Why Hackers Will Save the World, Part 37828

The ideas in this PhD thesis, which is rather heavy going but has its heart in the right place, may be familiar to readers of this blog:

A critique of post-industrial theories framing Information Society discourse as well as a consideration of the “newness” of information in the digital age provide fertile ground for a discussion of tech activism in contemporary social movements. Using the framework of critical constructivism, I analyze how tech activists consciously design technology that embodies values of equality, freedom and justice. Their creation and appropriation of free software indicates a more general argument for open knowledge production as the basis for a new mode of work, and indeed, a new set of social relations. In reconstructing the internet along a democratic model and through a democratic process, I argue, tech activists are creating a model of social organization that is radically transformative, refusing the reductive limits of the neoliberal world order, and enacting the possibility of a better world now.

Or, in a nutshell, we must all learn how to share.

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Take this Survey: It's the Law

As I've noted before, free software stands in an odd relationship with the law that governs it. On the one hand, free software could not exist sustainably without copyright - the GNU GPL depends on it for its power. On the other, copyright - and, even more, patents - are intellectual monopolies that represent the antithesis of everything that free software stands for.

Given that tension, it's clearly a good idea to understand how that works out on the ground, among the people who have to negotiate the legal minefields hemming in the act of coding. Sadly, there's not much research in this area, an omission that Thomas Otter hopes to remedy:

I’m labouring away at what must be one of the longest part-time PhDs ever. My research is looking at how software code and law work or don’t work together. However, there is light at the end of the tunnel. In order to add a bit of empirical juice to will be a rather dry theoretical legal tome, I’ve decided to do a survey.

He's particularly keen to get people from the world of free software participating in order to complement those from more traditional areas. You can find the survey here: it's not very onerous, and doesn't delve too deeply into anything heavy (I've filled it in and lived to tell the tale). And if you're looking for an incentive to do so beyond adding to the cairn of knowledge, both the raw results of the survey and Otter's analysis will be freely available later this year.

Haggling in the Bazaar

As open source becomes more widely used, people have started exploring how and why its approach to developing software works so well. The pioneering analysis here is Eric Raymond's Cathedral and the Bazaar, but that was largely describing a prelapsarian world of free software with little commercialisation. An intriguing question is how the bazaar functions in the corrupting presence of serious dosh....

On Open Enterprise blog.