DeLanda: "Open-Source"

As for beginnings: DeLanda's (2001) title, "Open-Source: A Movement in Search of a Philosophy" reminds me of Six Characters in Search of an Author, which is said to have premiered to shouts of "Manicomio!" [Madhouse!] and "Incommensurabile!" [Incommensurable!].  Let's hope this association is not too inauspicious.  On to the paper's first sentence:

The hacker movement referred to by the term "open-source" has burst into public consciousness in the last few years due to its spectacular success in the production of reliable and robust software. -- DeLanda, 2001.

I fear that, these days, anyone who hasn't previously been steeped in "open source" for a decade would more likely think of Heartbleed. For example, in "How I Explained Heartbleed To My Therapist: Riding Open Source’s Race to the Bottom", Meredith L. Patterson put it this way:

These bugs that happen, these mistakes in software that lead to vulnerabilities, they aren’t one-off problems. They’re systemic. There are patterns to them and patterns to how people take advantage of them. But it isn’t in any one particular company’s interest to dump a pile of their own resources into fixing even one of the problems, much less dump a pile of resources into an engineering effort to fight the pattern. --Meredith L. Patterson, Sept. 25, 2014

Dr Patterson insists that this is "worse than a tragedy of the commons," perhaps because she's had no small taste of personal tragedy as part of the "making of."  In the end though, there's a very apt point here about how "it isn’t a hobby."  Rather, the business of providing public goods seems to conjure up all sorts of personal demons: hackerdom as a world of high-strung vigilantes, ego maniacs, and depressive narcissists -- perhaps not so unlike the world of Olympian gods which it, at least now and then, claims to draw inspiration from.

But, alright, to continue past the first sentence:

[W]hen I say that this movement is still in search of philosophical foundations I do not mean to imply that it does not have a philosophy. It has in fact several but, in contrast to the high quality of its software products, the philosophies in question are shallow and brittle. The purpose of this essay is not, however, to criticize these philosophical ideas but, on the contrary, to show that their low quality is quite irrelevant to the success of the movement [...] what matters about the open-source movement is not so much the intentional actions of its main protagonists, actions which are informed by specific philosophies, but its unintended collective consequences.  --DeLanda, 2001

OK, I'm prepared to accept that possibility, as long as we take into account that the unintended consequences are not entirely rosy, as indicated above.  And DeLanda highlights the double-edged nature of the economics here:

The economic problem of intellectual property is that when goods which are not rivalrous in consumption are made subject to property rights, the exclusion aspect of these rights generates social waste: given that additional copies of a given good may be generated and distributed at virtually no cost (this is particularly true of goods in digital form) excluding people from them means that wants will go unsatisfied, wants that could have been satisfied at very little cost to society. On the other hand, not making these goods subject to property rights means that those producing them will have no incentive to do so, particularly if the costs of production happen to be high. --DeLanda, 2001

The first move in the essay is to point out the somewhat perverse nature of the "missionary" version of free/libre/open source.

I have never thought it is a good idea to base one's philosophy on "universal moral principles", particularly when they involve the generalization of one's morality into everyone's morality. --DeLanda, 2001

DeLanda seems to fall squarely into the pragmatic "open source" flavor -- although I think even Richard M. Stallman (RMS) would agree with this part:

These pragmatic concerns have less to do with the "evils of proprietary software" and more with the kind of environment conducive to the creation of good software.  --DeLanda, 2001

Others involved with the free software foundation expand on similar points, e.g. B. Mako Hill writing on "When Free Software is not (practically) better".  However, part of my own critique has been that if the license is "a legal instrument for community-building" then it should not be the only one, or even the main one -- community building is rather a largely extra-legal affair.  And DeLanda expands on this point, following on and expanding a theme from Eric S. Raymond (ESR):

[An] appropriate description of the task of project leaders (other than their contributions as writers of code) is that their role is the creation of a community supporting a project. --DeLanda, 2001

So perhaps now we have project leaders playing a role a bit like the kings in the Golden Bough (work organizes around them, even ultimately resulting in their ritual sacrifice etc.).  On the other hand, it is not just that leaders on their own exert a "transcendent" organizing force, but that they actively engage in designing -- or at least -- deploying collaboration models that work well:

[The Linux] development model implied constantly releasing any new piece of code (so that interested users could immediately begin to work on it, thereby keeping them constantly motivated), delegating responsibility for specific areas to motivated users (making them co-developers), promoting cooperation through a variety of means, and being as self-effacing as possible to block any suspicion that credit for the work done would not be shared equally, or that decisions about the quality of a given piece of code would not be made objectively.  --DeLanda, 2001

This sort of model, or aspects of it, would be at least in principle replicable, even for someone without the charisma of Linus Torvalds.  One might even look for similar organizing principles in completely different media, as with DeLanda's "medium independent" ideas from Philosophy and Simulation, the emergence of synthetic reason.

So far there seem to be two forces at work: the leader, who provides a sort of pole or "singular point" around which things organize, and the "open, evolutionary context" (per ESR).  This 2-part system reminds me of Sloterdijk's Spheres I: Bubbles and the bi-centred spheres of incubation that he talks about.

Here is another place where the essay seems a bit dated: After ESR, "The dangers of forking cannot be underestimated."  But these days, a certain level of forking is a typical and necessary part of the open evolutionary context of distributed open source software development.  Perhaps if there is too much forking and consequent fragmentation, that would be make any kind of coordination impossible.  This can certainly be studied empirically, and I think my own experience with PlanetMath is relevant here.

I'm glad that DeLanda writes: "Locke's ideas seem to me to bear more on the question of the legitimacy, not the nature, of private ownership."  The issue of "ownership" as interpreted in the original PlanetMath (circa 2000, hereafter PlanetMath/Noosphere) emphasized an owner's control of individual articles.  Since there was no way to fork the article, any suggestions or changes had to be sent in as bug reports, otherwise known as "corrections".  This wasn't wiki-style editing but an explicitly Raymond-ite "homesteading."  It encouraged authoritative authorial control, but didn't avail itself of the quick "anyone can edit" features of Wikipedia.  This hasn't changed in the latest iteration of the PlanetMath software (circa 2013, PlanetMath/Planetary) -- but it could definitely be worth making some efforts to rethink things in the future.  There are a range of different methods for securing and maintaining "legitimacy" and it is interesting to think about how things have played out in various contexts over the last two or three decades.  This is perhaps especially interesting in light of the rise of "free culture" and other spin-offs from the free/open source software movement.

[A]s medieval markets grew and complexified their transaction costs increased accordingly, and hence that without a set of institutional norms and organizations to keep these costs down the intensification of trade in the West would have come to a halt. [...]  unlike the simple dichotomy of governance structures (markets coordinated by prices versus firms coordinated by commands) which results from including only a few transaction costs, the inclusion of a wider variety of costs leads to consider a host of hybrid structures between pure markets and pure hierarchies. --Delanda, 2001

So coordination itself can become quite complex.  Germane to the discussions here, this reminds me of Bateson's ideas about communication and learning.  Commands, in a Wittengenstein mode, are more or less only useful for direct control, whereas I can imagine markets achieving something similar to Bateson's "punctuation of experience" -- for example, by establishing a "going rate" for a given good or service.  Regarding these different varieties of organization, DeLanda cites Fernand Braudel [The Wheels of Commerce, New York: Harper and Row, 1983, pp. 225-228] who critiques Karl Polanyi's earlier (1972) clear-cut distinctions, and quotes Herbert Simon's description of Hayek style markets:

The pragmatic mechanism described by von Hayek is a much more modest (and believable) piece of equipment that strives for a measure of procedural rationality by tailoring decision-making tasks to computational capabilities and localized information. --The Sciences of the Artificial, Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994, p43

"The key is the decentralized use of local information."  In the case of the Linux kernel, it is almost as if the organization of work mirrors the logical organization of the software itself.  This would be an interesting comparison to make in the context of research on Human Computation (a new journal in this area started recently).  It is also fascinating to see such an essay -- written in 2001 -- conclude "Even non-programmers have a lesson to learn from this daring institutional experimentation."  2001 was the "watershed year for free culture."