Franz hat den Artikel »Vom Kapitalismus über den Commonismus zum Kommunismus?« von Daniel Scharon aufgetan, dessen Original ziemlich schwer lesbar ist und das ich deshalb reformatiert auf keimform.de übernommen habe. Der Artikel enthält eine Auseinandersetzung mit Oekonux, Freier Software, Peer-Ökonomie, Commonismus und Kommunismus.
Zu diesem Artikel einige Anmerkungen, weil’s so viel ist, in einem extra Artikel.
[Der nachfolgende Artikel ist ein (reformatierter und nun lesbarer) Repost aus dem Blog Marx101. Lizenz: CC-by-sa-nc]
Verfasser: Daniel Scharon
Die zunehmende Verbreitung und Bedeutung von Freier Software rückt die Zusammenhänge ihrer Entstehung sowie ihre grundsätzlichen Bedeutung in den Fokus wissenschaftlichen Untersuchungsinteresses. Doch dabei bleibt es nicht stehen. Freie Software und dessen Entwicklungsmodell wird von vielen als etwas ganz neues angesehen, das dem bisherigen Modell, Software zu produzieren, diametral entgegen steht. (mehr …)
Today, the Oekonux project celebrates its 10-th birthday. Stefan Merten, the main founder and maintainer of the project, wrote on the mailing list:
Ten years ago, at the 21st of July 1999, I sent the first mail using the first Oekonux mailing list which had been just created:
I remember that at this time after ten years of heavy political activism I did not want to engage in something new. I remember that I was tired of this and also bored because after ten years you start to see the repetitions… Well, in the end I did not do what I wanted but instead followed my inner calling and founded Oekonux. That was really Selbstentfaltung 🙂 .
Heute, 9. Juli 2009, halte ich auf Einladung der Informatikfachschaft an der FU Berlin einen Einführungsvortrag zu Oekonux, Freier Software und den Perspektiven einer Freien Gesellschaft:
Ort: SR FB 1.1.16 in der Arnimallee 14, 14195 Berlin (U-Bahnhof Dahlem-Dorf)
Zeit: 16:15 Uhr
This post finally concludes my coverage of the ox4 conference (part 1, part 2, part 3). On the third day, George Dafermos presented a case study of the FreeBSD project. He talked mainly about how the project is structured and how division of labor emerges.
The core team comprises 9 people which are elected by the committers and who, in turn, decide who gets commit rights. There are about 250 committers (who have the right to commit code to the code base) and about 5500 contributors (who have to filter their contributions through one of the committers). This confirms the 1-9-90 rule of thumb: less than 1% of participants steer the project (the core team), less than 10% contribute regularly (the committers), the rest contributes occasionally (the contributors). Officially, the core team also has the task to resolve conflicts, but there are very few conflicts, and usually the involved people resolve them by themselves.
This post continued my coverage of the ox4 conference (part 1, part 2). The topic of Raoul Victor’s talk was Money and Peer Production. He pointed out that money as a dominant social relation emerged only with capitalism. In pre-capitalist societies, most social relations weren’t based on money and symmetric exchange. That’s an important reminder since people often believe that money and markets are more or less neutral tools which can be used for non-capitalist purposes, since they are far older than capitalism. They forget that money and markets have never been the primary means of organizing production in any non-capitalist society, they only played minor, supporting roles. Money cannot become the dominant social form outside of capitalism, and capitalism cannot exist without money.
Raoul also explained that money is just the incorporation of symmetric exchange; you cannot abolish money without abolishing exchange, and vice versa. Money emerges spontaneously when it is needed, e.g. cigarettes were used as a substitute money in times of war. When markets are forbidden but there is no other adequate way of organizing production and distribution, black markets appear—markets in their worst form. So money can only be abandoned by getting rid of its root cause: exchange.
This post continues my coverage of the Fourth Oekonux Conference. Johan Söderberg talked about the Czech open hardware project Ronja. RONJA was developed to provide a cheap, easily producible alternative to Wi-Fi, allowing wireless data transmission between computers. Amazingly, Ronjas use visible light for data transmission, but they are quite fast (10 MBit/s) and allow reliable point-to-point data transmissions, except in case of fog.
The goal of the Ronja project was not only to build affordable open hardware for data transmission, but also to allow the creation of anonymous, censorship-proof networks that can’t be controlled by companies or the state. All design information has been published under the GNU Free Documentation License. The Ronja hardware was sufficiently successful to be employed not only by private people, but also by companies.
From March 27th to 29th, the Fourth Oekonux Conference (announcement) took place in Manchester. It was great to meet some nice people again and to meet many nice and interesting people for the first time (in real life, that is, since I knew many participants already from virtual communications and it was a good experience to finally meet them in person).
Here are some quick notes which I wrote down during the conference sessions and polished and extended a bit afterwards.
During the first day, I didn’t took many notes, since I was busy as session helper (moderating the discussions and so on). Stefan Merten talked about Current limitations of peer production, and ideas on how to overcome them. Since Stefan doesn’t like the idea of social agreements between producers which might involve a coupling between giving and taking (as I discuss in my book), he is stuck with having to hope for technical solutions. Computers are machines for making perfect copies of digital goods, and Stefan hopes for machines can take make perfect copies of physical goods—the old Replicator dream.
Version 1.0 of the 4th Oekonux Conference program has been released. 26 speakers cover a wide range of topics from immaterial to material peer production and theory to practice. As far as titles of the speeches are given — a very interesting program!
The 4th Oekonux Conference is organized by Oekonux project in cooperation with P2P Foundation and takes place in Manchester (UK) from 27th to 29th of march 2009. Conference organizers ask for registration, which would help to prepare the conference.
Download the