Education/Open Source Workshop

Free Software: Software for Social Justice

Twenty years ago many people predicted software would increasingly control our lives. Today it's true. The free software movement is about having the right to observe and participate in the software that controls our lives.

Some of the basic ideas of free software are the right to modify and redistribute software. "Free" refers to these freedoms, rather than the cost of the software.

As an example voting in the states is now done with machines by Diebold running closed source software. Consequently there's no way for the public to observe the software and verify that it doesn't add republican votes, etc.

As another example if everyone uses software, they should all have a say in how it works. Usually however we're forced to use software which the autocratic elite and the development team get to decide how works.

Sharing Software with Neighbors

Richard Stallman started the free software movement in the 1980s while working at MIT's AI lab. One of his experiences was using a broken printer driver. Because he was a programmer at MIT, he could fix it and share this correction with all other printer driver users. However when he asked to manufacturer for the source code so he could fix it, they refused. It would be in the interest of the manufacturer to have a programmer from MIT fix their software for them for free, but they made it impossible by withholding the source code and illegal using copyright and license agreements. To Richard Stallman, this is an example of anti social behavior.

A good society should be built on sharing with your neighbor. Children are taught the importance of sharing. But closed source software succeeds through not sharing.

Recently lots of laws have been passed which make sharing illegal. The free software movement spawned "copyleft" to oppose copyright. The idea of copyleft is it specifically gives you the rights to modify and redistribute the software, but your derived works must be under the same terms as the original software. This prevents companies from taking the hard work of open source developers, contributing to it and not sharing their contributions.

Software patents are examples of laws which prevent people from sharing software. Patents let a company prevent other developers from using an idea, regardless of how the company holding the patent chooses to exercise the idea: In the public interest, disinterest, or not at all. Patents have been granted on many very simple, general ideas: One click shopping. North America was one of the first places to grant patents on software. There was great resistance to allowing software patents in Europe.

The Digital Millenium Copyright Act is another example of laws which make sharing software illegal. In cases where software patents are infringed by anonymous groups of developers who don't charge for their work, users of the software can be made responsible for breaking the law.

See Richard Stallman's paper on the right to read and encrypting electronic books.

Accumulation by Dispossession

Closed source software is an example of accumulation by dispossession. This is taking something which wasn't previously property and making it property.

The last forty years has seen a concentration of wealth in North America and much of this wealth is the result of accumulation by dispossession. Often the people getting really rich are not working hard or creating new things, but creating property out of things which weren't previously property. The last forty years have also seen the rise of neo-liberalism and free market fundamentalism. Among their principles is that everything should be property which can be bought and sold: Water, air and software.

An example of accumulation by dispossession is bio piracy like the patenting of the basmati rice gene. Farmers in India have been sharing rice for thousands of years, but a company, after forcing the Indian government to accept intellectual property laws similar to North America, goes into India, takes the cooperative work of generations of farmers, and claims to have "discovered" it. Then farmers are obliged to pay royalties to company holding the patent. Thus the company has created property out of something which wasn't property before.

Microsoft and Bill Gates are examples of accumulation by dispossession. Software has always been shared and modified among hackers and hobbyists. In Bill Gates' 1976 open letter to hobbyists, he denounces this social behavior as steeling. Microsoft became super wealthy by taking software, which used to be shared freely like ideas, and making it property.

Technically Facilitated Collaboration

• Historically, projects have been less complex and people more focussed: Someone spent an entire lifetime carving a staircase out of a single tree trunk. As the size and complexity of projects increases, and the volume of prior knowledge in the project's context increases, the number of people needed to work together on a project increases. As does the complexity of their communication and collaboration. So we have more people exchanging more information about a project than ever before, enabling very advanced projects, such as going to the moon, Linux, other better examples? But the collaboration has overhead. So discovering new social and technical processes for highly parallel, highly collaborative work is key.
• What does this have to say about diversity? I have some material on privileged, dominant groups. Is increased collaboration anti-oppressive or does it favor dominant social norms? On the one hand, the need and capacity for more participation is involving people from around the world. However if the tools or processes are designed by and for dominant social groups like straight, white, North American men, they're reinforcing dominant norms.
• Tools for collaboration does generally improve openness and fight hierarchy. By delegating management to a tool or process, it removes people from positions of management and gives equal access and opportunity to participate and contribute. Simple tools create a horizontal structure. On the other hand, the more technical the tools or process, the more time is needed to get up to speed, creates a different form of hierarchy where power is wielded by those with knowledge, skill or access.

In Open Source

• Open source it is sometimes hard to create institutional memory. It's volunteer, small contributions are often made by many people, there is high turnover. Hence tools to facilitate collaboration are key.
• The development of these tools and processes itself requires highly parallel, highly collaborative work. Collaborative technology is highly adopted in technical fields. Examples include bug tracking systems which let you search, sort and assign hundreds, even millions of bugs or issues. This is a big improvement over having someone responsible for managing and delegating issues, or an un-searchable list, or everyone maintaining their own, overlapping list of bugs.
• Wiki is used extensively in open source to manage documentation because it can be updated as soon as outdated information is identified. In this way it reduces the overhead of collaboration. Another principle of Wiki is version control instead of access control. Instead of requiring contributors to request and be granted access from an administrator, it encourages everyone to contribute and tracks revisions so a contributor can't delete any information and mistakes are easily reverted. If mistakes are more easily reverted than created, a contribution is at least as good as the previous version. A final aspect of Wiki is attribution. In face to face collaboration, our contributions are attributed to ourselves and positively or negatively affect our reputation. Contribution may become more or less difficult in future, relative to our reputation. Downsides of this are contributions may be treated personally, contributors may feel personal ownership of aspects of a collaborative project. When we work together but not face to face, even offline but at different times, we loose attribution and people may avoid responsibility, good or bad, for their contribution. Example: Someone anonymously making a renovation to the housing Coop. Wiki encourages contributions to be attributed to a username and for people to invest in the positive reputation of their username. How is this related to meritocracy?

In Activism

• Activism faces many of the same issues as open source development: Volunteer, high turnover, hard to create institutional memory. Well funded activism with abundant resources is rare, so activist projects often lack physical space, materials and support staff that help collaboration in other organizations.
• Activism has less adoption of technical tools than technical projects. Exceptions include Free Geek, though it is a technical activist group.

In Enterprises

• Technically facilitated collaboration is increasingly important even with the resources available in enterprises. Enterprises are increasingly concerned about an aging workforce and loosing "social capital"

Open Standards

• One example of the overhead of collaboration is the web. The web is a common denominator, an Open Standard. There's some material on Tim Berners-Lee and open standards and their contribution to the success of the internet.
• However the web has considerable overhead compared to other modes of communication: News groups and email. Modern web browsers have exorbitant system requirements. The proliferation of non-interoperable social networking sites. Editing encyclopedia entries with the facilities of a browser's form field data entry.
• Hopefully more open standards evolve to allow web applications and desktop applications to interoperate: CalDAV so Evolution, Sunbird, iCal, Exchange, Google Calendar, Emacs calendar mode work together. WebDAV to edit MediaWiki articles with a desktop word processor. An open standard for realtime collaborative editing, so SubEthaEdit, Gobby, Google Docs and maybe in the future MediaWiki could work together.
• OpenID is an interesting open standard for attribution, one of the keys to collaborative work. It will be interesting to see how a global identity system fosters new reputation systems. One problem with OpenID is it's web-centric. Previous open identity and attribution systems exist, like OpenPGP.

Interaction

• To present this material, a good strategy might be to ask a group what they think of software piracy: What it means to them. Then ask the group what they think of bio piracy. A group of activists will likely have opinions about bio piracy and accumulation by dispossession. Then make the connection between the two: In the case of bio piracy, "piracy" is obstructing sharing through the invention of property. In the case of software, "piracy" is sharing.

TODO

• How does the production of "belonging" in the sense of belonging to a group influence collaboration? Example: Emails to the Ubuntu project from SABDFL, Mark Shuttleworth. Gang colors or badges.
• How do Meritocracy and mind share affect collaboration and anti-oppression?