Digital divide conference papers available
Recently we had a conference dealing with several digital divide related topics: citizen participation, free software, biopatents, copyright, and sustainable information society. Some papers are available. Keynotes by Colin Lankshear and Rishab Aiyer Ghosh may be of interest to FLOSS researchers, as well as the papers in the “Open and Collaborative models” session and Tere Vadén’s paper from the IP session. My presentation is missing from the conference site; you can read the slides while I’m finishing my paper. I think the conference was succesful. I met some good people to work with in the future.
Also, hello to people reading Planet FLOSS Research.
Linux Asia 2005
Frederick Noronha asked me to give a report on Linux Asia 2005.
After Asia Source, Linux Asia was a boring event. The difference between community events and corporate-driven conferences is that the latter have lots of PR talk and you need to work to find out what is the reality. But I also wanted to see the corporate side of FLOSS. Some random notes below.
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Distributed Software Capitalism?
Benjamin Rossen is proposing a “New Linux Business Model” which would make it possible “to divide the source of Bill Gates’ billions among the people who are actually doing the creative work”. Rossen suggests that by establishing a non-profit company that would provide custom free software engineering and administration services. The outcome would go to the people who contribute and the resulting software would be free.
That’s a great intent but I’m sceptical. First, how is this different from any software company that hires programmers to write software that is released under a free license (like MySQL, Trolltech, SOT and others)? Second, how will the open source process work when there’s a large organisation involved? Isn’t one of the key reasons behind open source that it’s disorganisational, that the process is arbitrary and done for the fun of it? It looks like Rossen’s idea is trying to make the bazaar back into a cathedral.
Jordi Carrasco-Mu�oz suggested something similar in 2003 with his idea of Open Code Market that would be a marketplace for programmers willing to tailor free software for pay. Unfortunately, Open Code Market didn’t get off the ground either.
By the way, in 1999 there was also a thing called
The Open Market Source Definition which is basically a non-copyleft version of the Open Source Definition. In my view, it is based on a misunderstanding of free software business models.
