The Open Source Manifesto

[Aeschines]

The world has reached a cusp at which the future of the modern economic model of capitalism will be decided. The system of economics native the United States and much of the Western world is heavily reliant upon the profit potential of proprietary information, systems and products. Over the past 20 years, this model has been undercut by more equitable alternative solutions. These solutions demonstrate efficiency and support structures which dwarf those rooted in the contemporary arrangement and therefore, they threaten the prolonged dominance of proprietary capitalism and corporate structure.

Wikipedia can be analyzed as a microcosm of what is taking place in the larger economic scheme. Wikipedia (wiki) is one of the foremost proponents of Open Source, free software and liberation of information. Their mission is to enlighten the entire world without taking value from their users lives in the form of monetary cost. Recently, this company initiated a fund raising campaign due to its inability to maintain existing services and growth potential with current finances and revenues. The problem Wikipedia is experiencing is the result of critical miscalculations in the structure of their business model. Because users of the online encyclopedia database do not have to provide funds to the owners, who need money to maintain physical costs, and advertising revenues are not possible due to the open source license under which the company operates, the Wiki owners have had to find their resources elsewhere. It happens that they were unable to secure the necessary monies to maintain their expanding system.

The basis of Wikipedia is open membership and contribution in order to provide content. As the system grows, more resources are required to accommodate increased traffic, data and bandwidth needs. This is because Wikipedia is merely a central server which acts as a storage and transfer station, accumulating all resources in one location, and making such compiled data available to all users. It is this structure that has rendered their economic form unsustainable, as its recourse and quality increases directly result in popularity increases. In essence, they are fighting the business model that they simultaneously support, and they are losing. Even if they succeed in securing the necessary funds required to maintain their systems through their fund drive, their needs will only continue to increase, and their funds will again prove insufficient.

One of two things will now happen to the Wikipedia company. They will either fail outright and cease to exist or their business model will change in order to address their needs. I believe that their function is in too much demand to fail entirely; making it so only the second option is viable. A change critical to the companies identity will take place. There is a list of possible changes that could save the system, all of which fit into two categories:

• They can maintain a central server and develop a steady income through various methods
• They can outsource their physical requirements to their vast pool of users

The first option is considerably less viable than the second for a number of reasons. First: Wikipedia’s license does not allow advertizing, nor would users likely stand for such a change. Second: no end user required payment structure is possible under the company’s license, and again, users would likely be outraged with such a change. Third: a change in the company’s license would likely result in serious legal ramifications and decrease in popularity, as any attempt to go public or for profit would necessitate making all current content proprietary. Such a change can simply not be afforded.

The second alternative solution to Wikipedia’s problem is therefore the only possible option after all: To outsource data and traffic requirements from central server to user machines and effectively reduce the websites function to that of its current central networking hub. This part of its current system requires only but a small fraction of the funds needed to operate the entire company, and even this can be disassembled into constituent parts: in the form of executable software operating on end user’s machines, although such a change will probably not be necessary. If indeed Wiki adopts this type of solution, it will closely resemble operations such as Torrent browsers, acting to perform user searches and tracking fragmented data deposits on individual machines.

In order to achieve such a structure, Wiki would only need to implement one small change at a time. The first would be to have Wiki articles attach themselves to the machines of individual users, not one article to each user; rather, a clone of the original on each machine that accesses the data. Once every article is fixed with such an operation, a hash checking software, like that present in Torrent systems, will we installed attached to each article, coordinated by automatic updates provided when visits to the web based browser are made. This will effectively maintain the possibility of continuous modification of data by contributing users and make the changes unanimous among users. Next, a small software modification should be made available as a tool on web browsers that enable rapid torrent downloads and uploads between user pools. Such systems have existed for several years already and have demonstrated themselves to be widely popular and effective. After these modifications are made, the central server at Wikipedia can be shut down to the point that only the browsing function remains, effectively cutting down an estimated 90% of operating costs. When such changes are made, Wikipedia will effectively resemble, in its own structure, the system of information sharing that they have made possible and popular.

These are exactly the types of issues that are taking place on the global scale. Individuals and groups are finding their published works illegally distributed and their products reverse engineered and produced under a different name, receiving no royalties, in a different country. One of the major problems is that, although the proprietary capitalist system has been widely adopted, the majority of the world lacks the legislation to protect intellectual property and the resources to enforce such legislation. Yet, at the same time that the creators of the pirated information feel largely cheated, their ideas are raising the standard of living for many people, a large number of which were, and continue to be, in dire poverty.

In some situations, pirates and users of pirated property are found and prosecuted for many times the value of that which was stolen, and never less, but in the wider scheme, it is only a token percentage of those guilty of such actions that are ever caught. In the majority of these cases, the situation is already untenable for license holders, and they face circumstances at least as grim as those faced by Wikipedia. No achievable amount of legislation or enforcement is likely to mitigate the issues, so the question becomes, how these entities and the system they exist in will survive.

The answer is identical to that which must be embraced by Wikipedia. The forces acting to countermeasure efforts made by the license distributors and holders are overwhelming and posses a capacity to decimate opposition and avoid detection with efficiency comparable to epidemic viruses. There is now widespread fear and hatred for these forces among the elite of the entrenched proprietary capitalist system: corporations, engineers, researchers, universities, publishers, authors, artists, musicians, designers, architects and those in a multitude of other creative capacities, are enraged by the determination and efficiency with which their works are stolen.

Already, many of these people have realized that their goals to make profit on all replication of their work are unattainable against these new forces, and their hatred has turned to fear. All of the attempts to secure intellectual property have failed at an accelerating rate since the late 1980’s, regardless of the cost of the protective measures. As an example; in 2007, the Sony Corporation released their new media format, the Blue Ray Disk. It was accompanied by a very advanced, very expensive anti piracy program called BD+. This software cost millions of dollars in research and development and its programmers made the claim that it was a self defending, hacker proof system. After a few movies were released on the new format various members of the intellectual property law counter movement set to breaking the system. Within a few months, “arnezami,” a member on a website called Doom9.org, posted that he had cracked the code.

Facing these terrifying facts, intellectuals amongst those in danger of losing the ability to make a profit have started putting up a stink. Lobbyists from the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and other endangered industries have embarked on a campaign to convince the government of the necessity to bypass the laws of due process and allow the immediate prosecution of individuals determined to be pirates by RIAA snoop software.

Continued on next post

[Aeschines]

Whether or not such measures are taken are of little consequence in a much larger picture, as regardless of what is done in this country to protect music and movies, the vast majority of the world’s population would not be subject to such laws. The question would remain, is this economic system worth defending. I will attest that, much like in the situation with Wikipedia, the modern form of proprietary capitalism must morph into something else in order to survive.

Critics of this idea believe that in a system where there are no laws to guarantee profit for producers of intellectual property, innovators would cease to innovate. Such concepts are all but entirely false, as there already exists much evidence to the contrary. One group of examples can be seen at Sourceforge.net; here, over 130,000 open source software projects have been created by millions of programmers to be given away with no charge for the benefit to the larger society. These people defy the rules of classical economics in that they do not, by definition, act rationally, intentionally avoiding profit from their efforts. It is interesting to note that the universe did not cave in upon itself and disappear into infinitely tiny space with a resounding POP! when this “Law” was broken.

Again I arrive the subject of whether or not we should act to defend the current economic system. If you consider the morality and ethics of proprietary capitalism, interesting conclusions can be drawn about the values encouraged by our system of economics and the laws that protect it. In the most basic definition, money is anything that is generally accepted in exchange for goods or services. In other words, money is a means of converting time and effort into an exchangeable form with value. Generally, if something takes more time and effort to complete, it is assigned a greater monetary value. In many instances, individual items are paid for in situations similar to that of pottery making; a sculptor shapes a mass of clay into a functional and aesthetic object and, in the market, he or she can receive payment for his or her time, effort and materials. This is the basic unit upon which our economic system is based. It has changed very little since its original creation, and because of this, exploitations of the system are possible.

There are instances in the modern world when a product or service can be sold a great number of times at or near its initial perceived value without considerable additional time, effort or materials. In such cases, the proprietor of such a product can achieve vast amounts of money for very little additional work beyond the original creation. Since money is essentially a value for time and effort, such proprietors would be receiving payments of time and effort in quantities many times greater than they put in themselves. Take Microsoft Windows as an example: a software product is created, perhaps taking 50,000 hours to create using $100 million in resources. Every copy of Windows sold might cost an extra $2 in terms of time and resources. This product is then sold to millions of individuals in the market for approximately $200. If $200 dollars equates to 1.13 hours given an average wage of $15 per hour, then each copy of Windows sold would be equal to 13 hours of value. If Microsoft averages its sales of Windows at 10 million copies sold each month, then in one year they earn 1.56 trillion hours in value. This example makes it very obvious that our system of exchanging value has lost much of its accuracy since it was first developed. It may also be worth noting that Microsoft is one of the companies up in arms against piracy of its proprietary software, presumably due to the profit potential that they lose from such acts of theft (note that all figures are arbitrary)

There are now alternatives to buying proprietary products in the computer software industry. There is a movement for providing free, non proprietary software to anyone with the capacity to use such technology (the requisite is a modern computer). Programs that fit into this movement are called Open Source, and they conform to certain special license requirements that ensure that variations on the original source code of the programs is never used to turn a profit. By comparison to proprietary competitors such as Microsoft, it is hard to imagine why anyone would not choose to buy Open Source programs if all other qualities are comparable. Indeed, a considerable portion of the software market is moving to Open Source alternatives where they can be found.

An Open Source, non proprietary product or service given away free of charge, provides value to any person who uses it with no cost in money, time, effort or resources. The creator of such a product enjoys the same benefit as the end users as well as potentially gaining notoriety. A proprietary product or service is given away at monetary cost to those who buy it, decreasing the wealth of users in order to benefit the original creator. In cases like Microsoft, considerable value is taken away from society for the benefit of company employees and owners. If these statements are true, then Open Source, non proprietary products and services are inherently altruistic, as the creators give away their time and effort to improve the quality of life for all those who use their product. Proprietary products or services, conversely, are inherently greedy and vain, taking value from society to increase the quality of life and reputation of the creators. To take these ideas a step further, any legislation that encourages the creation of open source products also encourages values of generosity, compassion, empathy and kindness. On the opposite side of the coin, any legislation that encourages the sale of proprietary products encourages values of greed and self indulgence. For this reason, laws such as patents and copyright are socially immoral, as they prevent benefit to a larger number of people.

By now, I expect my readers to be pretty angry, and although I am sure that the reasons for such anger are numerous, they are most likely to be rooted in a feeling of betrayal. I assume that this is the case, as it is indeed the feeling that I felt most powerfully when I came to these conclusions: the form of governance and economics which I have been raised in and taught to embrace are innately immoral and directly conflict with common ethical codes and the foundation of all religions. There is a long history that provides the necessary framework for understanding how humanity have arrived at this dismal position, but what is more important is that we focus on how to sculpt the future. Like the potter who receives only his or her due benefit for a product, we need to embrace values of equity. The system in which we work and live has developed an advanced means of defending itself with checkpoints and ballasts strategically placed to fend off dissenters, and up until recently, nothing short of nuclear war has posed as true a threat to its method of maintaining hierarchical superiority and a stratified global society. But now the ingrained taint that has poisoned philanthropic innovation is shaken by the more powerful human need to care for one another. We are creatures of immense virtue and such will be our most esteemed asset in this time of great need, at the moment of our liberation. Embrace your family that covers the globe and give selflessly and take what is freely offered to you.

This not a call to arms against a corrupt government, rather, it is a prediction of future economic and geopolitical events. The majority of the world seems to be sick and tired of having their wallets crushed beneath the invisible thumb of Adam Smith. There is a group of people that has not resigned against the uneven odds and rhetorical evidence that states the unwavering success of proprietary capitalism. They have fought back, perhaps unknowingly, and have won momentous battles. All that is needed now in order to achieve widespread equitable distribution of intellectual property is an aggregate espousal of this new system: Open Source. Sooner, rather than later, this movement will realize its full potential, and little will stand in the way of the philanthropic force of humans supporting one another. Let us act now to usher this movement on and do our best to contribute freely where we are capable, and let us take every opportunity afforded to us by those who have already embarked upon this sanctified journey.