Kategorie: English

The inventor of WWW and HTML, Tim Berners-Lee, shows mashups using open data, e.g. OpenStreetMap after the earth quake in Haiti.

Der Erfinder von WWW und HTML, Tim Berners-Lee, zeigt Mashups mit offenen Daten, z.B. OpenStreetMap nach dem Erdbeben in Haiti.

[Deutsche Version beim CommonsBlog]

Reposted from counterpunch

Human solidarity as expressed in the slogan “all for one and one for all” is the foundation of commoning.  In capitalist society this principle is permitted in childhood games or in military combat. Otherwise, when it is not honored in hypocrisy, it appears in the struggle contra capitalism or, as Rebecca Solnit shows, in the disasters of fire, flood, or earthquake.

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Great video on openness, open design, and sharing — created during the Open Design Workshop at the Betahaus as part of Social Media Week Berlin 2010 [via].

Delivered in Beta from KS12 on Vimeo.

[via OnTheCommons, deutsche Übersetzung unten]

The vocabulary of the commons is expanding as people increasingly realize the practical value of this concept. No longer simply a noun, the commons now is talked about as a verb and adjective.

Commons: What we share. Creations of both nature and society that belong to all of us equally, and should be maintained for future generations.

Commons-based society: A society whose economy, political culture and community life revolve around promoting a diverse variety of commons.

Commons-based solutions: Distinctive innovations and policies that remedy problems by helping people manage resources cooperatively and sustainably.

Commoners: In modern use, the people who use a particular commons; especially those dedicated to reclaiming and restoring the commons.

Commoning: A verb to describe the social practices used by commoners in the course of managing shared resources and reclaiming the commons. Popularized by historian Peter Linebaugh.
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Adrian Bowyer gave a talk at FOSDEM 2010 in Brussels about RepRap, the cool GPL licenced 3D-printer which could (partly) replicate itself. Watch the talk and learn, why personal fabrication will succeed over old industrial mass production, even in its decentralized form, and why personal fabrication will succeed in the run for creativity [via].

The vision of post-scarcity is a popular but controversial meme in the debates of peer production. Post-scarcity envisions a world where everything is free as in free beer, where no payment or accounting is requirement for anything you use. Post-scarcity ideas usually rely very strongly on advanced technology, postulating that almost everything can be automated—or at least, everything that’s not fun and pleasant to do. Post-scarcity theorists also believe that advanced technology can provide enough natural resources and enough energy in order to satisfy everyone’s needs and wishes, possibly through extracting resources from space or through speculative future technologies such as nuclear fusion power.

A weak form of post-scarcity thinking is present in one of the founding documents of the free software movement, Richard Stallman’s GNU Manifesto (“weak” because there are still necessary tasks that are neither fun nor automated away):

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In a recent post Oekonux participant Raoul Victor from France deals with the question, if it is possible to have »no commercial injustice«. Here is the main part of the post (full length here in RTF).

The problem is that the main source of “injustice” is commerce, trade itself. For two fundamental reasons: the first is general and concerns any symmetric exchange; the second is more specific to capitalism. Vollständigen Artikel lesen »

[Deutschsprachige Version]

Commons are common pool resources. Commons are common goods. Commons are social relationships. You can find all of these descriptions for the term. Which is the correct one? All three versions are valid—at the same time!

The word „common“ is the best starting point for the analysis. The common thing within a commons are the resources, which are used and cared for, are the goods resulting from joint activities, and are the social relationships emerging from acting together. These three aspects are so different for all commons, that no one could describe them in a reasonably complete manner.

Commons are at odds with commodities, although a commodity is a good which is produced in a specific social form using resources. But it is usual that traditional economics only consider resources as social forms of production in a marginal way or even not in any way. I will try to overcome this limitation by using the following taxonomy of goods [Illustration 1]. I decide to put the concept of „good“ into the center, while describing from the triple definition explained above: as a common good, as a resource and as a social form.

Illustration 1: Proposed taxonomy of „good“

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[Deutsche Fassung]

The following manifesto is the result of a one and a half year process, where dozens of participants from politics, unions, sciences, the free culture and software movement, the environmental movement, economy as well as from art and culture discussed about commons and the relevance for humankind. It was developed in the context of the Interdisciplinary political salons of the Heinrich Böll Foundation‘s „Time for commons“.

Below, the entire text of the manifesto is documented, which is also available as a nicely layouted PDF (4 pages) at Commonsblog. Vollständigen Artikel lesen »

[Diesen Artikel gibt es auch auf Deutsch.]

It’s probably safe to say that the copyleft principle has been essential for the success of free software. Copyleft means that all versions of a software or document will remain free, preventing companies from creating “value-added” versions of free programs and selling them as proprietary, non-free software. The GNU General Public License (GPL)—the first and most well-known incorporation of the copyleft principle—is used for about 50–70% of all free programs, making it more popular than all other free software licenses together.

At first sight, the situation in the newly emerging field of free and open hardware might seem similar—here, copyleft licenses such as the GPL and the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License (BY-SA) are very popular too (see below for a more detailed analysis). But actually, the situation is very different for hardware design, since copyleft relies on copyright, and hardware is (in most cases) not protected by copyright law.
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