Author: Tom Slee

Money Ruins Everything, but we have to talk about it anyway

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In Money Ruins Everything (blog post, complete article), John Quiggin and Dan Hunter look out at the new forms of creative expression introduced by the Internet (blogs, wikis, citizen journalism, and to some extent open-source software) and conclude that today’s most important innovations are driven by the collaboration of amateurs with non-economic motives. They give this development progressive political overtones by labelling it "the ‘amateur collaborative content’ movement" [p216] and explicitly identify it as a non-commercial alternative to the market. I don’t know Dan Hunter’s other writings but Quiggin, at least, is a social democrat whose views I usually agree with and whose writings I read often and respect, so I don’t disagree lightly with him. But the picture they paint is a distorted one so I have to.

[Note to regular readers: you may want to move right along – much of what’s here is stuff I’ve written earlier in other contexts. It’s just more of the same, but it needs to be said.]

There are three major things wrong with the paper.

  1. A portion of the activity they describe as non-commercial is in fact commercial.
  2. They exaggerate the rise of the amateur in the Internet age.
  3. They neglect the other side of the coin, which is the spread of commercialism into areas that were previously non-commercial.

I thought I’d talk about all three, but it’s taking too long to write and I need to go and cook some dinner as part of my contribution to our household’s creative production so I’ll just address the first. If I were to say something about the other two it would be

(2) in assessing the rise of the new amateurism they neglect instances of amateur production that existed before the Internet and may be driven out by the rise of the Internet. And

(3) Facebook represents the commercialization of conversation, not the amateurization of collaborative content production.

The distinguishing technological feature of the collaborative web ("web 2.0") is the shift from peer-to-peer networks to a "platform" architecture that is built on top of the lower-level protocols of the Internet.

Wikipedia is a platform: it defines the ways in which you can interact with it, stores the changes you make, and provides security and authentication mechanisms among other things. Facebook is a platform. Amazon is a platform. YouTube is a platform. Blogging takes place on platforms. So the authors are wrong when they say that "As a result of various forces—notably the ascension of the general purpose computer, peer-to-peer technologies, and the internet—all manner of established verities in the content industry are falling." [p215] None of the platforms mentioned above operate in a peer-to-peer manner.

The distinction matters because when content is built on a platform, it is in some important senses owned by the platform-owner or aggregator. Private ownership is present, even if the content (videos, book reviews etc) is explicitly shared by its amateur producer. The suggestion that "Users can modify open source software as they see fit, and can choose whether to make their modifications publicly available, but cannot charge for the use of software derived from an open source program." [218] is incorrect for open source software itself (it applies only to GPL’d software and not software produced under other open source licenses such as the BSD license, and even then copyright owners – such as MySQL AB, now a part of Sun Microsystems  –  can and do charge for some versions of the software). More importantly for this paper, it is also misleading when it comes to collaborative content. Chad and Steve cannot sell an individual video produced by an amateur, but they can sell the entire collection of videos lock stock and barrel to Google for about a third of a billion dollars each; Michael Birch can sell Bebo and all its content (including Billy Bragg’s songs) to AOL and pocket $600 million. Now that’s commercial. Or you can get a seat at Davos, of course, which now seems to be the Cannes red carpet equivalent for our youthful webby leaders.

Amateur production on a non-commercial platform such as Wikipedia is non-commercial. And it’s important. No argument there. But amateur production on a commercial platform is commercial activity. With one party in each transaction motivated my money, it’s the sound of one hand shaking. Back in 2003 Tim Bray’s dinner companion Robb Beal introduced the phrase "digital sharecropping" to distinguished building software "for any platform that is owned and operated by a company" from building sofware for the web. But now that dichotomy has faded: the web includes many platforms owned and operated by companies and sharecropping has moved online along with it. Nicholas Carr has been particularly pointed about the movement of digital sharecropping onto the web, and Seth Finkelstein has pointed to several examples including citizen journalism. It’s a phrase that should be front and centre of everyone’s mind when they see the phrase "networked production".

The distinction can often be seen in who is sharing what. On a non-commercial platform, the amateurs share and the platform owners share as well. At least, my understanding is that on Wikipedia not only the content but also the software and large amounts of data mining derived from it about users and so on is shared publicly. In contrast, on a commercial platform only the amateur material is shared. The contributions of the commercial part of the transaction (Amazon’s sales data for example; data on user habits; the software that runs the platform itself) are not shared — in fact this half of the story is hidden with as much zealousness as the source code of any closed-source company. One of the reasons that "The Long Tail" was such a flop of a book is that the data Chris Anderson relies on is unavailable for anyone else to inspect, and much of it was given to him in filtered form by the content owners.

A second failure is most obviously present in the following paragraph (page 245).

Copyright thus provides incentives to the intermediaries of the content industries—publishers, agents, movie studios, retail stores, etc.— where the processes of moving content from creator to user are expensive or capital-intensive. These “content processes” include the creation of the content, the selection of the content for commercial publication, its production and dissemination, its marketing, and its eventual use. Until recently each of these processes has been too expensive, too difficult,  or too specialized for amateurs to undertake. So until now, highly capitalized intermediaries were necessary to ensure that content moved into society.

Amazon, Google and so on are obviously highly capitalized. More so, in fact, than many small distributors of pre-web content. The web is seeing the movement of content into society consolidated into a handful of "highly capitalized intermediaries": very large and wealthy commerically-driven web site owners, including such old-school outfits as News Corporation, the owner of MySpace. It does no good to ignore this trend.

The paper also elides the distinction between amateur and professional motivations, with the temptation to caricature employed work as factory-line production of alienated labour, while amateur work is driven by love. To take a relevant example, what is the overlap between the motivations of John Quiggin (blogger) and John Quiggin (employee)? Is his work for the University of Queensland driven by the his "first rule" which is "never to give more than you get?" [231] And if not, why does he think that software engineers for commercial software companies writing closed-source programs are driven by different motivations? There is a possible argument (nicely made by Geof in a comment on a previous post) about alienation and the relationship between the developer and the code, but this does not cover production in sharecropping platforms. I’m more inclined to go with another comment by Dipper, that participation in many cases can be covered by standard utilitarian calculus.

One argument made by the authors is that the incorporation of money into production would drive out amateur efforts in a blood-donation kind of way. I’m happy to help push someone’s car out from a snow drift for free, but I wouldn’t do it for a dollar. But there are two groups of people with an incentive to keep money out of the equation: one is the promoters of real community-driven, shared production (the authors’ camp, and one I’m quite happy with) and the other is the turbocapitalist platform owners such as Amazon (would you review a book for a nickel? would you trust the review of someone who did?) It is this shared interest in supressing the role of money for very different reasons that makes me most queasy in contemplating the future of the Internet. We need to be clear in distinguishing public goods from privately owned plantations. Unfortunately, in this paper, John Quiggin and Dan Hunter fail to make the distinction and the result is a distorted picture of web-based creative work. Money may ruin everything, but turning a blind eye to money doesn’t get around that problem.

I feel like I’m being harsh on the authors here – as I say, I agree with their political sympathies, and the one I have read (Quiggin) is obviously smart and well informed on many issues. But serious social scientists need to do serious work on the nature of production on the Internet and not just adopt the turbocapitalist line. Me, all I can do is raise a few questions. But then, when it comes to social science, I’m just an amateur.

Paying for Linux

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Last week on ‘Linux Goes Corporate’: After Nick Carr mentioned my post on the Linux Foundation report and on Linux as corporate joint venture, Timothy Lee and Ed Cone/Clay Shirky responded and then Doc Searls put in his two cents worth. The main point of the responses is that the shift from hobbyists to professionals is not important. For example:

"the open source model is about organization, not who signs your paycheck" (Lee).

"the idea that the minute you pay people to do something, you have the right to manage them and the right to completely take over that work for the benefit of the company — that’s not true" (Shirky).

"in all the conversations I’ve had over the years with kernel
developers, none has ever copped to obeying commands from corporate
overlords to bias kernel development in favor of the company’s own
commercial ambitions. In fact, I’ve only heard stories to the contrary" (Searls).

The professionalization of Linux matters because it marks a change. Open source now is not the same as ten years ago when The Cathedral and the Bazaar was written.

Despite the historical revisionism of the "paycheck’s don’t matter" crowd, the absence of paychecks certainly mattered ten years ago. Eric Raymond opened his classic essay with these sentences:

"
Linux is subversive. Who would have thought even five years ago that
a world-class operating system could coalesce as if by magic out of
part-time hacking by several thousand developers scattered all over
the planet, connected only by the tenuous strands of the Internet?"

Ten years on what stands up? "several thousand developers scattered all over the planet" does – the number of participants in the Linux kernel is larger than ever. But the Linux kernel now is not developed by "part-time hacking". And Linux is no longer subversive, in that anything IBM is happy about is not, by definition, subversive.

And it mattered six years ago when Yochai Benkler wrote "Coase’s Penguin: Linux and the Nature of the Firm", which contains this statement:

Programmers do not generally participate in a project because someone who is their boss instructed them, though some do. They do not generally participate in a project because someone offers them a price, though some participants do focus on long-term appropriation through money-oriented activities, like consulting or service contracts.

So now programmers do participate in the Linux kernel because their boss instructed them to (or paid them to).

Now I can imagine people saying that just because the Linux programmers are paid, that doesn’t make their motivation financial and that doesn’t mean companies can tell them what to do. Here is Lee:

What makes the open source model unique isn’t who (if anyone) signs the
contributors’ paychecks. Rather, what matters is the way open source
projects are organized internally. In a traditional software project,
there’s a project manager who decides what features the product will
have and allocates employees to work on various features.

This is a caricature. I work in a commercial, closed-source software company, and my job is very close to that of a project manager. But what an expert programmer spends his or her time on is always a negotiated thing. Partly it’s a matter of skill and expertise (who is best placed to identify algorithms or code-level weaknesses and areas for improvement?), partly it’s a matter of "what needs to be done" and partly it’s a matter of innovation. And as Joel Coehoorn says in a comment to Lee’s post,  "there most definitely are project managers for open source projects. I
can’t think of a single successful open source project that doesn’t
have a well-defined road map for features." Open source believers too often portray paid closed-source programmers as wage slaves, and paid open-source programmers as free agents working for love (to scratch an itch) who just happen to collect a paycheque. It’s a dichotomy that just doesn’t hold up.

Shirky argues that "the idea that the minute you pay people to do something, you have the right to manage them…that’s not true" but this statement applies to the employees where I work just as much as to IBM employees working on the Linux kernel, and there is nothing about the Linux kernel that gives Redhat programmers a special "ignore the boss" license. Shirky says that "If [a senior manager] announced a strategic change in the kernel they would be laughed out of the room" as if senior managers routinely dictate strategic changes in the Windows kernel or database kernels. More senior managers get laughed out of the room than Shirky would believe.

This leaves us with ownership. IBM and Redhat do not own and will never own Linux. But Redhat sells Linux, and the ability to sell something is one component of ownership. The distinction is more one of exclusive ownership. And here the Visa analogy I used originally holds up – Visa is now a separate company but it is also a collaborative venture and companies that helped to build it were simultaneously assisting their competitors. Industrial sponsorship of academic research – an activity the pharmaceutical industry relies on – has the same tensions about ownership and organization and direction.

Open source, like any new phenomenon, is changing. Our understanding of it has to change too. The Linux Foundation report prompts us to re-examine some of the neat and clean dichotomies that were floated around ten years ago and see if they still hold water. A few do, but many don’t.

Linux Grows Up and Gets a Job

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Linux started as a hobby project. But it is now 17 years old and it has grown up, and a recent report by the Linux Foundation, which extends a series of investigations by Jonathan Corbett, shows that it is no longer a hobby, it is out in the working world.

The report looks at the Linux kernel, and so does ignores all those other pieces of the operating system (drivers, applications, desktop interfaces and so on). Still, the kernel is the heart of the OS and "one of the largest individual components on almost any Linux system. It also features one of the fastest-moving development processes and involves more developers than any other open source project." So this report, which "looks at how that process works, focusing on nearly three years of kernel history as represented by the 2.6.11 through 2.6.24 releases." is a valuable window on what may happen to successful open source projects as they mature.

One of the highlights: "over 70% of all kernel development is demonstrably done by developers who are being paid for their work". 14% is contributed by developers who are known to be unpaid and independent, and 13% by people who may or may not be paid (unknown), so the amount done by paid workers may be as high as 85%. The Linux kernel, then, is largely the product of professionals, not volunteers.

So Linux has become an economic joint venture of a set of companies, in the same way that Visa is an economic joint venture of a set of financial institutions. As the Linux Foundation report makes clear, the companies are participating for a diverse set of commercial reasons. Some want to make sure that Linux runs on their hardward. Others want to make sure that the basis of their distribution business is solid. And so on, and none of these companies could achieve their goals independently. In the same way, Visa provides services in many different locations around the world in different sizes and types of stores. Some banks need their service mainly in one country, some in another, but when they work together they all get to provide their services all around the world.

This does not mean that Linux was always a commercial venture, or that all open source projects are commercial ventures. To invoke another parallel, open source software is a creative venture like music. Many people create music for all kinds of reasons. Most people create music for an audience of one when they hum in the kitchen or sing in the shower. A smaller (but still huge) number of people get together to form groups or participate in orchestras or bands. They don’t earn a living from it, but they love doing it and enjoy their performances. Some might dream of hitting the big time, others are happy being part of their community. Then a much smaller set of people take it a step further. Maybe they are paid to be in an orchestra; maybe they are in a band with a manager and bar gigs around the country. And a lucky few, of course, hit the big time. They get a record deal, find a big audience, and make some real money.

So is music produced for love or for money? Both of course, in various proportions across the spectrum. Open source started off as a small-scale set of projects done mainly by volunteers. As the scale and scope of open source projects an increasing number have provided their contributors with some money (augmented perhaps by a waitressing job). Now a few of the most successful have hit the big time and become full-scale economically important commercial enterprises.

Things change. As open source software has matured and expanded it has become both more unlike the rest of the world and more like it. It will be fascinating to see what comes next, but the Linux Foundation report has made clear that open source has crossed its commercial Rubicon, and there is probably no going back.

Update: follow-up and response to some discussion here.