The Politicization of Open Source

Someone I respect greatly wrote to me recently against the growing politicization of open source. (Many of the principles I’m talking about are described in Eric Raymond’s The Cathedral & The Bazaar, so its cover is shown here.)

He called Moveon.org "the kiss of death," and called such groups (on both sides of the aisle) a "fever swamp."

The net neutrality debate, my friend feels, is a distraction. Let the Bells do what they want, he says. Instead, restrict the fight to the need for more open spectrum. That way, he feels, we can bypass anyone whose terms and conditions are unacceptable to us.

Stay away from politics, and get back to business as quickly as possible.

I would love to agree. But I can’t.

You can’t ignore a political monopoly and expect it to restrict itself. Right now the so-called Progress & Freedom Foundation, Bell-funded, is gearing up to demand auctions of all spectrum, so as to prevent unlicensed uses from gaining a foothold, ever, and cement the Bell monopoly’s position.

Of course, I did make one statement which my friend might (if he chose) see as a compromise.

That is, the problems of the open Internet are mainly business model problems.

If Level 3, Google, or any other big fiber player were making a big profit selling the bits hidden in the ground, if we could get fat wireless pipes in thousands of cities (as we should be able to do with WiFi and WiMax), then the game would be over, and we could get back to business.

Competition is the ultimate answer. Continuous, non-stop competition, with anti-trust to backstop once the game is over and a monopolist is crowned, is the proper course of action.

The capital requirements for selling fat bit pipes continue to decline. They are not increasing. The only reasons you can’t get such pipes now is that the incumbents hoard their bits, and place political barriers in the path of anyone who might want to compete.

Political barriers.

The way you break down a political barrier is politically. You win an overwhelming majority to your side. You find allies. You create political solutions that destroy the barriers and try to assure they won’t be re-erected. You elect candidates who agree with you and pass laws.

We have a new medium here, one that needs principles to assure its liberty. These are political principles. Principles worth fighting for. Principles that are being undermined, systematically, by the Bell companies and the copyright industries, to the ever-lasting economic detriment of the United States of America.

Let me summarize them:

• Spectrum is an ocean. It is not property. Every user should have a right to use the radio spectrum so long as they don’t interfere with others.
• Network neutrality is imperative. Everyone knows what it is when they see it. The Internet is an edge network that should be run at the edges, not at the center.
• Basic intellectual building blocks should be shared. The larger the commons, the more complex the structures you can build on top of it.

These are the foundations of a fast-growing technology market. These are the political principles of open source.

And they are principles worth fighting for.