The average high school US history textbook gives a thumbnail sketch of these movements, but for those who didn’t get that or don’t remember it, the gist is that, from very shortly after Europeans reached North America until right around the Civil War, groups of people regularly launched themselves into the North American wilderness, trying to found new communities organized around communitarian and egalitarian principles. They met with some success, but eventually the movements petered out, with none of them truly surviving into the modern age.

Owen by BinaryApe, used under CC-BY

The tie from this book to my own interests should be clear, but if not, I should make them explicit: free and open source software often thinks of itself as being sui generis, but in fact it is part of a history (in this country) of retreat from established economic structures with the intent of creating parallel systems that would eventually compete with or replace those established structures with something simultaneously individually empowering and socially just. (See also.) I’m both personally and professionally curious about gleaning lessons from such past experiments- so I picked up the book. If any of this blog’s readers have suggestions either of more histories of this movement, or of histories of other similar movements (watch this space for a post on the local food movement soon), please do let me know in email or comments.

Unfortunately, Bestor’s intended follow-up book (covering the 1840s to the end of the movement) was never completed, which limits the lessons that can be drawn about the decline of the movement.  Nevertheless, some observations and themes from the book:

• The movement had a broad spectrum of motivations and philosophies- some were heavily religious, while others were overtly anti-religious; some had (or were intended to have) quite complex governance systems, while others were nearly anarchist, and indeed Marx condemned them in strong terms because (to over-simplify) they were not dedicated to fighting the good fight in the cities. Interestingly, while the community focus of these groups was typically very strong, in modern terms we might also call them libertarian (or what Erik Olin Wright calls ‘interstitial’ revolutionaries): they all believed that they had the right and the ability to make a better world by striking off on their own, rather than working within or against established structures.
• Religion was initially a major motivating force; this faded over time, but Bestor does not make it clear why later groups tended to be non-religious. Interestingly, American critics of later movements like Owenism apparently tended to focus on this non-religious aspect, rather than the practical/anti-capitalist issues modern critics might focus on.
• As with every movement, looking at who left is often as important as understanding who stayed. In particular, Bestor mentions that when pragmatists became frustrated and left New Harmony (perhaps the highest profile of the various communities), those left behind were a combination of those too lazy to leave and those too fanatic to leave. This was a huge problem for the morale of the remaining pragmatists, who resented the free-riders and were driven nuts by the fanatics, and so they repeated the cycle.
• Relatedly, Bestor argues that the repeated talk of ‘everyone will live in our miraculous new society any day now’ meant that many newcomers were not prepared for the long haul; that may have disillusioned some people and contributed to a sense of lack of momentum. To paraphrase Bestor, ‘a new society cannot be built on excuses.’
• When the movement started, it was actually pretty easy to get a community going- lots of land was effectively empty, and the median community size in the US was in the low hundreds, making it quite easy to form a community that had all the ‘comforts’ (such as they were) of traditionally organized communities. As time progressed, two things began to work against this: first, more and more ‘normal’ landowners migrated to the midwest, causing land to become more scarce, and second, even the smallest villages became larger as the country’s overall population grew. This meant that finding enough space for a ‘basic’ community became a much more capital intensive process over time. Not coincidentally, later communities tended to have wealthy patrons- with all the plusses and minuses that brings.
• As economic complexity increased (more machinery, more specialists) it became harder to create a self-sustaining village, especially if your human capital stocks were limited to ‘believers.’ For example, when the movement started in the late 1600s/early 1700s, having a self-sustaining community required very little specialization, while by the mid-1800s, it was understood that you needed machinists and manufacturers who would trade with other areas. Bestor says that New Harmony was bitten by this, as the land they bought for the town had the hardware for extensive wool manufacture, but lacked the people familiar with the machines, killing an expected source of financial sustainability.
• Over time, some of the social goals of early communitarians became more broadly accepted or supplied by other organizations. For example, public education was a significant goal of New Harmony, but over the course of the 1800s, that became more common in non-utopian communities. New Harmony also had a concept of mandatory social insurance; unions started providing similar services in the late 1800s. This again made recruitment harder.
• As for most world-changers, the gap between theory and practice was often large. Robert Owen, the wealthy patron of New Harmony, created an elaborate philosophical scheme intended to encompass everything from the individual to the nation-state, but he was bad at creating practical schemes, which led to constant reorganizations at New Harmony. This may reflect the extreme difficulty of organizing a full society; capitalism has the advantage of being simple and direct in general scheme relative to a centrally planned society like Owen’s.

I’ll refrain from drawing any direct conclusions for free and open source software here, in part because many of them will be obvious to many of my readers, and also because my reading of the book (especially several months after the fact) is inevitably heavily biased by my own thinking about social movements like this one, so I’m not sure whether any ‘lessons’ would reflect actual history or just my interpretation (compounded with Bestor’s.) With or without direct applicability, though, the book was an interesting read for a history nut, and left me with a lot of food for thought.

Picker

Grimmelman

Perhaps some day before the case settles I’ll actually be able to read them all. In the meantime linking here so that I can find them all later.

Relatedly: (added later): similar long-term numbers for server market share, both by OS and by chip family (x86 v. everyone else, primarily) would be terrific to have if anyone knows of a source of them (ideally without paying Gartner bazillions, though I really need to look into whether or not the school’s Bloomberg subscription gives me access to that.)

Interspecies cooperation by Barry Rogge. License:

For those interested in some of my previous writings on intrinsic motivation, this survey paper by Simon Gächter may be of interest.

Key sentence:

[W]e find strong evidence that many people’s attitude toward voluntary cooperation is conditional on other people’s cooperation… Moreover, the fact that many people contribute more the more others contribute also speaks against pure altruism explanations, because they predict that people reduce their own contributions when informed that others already contribute to the public good.

Basically, the paper argues (and justifies through a survey of experimental evidence) that a majority of people are ‘conditional cooperators’ who cooperate in community projects (voting, paying taxes, charity work, etc.) if and only if other people cooperate. If they think others are ‘defecting’ (i.e., not cooperating) then they will stop cooperating as well.

The paper also has some more detailed observations that come out of the experimental work; among them that voluntary cooperation is fragile; group composition matters (i.e., groups with more conditional cooperators will be healthier); and that ‘belief management’ maters- i.e., if people think that they are in a group with more conditional cooperators, that group will be more robust. None of these will come as a huge surprise to anyone who has been involved with volunteer communities, but still interesting to see it experimentally confirmed.

I’ve always suspected that something like this is the case, and that it explains in part why the GPL is so successful, since it uses copyright to force cooperation and penalize defection, and (importantly) makes a clear public statement that that is the case, which serves a signaling function (everyone in the community knows these are the ground rules) and a filtering function (people who aren’t interested in collaborating don’t join as much as they join other groups.)

The paper is only 25 pages and fairly readable; if you’re interested in the dynamics of volunteerism I recommend it.

Those of you who aren’t into economists and their fancy ‘measurements’ may also want to look at this related early paper, which is somewhat dated (the concept of low and high authoritarians is sort of discredited at this point) but still possibly of interest in explaining some of the psychological mechanisms at work here.

(Came to this by way of this paper on tax evasion, which looks to have many other interesting citations that I should investigate once exams are done. Only Telecoms left…)

This Data Bill of Rights is our promise to you.

• You can export and/or delete your data from Wesabe whenever you want.
• Your data is your data, not ours. Our job is to help you understand and act on your data.
• We’ll keep all of your data online and accessible for as long as you have an account. No “archive access” charges.
• Any data you want us to keep private, we will.
• If a question comes up not covered by these rights, we will answer it remembering that your data belongs to you.

Interesting. My intuition is that this is a really good start in the right direction for web apps; he himself notes, though, that it isn’t legally binding. They are considering doing that- will be very interesting to see that if/when it happens.

No one should be surprised that social network users can’t ‘vote with their feet,’ because most users give up a portion of their autonomy when they choose to use web services. This post will suggest that protecting autonomy is desirable and should be designed in to software, and outline five qualities that such software would have.

[The rest of the post will not be brief; it is in part a draft of an essay for my class in 'Law in the Internet Society'.]

Voting With Your Feet and Other Freedoms

From my ‘Law in the Internet Society’ class mailing list, in a discussion of Facebook’s ‘Beacon’:

The ironic thing is that while some genuinely concerned users are trying to oppose facebook’s policies, the best idea they came up with was to create a facebook group.

It does seem a little odd, doesn’t it? We take for granted that a boycott is the most effective way to protest the actions of a commercial entity- so even the most ardent Facebook fans realize that something is not quite right when this sort of thing happens.

So Why Don’t You Leave?

The standard conservative retort to Americans who complain about the US is ‘well why don’t you leave?’ Answering this question proves illuminating when discussing web services. Liberals don’t generally move to Canada (even during the last seven years) because their friends, families, and jobs are in the US. That makes it difficult to “vote with your feet”, but significantly weakens protests.

This is not a critique of those who use didn’t move to Canada during the 60s, or those who use Word to criticize Microsoft¹, or even those who use Facebook to protest Facebook.  The ties that bind us can be strong, and it isn’t necessarily a sign of weakness that so few of us are willing to pay the high costs that come with breaking them.  But thinking about protest this way highlights an important problem- that the services we choose can drastically reduce our freedom to make choices- our autonomy.²

Autonomy is never complete; we have no choice of the place and culture we grew up in, and as social animals our ties to friends and families are somewhat hardwired. But technology can – and should – do better.

Technology and Autonomy

Technology is easily fungible, so we can implement and use autonomy-protecting software. This is presumably philosophically desirable, but could also improve markets and lead to better products by increasing user choice.

Unfortunately, very few people design technology with autonomy protection in mind, since an autonomous user is a user who can choose to pay someone else. Designing modern, network-centric software this way is also difficult, since users expect frequent updates, reliable communication with large groups, and global accessibility, all of which are easier when designs are centralized.³

Free Software Is a Good Start…

Free Software is a great step towards autonomy-protecting software. By ensuring that users have the rights to modify their own software or pay others to modify it for them, Free Software ensures significant scope for user autonomy. And in practice, users exercise this autonomy all the time, helping to make the Linux market vibrant and competitive.⁴

… but it isn’t enough any more

The right to modify and run source code is now frequently insufficient to fully protect user autonomy.

Think about what it would take to leave Facebook, for protest or any other reason. If the software was open source, you or your friends could pay someone to modify it (or learn to modify it yourselves) and remove the offending features. You’d end up with OpenFacebook.com. And then…?

You’d still lack the basic information about your social network that enables protesting on Facebook- you’d have to rebuild your addressbook from scratch. You’d have lost the things your friends posted on your wall, as well. And if your friends who were still in facebook wanted to see how you were doing, they’d check your facebook page- which at best would be badly out of date and at worst might not even exist anymore.

Are you actually prevented from leaving under these conditions? No. But your autonomy- in part, the right to vote with your feet – is certainly constrained.

so what is enough?

A Free Software Definition for the next decade should focus on the user’s overall autonomy- their ability not just to use and modify a particular piece of software, but their ability to bring their data and identity with them to new, modified software.

Such a definition would need to contain something like the following minimal principles:

1. data should be available to the users who created it without legal restrictions or technological difficulty.
2. any data tied to a particular user should be available to that user without technological difficulty, and available for redistribution under legal terms no more restrictive than the original terms.
3. source code which can meaningfully manipulate the data provided under 1 and 2 should be freely available.
4. if the service provider intends to cease providing data in a manner compliant with the first three terms, they should notify the user of this intent and provide a mechanism for users to obtain the data.
5. a user’s identity should be transparent; that is, where the software exposes a user’s identity to other users, the software should allow forwarding to new or replacement identities hosted by other software.

Traditional free software deliberately follows principle #3, and typically provides the other factors, but only as unintentional side-effects of being locally installed and managed software.

From Free Software to Services with Autonomy

To protect user autonomy while the pendulum swings back between centralized and decentralized services, services will have to be designed nearly from the ground up with these principles in mind. That will require a lot of work- not just technical design, but new licenses, terms of service, evangelism, and perhaps organizational models. Hopefully, though, these principles can serve as guideposts which can focus and guide those who want to give users their autonomy- one facet of which, among others, is the right, to vote with their feet.

1. Hi, Berkman!
2. This essay necessarily simplifies autonomy- for a more nuanced background, see the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
3. See, e.g., this or this.
4. It isn’t a terribly profitable market, but that is a feature of highly competitive markets, not a problem.

[picture: 'Unsolved Mystery', by ButterflySha, used under a CC-BY license.]

Hypothetical copyright exam question for your late-night pondering: If a poem is derived from statistical analysis of 22 books, but contains no actual direct sequences from those books longer than 2-3 words, is it a derivative work of those 22 books?

Thou shalt be I. . .
Thou shalt be I, and quench the
fire in a pit
dug in the

direction of this rock,
deliberately,
now thy peace, the green weed

and explain the high road from which
miraculously we had
been left unsolved.

from King of Eatable Birds, by Anne Mordeus and the machine.

[hypothetical, though I think probably less interesting, parallel patent exam question: if an evolutionary algorithm creates a better design than humans, and the humans can't necessarily explain why, is the resulting design or process still patentable?]

[Cross-posted from First Movers; comments over there.]

“Free software… refers to four kinds of freedom, for the users of the software…”
–Free Software Definition, emphasis mine

“closing the [ASP] loophole would infringe on certain peoples rights and he [Moglen] didn’t see any way to preserve everyone’s rights…”
– Eben Moglen, as paraphrased here

[The rest of this post is not based on any conversations with FSF/SFLC folks on this issue, but merely on readings of essays/interviews/etc., and so their position here may represent a bit of a strawman. To the extent that the representation is inaccurate I apologize and will strive to fix it if someone points out the inaccuracies. That said, if it is a strawman, it is a useful strawman which helped me sort out my own thinking on the subject.]

who has the freedoms and the rights?

In one of my GPL posts, I mentioned that I thought that the question of ‘who holds the rights’ is a critical distinction between the ‘free’ and ‘open/pragmatic’ licensing camps. To the free camp, rights are held by users; and to the open/pragmatic camp, rights are held primarily by developers- who then grant most (but not necessarily all) rights to users. I thought I’d dig a bit more into that notion, particularly into the question of what a ‘user’ is in this day and age, because I think it helps explain the current dilemma around free software as deployed over the web.

who ‘users’ used to be

FSF has always insisted that “users” are the locus of all rights. In practice, to FSF, “users” has really meant “the people who install the software”- what I’ll call “user-deployers” or “deployers”, in comparison to “the people who use the software”- what I’ll call “user-consumers” or “consumers.”

In the beginning, this was not problematic- anyone who deployed free software also consumed it, so giving rights to all deployers also gave rights to all consumers.

As free software got more popular, this got a little more complicated- deployers were often systems administrators in an organization (who had full rights to modify the code) and the software was used by consumers in the same organization. These user-consumers were given the binaries but were not given enough permissions to install new versions of the binary, or access to source (though they could presumably obtain them for their personal, non-work PCs if they were skilled enough.) And so there was a gap between the rights of deployers (who could modify) and consumers (who could not)- a small gap, but a gap nonetheless.

In practice, this worked OK. The interests of user-deployers and user-consumers were not perfect aligned, but they were pretty close- deployers mostly wanted consumers to get things done and get out of the way, so they protected consumers to a large extent. In addition, even if they weren’t always exactly aligned, consumers and deployers were clearly both on the same side against the software vendors- both consumers and deployers wanted more freedoms than the vendors would necessarily have chosen to give. Given this combination, for most purposes it is fair to say that in practice user-consumers had the freedoms to use and modify- even if in practice those rights were granted to and proxied through the deployers hired by their organizations.

who ‘users’ are now

That brings us to the present day. With the advent of the LAMP-powered web, user-deployers and user-consumers of free software are often no longer in the same organization- the deployer, who was once the local sysadmin, is now the sysadmin of Google or Yahoo. As a result, the interests of the user-deployer and user-consumer are often poorly aligned or in outright conflict. In addition, the old tension between vendors and user-deployers, which helped protect user-consumers, has to a large extent vanished- since the deployer of the free software (the party that runs the compiled code) is now also the vendor.

In a web world, then, user-deployers have the same rights they’ve always had to use and modify. The FSF apparently believes that should not change. But since the deployers and consumers aren’t part of the same organization anymore, the deployers no longer protect the user-consumers, and so user-consumers end up frequently making use of free software without even the slightest ability to use and modify the software- and often even without the right to use and modify their own data!

This is, I think, part of why Matt Asay wants to call GPL ‘the new BSD‘- like the BSD, the GPL lets software vendors (in the BSD case, Apple; in the GPL case, Google) deliver software to consumers without also delivering the freedoms to use, modify, and redistribute. Some freedom is preserved- the freedom of the deployer to use and customize- but this is not, at least in my mind, the kind of freedom I’m aggressively interested in working towards.

so how to restore freedoms to user-consumers?

This problem isn’t easy to resolve systematically- since they are in conflict, any attempt to guarantee rights to user-consumers would seem to require some compromise of the rights of user-deployers. I admit I myself am a bit stymied on the issue, though I have some ideas.

Prof. Moglen and FSF’s position seems to be that the freedoms of user-deployers will trump those of user-consumers until someone comes up with a principled and rights-centric way to draw the line between the two. Unfortunately, Moglen seems skeptical this line can be drawn- and experience shows that he is usually right.

I remain interested in the problem, though, since in the end I’m much more interested in the freedoms of users than the freedoms of sysadmins. I hope that better understanding that there is more than one type of user takes me one step closer to figuring out where the line can and should be drawn.