The Commons Touch

It used to be an insult to be called an armchair activist or bedroom revolutionary. But the world of free software and ‘free-culture’ activism is changing all that and encouraging a new form of practical ‘anti-capitalism’.

Freedom in this sense is about more than ‘free beer’, or something-for-nothing. It describes an ethical commitment to sharing knowledge, treating it as a public good rather than simply a commodity. Unlike the ‘free’ market assumption that competition is necessary to encourage innovation, this promotes development on the basis of co-operation. Social sharing is a vital part of the remix culture in contemporary. It is also key to the success of programmes such as Firefox, OpenOffice, or the Linux operating system, which are developing at a rate that far outstrips their copyright-protected rivals.

The success of free software extends beyond the defence of the public domain against the expansion of markets. It also recognises the role of users in improving the products they rely upon, blurring the boundary between producer and user by encouraging participation in the creative process. There is something new here – not the novelty of the ‘new economy’, whose gurus reduce the intellect to private property, but a recognition that value is increasingly created outside the direct productive process. This encourages an understanding of the user as a participant in an ongoing creative process, rather than simply a passive consumer.

This commitment to freedom is not to everyone’s taste. Some progressive critics have argued that free software is simply a recipe for exploitation, replacing paid work with the voluntary servitude. And it is not necessarily anti-capitalist either. Big business advocates of open source (the uninhibited sharing of software code) are even looking to it to correct the ‘market failure’ that has seen Microsoft develop a near monopoly. Such criticisms are important, but they are a better argument for defending the principle of freedom from commercial exploitation than turning our backs on a movement that is providing a successful global challenge to the corporate takeover of everything.