Software Free

Ignoring the parodistic language, that is:

Essentially, with the Internet, capitalism gifts the masses with a false commons where people can work, off the clock, creating information and relationships that the ruling class can enclose, appropriate, commodify, and sell back to us at a later date. It’s a way of letting the process of primitive accumulation work as a perpetual, and because of the stagnation of the economies in the advanced capitalist countries, vital, supplement to the mechanism of exploitation, and one that should be seen alongside the other forms of primitive accumulation that are occurring right now and are, for sure, much more important: the direct seizure of Iraqi resources, the copyrighting and commodifying of the material of our bodies, and most obviously, the accumulation by dispossession that is occurring in Africa, in China, in Latin America, as capitalism pushes to its limits and attempts to expunge from the earth any trace of commonly-held land.

One of the great questions of contemporary American political economy is, who shall control the commons? “The commons” refers to that vast range of resources that the American people collectively own, but which are rapidly being enclosed: privatized, traded in the market, and abused. The process of converting the American commons into market resources can accurately be described as enclosure because, like the movement to enclose common lands in eighteenth-century England, it involves the private appropriation of collectively owned resources.

If you have some interest in the philosophy of Free Software, Read more - Bollier’s essay provides the sort of Advance Organizers that educational psychologists talk of when learning a new concept! Be sure to read even if you have no interest in Free Software - it won’t be disappointing!

Here is RMS’s response to the essay.

"...As the world faces a wave of new enclosures brought about by globalisation we’ll hopefully examine some of the history of the ‘commons’, their enclosure and the spirited resistance to private ownership over the centuries..."

A year ago, I wrote about the plight of urban trees. At the time, I never imagined we'd have a solution as far-sighted as this:

A plane tree in central London has been valued at £750,000 under a new system that puts a "price" on trees. How?

A six-foot-wide plane in Berkeley Square, Mayfair, is thought to be the UK's most valuable tree.

Large, mature, city trees like this one are being blamed - sometimes wrongly and often fatally - for damage to neighbouring properties.

But it is hoped a new valuation system will make it harder for "expensive" trees to be felled due to doubtful suspicions they are to blame for subsidence.

...

Putting a price on a tree changes people's attitudes and if developers think in financial terms, then a community asset must be valued in the same currency, he says.

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Source: open...