The Great Battle of Civilization in an Open-Source Computer-Software License




A very interesting and important quotation from the world of computer software–yet very relevant to the big themes in fighting throughout our civilization: competition and cooperation–represented through the catch-words “Open Source” and “GNU General Public License (GPL) Version 3″ by Eben Moglen (GPL v3 has only recently been published after a long debate throughout the open source software community):

“What is really important about what we are doing is that we are modeling other things that people can do for themselves. We are not creating something that you have to take from us, you either like or dislike, you either approve of or you disapprove of, you either wish for or hate. We are only establishing ‘proof of concept plus running code plus community equals freedom’. And that proposition applies far beyond the domain of computer software, applies far beyond the domain of freeing music from its owners, applies far beyond the domain of making the children of the world the programmers and the videographers and the producers and the directors, not the *consumers* of culture. Those things this is about, no question, and the mighty will fall in many directions, as communities begin to out-produce what capitalism’s deepest and intensest collections of power can presently do on their own terms.”

But this is the least of it, really, the least of it. The fundamental improvement being reached here is an improvement in the technology of self-government. An improvement in the technology of human freedom through the substitution of words and ideas for force. An improvement of the substitution of community values for the single minded pursuit of individual or aggregate profit at the expense of any other competitor that might get in the way. We have refashioned what competition and cooperation mean, as we have refashioned how production occurs in the digital economy.”

~From “The Real Meaning of GNU GPLv3” at Linux Journal

Keywords : capitalism, competition, socialism, cooperation, solidarity, life-sustaining political economy, participatory democracy, self-governance, self-organization, community entrepreneurship, open source democracy, open source software, GNU GPL v3
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