Risks of diluting the meaning of open source

Dear Pen, after thinking a while about your words I’d like to add a few thoughts myself:

I agree with you and like to think of “prefigurative politics practice” in this context. As long as the development of open-source hardware isn’t a defined specification of a job/employer (= economic pressure), the acceptance of open hardware will depend on our social practices and care - while hopefully step-by-step being able to showcase the (in theory undeniable) advantages of “the-more-the-better-open-source”.

When it comes to guidance to that, I really appreciate the work done by @rmies, @Moe, @JBonvoisin and Mehera as there metrics for openness (Bonvoisin/Mies 2018, fig. 2, s.a. this visualization) and reuse (Mies/Häuer/Hassan 2022, e.g. tbl. 4) of open-source hardware are as comprehensible as consistent.

At the same time I’d say it is relevant to carefully analyze (and criticize, if necessary!) any form of openness pretended right from the start or reduced mid-way (see several examples this year). Even if those “enclosures of the commons” might not happen deliberately every time, short-term incentives and a seemingly “world of free riders” can put enormous pressure on open-source hardware developers.

Therefore I can’t help to elevate @Muiren’s words enough:

It might be time to speak about enabling and raising openness by community resilience way beyond fancy foundations, granular initiatives and public funding, so individual risk can be shared and one’s endeavors not destroyed but preserved over night.

What we are seeing with all those LLMs and transformer models right now, shows a more than relevant technological trend to a significant part not even caring about any definition, legalisation, neither cultivation nor compensation of openness and instead re-distributing the wealth of intellectual property from many to few:

Asked about […] “AI,” Perens expresses disapproval. “I think that AI is always plagiarism […] When you train the model, you’re training the model with other people’s copyrighted stuff. […] Should we be training it with open source software? I don’t think so. […] So that’s a big question we have to resolve.”

…as it says in the article linked by @jmwright. Although this shows the potential of non-proprietary use of intellectual produce already, it might be necessary to open “Pandora’s box of politics” in this discussion. 'Cause when it comes to science hardware and technology, intellectual property is individual property and in a connected world, this is - and might always has been - against progress.

3 Likes