With the open source movement often adopting free market terminology, technology policy debates can grow confusing.

The recent Red Hat Summit in Nashville featured FSF general counsel, Eben Moglen, trying to fit open source into a “red, white and blue” framework by casting it in terms of historical American industrial and personal ideals. A recent news article quotes Moglen as stating : “The actual politics are very American -- they are not scary, but as natural as apple pie. The free software solution is a return to the traditional result of personal ingenuity.” Moglen reportedly continued: “It's freedom to invent, not reinvent -- not invent over again something someone else had invented and locked up, but invent in the way that inventing was done in the great spurt of 19th-century inventiveness.”

Besides the fact that Moglen compares current technological innovation to 19th century smoke stack industries, which belong in an almost entirely previous industrial revolution era, he leaves out the fact that many leading innovators in America at the time heavily relied on patents (George Westinghouse held 361 patents and Thomas Edison held 1093 patents). The article’s author points out that of the great inventions in the 19th century referred to by Moglen: “none of those inventions were open source in any way that we would understand the term. In fact, according to the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, the total number of patents granted each year in the 1880s and 1890s was 21,000, compared to 1,000 a year in the 1850s.”

To give due credit, Moglen does hold a PhD in history from Yale. However, even if open source resembles or arises from principles of early American innovation, how exactly would that help the open source movement or its technology today?

posted by Noel Le @ 2:55 PM | Free Culture Movement

Link to this Entry | Printer-Friendly | Email a Comment | Post a Comment(0)