Tài liệu How Open Is the Future- Economic, Social & Cultural Scenarios Inspired by Free &

How Open is the Future?

Marleen Wynants & Jan Cornelis (Eds)

How Open is

the Future?

Economic, Social & Cultural Scenarios

inspired by Free & Open-Source Software

The contents of this book do not reflect the views of the VUB, VUBPRESS or the

editors, and are entirely the responsibility of the authors alone.

Cover design: Dani Elskens

Book design: Boudewijn Bardyn

Printed in Belgium by Schaubroeck, Nazareth

2005 VUB Brussels University Press

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D / 2005 / 1885 / 01

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial￾NoDerivs License. To view a copy of this license, visit

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There is a human-readable summary of the Legal Code (the full license) available at

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/be/legalcode.nl.

Foreword & Acknowledgements

This volume offers a series of articles ranging from the origins of free and open-source

software to future social, economic and cultural perspectives inspired by the free and

open-source spirit. A complete version of How Open is the Future? is available under a

Creative Commons licence at http://crosstalks.vub.ac.be.

How Open is the Future? is also available as printed matter, as you can experience at

this moment.

The topic of free and open-source software emerged from the initiative by Professor

Dirk Vermeir of the Computer Science Department of the VUB – Vrije Universiteit

Brussel – to award Richard Stallman an honorary doctorate from the VUB. From then

on we set out to create a neutral platform where the voices of artists, journalists, key

social and economic players, policymakers and scientific researchers could mingle

and reflect on a possible future and the preservation of our digital and intellectual

commons.

First of all, we want to thank all the participants and speakers at the first

CROSSTALKS workshop, Windows by Day, Linux by Night, on 11 December 2003 and all

the participants at our first Science and Industry Dinner on 20 February 2004, in par￾ticular, guest speaker Tim O’Reilly for his talk and Richard Stallman for popping in and

increasing the complexity of the discussions.

We are grateful to all who contributed to this publication and spent a considerable

part of their time clearing the trajectory from the free and open-source software issue

5

towards a future agenda for a new kind of commons in an open-minded knowledge

and communication society.

Special thanks go to people who engaged in fruitful debates with us on the issue,

who gave tips and comments and reviewed the texts: Jean-Claude Burgelman, Marc

Nyssen, Bruno De Vuyst, Serge Gutwirth, Mirko Tobias Schäfer, Marianne Van den

Boomen, Séverine Dusollier, Peter Hanappe, Bernard Rieder, Marc Nyssen, Leo Van

Audenhove, Leo Van Hove, Caroline Pauwels, Bram Lievens, Jo Pierson, Jacques Vilrokx,

Ilse Laurijssen, Jan Belgrado, Jean Vereecken, Frank Gielen and Frederik Questier. Many

thanks go to the people who supported the CROSSTALKS events and refined their con￾cept: Dirk Tombeur, Luc De Vuyst, Michel Flamée, Theo D’Hondt, Viviane Jonckers, Dirk

Vermeir, Olga De Troyer, Koen Smets, Nadine Rons, Christ’l Vereecken, Sandra Baeyens,

Mieke Gijsemans, Kris van Scharen, and Monique Peeters. Particular thanks go to

Marnix Housen for his inspiring support in the end phase of the book.

We owe a lot of gratitude to Sara Engelen for her indispensable and creative dynamism.

Luc Steels was the backstage motivator and caterer of critical comments.

Furthermore we thank Veronica Kelly for enhancing this book with her wonderful

and meticulous English editing, Boudewijn Bardyn for the art direction and layout, Kris

van Scharen for the production and Dani Elskens for the cover design.

CROSSTALKS owes a great deal to the stimulation of the Head of the VUB Interface

Cell, Sonja Haesen. Last but not least, we thank Rector Benjamin Van Camp for his con￾tinuous support and his encouraging engagement in the CROSSTALKS activities.

The Editors

6

How Open is the Future?

Table of Contents

Foreword & Acknowledgements 5

Preface 11

Marleen Wynants & Jan Cornelis

PART I – DRIVING FORCES: KEY PLAYERS & PROJECTS 29

Will the revolution be open-sourced? 31

How open source travels through society

Marianne van den Boomen & Mirko Tobias Schäfer

Free as in Freedom, not Gratis! 69

An interview with Richard Stallman,

the embodiment of the dilemma of our digital commons

Marleen Wynants

The Open Source Paradigm Shift 85

Tim O’Reilly

Open Courseware and Open Scientific Publications 111

Frederik Questier & Wim Schreurs

Roots Culture - Free Software Vibrations Inna Babylon 135

by Armin Medosch

7

PART II – MAKING IT HAPPEN: CASE STUDIES FROM BRUSSELS, BELGIUM, EUROPE & BEYOND 165

Extremadura and the Revolution of Free Software 167

Achieving digital literacy and modernizing the economy of one

of the European Union’s poorest regions

Angel Vaca

Building Open Ecosystems for Collaborative Creativity 199

Peter Hanappe

A Walk through the Music Bazaar & the Future of Music 231

Sara Engelen

Open Source, Science and Education 275

Marc Nyssen & Frederik Cheeseman

Open Standards Policy in Belgium 285

Peter Strickx & Jean Jochmans

PART III - ETHICS & BOTTLENECKS 293

The Patenting of Life 295

An interview with VUB scientist Lode Wyns about the dangers of patents in

biotechnology and the pressing need for ethics in law

Lode Wyns

Fostering Research, Innovation and Networking 309

Jan Cornelis

Is Open-Sourced Biotechnology possible? 357

Daniel de Beer

Legal Aspects of Software Protection through Patents, 375

and the Future of Reverse Engineering

Bruno de Vuyst & Liv Steuts

8

Table of Contents

PART IV – THE FUTURE IS OPEN 393

Advancing Economic Research on the Free and Open Source Software 395

Mode of Production

J.-M. Dalle, P. A. David, Rishab A. Ghosh, and W.E. Steinmueller

The Future of Open Source 429

Ilkka Tuomi

The Future of Software: Enabling the Marketplace to Decide 461

Bradford L. Smith

Dual Licensing – A Business Model from the Second Generation of 479

Open-Source Companies

Kaj Arnö

Towards a EU Policy for Open-Source Software 489

Simon Forge

ANNEXES 505

I. The GNU General Public License (GPL)- Version 2, June 1991 507

II. Building Innovation through Integration 517

A Microsoft White Paper – July 2000

Index 527

List of Pictures 533

9

How Open is the Future?

Preface

Marleen Wynants & Jan Cornelis

“What if Leonardo da Vinci had patented his ideas?” At first sight, the question

seems a perfect metaphor for what might happen to our knowledge-based and

commercially driven society if fundamental ideas are no longer a public good. Given

the growing skepticism about the intrinsic value of patented technologies and

copyrighted content descriptions, it could indeed seem that patents on da Vinci’s

ideas might have obstructed the engineering industry and most of the innovations

and developments that make our society what it is today. But let’s concentrate on

facts, not myths: da Vinci’s ideas were not public! The artist Leonardo da Vinci

worked on commission throughout his life and did not publish or distribute the

contents of the technological innovations in his mirror-written codici. The fact is

that most of the notebooks remained obscure until the 19th century, and were not

directly of value to the explosive development of science and technology that

occurred in the 17th and 18th centuries. If some of Leonardo’s ideas had been

patented, they might have changed history and the engineering landscape of socie￾ty in a fundamental way, just as Galileo’s patent on the telescope led to enormous

breakthroughs in astronomical research and its instruments. But why then did

Leonardo never allow his anatomical studies to be examined during his life? Maybe

the answer lies in his explicit comment on intellectual property: “Do not teach your

knowledge, and you alone will excel”. So maybe it’s not so strange after all that da

Vinci’s best preserved notebook, the Codex Leicester, was bought by Bill Gates in

1994 and has found a home in Seattle.

11

Bowling Alone?

The da Vinci case proves that the issues of creativity, invention and ownership and their

potential social, economic and cultural relevance are not simple. And especially in a time

of increased networking and digital collaboration, the traditional notions of property and

ownership are challenged in many ways. One of the possible incentives to start reflecting

on the opposing social and economic forces in our society is the Free and Open-Source

Software (FOSS) movement. Most of the initial discussions were restricted to free and

open versus proprietary software. Yet the interdependence of innovation and society

calls for an interdisciplinary and constructive approach when exploring the processes of

creating, validating and distributing. Where are the limits to owning and sharing? Where

does using end and abusing start? How about ethics in politics and law? What about

sharing what is yours? What about sharing what is not yours? How can we move to a

more open culture and economy and yet preserve the quality and efficiency a thriving

society needs? Can we learn from the perspectives and models of the open-source soft￾ware industry? The following pages offer an affirmative answer to this last question.

There are different perspectives to be taken into account, in which facts and history

play a fundamental role. That’s why we begin our book with the driving forces, the key

players and projects associated with the Free and Open-Source movement (Part I). What

follows are innovative scientific experiments and some current and colorful education￾al, cultural and political cases (Part II). Then the focus shifts to legal and policymaking

ethics and bottlenecks: where are the ethics in law-making? How to preserve the free￾dom of academic research (Part III)? The perspectives on the future proposed in the last

part of this book go from the new challenges in the social sciences to extended outlooks

and pitfalls for the open-source and the proprietary software industries (Part IV).

Leading Edges

There are two reasons why today the free and open-source software issue has become

such an inspirational and powerful force: the rise of the Internet and the excesses of

intellectual property. Internet technology made massive, decentralized projects possible

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Marleen Wynants & Jan Cornelis

for the first time in human history. It’s a unique tool that has irreversibly changed our

personal and professional communication and information research. Intellectual prop￾erty, on the other hand, is a legal instrument that has become a symbol of the exact

opposite of what it was developed for: the protection of the creative process. As a result,

thousands of free-thinking programmers, scientists, artists, designers, engineers and

scholars are daily trying to come up with new ways of creating and sharing knowledge.

The Free and Open-Source movement pushes the paradigms of ownership, copy￾rights and patenting around. At present there are dozens of licenses, from Stallman’s

General Public License to the Creative Commons ShareAlike agreement, that allow

open products to exist in a proprietary world. Under these licenses, knowledge-based

property becomes something to be distributed in order to create new ideas rather than

protected in order to make (more) money.

Of course, the concept of free and open source is not new, and with a little effort

one could go back to the ideals of the Greek philosophers and their agora where

knowledge was shared and openly discussed, at least by those who were not slaves.

Closer to our times, in 1905, the scientist and philosopher Rudolf Steiner formulated

what he called the “Fundamental Social Law”:

The well-being of a community of people working together will be the greater,

the less the individual claims for himself the proceeds of his work, i.e., the more

of these proceeds he makes over to his fellow-workers, the more his own needs

are satisfied, not out of his own work but out of the work done by others.

(Rudolf Steiner, 1905)

In 1968 the biologist and ecologist Garrett Hardin raised the issue again in a probing

way in his famous article in Science, “The Tragedy of the Commons”:

However, selfish households accumulate wealth from the commons by acquiring

more than their fair share of the resources and paying less than their fair share

of the total costs. Ultimately, as population grows and greed runs rampant, the

commons collapses and ends in “the tragedy of the commons”. (Garrett Hardin,

Science 162:1243, 1968)

13

Preface

Most of the dilemmas associated with Hardin’s “tragedy of the commons” can be asso￾ciated with the difficulties the free and open-source software movement is facing

today: balancing well-being versus wealth, fast innovation versus quality, and devel￾oping a sustainable business model versus sociability.

Maximum Openness

The creativity and enthusiasm of information technologists have changed the way in

which millions of people work and communicate. Since the 1990s we have grown

familiar with personal computers, software, mobile phones, global networking, the

Internet, downloading games and music and lots more. The idea that software devel￾opers in many different locations and organizations were sharing code to develop and

refine the software programs that enable us to use all these tools has never been head￾line news. Except that these whiz kids – as that’s how we prefer to think of them –

were in tune with a revolutionary movement called “copyleft” which was to change

our views on intellectual ownership and organizing creativity more profoundly than

we could ever have imagined. In this context it should not be forgotten that the move￾ment was initiated by a small group of computer scientists who engaged in a collabo￾rative project driven by personal motivation, a clear focus and hard concentration. The

impact of and interplay with ongoing sociological, economic and cultural movements

were not predictable, in the sense that the real importance of the free and open-source

software movement is not only the opening up of new perspectives in information

technology, but – even more – the fact that it is inextricably bound up with cultural

and economic innovation and social and ethical restoration.

The story of the Free Software Movement started in the 1970s with the release of

software that was NOT free. Before that time, software was not seen by the computer

industry as a product that could be profitable. The industry was focused on producing

and selling hardware, and the software was delivered with it, including the source

code. When UNIX, the mother of all computer programs, became partly commercial￾ized, Richard Stallman started working on GNU – a free, gratis version of UNIX accessi￾ble to everybody. Stallman initiated a great deal that was crucial for the development

14

Marleen Wynants & Jan Cornelis

and breakthrough of the Internet – like Sendmail, Apache, and PERL. But for a GPL￾licensed or free UNIX version, we had to wait until 1991, when a student from the uni￾versity of Helsinki who didn’t have enough money for an official UNIX version decided

to make one himself – with a little help from the world out there...

Message-ID:

[email protected]

From: [email protected] (Linus Benedict Torvalds)

To: Newsgroups: comp.os.inix

Subject: What would you like to see most in minix?

Summary: small poll for my new operating system

Hello everybody out there using minix-I’m doing a (free)

operating system (just a hobby, won’t be big and professional

like gnu) for 386 (486) AT clones. This has been brewing since

april, and is starting to get ready. I’d like any feedback on

things people like/dislike in minix, as my OS resembles it

somewhat

Any suggestions are welcome, but I won’t promise I’ll implement

them :-)

Linus

Linus Torvalds launched his project on the web and called on the international hacker

community to develop the system together with him. They succeeded, and it became

known by the name LINUX – or more correctly, GNU/Linux, as from the outset it was

released under the GPL license. What’s so amazing and inspiring about GNU/Linux is

not only its success in the market but also that the true revolution is in the method.

In 1998 some people in the free-software community began using the term “open￾source software – OSS’’ instead of “free software’’. The issue of whether software

should be open-source is a practical question, it’s about a methodology. Hence, OSS is

the collective noun for all software with available source code, adaptable by all, under

the limitation that the adaptations should be made available to others. Free software,

on the other hand, stands for a social movement, for an ethical issue. For the open￾source movement, non-free software is simply not such a good solution, while for the

15

Preface