MA Thesis September 2005
Masters of Arts
in
International Relations
September 2005
The Political Economy of Governmental Adoptions of Free/Open Source Software: Evolving Global Property Relations
Chapter One: Selective History of the Software Industry
The Origins of the Software Industry and its Commercialisation
The Emergence of the Free Software Backlash
The Coining of ‘Open Source’ as a dilution of ‘Free Software’
Chapter Two: Relationship of the FS and OS Movements and Theoretical Framework
The Socio-Political Embedding of ‘Free Software’
The Importance of Licensing Structures
The Relationship of Licensing Structure to the ‘Open Source’ Narrative
The State as Regulator of Mechanisms Insuring Conditions for Profit Accumulation
Chapter Three: Geopolitics of Governmental Adoptions of FOSS
Origins of FOSS Adoption at the level of the Poorest Governments
From Developmental Policy to Strategic Promotion of Domestic Industry
Delineation of Technical from Political in Attitudes to FOSS
Reflections of these Tensions at the Level of International Negotiations
List of Acronyms
BSD:
FOSS: Free/Open Source Software
FS: Free Software
GATS: General Agreement on Trades and Services
GATT: General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade
GNU: GNU’s Not UNIX
GPL: General Public License
ICTs: Information and Communication Technologies
IPRs: Intellectual Property Rights
IOSN: International Open Source Network
OECD: Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development
OS: Open Source
OSD: Open Source Definition
OSI: Open Source Initiative
TRIPs: Agreement on the Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property
UNCTAD: United Nations Conference on Trade and Development
UNDP: United Nations Development Programme
UNESCO: United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation
UNIDO: United Nations Industrial Development Organisation
WTO: World Trade Organisation
Although the start of my Masters study at the
This is how I came to the topic under analysis, and it is important for me to note the receptive and nurturing ambience that welcomed me at the
In addition, I would like to thank my parents, Mike and Diana, as well as my sister, Rachel, who have supported me throughout my studies both financially and emotionally. It is also necessary to note that the French Government has been an invaluable help in providing financial assistance during this Masters.
Introduction
The nature of knowledge creation does not fit easily into absolute conceptions of property, however. When one 'sells' a piece of knowledge to a ‘buyer’, all this entails in effect is the sharing of knowledge inasmuch as one cannot detach oneself from an idea. The seller retains the knowledge even though he is paid for it by the buyer, which means that neither has 'absolute ownership' of the 'commodity'. In addition, the creation of knowledge clearly involves a collegial effort as is illustrated by the workings of knowledge creation in academia. This means that it is hard to establish any absolute criteria for 'individual' ownership of knowledge and that the practice of knowledge creation would be undermined if it were too closely attached to a notion of property as exclusive ownership
Without knowledge creation, and thus innovation, no profit accumulation can take place within the knowledge economy. It is therefore apparent that profit accumulation in knowledge-dominated sectors of the economy is dependent upon a conception of property more akin to that of a ‘bundle of rights’.[2] Software provides an interesting example of the dialectic between these two forms of property rights inasmuch as the attempt to impose an absolute notion of property on software provoked a backlash that took a less-absolute notion of property as its premise.
Keeping the foregoing in mind, the purpose of this study is to trace the emergence of Free/Open Source Software (FOSS) in light of the role governments have played with respect to this phenomenon. It will be shown that governments have tended to adopt a flexible approach to the development of mechanisms of profit accumulation regarding software and have strived in most cases to depoliticise the associated property issues. Such a stance illustrates the wider significance of the role played by governments regarding the economy, a role designed to balance external pressures against domestic ones in an attempt to preserve the conditions of successful profit accumulation. This strategy amounts to ensuring a successful reproduction of the capitalist mode of production.[3]
The case of FOSS exemplifies the complexity arising out of the need and ability of states to provide the means for enclosing the public domain in order to extend the necessary conditions for profit accumulation. An examination of the involvement of governments with a high-technology sector of the economy will provide valuable insights into the nature of the state itself.
Before we proceed with this analysis, it is necessary to introduce certain concepts that will provide the backbone of our study. Our approach is historical materialist and it is therefore to be expected that the concepts used in this work will be fully articulated in their dynamic contexts without relying on narrow taxonomies. Nonetheless, some preliminary terms must be understood at the outset.. First of all, proprietary software is software whose source code (the code by which a piece of software is rendered intelligible to software programmers) is not included in distributions that are sold. Only the object code, consisting of binary code, is included in proprietary software distributions, so that the architecture of a specific piece of software is hidden from the buyer. The mode of development of this type of software tends to be structured like that of a ‘cathedral’[4], where a set number of developers are employed to work on a certain project. The analogy with Coca-Cola is often used to describe this concept[5], as the means of producing the soft drink are never included in the sold package. It is thus nearly impossible to reverse-engineer proprietary software and moreover, with the ever increasing scope of copyright protection, the legal right to reverse-engineer software is also precluded.
‘Free software’ (FS) and ‘Open Source software’ (
One final note regarding our taxonomy is necessary at this stage. We shall use the expression ‘traditional concept of public domain’ to represent what we see as the de facto working of the public domain in capitalist society. Although the public domain is protected and sustained de jure by the state, we shall argue that the public domain has never been actively protected de facto from encroachments by private property. The public domain is constituted de facto by what is left once private property has been carved out. Although a full discussion of the concept of public domain stands outside our field of enquiry, this caveat is fundamental to our point concerning what we shall show are substantial differences between the FS and OS licensing structures.
The argument presented in this study will unfold in three main sections, beginning with an analysis of a selective (and brief) history of the development of the software industry in Chapter One. On this historical basis our attention will then focus on a theoretical enquiry into the dialectical relationship between two forms of property in Chapter Two, as this concerns the relationship between the FS and OS movements. Special focus will be drawn both to the licensing structures that govern the movements as well as to a short discussion of the role of the state within the dialectic of conceptions of property. Having thus laid out our theoretical approach to the issue, the study will then turn in Chapter Three to developments at the governmental level (with respect to both local, national and international negotiations) to highlight how the positions adopted by governments can be situated within the dialectic of forms of property. The argument will strongly indicate that governments have tended to follow business interests in the attempt to incorporate FOSS into capitalist forms of profit accumulation, particularly since FOSS has become a ‘credible’ policy option for mainstream governments.
Chapter One: Selective History of the Software Industry
The history of the software industry is a symptom of the wider trend towards the rationalisation of relatively pure ‘information’ industries within the business world. Although we will not focus on the debate over whether the last twenty-five years of the twentieth century represented an ‘information revolution’, (we shall nonetheless adopt a sceptical stance with regards to ‘information society’ advocates such as Manuel Castells and Pekka Himanen, in order to avoid exposing our work to the charge of cultural voluntarism[6]), it is notable that an increasing amount of surplus value (in the form of profits) has been extracted from information-related work in the recent past.
As we progress through our brief account of the relevant history of the software industry, we will take special note of the government’s role in creating and regulating the market for software, a key element in this rationalisation process. Crucially, the origins and evolution of the various types of software licenses will be related to the development of the ideological confrontation between the two factions constituting the FOSS movement, the Free Software (FS) and the Open Source (OS) movements as delineated in David Berry's studies while avoiding
The Origins of the Software Industry and its Commercialisation
Prior to the early 1970s there was no concept of pure software[7]: computing programs only existed in direct combination with hardware. Although this inextricable bundling of computer software and hardware created interoperability problems, it resulted necessarily in an openness in software development. This openness was partly the result of the decision by the U.S. Department of Justice in 1956, under the anti-trust laws, to restrict the operations of AT&T and Western Electric to purely telecommunications matters, entailing that the distribution of the source code associated with hardware products was mandatory. [8] Moreover, software was seen as the carrot to attract clients to a piece of hardware.
One of the cultural and etymological offshoots of this was the invention of the word ‘hack’ at MIT, a word with no intended pejorative implications Hackers were defined as those engineers who tried to take a piece of hardware apart in order to customize or improve it: a hacker had to have both style and technical virtuosity.[9] Indeed, many have noted the similarity of the notion of the open communication of improvements to the meritocratic culture of Enlightenment thought. [10] Further examination of hacking and hackers will be elaborated below.
Given the government-imposed restrictions on AT&T’s remit, its Bell Labs subsidiary, which developed the UNIX operating system, was similarly bound. UNIX was first developed between 1969 and 1974[11] as a deliberate attempt to bridge the operability gap between various platforms[12] but was not conceptualised as a profit-related enterprise in-and-of-itself. Rather, the source code of the operating system was distributed to universities almost without restrictions.[13] The legal basis for this decision has been mentioned above, but an additional strategic rationale also played a role inasmuch as Bell Labs engineers saw in this dissemination a means of improving the software most efficiently.[14] The UNIX operating system thus spread quickly.[15] Given high demand and the low price of UNIX, it rapidly became a standard in research communities. [16] Open sharing was just as prevalent in the field of computer research as in the rest of academia.[17]
The years 1970-76 are important to what might be called the 'epistemic community' of computing research.[18] This is the period that saw the first independent commercialisation of software and the beginning of what was in effect a schism within this epistemic community. Government involvement had predominated in software development up to this point, both directly and indirectly.[19] Its direct involvement consisted mainly in the heavy subsidising of hardware producers by the Department of Defence for example, a fact recognised in most histories of computing.[20] In addition, Government was directly involved at the level of universities and therefore in the evolution of open standards of communication. For instance, the creation of the TCP/IP protocol (the standard protocol for computer networking) and much of the development of the Internet were conducted in universities or at publicly funded research facilities such as the European nuclear research centre CERN.[21]
Indirect involvement of the Government through legislation was also significant. For instance, from 1969 onwards the U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) began attacking IBM on anti-trust grounds, demanding that the company un-bundle its computing ‘solutions’.[22] IBM tried to pre-empt possible conviction by selling its software packages separately, and in 1974 all software produced began to be sold separately from hardware throughout the computing industry at the behest of the DoJ.[23] This was the legal foundation for the emergence of a ‘software industry’ and it was cemented by the passing of the 1976 Copyright Act, which allowed for software to be copyrighted.[24] In the eyes of many proponents of ‘free software’, this represented the enclosure of a good that had previously been public. Software products could now become profit-generating centres. In the words of one such 'free software' advocate, Sam Williams:
with a single stroke of the president’s pen, Congress had given programmers and companies the power to assert individual authorship over communally built programs.[25]
Although our analysis does not focus on the impact of intellectual property rights per se on software, the 1976 Act is noteworthy as it shows direct government involvement in the creation of a software industry. The impact in the business world was almost immediate, with the creation of the first ‘purely-software’ companies. The anti-trust decision spurred a reappraisal of the AT&T strategy for UNIX, as the company began to restrict its licensing to the
The conscious decision to elaborate a ‘free’ alternative (inasmuch as the source code was freely available) to the now-limited version of UNIX stemmed from this initial restriction by Bell Labs beginning in 1976. Although the Berkeley Software Development (BSD), as this variant of UNIX was named, originated merely as an enhancement of UNIX in the collegial spirit of information sharing which held in the early 1970s, the BSD evolved into a genuine alternative by remaining ‘open’.[28] As UNIX gradually became commercialised in the early 1980s, the BSD continued publishing its source code. This ended up attracting more of a following for BSD than for UNIX since an organisation could maintain control of the code it used.[29]
The focus on security as a rationale for adopting software whose source code was published will re-emerge as we analyse governments’ adoption of FOSS in the contemporary global political economy. Nevertheless, we should note here that as Government attempted to foster the emergence of a software industry through the imposition of intellectual property rights (IPRs), public research communities tended to resist the tendency to restrict access to source code. Thus, rather than engendering a conscious political project to establish a new practice, the commercialization of software spurred research communities to take defensive measures to preserve their traditional method of software development. The political project emerged when was joined by civil liberty defence groups crystallized by the popular trend towards the marginalization of hackers, which we will consider below.
Concurrent with the increasing commercialisation of software was the explosion in the use of Personal Computers (PCs), predominantly in the business world. Although Xerox released its first graphic -interface computer in 1973, the PC only became popular from 1975 onwards with the advent of the Apple company, a firm that operated according to an explicitly libertarian perspective.[30] Apple showed other hardware vendors that the PC market had been born and that it had much potential. The explosion of PC sales gained speed in the early 1980s.[31]
IBM had twice attempted to design a PC during the 1970s in order to tap into an emerging market outside its traditional mainframe operations. However, it was only in 1983 that it was successful in targeting this nascent market by adopting a flexible attitude towards the procurement of components and operating systems. This choice of an ‘open architecture’ was unorthodox, yet it allowed IBM to become the industry standard in the PC market, supplanting the growing Apple. This predominant position was gained by outsourcing the production of components and software.[32]As the PC was adopted by the business world and increasingly by parts of the middle class, the software industry burgeoned. Significantly, Microsoft gained its strategic advantage by securing the operating system contract for IBM PCs.
In the conjuncture of a nascent, investment-attracting software industry and the popularisation of computing in the 1980s, a professional group of engineers concerned only with software emerged, an emergence we will refer to as the professionalisation of software engineers. While remaining sceptical of any (mono-) causal explanations, it is nonetheless possible to point to the identifiable influence of investment capital on what had been an epistemic community of computer scientists who had previously been termed ‘hackers’ within the non-pejorative meaning of the jargon of MIT.[33] In the 1980s we begin to see an exodus from computer science departments towards software companies as programmers were lured by the promise of higher salaries.
To a certain extent this trend served to politicize many of those who remained in the public research sector. It is indeed at this conjuncture (in 1983 specifically) that Richard Stallman started the GNU project, which was to spawn the Free Software Foundation, an organization making overtly political demands. Before we turn to this development, however, we must consider a cultural phenomenon occurring in the 1980s and beyond that serves to illustrate the cultural implications of the professionalisation of software engineers.
The Emergence of the Free Software Backlash
The term ‘hacker’ first emerged as a positive concept in the cultural jargon of MIT, as has been noted above. Indeed, some founders of the PC (such as the fathers of Apple) were often characterised as ‘first-generation hackers’ before this term came to have negative connotations.[34] Although the term was popularised in the eponymous novel by Levy in 1984, the fact that an increasing number of ‘amateurs’ had access to computing power at home brought with it the risk of decentralising control over this technology. Although the shift from second to third generation hackers witnessed an influx of new participants who only cared about breaking security features, the label ‘crackers’ was devised by the hacker community to delineate themselves from these illicit activities. This distinction was lost in most media coverage.
Within this context the media tended to remark on a parallel between hackers (who did not respect the rules set by vendors of technology) and outlaws.[35] Picking up on another aspect, a marginal strand of legal studies noted the enclosing effect of governance features embedded in technology that restrained users from modifying it, noting that modification and improvement had previously been a natural right.[36] This ambiguity notwithstanding, the 1980s witnessed a demonisation of the term ‘hacker’ within popular discourse. Thus by the turn of the decade the imagery had shifted from a realistic depiction of teenagers playing with technology to a portrait of electronic burglars focused on breaking the law. Indeed:
Somehow the dastardly nature of the deeds is emphasized instead of the playful depictions in many books written about hackers.[37]
The disproportionate clampdown on hackers on the part of the secret service and law enforcement authorities did, however, provoke a backlash from civil liberty defence organisations. The creation of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) in 1990, for example, can be understood in this light[38] although its characterisation in the mainstream press as an illicit “hackers’ defence fund” serves to illustrate the changing popular definition of hackers.[39] The vehemence with which hackers (who can be thought of as ‘amateur software engineers’) were denounced is reminiscent of the late-nineteenth-century period of the professionalisation of medicine, during which time those who practiced self-medication were denounced as illegitimate.[40]
With the social context of an emerging class of software ‘professionals’ in mind it is possible to understand more fully the emergence of the GNU project in 1983-84. This project (polemically labelled with the recursive acronym GNU’s Not UNIX) originated with MIT researcher Richard Stallman’s rebellion at the enclosure of UNIX by Bell Labs, which he regarded as breaking with the UNIX tradition of the free flow of source code.[41] Beyond this technocratic focus, the GNU project also reflected Stallman’s political revulsion at the brain drain he observed, away from public research facilities towards commercial software enterprises.[42] The GNU project consisted in an attempt to construct a UNIX variant from which all developers could draw and to which all could contribute, given that the source code was freely available. The GNU Emacs license was published in 1985 as an explicit attempt to impose a system of governance that would ensure the sustainability of the project: in effect it constructed a generalised system of trade[43] in which the price of access to GNU consisted in free access to upgrades.[44] This is what became known as the ‘viral clause’.[45] A formalised version of this license was released in 1989 as the General Public License (GPL), whose sole difference with respect to the 1985 release was that only redistributions needed to be licensed under the GPL while modifications for personal use did not have to be so licensed.[46] The organisation formed to administer the GNU project emerged in 1985 as the Free Software Foundation (FSF), an event that underlined the overtly political nature of the project by stressing the themes we have touched on above.
A caveat must be made at this point whose significance shall be elaborated in the next chapter. It is of fundamental importance to note that the GPL makes use of the traditional copyright governance system rather than being simply a variant of the public domain.[47] Rather, the license is known as ‘copyleft’ inasmuch as it utilises copyright law while obtaining the exact opposite results. In effect, copyleft stems the tide of private appropriation of a public good.[48] The version of property endorsed in the GPL is that of ‘moral rights’, inasmuch as the developer (or even the community of developers) has moral ownership of the software and can thus restrict redistribution of derived software to those who will respect the rules of the GPL.[49] Indeed, licensing software under the GPL is dependent upon one having control of the intellectual property contained in the software. In contrast with this approach, the public domain has traditionally been unprotected in the face of enclosure attempts.
The other ‘free’ license emerging in the 1980s alongside the GPL was derived from the BSD project. Whereas the GPL contained a reciprocity (or ‘viral’) clause, the BSD license was seen as more ‘relaxed’ insofar as it merely demanded citation of the University of California (UC) at
The dichotomy between the BSD and GPL licenses is symptomatic of a trend towards the dilution of free software into something akin to the public domain. i.e., an unprotected area. Stallman himself reflected critically upon this during 1991 when a group of developers ‘forked’ the Emacs project, that is, they started a new variant rather than folding the changes back into the GNU base. According to Stallman, there was a growing individualism as these developers conceptualised the GNU base as a public domain from which they could draw without obligation:
They said, ‘Why should I bother doing these things? I don’t care about the GNU project. It’s working for me.’[53]
In this way the tools within the GNU library were seen as things to be exploited rather than as a common pool to be maintained sustainably. This form of technocratic individualism may be seen as a predictable by-product of the professionalization of software engineering. The fact that the FSF emerged as a backlash against the trend towards commercialisation in individualism meant that the Free Software community had an immediate affinity with civil liberties defence groups, a combination that had formed a pole of attraction for software developers in the late 1980s.[54]
In the early 1990s the commercialisation of the Internet was gaining speed as the number of Internet Service Providers (ISPs) was growing and giving access to an ever-increasing number of developers and users. The close relationship of the combination of open source software and collegial cooperation to the evolution of the Internet is noted by most commentators and need only be mentioned here.[55] It is during this period that Linus Torvalds, a Finnish student, released on the Internet an initial version of an operating system that combined parts of BSD and GNU in the spirit of online cooperation.[56] This is why the operating system is now known as GNU/Linux: not because every version of Linux is necessarily licensed under GPL but because Linux was inspired by GNU. Given that this operating system originated as a hobby or pet-project, Torvalds did not systematically license Linux nor did he demand that contributors sign over their copyrights as would have been necessary under the GPL.[57] Although certain later releases of versions of Linux did license the software under the GPL[58], the original operating system’s structure was left informal. Indeed, certain open source advocates cite this increase in efficiency as the reason why Linux evolved so rapidly, given that Torvalds did not need to spend time investigating where the enhancements were coming from. By 1994 a workable version of Linux was released and has continued to be updated.
The Coining of ‘Open Source’ as a dilution of ‘Free Software’
As has been noted, the 1990s witnessed a devolution of the free software community into two relatively hostile camps: one committed to the socio-political project of Free Software and the other regarding free software as a sort of public domain from which they could draw with impunity without giving anything back. At the level of licensing this dichotomy expressed itself as a split between the GPL and BSD licenses. The latter group was more business-focused, as is illustrated by the example of Michael Tiemann who saw in the GPL not a political project but rather a business plan, envisaging the software industry as shifting from a product or content-based industry to a service-based one.[59] He was one of the first to create one such company in the early 1990s, Cygnus Support. Many other companies emerged in the mid-1990s such as Red Hat, VA Linux and others. The business logic governing such organisations was that they saw an opportunity to siphon off some of the innovative power that they regarded as being in the public domain.
It was at a meeting held at VA Linux that the ‘Open Source Initiative (OSI)’ emerged in 1998, epitomizing the shift in sentiment towards a business strategy within part of this community of programmers. Indeed:
It (…) codified a key tenet of the evolving open source software culture: pragmatism in the development of technically sophisticated software would trump ideology.[60]
The term ‘open source (OS)’ rather than ‘free software (FS)’ was proposed by Eric Raymond, who was to become a guru of the new faction, in order to court business interests. The OSI was created as an organisation with which business could deal and that would ‘police’ the use of the term OS.[61] Rather than proposing a license, the organisation produced a set of guidelines with which any ‘open source license’ would have to accord: this was to be known as the Open Source Definition (OSD). Although the GPL was of course covered by the OSD, the two were not identical. The OSD diverged inasmuch as redistributions of derived works could but did not have to be licensed under an open source license.[62] This removed the mandatory nature of the viral clause, transforming it into an optional feature of open source licenses. As will be discussed below, the explicit goal of the OSD was to establish a public-relations base for OS to make itself credible to business interests, symbolised by the act of replacing the term ‘free’ with ‘open source’.[63] Thus in 1998-9 a growing number of websites emerged designed to coordinate and rationalise open-source developments to make these developments intelligible to business interests.[64]
A number of strategic moves on the part of software businesses in 1998 helped give credibility to the business-friendly OS community. Drawing on the experience of software protocols that became Internet standards due to their open structure and non-proprietary nature (such as HTML, HTTP)[65], companies such as Sun Microsystems, Oracle and Netscape released the source code to their software (in Sun’s case, Java) in an attempt both to diffuse it and to draw on the resources of the online community of developers for improvements.[66] It is quite clear that Netscape’s move to publish the source code to its flagship browser in 1998 was born out of desperation stemming from losing its battle with Microsoft in the browser market. Although FS advocates would stress the voluntary nature of Netscape’s actions[67], it is important to keep the strategic business context in mind when analysing such moves in order not to fall into the voluntarist trap. This point will be discussed further in the next chapter.
The backing of hardware vendors also underlines this point and illustrates the effects of the OSI in attracting business interests. Hewlett-Packard was the first to formulate a business approach to FOSS, leading the way for the likes of Dell, Compaq and IBM to invest in FOSS and create strategic partnerships with Linux service providers such as Red Hat.[68] The strategic nature of such moves is evident in the example of Intel’s investment in Red Hat, which is best interpreted in the context of Intel’s uneasy strategic partnership with Microsoft.[69] Whatever the reasons for the backing, the net effect was to give credibility to OS as a marketable product and indeed as a potential profit generating centre. This credibility is visible in the initial public offerings (IPOs) of certain Linux companies such as Red Hat and VA Linux in 1999, which were some of the highest one-day rises in history.[70] Although these share-price rises proved to be ephemeral, linked as they were to the height of the dot.com bubble, they testify to the high degree of business credibility these companies had during this period. The high profile moves on the part of established businesses to adopt FOSS in the period 1998-99 illustrate the appeal that the dilution of FS into OS had for the business community.[71]
Similarly, in this period the language used to describe FOSS in the popular press evolved from an interchangeable use of the two terms FS and OS to an explicit preference for the latter.[72] The evolution of the language used to describe the phenomenon in The Economist is symptomatic. Whereas in 1998 the terms ‘free’ and ‘open source’ are used interchangeably[73], the term ‘open source’ is increasingly predominant in the discourse from early 1999.[74] This increasingly favourable media coverage, evolving from images of destructive hackers to viewing OS as a viable business strategy, closely mirrored the growing interest expressed in the hardware industry. Similarly, the notion of GPL-protected free software began to be viewed even by those involved in the community as a form of public domain, in the sense that one could pick and choose tools under the GPL that were unrestricted. It is clear that this is an inappropriate use of the notion of GPL, insofar as the innovative use of copyright is a fundamental part of the GPL that distinguishes its licensed material from the unlicensed public domain.[75]
Concluding Remarks
This historical analysis of the evolution of the software industry will hopefully have illustrated the gradual shift in the structure of the industry towards conformity with business interests. As a backlash developed in the form of free software, this too became diluted and was gradually led down the road towards cooptation as the door was left open for a gradual appropriation by the private sector of communally developed goods that had been designed to remain public.
The question of the philosophical conception of the public domain will inform our discussion in the next chapter when we address the inter-relations between the OS and FS movements. However our analysis will not focus purely on the level of discourse, as some others have[76], but will incorporate judgements about the influence of differences in the licensing schemes that govern the structure of these developer communities. This will avoid the widespread confusion of the OS and FS movements (usually conceptualised as one FOSS community)[77], which is usually justified on the grounds that, for end-users, the two movements appear to be identical.[78] The point here is that the conception of a distinction between end-users and user-developers is not enlightening in the case of FOSS, especially insofar as it is used at the level of government adoption of FOSS. Indeed, the mode of cooperation inherent in FOSS development conflates the notions of users and producers and at the level of government it is clear that the IT departments (who are the end-users in this context) have the infrastructure to interact with the community of FOSS developers.. Recognition of this underscores the historical materialist approach of our analysis.
Chapter Two: Relationship of the FS and OS Movements and Theoretical Framework
The preceding section has set out the historical evolution of the software industry, with special emphasis on the role of the state in creating and fostering this specialized sector. The study has been organised to investigate the origins of the free software (FS) movement, emerging as a backlash against the commercialization of software and the professionalization of software engineering. The anatomy of the FS movement paid special attention to the emergence of the OS movement from within as an attempt to depoliticize the FS backlash. It is now pertinent to delve into the relationship between the OS and FS movements themselves in more depth, both in terms of their contrasting philosophical approaches and their licensing structures. Although it may be superficially regarded as merely outlining technical differences between the two types of licensing governance systems[79], our argument will actually hold that the OSD represents a substantial slippage in the ‘copyleft’ provisions of the GPL. This slippage has the effect of conflating the notions of open source and public domain in important respects, a conflation having important consequences insofar as the OSD attempts to reconcile two conceptions of property which are dialectically related, that of exclusive ‘ownership of things’ and that of a less absolute ‘bundle of rights’. Within this context the role of the state with regard to the FOSS movement will be considered briefly in anticipation of a theoretical analysis that will inform the final part of this study.
The Socio-Political Embedding of ‘Free Software’
The philosophical approach inherent in ‘free software’ is partly explicable by referring to the social origins of the FSF backlash against the commercialization of software. The original linkage of FS advocates with organisations defending civil liberties has been touched upon in the preceding historical analysis, and this association has clearly coloured the political aspirations of the FS movement.[80] The work of David Berry is useful to touch upon at this stage in that he delineates the two movements of FS and OS along philosophical and discursive lines, with each vying to establish hegemony within the movement through the fixation of elements within the discourse concerning FOSS.[81]
The struggle for discursive hegemony is partly based on an interpretation of the recent past (usually starting back in the heyday of UNIX)[82] as well as on the construction of a narrative explaining why programmers choose to contribute to a FOSS project. In this sense historical contexts are, as is often he case, reinterpreted to provide backing for a political position.
The FS discourse, symptomatically epitomized by Stallman’s Free Software Foundation, hinges on the twin narratives of ethics and freedom.[83] Drawn from enlightenment ideals of communitarianism as well as collegial research and scientific progress, the FS discourse focuses on the values inherent in the community of programmers involved in the production of ‘free software’.[84] Thus, although the software produced through open collaboration is deemed to be of better quality than its proprietary counterparts, the community values established in the development process are viewed as being more significant than the product that emerges. The underlying argument upon which this discourse is based stems from a rejection of the theoretical assumption regarding the separation of the political sphere from the technical one.
In a connected sense the prescriptive functions of software, which determine what one can and cannot do with a piece of software within the confines of what it was designed to accomplish, are conceptualised as a form of governance or law.[85] While proprietary software does not allow one access to these restrictions, which are built into the technical standards of the source code itself, FOSS does allow one to view and alter them. Thus free software has a critical potential inasmuch as it provides transparency in these prescriptive functions by making it possible for everyone to view the restraints built into the code.[86]
This FS approach is by no means restricted to the organisation presided over by Stallman. Relatively marginalised strands of legal studies, for example, highlight the “legal right to hack the designed object in order to make what history and tradition would treat as consumers' "natural" right.”[87] The political agenda of the FSF is endorsed by many groupings of a civil libertarian inclination who consider themselves to be politically linked to the cause of preserving a free flow of information[88] This agenda is also linked to some proponents of the political project for an ‘open society’.[89]
Richard Stallman himself does not limit his political activism to the sphere of software: indeed, a recent example is his taking a seat on the advisory committee of the newly formed Latin American Telesur channel, designed as a political challenge to American media dominance in the region.[90] Similarly, the work of authors such as Castells and Himanen emphasises the derived social applications of the ‘hacker ethic’, which they regard as a new mode of behaviour that is to supersede Weber’s ‘protestant ethic’.[91] This linkage of free software to wider issues of technological independence and the rights of users arises again at the level of international negotiations in such forums as UNCTAD[92], where the struggle between the FS and OS rationales has been evident.
The Importance of Licensing Structures
It is clear that the free software movement emerged as a backlash against the commercialization of software, pragmatically uniting civil liberties defence groups with the FSF from the very start. Given the philosophical rationale that emerged from such a convergence, with its emphasis on freedom and collegial values emerging from the construction of a ‘community’, the GPL stands out as the crucial legal tool in defending the FS community from proprietary encroachments. In this way the GPL utilises traditional copyright law to defend licensed software against being appropriated by private interests who would withhold publication of the source code of derivative works.[93] Indeed an explicit part of the FOSS Foundation for
This point cannot be over-emphasised inasmuch as it constitutes the crucial distinction between the traditional notions of public domain and this new form of what we might call a ‘sustainable and reproducible public domain’.[96] In this sense the GPL represents an indictment of the traditional concept of public domain, given that the modifications to that concept inherent in the GPL constitute a recognition that the public domain has never been actively protected from private encroachment. Rather, it has been seen traditionally as comprised of what is left over once private property has taken what it wants.
The GPL does contain a clear conception of property, inasmuch as the owners retain creative control of their projects and can enforce openness on any further redistribution. The GPL thus vests in the community the “right to enforce community norms and thwart appropriation of the community's work.”[97] We have already noted that the Emacs license evolved into the GPL (during the period 1985-9), an evolution wherein the coverage of the viral clause was restricted to redistributions of GPL-licensed software rather than applying to any ‘private’ modifications per se. This point is particularly emphasised by advocates of FS like Lessig, who see the legal innovation of ‘copyleft’ as “a major bulwark of the current so-called “digital commons””.[98] The proprietary control inherent in the system of governance of GPL is evident in the fact that although any modifications submitted to an FS project do not necessarily have to be incorporated into the overall project. This discretion accorded to the ‘owners’ of a GPL’ed project is counterbalanced by the fact that any contributor can ‘fork’ an FS project (that is, create a different base of code over which one would have discretion), as long as this forking is itself licensed under GPL. In this sense the concept of property upon which GPL is based is one of property as a “bundle of rights” for the owner rather than an exclusive form of property as in “the ownership of things”[99].
This point will be returned to, but it is necessary to note that ‘free software’ originally emerged out of the recognition that software development would break down if an exclusive conception of property were imposed, just as academic research would slow down if similar standards were applied. Despite efforts to impose a regime of IPRs upon knowledge work, the very nature of knowledge precludes the ability to impose upon it exclusive concepts of property. Indeed, one can only share knowledge; selling knowledge would mean separating oneself from it once a sale is completed, which is nonsensical. In this respect profit accumulation in knowledge industries is dependent upon a re-articulation of the notion of property, despite the current attempts at enforcement of IPRs based on exclusive ownership. This points to a dialectical relationship between two different concepts of property in this context
The realisation emerges that licensing schemes are important, a realisation that can be directly linked to the philosophical rationale invoked as an explanation for the existence of the FOSS movement. The licensing structures that are chosen for software influence the subsequent development of the projects. Insofar as free software is explicitly directed towards the construction of a certain type of (public) community above and beyond the development of good software, the GPL provides a defensive governance structure in the face of private appropriations of a community/public good. Indeed, as one economic analysis of FOSS admits:
even trivial differences in the general license under which code is released affect subsequent development decisions in unrelated projects, creating path-dependent trajectories of software growth.[100]
The relationship between the GPL-type licenses, which do not represent absolute and exclusive conceptions of property, and more conventional forms of IPR imposed by the state, which constitute exclusive property, is reminiscent of the dialectic noted by Claire Cutler. She highlights the dialectical tension between two forms of property in the present period, e.g., one defined as the exclusive ‘ownership of things’ and the other as a less-absolute ‘bundle of rights’.[101] Although she remains critical of Castells’ thesis that a linear move from conceptions of property as ‘ownership of things’ to those of ‘bundle of rights’ represents the shift to an information society, Cutler finds that both conceptions of property are present in today’s society. Indeed, the tensions between the two constitute a dialectical relationship. Within this relationship she notes the continued instrumentality of law for the purposes of capital accumulation:
Property, like the chameleon, can change colour as the needs of capital dictate. Law is one of the mechanisms of flexible accumulation.[102]
In this sense the legal structure is subject to two distinct pressures arising from the two forms of property vying for hegemony. It is important to note the role that the emergence of OS plays regarding FS within this theoretical framework.
The Relationship of Licensing Structure to the ‘Open Source’ Narrative
As has been argued, the OS movement emerged as an attempt to depoliticise the FS phenomenon by programmers worried about a potential connection between ‘free software’ and the subversion of “intellectual property rights, communism, and other ideas hardly likely to endear themselves to an MIS manager.”[103] While FS advocates view the elaboration of UNIX in the 1970s as testimony to the positive productive effects of having a community of developers with freedom to collaborate openly, OS proponents view the “UNIX ‘philosophy’ (as one …) of what works and what has been shown to work in practical settings over time.”[104] The OS narrative is thus explicitly a-political.
This signals a shift undergone by a segment of the programming community in the early 1990s towards emphasising only the economic arguments for FOSS, as was noted in the previous chapter. This shift was premised on the notion that economic freedom is far and away the most important[106], implicit in the statement:
the economic self interest arguments for Open Source are strong enough that nobody needs to go on any moral crusades about it.[107]
It is within this blind faith in the efficiency of the free market that Raymond can reconcile the notions of the rational selfishness of the individual programmers with the need to share the improvements that ensure the sustainability of FOSS projects. This relationship is built on the kind of trust in others that ultimately translates into trust in the market mechanism rather than on a restrictive licensing system, as will be elaborated below.[108]
The multiplicity of first person singulars used to conceptualise members of the OS community contrasts starkly with the exclusionary terms (of ‘we’ versus ‘them’) used in Stallman’s FS discourse.[109] The implication of the OS standpoint is that within the apolitical realm of technique, all individuals’ interests can be coordinated through the workings of the free market. This obscures the fact that the FS backlash against proprietary software emerged as a response to inadequacies inherent in the impact of commercial interests upon the workings of software development through the market.
This contrast is also apparent in some of the secondary literature concerning FOSS, most notably in the field of economics and law. Rather than attempting to superimpose traditional economic models of behaviour onto the phenomenon of free software, FS advocates tend toward the polar opposite of political voluntarism in their interpretations of programmer’s actions. An example of this can be found in Lessig’s interpretation of Netscape’s releasing its code in 1998 as being an act of altruism in favour of the public good rather than a strategic business move.[110]
Conversely, the attempt to understand the FOSS model of development and community cohesion through the technologically-reductionist terms of the OS narrative tends to rationalise this group effect in terms of the smooth running of a system of rational self-interested actors.[111] In the business press, for example, the OS projects began to be viewed as some “new generation of standards bodies” during the course of 2001, in a sense reminiscent of neo-liberal discourse.[112] Much literature also exists that attempts to reconcile the open culture of OS with business culture in firms such as VA Linux or Red Hat, in the process committing the fault of associating FOSS with a kind of public domain from which commercial companies can draw in order to gain a strategic advantage while keeping improvements private.[113]
We have already noted that the OSD represents an open door for possible transfers of resources from the free software community to the private sector. This hinges on the difference in wording between the GPL, which states that all redistributions of any software licensed under the GPL must again be licensed in its entirety under the GPL[114], and the OSD, which includes certain licenses that contain the word can rather than its compulsory counterpart.[115] This switch to a voluntarist approach to insuring the sustainability of the projects is key inasmuch as it transforms the pool of FOSS already in existence into a form of public domain, undefended against proprietary enclosures. In effect, although the there is not necessarily an automatic slippage in licensing structures from a strict GPL to the looser OSD-covered licenses, there is a tendency for such slippage in order to preserve the option of proprietary enclosures upon later releases. This tendency can be perceived as a way of reconciling the contrasting notions of property found in strictly ‘free’ and proprietary software.
Attempts to understand FOSS from the economistic perspective of OS tend to view the ‘viral clause’ as contentious and controversial rather than an integral part of what constitutes ‘free software’.[116] In so doing these studies tend to substantiate Microsoft’s claim that FOSS acts like a cancer that “infects” intellectual property[117], thus hinting that developing countries would forfeit any strategic advantage stemming from IPRs in the new ‘digital economy’.[118]
The licensing structures used by many OS firms have therefore tended to become hybrid: the Mozilla Public License is in accord with the OSD but does not contain the viral clause of the GPL, and a new (January 2002) Linux release by Red Hat for high-end users contains certain proprietary enclosures.[119] This move towards hybridisation is mostly interpreted within the frame of reference of the OS narrative in terms of giving developers the freedom to use what works.[120] Even proprietary giants such as Microsoft have made moves in the direction of the hybrid approach[121], although of course only while retaining firm control over their IPRs.
From our discussion of the licensing differences between the OSD and the GPL, it becomes apparent that such hybridisation could only come about through the loosening of the terms of the GPL under the OSD. By so leaving the ‘back door’ open to proprietary encroachments, open source emerges as an attempt to reconcile the differences in the two conceptions of property delineated above. The moves by business to incorporate FOSS into their profit accumulation strategies through the newly formed OSI then reveals much of its real significance: within the dialectic between property as a ‘bundle of rights’ and as the ‘ownership of things’, OS represents a means of preserving the flexibility in the regime of profit accumulation.
Within the global trend towards the imposition of IPRs, the state acts to ensure the continued accumulation of profit domestically. Given that the ‘bundle of rights’ concept of property is more coherent for knowledge work per se, the state must therefore respond to dual pressures arising from the multilateral and domestic spheres.
The State as Regulator of Mechanisms Insuring Conditions for Profit Accumulation
At this point, it would be pertinent to incorporate a brief analysis of the role of the state into our discussion inasmuch as the state serves to ensure the smooth reproduction of the capitalist system by preserving and enhancing the conditions of profit accumulation. Although outside our field of enquiry strictly speaking, the capacity of the state to intervene in the imposition and protection of IPRs is a notable way in which government intervenes in the economy to protect the profit-accumulation mechanisms associated with the exclusivist notion property. On the other hand, government adoptions of FOSS strategies highlight the need for the state to encourage flexible means of profit accumulation that are associated with less-absolute concepts of property. These dual pressures, e.g., the need for conformity with multilateral regimes of IPR protection and of the need to defend local capital’s interests, shape the functioning of the state.
It is the specific configuration of the forces and relations of production that shapes the state. The state utilises law to govern both. It is in this sense that the state is both shaped by and the shaper of the forces and relations of production within capitalist society.[122] This is perhaps one of Poulantzas’ most enduring theoretical legacies[123], inasmuch as he saw government existing to preserve the smooth functioning of capitalist society while simultaneously facilitating social transformation in order to provide legitimacy to that preservation.[124] In essence, the state acts as promoter of capital’s “collective interest at the cost of their particular interests.”[125]
This framework for understanding the adoption of FOSS at the government level is enlightening, as it situates the state as a reflexive institution that must act compatibly with multilateral commitments while still ensuring the means for profitable enterprises to emerge. Support for this can be found in studies concerning FOSS at the level of the European Union, studies that highlight the impact of FOSS in terms of fostering competition in the domestic software market while simultaneously creating new opportunities for software and service providers at the domestic level.[126] The state can also be seen as balancing the interests of domestic capital with those of foreign (or global) capital. This often appears in the reasons given by states for adopting FOSS (reasons often including a strong wish to be independent from foreign suppliers). And while the state's can be interpreted as local responses to global pressures[127], it seems more adequate to view this function of the state as one of balancing global and domestic pressures.[128]
In this sense the positions taken by different governments can vary according to their interests within the global political economy. Although we do not wish to foreclose the analysis of the final section, a trend is notable in that governmental adoptions of FOSS are moving from the periphery of the global networks of knowledge-based profit accumulation towards the centre. The same motivations for FOSS adoption are thus not applicable for all governments.
A caveat must therefore be noted with respect to FS advocates’ interpretations of these governmental moves. Studies undertaken from this perspective tend to stress the fit between open source and public accountability[129], and even between an open society and open source.[130] The underlying current of philosophical idealism evident in such visions stems from a view that a change at the level of ideas about government, influenced by the principles of free software, will necessarily alter the power relations within and outside government. Although perhaps tenable at the level of early adoptions in governments at the periphery of ‘the digital economy’, this view obscures the fact that in many instances governments intend to foster a domestic software industry through FOSS rather than consciously attempting to democratise the provision of government services.
Such a voluntarist standpoint is reminiscent of arguments proposed by Castells and Himanen concerning the Hacker Ethic, in which culture stands as the primary determinant of individual behaviour and ultimately determines market relations.[131] A more appropriate structural interpretation would set such cultural and technical explanations within the material context in which they arise, embedded in material conditions: this underscores their relative autonomy with regard to the relations and forces of production.[132] But it is clear that while free software has been associated with civil liberties defence groups from the beginning, a clear conception of the linkage of the discourse to the licensing structures has tended to be sidelined in favour of this cultural voluntarism.
Concluding Remarks
The philosophical differences between the FS and OS movements are not only expressed at the level of discourse and language. The licensing structures employed are important governing mechanisms that influence the nature of both individual projects and the entire movement, affecting their sustainability. The two contrasting notions of property fundamental to Free Software on the one hand and proprietary software on the other have been briefly noted. Within the tensions arising from their dialectical relationship, the OS movement emerges as a means of pragmatically reconciling the two antithetical notions of property. The aim of OS is to depoliticise the backlash against proprietary software and thus represents a means of preserving flexibility in the capitalist mode of profit accumulation. Although a full discussion of the concept of public domain lies outside the reach of this particular study, it crucial to note the important differences between the effect of GPL and traditional concepts of public domain. The practical implication of the emergence of OS, and the associated relaxation of the licensing structure in the OSD, is to transform open source into something akin to the public domain. The role played by governments in this process is both crystallizing of the existing tendencies and influencing of further developments in the movement.
Chapter Three: Geopolitics of Governmental Adoptions of FOSS
The preceding discussion of the creation of the software industry and the subsequent backlash in the form of the creation of the FSF will have given a context for analysing the importance of government adoption of FOSS. The theoretical linkage of the shifting definition of property, as seen within the dialectical relationship of ‘ownership of things’ to ‘bundle of rights’, with the differences in licensing structures and rhetoric between the OS and FS factions of the FOSS movement is also relevant to our analysis of governmental support for FOSS. As we will illustrate, a trend is apparent wherein developing countries have been adopting FOSS first and are then followed by developed countries. This trend is associated with the transformation of FOSS into a mainstream policy option, a trend coordinated by the newly formed OSI,. FOSS is increasingly seen as a means of instituting an ICT-development strategy, itself regarded as a prerequisite for successfully integrating a domestic economy into global networks of trade.[133] It will be argued that the shift to viewing FOSS as merely a technical issue has taken place as business interests have incorporated OS development strategies into the capitalist regime of flexible accumulation. In so doing the OS rationale has been given priority over any appreciation of the socio-political implications highlighted by those propounding an FS discourse. As has been noted in the preceding chapter, this shift in rhetoric is linked to a dilution of the restrictions within the licensing structure originally inscribed by the FSF in the GPL.
Origins of FOSS Adoption at the level of the Poorest Governments
There is some support for the view that developing countries are leading the way in FOSS implementation, and it is clear that these countries do stress the socio-political as well as purely economic reasons for this move.[134] There is a visible trend in governmental adoption of FOSS strategies to move from local levels in the early stages to the national and international levels soon thereafter. As early as 1997, for example, certain local authorities such as that of Extremadura in
Strengthening the social dimension of its FOSS adoption, Extremadura’s advocacy of FOSS along the lines of the FS rhetoric is quite clearly linked to a wider agenda of social justice and communitarianism. The effects of the region’s proactive strategy are well illustrated by the fact that most schools in Extremadura provide one computer for every two children[140], at the same time as the strategy provides clear stimulus to the local ICT industry.[141] This type of result, arising from the government’s explicit protection of the local software industry, can also be found in
From Developmental Policy to Strategic Promotion of Domestic Industry
The nationalistic flavour of this program can be found again in the example of
The case of China, on the other hand, illustrates the case for viewing FOSS increasingly as a means for the government to promote the local software industry while remaining compliant with multilateral treaties such as those of the WTO (World Trade Organisation).[148] Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, the Chinese software industry has substantially expanded within the context of increasing government support, aimed both for domestic and export purposes.[149] Beginning in 2002, certain high-profile (government and think-tank) reports such as that of the Beijing Science and Technology Commission recommended investment in FOSS research as the best means for improving the Chinese software industry. In the course of 2002 the Chinese government established R&D facilities for FOSS research and in August 2003 introduced a law for the mandatory installation of locally produced FOSS. The creation of the Red Flag version of Linux can thus be accounted for as a result of state support for FOSS, although the important presence of large FOSS business supporters such as IBM, Red Hat and Turbo Linux (another Linux support start-up) is noteworthy.[150] Many initiatives to coordinate R&D with other countries such as
Given the fact that FOSS is not anti-capitalistic but rather 'differently-capitalistic'[152], these moves towards a state-led model of ICT development can be understood within the framework that we began to set out in the preceding chapter. Indeed, it is evident that the state in these cases can be understood to be operating as a local response to the global pressures “generated by the internationalising of production, and an attempt to gain some local control over these factors.”[153] By side-stepping the global trend towards the protection of IPRs inherent in TRIPs, a socially-conscious FOSS strategy for those countries on the periphery of the profit-generating global circuits of information production can indeed regenerate aspects of the state to become decision-making centres rather than mere institutions for the implementation of global agreements.[154] Within the context of globalization, which has brought about a transformation of the state out of its traditional sovereign role towards becoming a form of subsidiary local government whose role is to enforce multilateral agreements[155], the importance of FOSS in terms of regaining some influence for the state in domestic social governance is non-negligible. In this sense, developing countries can utilise FOSS to challenge the enclosure of the means of access to the global networks of computer communications that have been monopolised by TNCs, such as Microsoft, originating in Western countries.[156] This reason was cited especially in cases where Microsoft attempted to drop its prices to lock in users to the Windows operating system. Indeed, although the cost savings of FOSS for the
The example of China (along with France’s similarly nationalistic efforts to sponsor its software industry through the promotion of FOSS[158]) serves to illustrate the differences in attitude between those very poor regions of the global political economy that are entirely outside the ‘digital economy’ and who view FOSS as a means of entering the global networks of information, and those countries that are already linked up and who view FOSS as a strategic policy option for giving priority to domestic capital’s interests. As poorer regions such as Extremadura began to implement a coherent FOSS strategy successfully at the local level in the late 1990s, national governments such as those of
Delineation of Technical from Political in Attitudes to FOSS
In
The act of disembedding a communication technology from its social and political origins, reducing it to an economic and technical tool, serves the disciplining purpose of obscuring any emancipatory potential inherent in such technology.[168] And as we have noted, the original case of the FSF did have such potential because it contained the germ of a rejection of the “culture-ideology of consumerism itself,” an ideology that dictates passive consumption and a rejection of which has far-reaching implications.[169] This transformation of the focus of the state away from a concern for the public good (associated with a view of the state as a balancer of inherently conflicting interests) towards a concern for making domestic capital economically competitive (within the view of governance as merely a technical issue)[170], has served similarly to incorporate the open-source practice into flexible capitalist modes of accumulation.
The separation and relative isolation of the economic from the socio-political impact of ICTs is extremely important to note inasmuch as such a theoretical separation obviates any serious consideration of the socio-political implications of the mode of organisation inherent to FOSS.[171] Thus the full embracing of the socio-political implications of FOSS, which is clear in early governmental adoptions such as that of Extremadura, is reduced to a technical issue of government procurement of software. Thus the process by which this software alternative came to be regarded as a credible policy option for developed country governments is noteworthy for its coincidence with the emergence of the OSI.
This process of delineation has been analysed in our appraisal of the watershed years of 1998-99 for the ‘open-source industry’ but it is also reflected in the fact that more mainstream governments began to view FOSS as a credible policy option. The transformation of FOSS into a credible policy option is usually interpreted as the open-source market reaching maturity, as support services and consulting on the matter began to be available.[172]
In the governments of
Liora Salter has noted how formal standards organisations have been reluctant to deal with proprietary de facto standards, restricting their interventions to non-proprietary standards that arise out of competition amongst many companies, competition spurring widespread dissemination.[175] Within this context European countries and the EU itself have started to promote the use of FOSS as a means of levelling the playing field and of including interoperability standards in the software procurement of governments, implicitly viewing the existence of FOSS as a mere technical standard that is non-proprietary and thus likely to spread. Using the analytical distinction promulgated by Salter between standards development and standards enforcement[176], it is evident that the emergence of OS as a standard-generating phenomenon was inherently linked to its attractiveness to business interests, while the trend towards government adoption has the potential to lead to the enforcement of these standards under the doctrine of ‘technological neutrality’.
This phenomenon was discussed in our first chapter. It is particularly apparent in the case of the United States Government’s response to the emergence of FOSS as a viable alternative. Since 2001, the federal government has operated to consider FOSS alongside proprietary software for procurement purposes, without giving preference to either.[177] This hands-off policy has evolved into an explicitly ‘hybrid’ character, where a combination of proprietary and open-source systems are being used.[178] In this way, open source is becoming used synonymously with interoperability.[179] The licensing systems tend to themselves allow such hybridisation, as Linux vendors such as Red Hat begin to cater to such demands.[180]
Reflections of these Tensions at the Level of International Negotiations
The debates over the implications of FOSS find resonance at the international policy level in such institutions as UNCTAD and UNESCO, where a section of delegates (mainly from developing countries) stressed that the government can play a leading role in the development of a domestic contribution to the global FOSS community[181] and that through FOSS the state can play a “‘key role to extend and disseminate human knowledge’”.[182] In this way ideas associated with free software are incorporated in larger social projects such as the construction of ‘free’ digital libraries of educational and scientific resources.[183] The context provided for discussion within these international organisations does play a role in colouring considerations of FOSS. Indeed, while it was noted by some experts involved in the discussions about FOSS at UNCTAD that it was a mistake to view FOSS as a technical and thus apolitical choice but rather as one embedded in social relations, the institutional tendency towards consensus-building rather than real negotiations serves to marginalise these social aspects when ‘hard’ economic evidence can instead be cited.[184]
The discussions at the level of negotiations are reflected only tentatively in the final texts of the agreements concluded. Within the context of consensus-building at the level of international organizations the lowest common denominator tends to carry the most weight: this usually emerges as being the economic argument for a certain policy decision.[185] Leslie Sklair underscores this when he touches on the utility of demarcating the technical dimension of democracy from the political aspect. He notes that the deregulation of private telecommunications networks in the early 1990s served to enhance the technical aspect of democracy (by making communication physically easier) while leaving the prospects for socio-political integration of technology within civil society relatively untouched.[186]
In the area of research and development (R&D) the level of interest from countries as diverse as the
Concluding Remarks
The positions from which different governments approach ICT policies vary according to their placement within the global political economy. It is clear that the manufacturing economies of the global ‘South’ come under economic pressure to integrate into the global economy through the incorporation of ICTs. However, such technological adoptions in these countries tend to be viewed according to their wider socio-political implications. As a certain number of governments have followed the examples of early adopters of FOSS, the lesson learned has mainly been that the economic rationale for FOSS adoption is paramount compared to any socio-political justifications. Governments have thus exploited the potential for FOSS strategies to stimulate domestic IT industries, rather than opting for FOSS-related social policies to stimulate the emergence of a form of public domain protected from private enclosures.
Within the dialectical relationship between the two forms of property we sketched, it is possible to see governments’ FOSS strategies as the means for encouraging flexible profit accumulation in the software industry. This accumulation strategy, as we have seen, is dependent upon a technocratisation and depoliticisation of the state. At the level of international negotiations, this trend is supported by the institutionalisation of consensus building, which gives priority to economic arguments because they represent the lowest common denominator. Within the legal-discursive struggle for hegemony we analysed in the preceding section, it is clear that governments’ positioning facilitates the OS faction’s attempt to depoliticise the FOSS movement.
Conclusion
The software industry is increasingly perceived as being a sector essential to every aspect of modern life. The growth of this sector epitomises the wider trend towards the rationalisation of knowledge-dominated industries inasmuch as these have been constituted as profit-generating sectors in-and-of-themselves. This transformation did not take place in isolation from wider trends within the global setting, which witnessed a depoliticisation of governance mechanisms resulting in the state coming to play an increasingly technical role as only one among many institutions of governance. One important way in which this depoliticisation of governance has been instituted has been through the imposition of IPRs, symptomatic of the shift in the locus of authority from the public governmental level to the private sphere[194], although a full discussion of this process stands outside the reach of our analysis and has been conducted in other studies.[195]
The knowledge-related sectors of profit accumulation do not, contrary to what some have said[196], constitute a new mode of production per se but rather can be understood as an adaptation of the capitalist mode of production based on a dialectic identified by Claire Cutler between two definitions of property. The protection of IPRs is best conceptualised as shoring up an exclusive or ‘absolute’ notion of property as the ‘ownership of things’. This re-articulation of an absolute notion of property, to incorporate knowledge work within the wider context of flexible capitalist profit accumulation, has produced a backlash in the form of ‘free software’. Fundamental to the governance of the FS movement is a conception of property more akin to a non-exclusive ‘bundle of rights’, expressed as a political project. Thus Cutler’s dialectic of property is expressed in the field of software as a dialectic between proprietary and ‘free’ software.
In this context, we have argued that ‘open source’ software as it emerged in the late 1990s constituted an attempt to depoliticise this dialectic through the reconciliation of the two approaches, leaving the door open to a hybridisation of the two forms. The FS and OS factions represent two fundamentally different ways of conceptualising the FOSS phenomenon, linked to clear differences in the licensing structures associated therewith. We saw that the OS faction emerged within the wider context of the technocratisation of governance, in which technical questions are disembedded from the socio-political context within which they emerged.
The role played by governments in terms of FOSS adoption is thus particularly important, inasmuch as the state must balance priorities of flexible domestic profit accumulation against global demands[197] for the imposition of ‘absolute’ conceptions of property. Governments’ support for FOSS thus reflects a wider shift in governance to one where governance is seen as a political matter rather than merely a technical one. Insofar as governments’ interactions with the software industry are symptomatic of governmental interaction with the ‘new’ economy, it is evident that such interactions sit firmly within the capitalist mode of production.[198] In the increasing advocacy of FOSS by mainstream governments on economic grounds, it becomes clear that governments are helping to reproduce the conditions of the expanded reproduction of capital by favouring flexibility in conceptions of property.
The importance of recognising and analysing such trends for the field of International Relations (IR) is evident as soon as one considers the implications of viewing socio-political decisions as merely technical ones where political decisions come to be viewed as necessary technical steps.[199] The disciplinary effects upon political organisations of shifting the locus of decision-making power to technical organisations hinges on the fact that technical working groups set the framework for debate, thus influencing the conclusions that may emerge. The shift towards viewing FOSS as a technological form of the traditional concept of public domain (the implication of the OS standpoint) reincorporates the original FS backlash into capitalist relations of production, thus obscuring any socio-political significance of the mode of development inherent in FOSS. When the line between what is open to question (the political) and what is not (the technical) shifts towards the latter, the possibilities for questioning are themselves obscured.[200] If we are to take the view that drawing the line between the political and the technical is one important expression of imposing discipline and exercising authority seriously, this entails a need for a reappraisal of our taken-for-granted conceptions of what constitutes the technical. Thus the most direct implication for the field of IR is that we cannot take it for granted that technical organisations are apolitical; rather, these show themselves to be the real emerging locuses of authority on a global scale even if they are not widely recognised as such.
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·
·
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Word Count: Approximately 15,500 words
[1] See the rhetoric used at the height of the dot.com bubble, in The Economist for example.
[2] Property as ‘bundle of rights’ stems from a feudalist setting, in which a monarch owned land, but this took the form of having the right to appropriate a certain portion of harvests collected by serfs.
[3] The argument pursued will draw heavily upon Poulantzas’ work, notably Poulatzas (1980).
[4] This is the main analogy in Raymond, E. (2001), The Cathedral and the Bazaar: Musings on Linux and Open Source from an Accidental Revolutionary, (
[5] See for example May, C. (2004), ‘Side-Stepping TRIPs: The Strategic Deployment of Open Source Software in Developing Countries’, IPEG Papers in Global Political Economy no.9, accessed on http://www.bisa.ac.uk/groups/ipeg/papers/9 Christopher May.pdf, on 23rd April 2005.
[6] See Webster, F. (1995), Theories of the Information Society, (
[7] Most computing developments originated in the
[8] Castells, M. (2005), ‘The Political Economy of Open Source’, in WSF, accessed on http://mail.kein.org/pipermail/incom-l/2005-January/000239.html, on 10th July 2005.
[9] Levy, S. (1984), Hackers, (
[10] See for example Tuomi (2000) as cited and interpreted in Castells, M. (2002), The Internet Galaxy: Reflections on the Internet, Business and Society, (
[11] Kuwabara, K. (2000), ‘Linux: A Bazaar at the Edge of Chaos’, in First Monday, vol.5 (3), p.9
[12] Weber, S. (2003), ‘Open Source Software in Developing Economies’, accessed on http://www.ssrc.org/programs/itic/publications/ITST_materials/webernote2.pdf on 12th May 2005, p.7
[13] Salus, P.H. (1994), A Quarter Century of UNIX, (
[14] Weber (2003), p.7
[15] Castells, M. (2002), p.13
[16] Frost, J. (2005), ‘Some Economic and Legal Aspects of Open Source Software’, accessed on Free/Open Source Research Community, at http://opensource.mit.edu/papers/frost.pdf, accessed on 23rd May 2005, p.8
[17] This has led some, notably in the business press, to argue that the FOSS movement represents the software industry coming full circle (see for example The Economist (various) cited below). This is a dubious concept, given that the notion of software as a standalone product did not exist in the days before the decoupling of software and hardware.
[18] This ‘epistemic community’ consisted of a group of researchers employed by either public research institutions, government agencies such as the Department of Defence, and by computing businesses. This community cooperated closely and it can be argued that they conceived of their work as academic and cooperative.
[19] Many studies, such as those conducted by the United Nations Industrial Development Organisation (UNIDO) highlighted in the early 1980s the essential role played by governments in fostering the software industry. UNIDO (1983), Problems of Software Development in Developing Countries, (UNIDO, Vienna), Kopetz, H. (1984), Guidelines for Software Production in Developing Countries, (UNIDO, Vienna) and Narasimha, R. (1984), Guidelines for Software Production in Developing Countries, (UNIDO, Vienna), as cited in Heeks, R. (1995), ‘From Regulation to Promotion: The State’s Changing but Continuing Role in Software Production and Export’, Development Policy and Practice Working Paper no.30, (The Open University), p.2.
[20]
[21] There are many examples of universities collaborating: Universities of Illinois,
[22] Weber (2003), p.7.
[23] The symbol of these new companies is Microsoft, created in 1975.
[24] Williams, S. (2002), Free as in Freedom: Richard Stallman’s Crusade for Free Software, (
[25] Williams (2002), p.123.
[26] Castells (2005).
[27] Frost (2005), p.10.
[28] Frost (2005), p.11.
[29] Thus the Department of Defence chose 3BSD over the AT&T version of UNIX because of the security implications of having control of the source code. See Frost (2005), p.11
[30] Godwin, M. (2003), Cyber Rights: Defending Free Speech in the Digital Age, rev. ed. (
[31] See Pool, R. (2003), ‘A History of the Personal Computer’, in Ermann, D. and Shauf, M. (ed.s) (2003), Computers, Ethics and Society, (
[32] Pool (2003), p.99.
[33] Williams (2002), pp.206-207.
[34] See Pool (2003).
[35] Williams (2002), p.207.
[36] See as example Cohen, J.E. (1998), ‘Copyright and the Jurisprudence of Self-Help,’ in Berkeley Technical Law Journal, pp.1141-2.
[37] Halbert, D. (1994), ‘Computer Technology and Legal Discourse: The Potential for Modern Communication technology to challenge Legal Discourses of Authorship and Property’, in Murdoch University Electronic Journal of Law, vol.1 (2), p.13.
[38] Halbert (1994), p.14.
[39]
[40] See Porter, R. (1987), Disease, Medicine and Society in
[41] Castells (2005).
[42] See the GNU manifesto.
[43] Kuwabara (2000), p.52.
[44] Williams (2002), p.124
[45] Notably, this licensing system emerged concurrently with the trends we identified above.
[46] Williams (2002), pp.126, 130.
[47] Stallman, R. (2003), ‘The GNU Manifesto’, in Ermann, D. and Shauf, M. (ed.s) (2003), Computers, Ethics and Society, (
[48] Benkler, Y. (2002), ‘Coase’s Linux, or, Linux and The Nature of the Firm’, in Yale Law Journal, vol.112 (3), p.73.
[49] Stahl, B.C. (2005), ‘The Impact of Open Source Development on the Social Construction of Intellectual Property’, in Koch, S. (ed.) (2005), Free/Open Source Software Development, (London, Idea Group Publ.), p.266
[50] Frost (2005), p.12 n.13.
[51] Castells (2005).
[52] Frost (2005), p.12 n.13.
[53] Williams (2002), p.149.
[54] Williams (2002), p.130.
[55] See Castells (2002), p.38, Lessig, L. (1999), Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace, (
[56] Williams (2002), pp.13-79.
[57] Wired (2004), ‘Anonymous Source’, in Wired, July 2004, p.138.
[58] Williams (2002), p.147.
[59] Williams (2002), p.132, Varian, H.R. and Shapiro, C. (2003), ‘Linux Adoption in the Public Sector: An Economic Analysis’, accessed at http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/~hal/Papers/2004/linux-adoption-in-the-public-sector.pdf on 9th June 2005, p.7. This was supported by comments in the business press: see The Economist (1999), ‘Hackers Rule’, 20th February, p.87, and ‘Venture Communism’, 12th June, p.92.
[60] Weber, S. (2000), ‘The Political Economy of Open Source Software’, BRIE Working Paper 140, E-Conomy Project Working Paper 15 (June 2000), accessed at http://e-conomy.berkeley.edu/publications/wp/wp140.pdf, on April 28th 2005, p.10.
[61] Williams (2002), p.166.
[62] Frost (2005), p.36.
[63] http://opensource.org/for-hackers.html#marketing, as cited in Weber (2000), p.34.
[64] Moody, G. (2001), Rebel Code, (
[65] See Gillies and Cailliau (2000), pp.206, 234-5.
[66] Castells (2001), p.16.
[67] See Lessig (1999), p.105.
[68] See Castells (2005) and Moody (2001), pp.220-4.
[69] Moody (2001), p.218.
[70] The VA Linux shares, for example, rose 700% during the initial public offering.
[71] This view is supported by interviews with cadres in such companies as Oracle. See Moody (2001), p.215.
[72] Williams (2002), p.166. See also Harmon, A. (1998), ‘For Sale: Free Operating System”, in New York Times, 28th September 1998
[73] The Economist (1998), ‘Red Hat Trick’, 3rd October 1998, p.110
[74] See The Economist (1999), ‘Hackers Rule’ (20th February, p.87), ‘Venture Communism’ (12th June, p.92), Linux Loot’ (13th December, pp.136-9).
[75] See for example Robert Young’s use of the term public domain in relation to the GPL model, in Williams (2002), p.151. See also note 9 p.154.
[76] This, we shall argue, is ultimately the case in Berry, D. (2004), ‘The Contestation of Code: A Preliminary Investigation into the Discourse of the Free/Libre and Open Source Movements’, in Critical Discourse Studies, vol.1 (1), and in Berry, D. and Moss, G. (2005), ‘Free and Open-Source Software: Opening and Democratising e-Government’s Black Box’, accessed on http://www.sussex.ac.uk/Users/hbp17/, on 10th July 2005.
[77] Although May (2004) is a very astute study, coming as it does from the perspective of intellectual property rights as applied to software, May confuses the two movements into one, FOSS.
[78] This point is made most prominently in a think tank report on African adoption of FOSS. Bridges.org (2005), ‘Comparison Study of Free/Open Source and Proprietary Software in an African Context’, on http://www.bridges.org/software_comparison/SoftComp_Final_24May05.pdf, accessed on 15th June 2005, p.15 n.4
[79] Sánchez, W. (1999), ‘Open Software in a Commercial Operating System’, 1999 FREENIX Presentation, accessed on http://www.wsanchez.net/papers/FREENIX_1999/, on 2nd February 2005.
[80] Adamson (2002), ‘Internet Futures: A Public Good or Profit Centre?’, in Science as Culture, Vol. 11 (2).
[81]
[82] Cobb and Rifkin (1991), p.81, as cited in Halbert (1994), p.2.
[83]
[84] Bezroukov (2003) and Kelty (2001), as cited in
[85] This is the main argument in Lessig (1999).
[86]
[87] Cohen (1998), pp.1141-2.
[88] One prominent example is the Indymedia network. Kidd, D. (2003), ‘Indymedia.org: A New Communications Commons’, in McCaughey and Ayers, M.D. (ed.s) (2003), Cyber Activism: Online Activism in Theory and Practice, (
[89] This is the point made by Lessig, who invokes the ideas promulgated by George Soros in his analysis of code as law. See Lessig (1999), pp.105, 108.
[90] See Daniels, A. (2005), ‘‘Chavez TV’ beams into
[91] See Castells, M. and Himanen, P. (2002), The Information Society and the Welfare State: The Finnish Model, (
[92] This was witnessed first-hand at a conference the author attended at UNCTAD in
[93] May (2004), p.19.
[94] May (2004), p.25.
[95] Frost (2005), p.33.
[96] UNCTAD (2004), p.3.
[97] McGowan, D. (2001), ‘Legal Implications of Open Source Software’, in University of Illinois Law Review, vol.2001, pp.287-8.
[98] Lessig, as quoted in Williams (2002), p.182.
[99] Cutler, A.C. (2002), ‘Historical Materialism, Globalization, and Law’, in Rupert, M. and Smith, H. (ed.s) (2002), Historical Materialism and Globalization, (
[100]
[101] Cutler (2002), pp.236-47.
[102] Cutler (2002), p.248.
[103] Weber (2003), p.10.
[104] Weber (2000), p.31.
[105] Berry (2004), p.78.
[106]
[107] This is explicitly stated in the OSI mission statement: http://opensource.org/for-hackers.html#marketing, as cited in Weber (2000), p.34.
[108]
[109]
[110] The move by Netscape in 1998 can best be viewed as opportunistic in the battle with Microsoft over web browser market share. See Lessig (1999), p.105.
[111] Raymond (2003) as quoted in
[112] The Economist (2001), ‘Out in the Open’, 14th April, p.S6.
[113] See Lin, Y. (2005), ‘Hybrid Innovation: How Does the Collaboration Between the Floss Community and Corporations Happen?’, accessed on Free/Open Source Research Community, at http://opensource.mit.edu/papers/lin4_hybrid.pdf, on 5th June 2005, p.13, for a symptomatic example.
[114] See the GPL on http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html, accessed on 12th June 2005
[115] See the OSD on http://www.opensource.org/docs/definition.php, accessed on 12th June 2005
[116] Varian and Shapiro (2003), p.18.
[117] Sánchez (1999).
[118] Waters (2005).
[119] The Economist (2002), ‘Going Hybrid’, 27th July, pp.65-6.
[120] Lin (2005), p.13.
[121] This is done through such portals as www.gotdotnet.com, as Microsoft attempts to tap the innovative power of the FOSS community without giving up their claim to their intellectual property rights.
[122] Poulantzas (1980), p.148.
[123] See for example Bob Jessop’s biography of the French Marxist: Jessop, B. (1985), Nicos Poulantzas: Marxist Theory and Political Strategy, (
[124] Palan, R. and Abbott, J. (1999), State Strategies in the Global Political Economy, (
[125] Jessop, B. (1982), The Capitalist State: Marxist Theories and Methods, (
[126] See the Information Society Directorate of the European Union, accessed on http://europa.eu.int/information_society/activities/opensource/index_en.htm, on 1st of June 2005. See also the report: International Institute for Infonomics (III) (2002), Free/Libre Open Source Software: Survey and Study, accessed on http://www.infonomics.nl/FLOSS/report/, on 22nd July 2005.
[127] Cox, R.W. (1981), ‘'Social Forces, States and World Orders: Beyond International Relations Theory', Millennium: Journal of International Studies, vol. 10 (2), p.151.
[128] Jessop (1985), p.338.
[129]
[130]
[131]
[132] This is a point made by Louis Althusser. Although Castells began as an Althusserian, the direction of his theoretical development attracted criticism concerning his lack of emphasis on the concept of relative autonomy, as his sociological explanations tended to portray two autonomous spheres of politics and technique. See Webster (1995) for his critical chapter on Castells’ work.
[133] Weber (2004), p.16.
[134] Story, A. (2004), ‘Intellectual Property and Computer Software’, ICTSD and UNCTAD Issue Paper no.10, p.13.
[135] Marson, I. (2005), ‘Linux Brings Hope to
[136] Secrétaire du Conseil du Trésor du Québec, ‘Le Logiciel Libre au Sein des Gouvernements’, accessed on http://www.webmaestro.gouv.qc.ca/ress/libre/gouvernements.html#france, on 12th June 2005
[137] Marson (2005).
[138] Cha, A.E. (2002), ‘
[139]
[140] Extremadura Regional Government, ‘GNU/Linex’, accessed on http://www.linex.org/linex2/linex/ingles/index_ing.html, on 23rd June 2005
[141] The Economist (2003), ‘Open-Source’s Local Heroes’, 6th December, p.T5.
[142] The Economist (2003), p.T5.
[143] See the laying out of what could be seen as a mission statement by a Peruvian Congressman in Nuñez, E.D.V. (2002), ‘Letter to Juan Alberto González, General Manager of
[144]
[145] Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) (2004), ‘Government Open Source Policies’, accessed on http://www.csis.org/tech/OpenSource/0408_ospolicies.pdf, on 14th July 2005, p.10.
[146] UNCTAD (2003), E-Commerce and Development Report 2003, (
[147]
[148] The main WTO agreements are the General Agreement on Trades and Services (GATS), General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and the Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property (TRIPs).
[149] Heeks (1995), pp.2, 7.
[150] UNCTAD (2003), p.118.
[151] CSIS (2004), p.4.
[152] May (2004), p.18.
[153] Cox (1981), p.151.
[154] This is the main thesis of May (2004).
[155] MacLean, J.S. (2000), ‘Philosophical Roots of Globalization and Philosophical Routes to Globalization’, in Germain, R.D. (ed.) (2000), Globalization and its Critics: Perspectives from Political Economy, (
[156] Sklair, L. (1991), Sociology of the Global System, 2nd ed. (Mempstead, Prentice Hall), p.91.
[157] Azhar (2004), p.54 and Helmore (2004), as cited in UNCTAD (2003), p.111. See other examples of this in the same source.
[158] See CSIS (2004), p.6
[159] See the website of the ADAE on http://www.adae.gouv.fr/
[160] French Senate, Proposition of Law Number 32, 2002-2003 Session: http://www.senat.fr/leg/ppl02-032.html, accessed on 1st July 2005
[161] Secrétaire du Conseil du Trésor du Québec, ‘Le Logiciel Libre au Sein des Gouvernements’.
[162] French Senate, Proposition of Law no. 32.
[163] Secrétaire du Conseil du Trésor du Québec, ‘Le Logiciel Libre au Sein des Gouvernements’.
[164] Williams, S. (2002), ‘A Timeline of Open Source in Government’, on O’Reilly Linux Dev. centre, http://www.linuxdevcenter.com/pub/a/linux/2002/07/15/osgov_timeline.html, on 10th July 2005. See also ‘Brave GNU World’, accessed on http://gnu.open-mirror.com/brave-gnu-world/issue-12.fr.html, on 12th July 2005.
[165] French Senate, Proposition of Law no. 32.
[166] CSIS (2004), p.6
[167] The economic argument of cost-cutting and independence from a foreign (mainly
[168] MacLean And MacLean, J.S. and El Kahal, S. (1995), ‘The ‘Privatization’ of UNESCO: A New Form of Politicization within the Global Political Economy’, Draft Paper for Conference ‘The UN at 50’ (New York, 16-18 March, 1995), p.6.
[169] Sklair (1991), p.95.
[170] Cerny, P.G. (2000), ‘Structuring the Political Arena: Public Goods, States and Governance in a Globalizing World’, in Palan, R. (ed.), Global Political Economy: Contemporary Theories, (
[171] This is an application of what I see as a main argument in MacLean And El Kahal (1995), p.6.
[172] See UNCTAD (2003), p.101.
[173] CSIS (2004), p.5
[174] See CSIS (2004), p.5 and the Information Society Directorate Website on FOSS.
[175] Salter, L. (1999), ‘The Standards Regime for Communication and Information Technologies’, in Cutler, A.C., Haufler, V. and Porter, T. (ed.s) (1999), Private Authority and International Affairs, (
[176] Salter (1999), p.105.
[177] This began with a favourable policy recommendation on FOSS in high-end computing coming from the President’s Information Technology Advisory Committee (PITAC) in October 2001. See PITAC (2000), ‘Developing Open Source Software for High End Computing’, accessed on http://www.nitrd.gov/pubs/pitac/pres-oss-11sep00.pdf, on 12th July 2005.
[178] The example of
[179] Metcalfe, R. (2005), ‘Open Source Needs Good Policy Support’, in Financial Times, 8th June 2005, p.18
[180] The Economist (2002), ‘Going Hybrid’, 27th July, pp.65-6.
[181] UNCTAD (2004), p.6.
[182] Barry and Dauphin (2003) concerning UNESCO’s views, as quoted in May (2004), p.17.
[183] May (2004), p.17.
[184] This can be understood within the context of the trend within the global political economy towards a dominance of “technical-instrumental knowledge” over “practical emancipatory knowledge.” See MacLean And El Kahal (1995), p.32.
[185] Cox, R.W. and Jacobson, H.K. (1977), ‘Decision Making’, in Cox, R.W. and Sinclair, T.J. (ed.s) (1996), Approaches to World Order, (
[186] Sklair (1991), p.178.
[187] CSIS (2004), pp.2-11.
[188] CSIS (2004), p.13.
[189] See FOSSFA mission statement accessed on http://www.fossfa.net/tiki-index.php?page=History on 14th June 2005.
[190] CSIS(2004), pp.3-4 & 6.
[191] CSIS (2004), p.9.
[192] See UNCTAD (2003) for example.
[193] See the FISL website on http://fisl.softwarelivre.org/6.0/, accessed on 2nd August 2005.
[194] Cutler, C. (1999), ‘Locating “Authority” in the Global Economy’, in International Studies Quarterly vol.43 (1), p.73.
[195] See for example May, C. (2000), The Global Political Economy of Intellectual Property Rights: The New Enclosures?, (
[196] See Castells, M. (1996), The Rise of the Network Society, (
[197] These demands are most often expressed at the bilateral level, with the U.S. Trade Representative leveraging the special 301 provisions of the U.S. Trade Act to force compliance with the TRIPs agreement of the World Trace Organisation (WTO).
[198] This is particularly noted in May, C. (2002), The Information Society: A Skeptical View, (
[199] This trend within the software industry is paralleled by debates over technical and political views of Internet governance, as is evident in the debates over conducted within the context of the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS). An analysis of this negotiation process stands outside the field of enquiry of this study unfortunately. For an notable analysis of this, see Kleinwachter, W. (2004), ‘Beyond ICANN vs. ITU?’, Special Issue on WSIS, Gazette, vol.66.
[200] Bourdieu, P. (1998), Practical Reason: On the Theory of Action, (
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