Eben on Software Ecology

Eben Moglen is probably the most fluent and engaging speaker it has ever been my privilege to interview; proof of his enduring appeal can be found in the fact that I don't get tired reading yet more interviews with him, like this one, which includes the following suggestive passage:

One of the things that everybody now understands is that you can treat software as a renewable, natural resource. You can treat software like forest products or fish in the sea. If you build community, if you make broadly accessible the ability to create, then you can use your limited resources not on the creation or maintenance of anything, but on the editing of that which is already created elsewhere. We package them for your advantage, things you didn't have to make because you were given them by the bounty of nature.

And this one, too:

If you've become dependent on a commons, for whatever role in your business, then what you need is commons management. You don't strip mine the forest, you don't fish every fish out of the sea. And, in particular, you become interested in conservation and equality. You want the fish to remain in the sea and you don't want anybody else overfishing. So you get interested in how the fisheries are protected. What I do is to train forest rangers ... to work in a forest that some people love because it's free and other people love because it produces great trees cheaply. But both sides want the forest to exist pristine and undesecrated by greedy behavior by anybody else. Nobody wants to see the thing burn down for one group's profit. Everybody needs it. So whether you are IBM, which has one strategy about the commoditization of software, or you're Hewlett-Packard, which has another, whatever your particular relationship to that reality is, everybody's beginning to get it. In the 21st century economy, it isn't factories and it isn't people that make things -- it's communities.

The beauty of all this analysis is that the ideas flow both ways: if free software is a commons like the forests or the seas, then it follows that the forest and the seas share many characteristics of free software. Which is why you read about them all the time on this blog. (Via Linux Today.)