jeff Howe and the title of a June 2006 Wired article on the topic.“Wisdom of crowds” is a term coined by James Surowiecki and used as the title of his 2004 book.
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By the late 1990s, this legal scholarship was in full flower, Internet usage was soaring, and the free software movement produced its first significant free operating system, GNU/Linux. The commoners were ready to take practical action. Lessig, then a professor at Harvard Law School, engineered a major constitutional test case, Eldred v. Reno (later Eldred v. Ashcroft), to try to strike down a twentyyear extension of copyright terms — a case that reached the U.S. Supreme Court in 2002. At the same time, Lessig and a number of his colleagues, including MIT computer scientist Hal Abelson, Duke law professor James Boyle, and Villanova law professor Michael W. Carroll, came together to explore innovative ways to protect the public domain. It was a rare moment in history in which an ad hoc salon of brilliant, civic-minded thinkers from diverse fields of endeavor found one another, gave themselves the freedom to dream big thoughts, and embarked upon practical plans to make them real.
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Open business. One of the most surprising recent developments has been the rise of “open business” models. Unlike traditional businesses that depend upon proprietary technology or content, a new breed of businesses see lucrative opportunities in exploiting open, participatory networks. The pioneer in this strategy was IBM, which in 2000 embraced GNU/Linux, the open-source computer operating system, as the centerpiece of its service and consulting business. 16 Dozens of small, Internet-based companies are now exploiting open networks to build more flexible, sustainable enterprises.
16.Steve Lohr, “IBM to Give Free Access to 500 Patents, New York Times, July 11, 2005. See also Steven Weber, The Success of Open Source Software (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004), pp. 202–3. See also Pamela Samuelson, “IBM’s Pragmatic Embrace of Open Source,” Communications of the ACM 49, no. 21 (October 2006).
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Stallman’s atavistic zeal to preserve the hacker community, embodied in the GPL, did not immediately inspire others. In fact, most of the tech world was focused on how to convert software into a marketable product. Initially, the GPL functioned like a spore lying dormant, waiting until a more hospitable climate could activate its full potential. Outside of the tech world, few people knew about the GPL, or cared.~[* The GPL is not the only software license around, of course, although it was, and remains, the most demanding in terms of protecting the commons of code. Other popular open-source licenses include the MIT, BSD, and Apache licenses, but each of these permit, but do not require, that the source code of derivative works also be freely available. The GPL, however, became the license used for Linux, a quirk of history that has had far-reaching implications.]~ And even most techies were oblivious to the political implications of free software.
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In 1991, Torvalds was a twenty-one-year-old computer science student at the University of Helsinki, in Finland. Frustrated by the expense and complexity of Unix, and its inability to work on personal computers, Torvalds set out to build a Unix-like operating system on his IBM AT, which had a 33-megahertz processor and four megabytes of memory. Torvalds released a primitive version of his program to an online newsgroup and was astonished when a hundred hackers responded within a few months to offer suggestions and additions. Over the next few years, hundreds of additional programmers joined the project, which he named “Linux” by combining his first name, “Linus,” with “Unix.” The first official release of his program came in 1994. 27
27.One useful history of Torvalds and Linux is Glyn Moody, Rebel Code: Inside Linux and the Open Source Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Perseus, 2001).
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The Linux kernel, when combined with the GNU programs developed by Stallman and his free software colleagues, constituted a complete computer operating system — an astonishing and unexpected achievement. Even wizened computer scientists could hardly believe that something as complex as an operating system could be developed by thousands of strangers dispersed around the globe, cooperating via the Internet. Everyone assumed that a software program had to be organized by a fairly small group of leaders actively supervising the work of subordinates through a hierarchical authority system — that is, by a single corporation. Yet here was a virtual community of hackers, with no payroll or corporate structure, coming together in a loose, voluntary, quasi-egalitarian way, led by leaders who had earned the trust and respect of some highly talented programmers.
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The real innovation of Linux, writes Eric S. Raymond, a leading analyst of the technology, was “not technical, but sociological”:
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Linux was rather casually hacked on by huge numbers of volunteers coordinating only through the Internet. Quality was maintained not by rigid standards or autocracy but by the naively simple strategy of releasing every week and getting feedback from hundreds of users within days, creating a sort of rapid Darwinian selection on the mutations introduced by developers. To the amazement of almost everyone, this worked quite well. 28
28.Eric S. Raymond, “A Brief History of Hackerdom,” http://www.catb.org/~est/writings/cathedral-bazaar/hacker-history/ar01s06.html.
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The Free Software Foundation had a nominal project to develop a kernel, but it was not progressing very quickly. The Linux kernel, while primitive, “was running and ready for experimentation,” writes Steven Weber in his book The Success of Open Source: “Its crude functionality was interesting enough to make people believe that it could, with work, evolve into something important. That promise was critical and drove the broader development process from early on.” 29
29.Steven Weber, The Success of Open Source (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), p. 100.
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There were other powerful forces driving the development of Linux. Throughout the 1990s, Microsoft continued to leverage its monopoly grip over the operating system of personal computers, eventually attracting the attention of the U.S. Department of Justice, which filed an antitrust lawsuit against the company. Software competitors such as Hewlett-Packard, Sun Microsystems, and IBM found that rallying behind an open-source alternative — one that was legally protected against being taken private by anyone else— offered a terrific way to compete against Microsoft.
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Given these problems, there was great appeal in a Unix-like operating system with freely available source code. Linux helped address the fragmentation of Unix implementations and the difficulties of competing against the Microsoft monopoly. Knowing that Linux was GPL’d, hackers, academics, and software companies could all contribute to its development without fear that someone might take it private, squander their contributions, or use it in hostile ways. A commons of software code offered a highly pragmatic solution to a market dysfunction.
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Stallman’s GNU Project and Torvalds’s Linux software were clearly synergistic, but they represented very different styles. The GNU Project was a slower, more centrally run project compared to the “release early and often” developmental approach used by the Linux community. In addition, Stallman and Torvalds had temperamental and leadership differences. Stallman has tended to be more overbearing and directive than Torvalds, who does not bring a political analysis to the table and is said to be more tolerant of diverse talents. 31
31.Torvalds included a brief essay, “Linux kernel management style,” dated October 10, 2004, in the files of the Linux source code, with the annotation, “Wisdom passed down the ages on clay tablets.” It was included as an epilogue in the book Open Life: The Philosophy of Open Source, by Henrik Ingo, and is available at http://www.openlife.cc/node/43.
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So despite their natural affinities, the Free Software Community and the Linux community never found their way to a grand merger. Stallman has applauded Linux’s success, but he has also resented the eclipse of GNU programs used in the operating system by the Linux name. This prompted Stallman to rechristen the program “GNU/Linux,” a formulation that many people now choose to honor.
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Yet many hackers, annoyed at Stallman’s political crusades and crusty personal style, committed their own linguistic raid by renaming “free software” as “open source software,” with a twist. As GNU/Linux became more widely used in the 1990s, and more corporations began to seriously consider using it, the word free in “free software” was increasingly seen as a problem. The “free as in free speech, not as in free beer” slogan never quite dispelled popular misconceptions about the intended sense of the word free. Corporate information technology (IT) managers were highly wary about putting mission-critical corporate systems in the hands of software that could be had for free. Imagine telling the boss that you put the company’s fate in the hands of a program you downloaded from the Internet for free!
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One response to this issue was the rebranding of free software as “open-source” software. A number of leading free software programmers, most notably Bruce Perens, launched an initiative to set forth a consensus definition of software that would be called “opensource.” At the time, Perens was deeply involved with a community of hackers in developing a version of Linux known as the Debian GNU/Linux distribution. Perens and other leading hackers not only wanted to shed the off-putting political dimensions of “free software,” they wanted to help people deal with the confusing proliferation of licenses. A lot of software claimed to be free, but who could really tell what that meant when the terms were so complicated and legalistic?
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The Linux world behaves in many respects like a free market or an ecology, a collection of selfish agents attempting to maximize utility which in the process produces a selfcorrecting spontaneous order more elaborate and efficient than any amount of central planning could have achieved. . . . The utility function Linux hackers are maximizing is not classically economic, but is the intangible of their own ego satisfaction and reputation among other hackers. 36
36.Eric Raymond, “The Cathedral and the Bazaar,” available at http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/cathedral-bazaar/ar01s11.html.
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Red Hat, a company founded in 1993 by Robert Young, was the first to recognize the potential of selling a custom version (or “distribution”) of GNU/Linux as a branded product, along with technical support. A few years later, IBM became one of the first large corporations to recognize the social realities of GNU/Linux and its larger strategic and competitive implications in the networked environment. In 1998 IBM presciently saw that the new software development ecosystem was becoming far too variegated and robust for any single company to dominate. It understood that its proprietary mainframe software could not dominate the burgeoning, diversified Internet-driven marketplace, and so the company adopted the open-source Apache Web server program in its new line of WebSphere business software.
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It was a daring move that began to bring the corporate and open-source worlds closer together. Two years later, in 2000, IBM announced that it would spend $1 billion to help develop GNU/Linux for its customer base. IBM shrewdly realized that its customers wanted to slash costs, overcome system incompatibilities, and avoid expensive technology “lock-ins” to single vendors. GNU/Linux filled this need well. IBM also realized that GNU/Linux could help it compete against Microsoft. By assigning its property rights to the commons, IBM could eliminate expensive property rights litigation, entice other companies to help it improve the code (they could be confident that IBM could not take the code private), and unleash a worldwide torrent of creative energy focused on GNU/Linux. Way ahead of the curve, IBM decided to reposition itself for the emerging networked marketplace by making money through tech service and support, rather than through proprietary software alone. 38
38.Andrew Leonard, “How Big Blue Fell for Linux,” Salon.com, September 12, 2000, available at http://www.salon.com/tech/fsp/2000/09/12/chapter_7_part_one.print.html. The competitive logic behind IBM’s moves are explored in Pamela Samuelson, “IBM’s Pragmatic Embrace of Open Source,” Communications of the ACM 49, no. 21 (October 2006), and Robert P. Merges, “A New Dynamism in the Public Domain,” University of Chicago Law Review 71, no. 183 (Winter 2004).
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It was not long before other large tech companies realized the benefits of going open source. Amazon and eBay both saw that they could not affordably expand their large computer infrastructures without converting to GNU/Linux. GNU/Linux is now used in everything from Motorola cell phones to NASA supercomputers to laptop computers. In 2005, BusinessWeek magazine wrote, “Linux may bring about the greatest power shift in the computer industry since the birth of the PC, because it lets companies replace expensive proprietary systems with cheap commodity servers.” 39 As many as one-third of the programmers working on open-source projects are corporate employees, according to a 2002 survey. 40
39.Steve Hamm, “Linux Inc.,” BusinessWeek, January 31, 2005.
40.Cited by Elliot Maxwell in “Open Standards Open Source and Open Innovation,” note 80, Berlecon Research, Free/Libre Open Source Software: Survey and Study — Firms’ Open Source Activities: Motivations and Policy Implications, FLOSS Final Report, Part 2, at www.berlecon.de/studien/downloads/200207FLOSS _Activities.pdf.
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With faster computing speeds and cost savings of 50 percent or more on hardware and 20 percent on software, GNU/Linux has demonstrated the value proposition of the commons. Open source demonstrated that it can be cheaper and more efficacious to collaborate in the production of a shared resource based on common standards than to strictly buy and own it as private property.
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But how does open source work without a conventional market apparatus? The past few years have seen a proliferation of sociological and economic theories about how open-source communities create value. One formulation, by Rishab Ghosh, compares free software development to a “cooking pot,” in which you can give a little to the pot yet take a lot — with no one else being the poorer. “Value” is not measured economically at the point of transaction, as in a market, but in the nonmonetary flow of value that a project elicits (via volunteers) and generates (through shared software). 41 Another important formulation, which we will revisit later, comes from Harvard law professor Yochai Benkler, who has written that the Internet makes it cheap and easy to access expertise anywhere on the network, rendering conventional forms of corporate organization costly and cumbersome for many functions. Communities based on social trust and reciprocity are capable of mobilizing creativity and commitment in ways that market incentives often cannot — and this can have profound economic implications. 42 Benkler’s analysis helps explain how a global corps of volunteers could create an operating system that, in many respects, outperforms software created by a well-paid army of Microsoft employees.
41.Rishab Aiyer Ghosh, “Cooking Pot Markets and Balanced Value Flows,” in Rishab Aiyer Ghosh, ed., CODE: Collaborative Ownership and the Digital Economy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005), pp. 153–68.
42.See, e.g., Benkler, “Coase’s Penguin, or Linux and the Nature of the Firm,” Yale Law Journal 112, no. 369 (2002); Benkler, “ ‘Sharing Nicely’: On Shareable Goods and the Emergence of Sharing as a Modality of Economic Production,” Yale Law Journal 114, no. 273 (2004).
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Nearly twenty years after the introduction of the GPL, free software has expanded phenomenally. It has given rise to countless FOSS software applications, many of which are major viral hits such as Thunderbird (e-mail), Firefox (Web browser), Ubuntu (desktop GNU/Linux), and Asterisk (Internet telephony). FOSS has set in motion, directly or indirectly, some powerful viral spirals such as the Creative Commons licenses, the iCommons/free culture movement, the Science Commons project, the open educational resource movement, and a new breed of open-business ventures, Yet Richard Stallman sees little connection between these various “open” movements and free software; he regards “open” projects as too vaguely defined to guarantee that their work is truly “free” in the free software sense of the term. “Openness and freedom are not the same thing,” said Stallman, who takes pains to differentiate free software from open-source software, emphasizing the political freedoms that lie at the heart of the former. 44
44.Interview with Richard Stallman, January 21, 2008.
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The DMCA has been roundly denounced by software programmers, music fans, and Internet users for prohibiting them from making personal copies, fair use excerpts, and doing reverse engineering on software, even with legally purchased products. Using digital rights management systems sanctioned by the DMCA, for example, many CDs and DVDs are now coded with geographic codes that prevent consumers from operating them on devices on other continents. DVDs may contain code to prevent them from running on Linux-based computers. Digital journals may “expire” after a given period of time, wiping out library holdings unless another payment is made. Digital textbooks may go blank at the end of the school year, preventing their reuse or resale.
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Initially, the goal was more exploratory and improvisational — an earnest attempt to find leverage points for dealing with the intolerable constraints of copyright law. Fortunately, there were instructive precedents, most notably free software, which by 2000, in its opensource guise, was beginning to find champions among corporate IT managers and the business press. Mainstream programmers and corporations started to recognize the virtues of GNU/Linux and opensource software more generally. Moreover, a growing number of people were internalizing the lessons of Code, that the architecture of software and the Internet really does matter.
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For all of its brainpower and commitment, Lessig’s rump caucus might not have gotten far if it had not found a venturesome source of money, the Center for the Public Domain. The center — originally the Red Hat Center — was a foundation created by entrepreneur Robert Young in 2000 following a highly successful initial public offering of Red Hat stock. As the founder of Red Hat, a commercial vendor of GNU/Linux, Young was eager to repay his debt to the fledgling public-domain subculture. He also realized, with the foresight of an Internet entrepreneur, that strengthening the public domain would only enhance his business prospects over the long term. (It has; Young later founded a print-on-demand publishing house, Lulu.com, that benefits from the free circulation of electronic texts, while making money from printing hard copies.)
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Another new business using CC licenses is Lulu, a technology company started by Robert Young, the founder of the Linux vendor Red Hat and benefactor for the Center for the Public Domain.Lulu lets individuals publish and distribute their own books, which can be printed on demand or downloaded. Lulu handles all the details of the publishing process but lets people control their content and rights. Hundreds of people have licensed their works under the CC ShareAlike license and Public Domain Dedication, and under the GNU Project’s Free Documentation License. 200
200.Mia Garlick, “Lulu,” Creative Commons blog, May 17, 2006, at http://creativecommons.org/text/lulu.
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This history matters, because when Gil was appointed culture minister, he brought with him a rare political sophistication and public veneration. His moral stature and joyous humanity allowed him to transcend politics as conventionally practiced. “Gil wears shoulder-length dreadlocks and is apt to show up at his ministerial offices dressed in the simple white linens that identify him as a follower of the Afro-Brazilian religion candomblé,” wrote American journalist Julian Dibbell in 2004. “Slouching in and out of the elegant Barcelona chairs that furnish his office, taking the occasional sip from a cup of pinkish herbal tea, he looks — and talks — less like an elder statesman than the posthippie, multiculturalist, Taoist intellectual he is.” 257
257.Julian Dibbell, “We Pledge Allegiance to the Penguin,” Wired, November 2004, at http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.11/linux_pr.html.
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One of the first collaborations between Creative Commons and the Brazilian government involved the release of a special CC-GPL license in December 2003. 260 This license adapted the General Public License for software by translating it into Portuguese and putting it into the CC’s customary “three layers” — a plain-language version, a lawyers’ version compatible with the national copyright law, and a machine-readable metadata expression of the license. The CC-GPL license, released in conjunction with the Free Software Foundation, was an important international event because it gave the imprimatur of a major world government to free software and the social ethic of sharing and reuse. Brazil has since become a champion of GNU/Linux and free software in government agencies and the judiciary. It regards free software and open standards as part of a larger fight for a “development agenda” at the World Intellectual Property Organization and the World Trade Organization. In a related vein, Brazil has famously challenged patent and trade policies that made HIV/AIDS drugs prohibitively expensive for thousands of sick Brazilians.
260.Creative Commons press release, “Brazilian Government First to Adopt New ‘CC-GPL,’ ” December 2, 2003.
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It is worth noting that a commons does not necessarily preclude making money from the fruit of the commons; it’s just that any commercial activity cannot interfere with the integrity of social relationships within the commons. In the case of GPL’d software, for example, Red Hat is able to sell its own versions of GNU/Linux only because it does not “take private” any code or inhibit sharing within the commons. The source code is always available to everyone. By contrast, scientists who patent knowledge that they glean from their participation in a scientific community may be seen as “stealing” community knowledge for private gain. The quest for individual profit may also induce ethical corner-cutting, which undermines the integrity of research in the commons.
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Free software was one of the earliest demonstrations of the power of online commons as a way to create value. In his classic 1997 essay “The Cathedral and the Bazaar,” hacker Eric S. Raymond provided a seminal analysis explaining how open networks make software development more cost-effective and innovative than software developed by a single firm. 343 A wide-open “bazaar” such as the global Linux community can construct a more versatile operating system than one designed by a closed “cathedral” such as Microsoft. “With enough eyes, all bugs are shallow,” Raymond famously declared. Yochai Benkler gave a more formal economic reckoning of the value proposition of open networks in his pioneering 2002 essay “Coase’s Penguin, or, Linux and the Nature of the Firm.” 344 The title is a puckish commentary on how GNU/Linux, whose mascot is a penguin, poses an empirical challenge to economist Ronald Coase’s celebrated “transaction cost” theory of the firm. In 1937, Coase stated that the economic rationale for forming a business enterprise is its ability to assert clear property rights and manage employees and production more efficiently than contracting out to the marketplace.
343.Eric Raymond, “The Cathedral and the Bazaar,” May 1997, at http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar. The essay has been translated into nineteen languages to date.
344.Yochai Benkler, “Coase’s Penguin, or, Linux and the Nature of the Firm,” Yale Law Journal 112, no. 369 (2002), at http://www.benkler.org/CoasesPenguin.html.
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The idea that a company can make money by giving away something for free seems so counterintuitive, if not ridiculous, that conventional business people tend to dismiss it. Sometimes they protesteth too much, as when Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer compared the GNU GPL to a “cancer” and lambasted open-source software as having “characteristics of communism.” 352 In truth, “sharing the wealth” has become a familiar strategy for companies seeking to develop new technology markets. The company that is the first mover in an emerging commercial ecosystem is likely to become the dominant player, which may enable it to extract a disproportionate share of future market rents. Giving away one’s code or content can be a great way to become a dominant first mover.
352.Joe Wilcox and Stephen Shankland, “Why Microsoft is wary of open source,” CNET, June 18, 2001; and Lea, Graham, “MS’ Ballmer: Linux is communism,” Register (U.K.), July 31, 2000.
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Netscape was one of the first to demonstrate the power of this model with its release of its famous Navigator browser in 1994. The free distribution to Internet users helped develop the Web as a social and technological ecosystem, while helping fuel sales of Netscape’s Web server software. (This was before Microsoft arrived on the scene with its Internet Explorer, but that’s another story.) At a much larger scale, IBM saw enormous opportunities for building a better product by using GNU/Linux. The system would let IBM leverage other people’s talents at a fraction of the cost and strengthen its service relationships with customers. The company now earns more than $2 billion a year from Linux-related services. 353
353.Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks (Yale University Press, 2006), Figure 2.1 on p. 47.
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As chance had it, Baraniuk’s research group at Rice was just discovering open-source software. “It was 1999, and we were moving all of our workstations to Linux,” he recalled. “It was just so robust and high-quality, even at that time, and it was being worked on by thousands of people.” Baraniuk remembers having an epiphany: “What if we took books and ‘chunked them apart,’ just like software? And what if we made the IP open so that the books would be free to re-use and remix in different ways?’”
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History-making citizenship is not without its deficiencies. Rumors, misinformation, and polarized debate are common in this more open, unmediated environment. Its crowning virtue is its potential ability to mobilize the energies and creativity of huge numbers of people. GNU/Linux improbably drew upon the talents of tens of thousands of programmers; certainly our contemporary world with its countless problems could use some of this elixir— platforms that can elicit distributed creativity, specialized talent, passionate commitment, and social legitimacy. In 2005 Joi Ito, then chairman of the board of the Creative Commons, wrote: “Traditional forms of representative democracy can barely manage the scale, complexity and speed of the issues in the world today. Representatives of sovereign nations negotiating with each other in global dialog are limited in their ability to solve global issues. The monolithic media and its increasingly simplistic representation of the world cannot provide the competition of ideas necessary to reach informed, viable consensus.” 447 Ito concluded that a new, not-yetunderstood model of “emergent democracy” is likely to materialize as the digital revolution proceeds. A civic order consisting of “intentional blog communities, ad hoc advocacy coalitions and activist networks” could begin to tackle many urgent problems.
447.Joichi Ito, “Emergent Democracy,” chapter 1 in John Lebkowsky and Mitch Ratcliffe, eds., Extreme Democracy (Durham, NC: Lulu.com, 2005), at http://extremedemocracy.com/chapters/Chapter%20One-Ito.pdf.
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As projects like GNU/Linux, Wikipedia, open courseware, open-access journals, open databases, municipal Wi-Fi, collections of CC-licensed content, and other commons begin to cross-link and coalesce, the commons paradigm is migrating from the margins of culture to the center. The viral spiral, after years of building its infrastructure and social networks, may be approaching a Cambrian explosion, an evolutionary leap.