Howard Rheingold, in a presentation he delivered in 2005 states:
"... businesses and nations succeed, only by defeating, destroying and dominating competition. Politics is about your side winning, at all costs. But I think we can see the very beginnings of a new story beginning to emerge. It's a narrative spread across a number of different disciplines, in which cooperation, collective action and complex interdependencies play a more important role. And the central, but not all important role of competition and survival of the fittest shrinks just a little bit".
Open source work is a collaborative process whereby users who have the knowledge, skill, tools and desire to innovate, collectively produce a product that is free, modifiable and useful. I have italicized the word 'product' because by definition and connotation it isn't appropriate in an open source context. A product in the traditional, commercial sense is a discrete entity which is normally produced for commercial gain. Open source products are typically free and their creation and constant innovation requires them to be so. Furthermore, 'free' in this context is not limited to a fiscal interpretation. The Four Freedoms, as defined by Stallman, provide a framework for understanding how open source is aligned with community produsage as opposed to commercial production practices. The Four Freedoms relate specifically to the free software movement but could easily be adapted for the purposes of other disciplines. The Four Freedoms are:
The freedom to better the program and release the innovated program to the entire community of users to foster an innovative environment and aid progress.
Freedom 0 - Personal Motives
The freedom to run the program for any purpose. Giving publics the freedom to use the technology for any purpose or application.
Freedom 1 - Customization
The freedom to adapt the software to suit your specific needs - Access to the source code is a precondition.
Freedom 2 - Redistribution
The freedom to share the software with others without violating copyright or piracy laws.
Freedom 3 - Innovation
Every minute of every hour of every day the precise form of the Wikipedia is altered by someone, somewhere who is both a user and a producer. Imagine if Wikipedia ceased to be amended at any given point in time and was published in a printed version. Only moments would pass before the printed version became out dated.
In a financial sense however, open source projects are what Wired Magazine's Chris Anderson calls Silicon Valley's gift to the world. This is because the majority of open source projects rely upon digital technologies which facilitate the collaborative process by enabling: communication with negligible costs, reproduction with negligible costs, distribution with negligible costs, publication with negligible costs and enables users to create and collaborate freely.
To illustrate the point that not all open source projects rely on digital technologies consider the humble mountain bike. Most people think that the mountain bike came from one of two places. Most believe it was created in a corporate R&D lab where researchers spent hours on end analysing the market and analysing the product, and as a result the mountain bike we all know and love came to be. The alternative and equally incorrect belief is that the mountain bike was created in an inventor's garage and commercialised by one of the big companies within the road bike or leisure sports category. The truth is, the mountain bike was developed by a group of young bike riding enthusiasts in Northern California as a result of their frustration with traditional bike models. They took the frames from bike models which were robust, the gears from racing bikes and the brakes from motorcycles, and because of their hybrid origins were originally called clunkers. Nonetheless, as Larry Lessig argues "... the most significant thing to recognise about what this internet is doing is its opportunity to revive the read-write culture..."
The Read-Write (RW) culture that Lessig refers to is one whereby users are also producers. Lessig argues that the 20th Century was a period dominated by a top down deliverance of culture and creativity as a result of the broadcast technologies. He terms this a "Read-Only (RO)" culture. The internet and its complementary digital technologies are reviving a Read-Write culture by giving people the opportunity to have a voice. Those with access to the internet are seizing the opportunity in droves. The number of individual blogs comprising the blogosphere is a contentious point but it is certainly in excess of 100 million. I've included this figure simply because it illustrates people's desire to be involved in virtual communities and engage in dialogue in an online environment.
Interestingly, two notable authorities on open source models Charles Leadbeater and Jochai Benkler, predict that the economics of open source projects along with their ability to innovate will challenge the accepted conventions of the commercial sphere. Leadbeater contends that the divide between the commercial sphere and open source projects will lessen and the corporate world will learn to harness the power, resourcefulness and diversity of the open source model.
