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IF
YOU'VE BEEN to a computer show in recent months you might have
seen it: a shiny silver drinks can with a ring-pull logo and the
words "opencola" on the side. Inside is a fizzy drink
that tastes very much like Coca-Cola.
Or is it Pepsi?
There's something else written on the can, though, which sets
the drink apart.
It says "check out the source at opencola.com".
Go to that Web address and you'll see something that's not available
on Coca-Cola's website, or Pepsi's--the recipe for cola.
For the first time ever, you can make the real thing in your own
home.
OpenCola
is the world's first "open source" consumer product.
By calling it open source, its manufacturer is saying that instructions
for making it are freely available. Anybody can make the drink,
and anyone can modify and improve on the recipe as long as they,
too, release their recipe into the public domain. As a way of
doing business it's rather unusual--the Coca-Cola Company doesn't
make a habit of giving away precious commercial secrets.
But that's the point.
OpenCola
is the most prominent sign yet that a long-running battle between
rival philosophies in software development has spilt over into
the rest of the world. What started as a technical debate over
the best way to debug computer programs is developing into a political
battle over the ownership of knowledge and how it is used, between
those who put their faith in the free circulation of ideas and
those who prefer to designate them "intellectual property".
No one knows what the outcome will be. But in a world of growing
opposition to corporate power, restrictive intellectual property
rights and globalisation, open source is emerging as a possible
alternative, a potentially potent means of fighting back. And
you're helping to test its value right now.
The
open source movement originated in 1984 when computer scientist
Richard Stallman quit his job at MIT and set up the Free Software
Foundation. His aim was to create high-quality software that was
freely available to everybody. Stallman's beef was with commercial
companies that smother their software with patents and copyrights
and keep the source code--the original program, written in a computer
language such as C++--a closely guarded secret. Stallman saw this
as damaging. It generated poor-quality, bug-ridden software. And
worse, it choked off the free flow of ideas. Stallman fretted
that if computer scientists could no longer learn from one another's
code, the art of programming would stagnate (New Scientist, 12
December 1998, p 42).
Stallman's
move resonated round the computer science community and now there
are thousands of similar projects. The star of the movement is
Linux, an operating system created by Finnish student Linus Torvalds
in the early 1990s and installed on around 18 million computers
worldwide.
What
sets open source software apart from commercial software is the
fact that it's free, in both the political and the economic sense.
If you want to use a commercial product such as Windows XP or
Mac OS X you have to pay a fee and agree to abide by a licence
that stops you from modifying or sharing the software. But if
you want to run Linux or another open source package, you can
do so without paying a penny--although several companies will
sell you the software bundled with support services. You can also
modify the software in any way you choose, copy it and share it
without restrictions. This freedom acts as an open invitation--some
say challenge--to its users to make improvements. As a result,
thousands of volunteers are constantly working on Linux, adding
new features and winkling out bugs. Their contributions are reviewed
by a panel and the best ones are added to Linux. For programmers,
the kudos of a successful contribution is its own reward. The
result is a stable, powerful system that adapts rapidly to technological
change. Linux is so successful that even IBM installs it on the
computers it sells.
To
maintain this benign state of affairs, open source software is
covered by a special legal instrument called the General Public
License. Instead of restricting how the software can be used,
as a standard software license does, the GPL--often known as a
"copyleft"--grants as much freedom as possible (see
http://www.fsf.org/licenses/gpl.html). Software released under
the GPL (or a similar copyleft licence) can be copied, modified
and distributed by anyone, as long as they, too, release it under
a copyleft. That restriction is crucial, because it prevents the
material from being co-opted into later proprietary products.
It also makes open source software different from programs that
are merely distributed free of charge. In FSF's words, the GPL
"makes it free and guarantees it remains free".
Open
source has proved a very successful way of writing software. But
it has also come to embody a political stand--one that values
freedom of expression, mistrusts corporate power, and is uncomfortable
with private ownership of knowledge. It's "a broadly libertarian
view of the proper relationship between individuals and institutions",
according to open source guru Eric Raymond.
But
it's not just software companies that lock knowledge away and
release it only to those prepared to pay. Every time you buy a
CD, a book, a copy of New Scientist, even a can of Coca-Cola,
you're forking out for access to someone else's intellectual property.
Your money buys you the right to listen to, read or consume the
contents, but not to rework them, or make copies and redistribute
them. No surprise, then, that people within the open source movement
have asked whether their methods would work on other products.
As yet no one's sure--but plenty of people are trying it.
Take
OpenCola. Although originally intended as a promotional tool to
explain open source software, the drink has taken on a life of
its own. The Toronto-based OpenCola company has become better
known for the drink than the software it was supposed to promote.
Laird Brown, the company's senior strategist, attributes its success
to a widespread mistrust of big corporations and the "proprietary
nature of almost everything". A website selling the stuff
has shifted 150,000 cans. Politically minded students in the US
have started mixing up the recipe for parties.
OpenCola
is a happy accident and poses no real threat to Coke or Pepsi,
but elsewhere people are deliberately using the open source model
to challenge entrenched interests. One popular target is the music
industry. At the forefront of the attack is the Electronic Frontier
Foundation, a San Francisco group set up to defend civil liberties
in the digital society. In April of last year, the EFF published
a model copyleft called the Open Audio License (OAL). The idea
is to let musicians take advantage of digital music's properties--ease
of copying and distribution--rather than fighting against them.
Musicians who release music under an OAL consent to their work
being freely copied, performed, reworked and reissued, as long
as these new products are released under the same licence. They
can then rely on "viral distribution" to get heard.
"If the people like the music, they will support the artist
to ensure the artist can continue to make music," says Robin
Gross of the EFF.
It's
a little early to judge whether the OAL will capture imaginations
in the same way as OpenCola. But it's already clear that some
of the strengths of open source software simply don't apply to
music. In computing, the open source method lets users improve
software by eliminating errors and inefficient bits of code, but
it's not obvious how that might happen with music. In fact, the
music is not really "open source" at all. The files
posted on the OAL music website http://www.openmusicregistry.org
so far are all MP3s and Ogg Vorbises--formats which allow you
to listen but not to modify.
It's
also not clear why any mainstream artists would ever choose to
release music under an OAL. Many bands objected to the way Napster
members circulated their music behind their backs, so why would
they now allow unrestricted distribution, or consent to strangers
fiddling round with their music? Sure enough, you're unlikely
to have heard of any of the 20 bands that have posted music on
the registry. It's hard to avoid the conclusion that Open Audio
amounts to little more than an opportunity for obscure artists
to put themselves in the shop window.
The
problems with open music, however, haven't put people off trying
open source methods elsewhere. Encyclopedias, for example, look
like fertile ground. Like software, they're collaborative and
modular, need regular upgrading, and improve with peer review.
But the first attempt, a free online reference called Nupedia,
hasn't exactly taken off. Two years on, only 25 of its target
60,000 articles have been completed. "At the current rate
it will never be a large encyclopedia," says editor-in-chief
Larry Sanger. The main problem is that the experts Sanger wants
to recruit to write articles have little incentive to participate.
They don't score academic brownie points in the same way software
engineers do for upgrading Linux, and Nupedia can't pay them.
It's
a problem that's inherent to most open source products: how do
you get people to chip in? Sanger says he's exploring ways to
make money out of Nupedia while preserving the freedom of its
content. Banner adverts are a possibility. But his best hope is
that academics start citing Nupedia articles so authors can earn
academic credit.
There's
another possibility: trust the collective goodwill of the open
source community. A year ago, frustrated by the treacle-like progress
of Nupedia, Sanger started another encyclopedia named Wikipedia
(the name is taken from open source Web software called WikiWiki
that allows pages to be edited by anyone on the Web). It's a lot
less formal than Nupedia: anyone can write or edit an article
on any topic, which probably explains the entries on beer and
Star Trek. But it also explains its success. Wikipedia already
contains 19,000 articles and is acquiring several thousand more
each month. "People like the idea that knowledge can and
should be freely distributed and developed," says Sanger.
Over time, he reckons, thousands of dabblers should gradually
fix any errors and fill in any gaps in the articles until Wikipedia
evolves into an authoritative encyclopedia with hundreds of thousands
of entries.
Another
experiment that's proved its worth is the OpenLaw project at the
Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School.
Berkman lawyers specialise in cyberlaw--hacking, copyright, encryption
and so on--and the centre has strong ties with the EFF and the
open source software community. In 1998 faculty member Lawrence
Lessig, now at Stanford Law School, was asked by online publisher
Eldritch Press to mount a legal challenge to US copyright law.
Eldritch takes books whose copyright has expired and publishes
them on the Web, but new legislation to extend copyright from
50 to 70 years after the author's death was cutting off its supply
of new material. Lessig invited law students at Harvard and elsewhere
to help craft legal arguments challenging the new law on an online
forum, which evolved into OpenLaw.
Normal
law firms write arguments the way commercial software companies
write code. Lawyers discuss a case behind closed doors, and although
their final product is released in court, the discussions or "source
code" that produced it remain secret. In contrast, OpenLaw
crafts its arguments in public and releases them under a copyleft.
"We deliberately used free software as a model," says
Wendy Selzer, who took over OpenLaw when Lessig moved to Stanford.
Around 50 legal scholars now work on Eldritch's case, and OpenLaw
has taken other cases, too.
"The
gains are much the same as for software," Selzer says. "Hundreds
of people scrutinise the 'code' for bugs, and make suggestions
how to fix it. And people will take underdeveloped parts of the
argument, work on them, then patch them in." Armed with arguments
crafted in this way, OpenLaw has taken Eldritch's case--deemed
unwinnable at the outset--right through the system and is now
seeking a hearing in the Supreme Court.
There
are drawbacks, though. The arguments are in the public domain
right from the start, so OpenLaw can't spring a surprise in court.
For the same reason, it can't take on cases where confidentiality
is important. But where there's a strong public interest element,
open sourcing has big advantages. Citizens' rights groups, for
example, have taken parts of OpenLaw's legal arguments and used
them elsewhere. "People use them on letters to Congress,
or put them on flyers," Selzer says.
The
open content movement is still at an early stage and it's hard
to predict how far it will spread. "I'm not sure there are
other areas where open source would work," says Sanger. "If
there were, we might have started it ourselves." Eric Raymond
has also expressed doubts. In his much-quoted 1997 essay, The
Cathedral and the Bazaar, he warned against applying open source
methods to other products. "Music and most books are not
like software, because they don't generally need to be debugged
or maintained," he wrote. Without that need, the products
gain little from others' scrutiny and reworking, so there's little
benefit in open sourcing. "I do not want to weaken the winning
argument for open sourcing software by tying it to a potential
loser," he wrote.
But
Raymond's views have now shifted subtly. "I'm more willing
to admit that I might talk about areas other than software someday,"
he told New Scientist. "But not now." The right time
will be once open source software has won the battle of ideas,
he says. He expects that to happen around 2005.
And
so the experiment goes on. As a contribution to it, New Scientist
has agreed to issue this article under a copyleft. That means
you can copy it, redistribute it, reprint it in whole or in part,
and generally play around with it as long as you, too, release
your version under a copyleft and abide by the other terms and
conditions in the licence. We also ask that you inform us of any
use you make of the article, by e-mailing copyleft@newscientist.com.
One
reason for doing so is that by releasing it under a copyleft,
we can print the recipe for OpenCola without violating its copyleft.
If nothing else, that demonstrates the power of the copyleft to
spread itself. But there's another reason, too: to see what happens.
To my knowledge this is the first magazine article published under
a copyleft. Who knows what the outcome will be? Perhaps the article
will disappear without a trace. Perhaps it will be photocopied,
redistributed, re-edited, rewritten, cut and pasted onto websites,
handbills and articles all over the world. I don't know--but that's
the point. It's not up to me any more. The decision belongs to
all of us.
i2P
Editor's Note: Please rate this article through the poll at the
bottom of the page.
Further
reading:
For a selection of copylefts, see http://www.eff.org/IP/Open_licenses/open_alternatives.html
The Cathedral and the Bazaar by Eric Raymond is available at http://tuxedo.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/
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