(Brussels): Some (many) Europeans refer to "the open source [software] community." A point we make in response is that we do not know exactly what that is, because we see four different groups, at least, involved in the FOSS movement.

1) Academicians, who want to invent code and circulate it freely for comment and improvement, and who do not want their creative efforts to be propertized by others. For this group, open source licenses make perfect sense. This is simply the principle of of free and open academic inquiry, as applied to research on software.

2) The New Millennium Collectivists/IP Socialists/Cargo Cultists (see past blogs for definitions), who want to de-propertize and de-marketize software, initially, and then all IP. This group is associated with Richard Stallman of the Free Software Foundation, Larry Lessig, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

3) A group we met in Milan, which is the FSF-Europe. They share the name of the U.S. FSF, but are more restrained, emphasizing the special characteristics of software, and eschewing any ambition to extend this mode of production to other forms of IP.

4) The business people, for whom open source software production is simply a business model. This includes IBM, which supports Linux because it wants to make the operating system into a commodity on which it hangs sales of hardware, proprietary applications, and services. (IBM does not favor "open source software" -- it favors "open source LINUX." There is a big difference.)

This business-model group includes other hardware companies, such as HP, Sun, and Dell. It includes purveyors of open source programs, such as Red Hat and MySQL. It also includes corporate CIOs, who want maximum competition in software to increase their choices and keep pressure on costs, and service providers, who see money in supplying interfaces.

posted by James DeLong @ 5:08 AM | Digital Europe

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