The Two Economies (Transcription)

Graham SeamanMail link

Or: Why the washing machine question is the wrong question

Transcription by Joel Schlosberg <jrs295 AT nyu DOT edu>, based on the audio recording of the talk


Note: There is also the paper of the talkLocal link.

Announcer: That's Graham Seaman, one of the most prominent members of the English Oekonux list, and one of the persons who is wading through all the German stuff on the German list, and he will give us a talk called "The Two Economies". Actually, I didn't read very much of his abstract, so I can't say very much about that, but...

Seaman: I don't know how many of you were in the last talk as well, but the last talk kind of ended with the speaker saying that the behavior he was talking about was typical of the Internet and it was something that didn't translate outside it. Well, what I want to talk about in this talk is how it might translate outside into the rest of the world. The last speaker was coming from a traditional economic background; his talk was all based on those terms, rationality and so on. My background is more Marxist, so I tend to use those terms. I don't think my argument is specifically tied to that, I think you can present it in other terms as well, but it's what I'm used to and it's what I find natural, so those are the terms that I've been using.

The second thing I should say is I had a too-fancy presentation arranged on the laptop, and it only worked with one version of the software. We don't have the same version here, so I'm going to be doing everything on the board and it's going to be very low-tech. But I don't plan to write very much on the board, so unfortunately you won't get, for non-English speakers, you won't have much written help with the talk.

So if I'm talking too fast, or not making any sense, please stop me. I would rather have interruptions in the middle than have all the questions at the end in one block. Part of the reason for this is: when you give a talk, you have to present it as though you have an argument, there's a thesis, there's a beginning, there's a middle, there's a conclusion. So I've done that. But in fact, what I have is a series of questions, where there are things that I'm not sure about, and I'd like the chance to ask other people what they think about the same problems. These are particularly things that relate to questions that have come up on the Oekonux list, so some of them will be very familiar to Oekonux people; there's questions that have been argued about before. I read the German list a little, but not very much, so it may well be there are questions that are being settled on the Oekonux list in German that I don't know.

So, looking at the way most things, most of the economy is organized at the moment, the production of material goods, you have most material goods being made by people working for a wage. They're being paid to do the work. They have to work for a wage, because in general, people don't own the things to make other things with, they don't own the means of production. Somebody else owns the means of production. The reason for making things is directly to make a profit. The things may be useful, but the immediate motive for making something is because the owner of the means of production can make a profit. And it is made by actually selling the product, so the product isn't available for everybody to take unless they have money to exchange for it. And finally, producers coordinate things by one another, not by talking to one another. So if I'm a bread manufacturer and you're a bread manufacturer, I don't say, "I'm making so much white bread, will you make so much white breads, brown breads", and together we satisfy everybody. We both produce whatever we're going to produce, and all the communication is indirect, through money, through prices. If I produce too much white bread, then the price of white bread goes down, and I know that's a signal to reduce my production of white bread.

Okay, so that is the standard capitalist mode of production, it's what I consider the essential parts of it. You can take every single point on that and match it against the way things can be done, in production of non-material goods. Not the way things have to be done, or they're always done, but can be done, and are done for some things, free software in particular. So people producing free software don't have to be working for a wage. They can be working just because they want to. No more reason than that: they want to do something. They are generally people who own the means of producing software themselves; most people, not everybody, but most people producing free software are working on their own computer they have sitting at home. I realize that's not the rule, but it's possible, and it's quite common. The reason they're making it isn't to make a profit, it's to produce something which is useful for them, or useful for somebody else, or just because it's pleasurable. And, other people can use it if they choose to. There is no payment involved with it. Finally, people communicate with one another, not via money - people don't decide whether to produce this piece of software or not to produce this piece of software according to the price of software of a particular type of software; they decide whether or not to through communication with other people. The communication is not mediated by money, it's mostly mediated by technology. Mostly, you do not have people sitting in a room and discussing with one another; there is still mediation going on there, and this type is technological rather than financial.

So described like that, you could say that's two very simplified descriptions of two different modes of production. But one of them is a complete mode of production, one of them englobes everything, you can have an entire society; we have an entire society that has been run for a long time the first way. We have a fragment of a society that is run the second way. It's not complete. It applies to a very limited range of goods: immaterial goods, and not even all of that. So the question is, "Is this the kernel of something new, that can expand to grow out and take over the rest of production? Is it possible for it to expand into other types of production, or not?" And, this question on the Oekonux list, I think, is sometimes called "the washing machine problem" it's sometimes called "the bread roll problem": "Can you produce things like washing machines, which are generally not interesting to make, made on a large scale with very repetitive work? Can they possibly be produced on those principles?"

To which there are at least two answers which I don't like, and one which I think is possible, but I have a lot of questions about it. Two I don't like: the first temptation is to say, "Well, what makes it possible to have this new mode of production for immaterial goods?" and it's some of the things I have listed: communication with large numbers of people mediated by technology; the fact that it's possible to actually own your own means of production; you're not dependent on somebody else to get access to a computer most of the time. So there's a temptation to say, "Well, if that works for immaterial goods, how about material goods, can we have some kind of magic technological jump that will give us something in every home that will turn out a washing machine, or a bread roll, or whatever we like." So there's one answer to this question which talks about fabbers, which are, as far as I know, machines generally used purely for prototyping, but in computer control you may have an import which is plastic and which is shaped by laser and so on. So there are possible glimpses of technologies that might give you the ability to break other kinds of production, apart from production of immaterial goods, break them free of this kind of unpleasantness associated with repetitive factory-type work. I might want to design my own machine, I design my own machine using a fabber.

To me that's magic that I don't believe in, and I don't believe it's going to happen. I want to know who's going to make the fabbers, I want to know how it is that they're not going to be incredibly wasteful compared with mass production. Similar things apply to energy; there are people on the list suggesting that maybe there is something, some kind of perpetual motion machine that will give us free energy that doesn't cost anything. I think that once you get into this kind of discussion, there is a real temptation to look for magic solutions. So that's one answer that I don't believe in.

The second answer that I don't believe in - I think it's possible, but it's, well - Look what's happened before: there was a time when the economy was almost entirely agricultural. Everything centered on who owned the land, how much food was produced. Now it's obvious that people need to eat, so that's going to be permanent; that's always going to be the case. It turned out not to be the case, because when factory-machine production arose, it started to dominate the economy in such a way that the farming side of it became almost irrelevant. Farming gradually became influenced by the same techniques, so that farming products became cheaper and cheaper. So that it's no longer the case that who owns farming land is something that decides policies of government. Obviously, it has an effect, especially in the moment with the Socialist discussions on the common agricultural policy, and so on. But it's not the central issue the way it once was. So there is a second argument that says the same thing will happen with immaterial goods. Material goods will become secondary: they'll become so cheap and easy to produce that nobody really cares about them; and all the important issues in society will be about producing immaterial goods, about ideas, about designs, about software, and so on. That idea I kind of maybe find believable in the very, very long-term, hundreds of years; but I find it unpleasant.

[Audience member speaks]

Seaman: That work in immaterial goods.

[Audience member speaks]

Seaman: I still find it unpleasant. Maybe I'm wrong, but looking back at what happened: What happened to the people who used to work on the farms? What happens now in most of the countries that are outside the old capitalist developed countries whose families have been working on farms in the past? You have extreme poverty; you have mass migrations to slums in cities; you have desperation; you have complete non-adaptation to the new way of doing things, and it takes several generations before people fit into that and have steady jobs and steady incomes, and the nice car and so on. It just seems to me that if that's a solution, I don't like it. I can see that it's possible.

[Audience member speaks]

Seaman: Yes. I'm saying out of the possible solutions, how does this spread? The first is technological, the fabber idea. The second is social, and it's a social idea I don't like. The third possibility is the one that I want to talk about, which again is social, but it means free software somehow going outside itself and finding allies in new areas. Obviously, this is not a complete answer to the question in any way, but it's an opinion about directions that it's possible to prefer things to go in.

Looking at how things have changed from one means of production to another - sorry, one mode of production to another mode of production in the past, I don't think anybody really understands what happened with the end of the Roman Empire, and how that went into feudalism. So the only real example we have is what happened in England in the 16th and 17th centuries and other countries at slightly different times: transition from there to the situation we've been in for the last couple of hundred years. I'd say that there are a few elements there you can look at there that I think are repeating themselves now. I hope there are no historians in this audience, because it's an incredibly distorted view of history, but I think that given a couple of hours I could probably justify it a bit more, but I try not to go on for a couple of hours. The first thing is: you had production, non-agricultural production, dominated by the guilds; guilds producing large numbers of apprentices who were supposed to go on to become journeyers, who were supposed to go on to become masters, and so on. That gradually separated itself out until you had rich guilds and poor guilds. You had people dealing purely with money buying the produce, who became almost completely independent of the guilds. The end result of that was that by the early 17th century in England, you had large numbers of people who were working outside the guilds who were small employers, who were making things outside the guilds, which was illegal. They were evading guild inspections. When people came to see, "Where you were getting your raw materials from, are you buying them from authorized guilds?", they would be arrested if they were found doing it. The system was producing people who had done apprenticeships, people who had become journeyers, people who found their way blocked. They couldn't go any further. So there were people who couldn't survive in the old system, who were trying to make new ways of surviving. A lot of those people in England then became supporters of the Levelers, the extreme faction of the left during the English Revolution. A large proportion of them were from East London, Suffolk in particular, were small employers who were working completely outside the guild system. And saw that the only way forward for them personally was destruction of the guild system.

So I say that's the first prerequisite - that you have people, that you have the old system actually producing the situation where there are people who need to get out of it, people who do not "fit" with the old system. Secondly, once these new people exist, they start infecting the old system. The people with money, the traders, the merchants, didn't really care where the products came from; they knew that technically they shouldn't be buying from anybody but the authorized guilds, but as soon as money is involved, then you have some element of a market, you have people trying to buy things as cheaply as they can; and if the person who is selling things most cheaply is the person who's outside the guilds, then they're not going to care about the law. So, you have the old system also starts getting infected by the new one. And as the new economy grew, the old economy found it just couldn't keep up with it. Those small employers who started out in the early 17th century - by the next century, there were some of them quite large employers of the first factories, needing factory workers. Now, if you have a factory with even 100 workers, which is not a very big factory, the people in there cannot be apprentices who are going to go on to become journeymen, who are going to go on to become masters. It's just impossible. So the whole guild system could not compete with them; the whole guild system could not adapt itself to factory work. You had new technologies which could not be used by the old system.

Now I claim that there are bits of elements similar to that in the present as well. You have the old system becoming, the old system first generating the new one. It's becoming increasingly hard for the old system to produce software products. There are many products - especially ones that require cooperation of some kind, that require some kind of sharing, even commercially, that simply can't be produced under commercial constraints. And you see attempts at organization of standards bodies purely by software companies with one another, and the things break down. [some words are hard to hear] They are just inherently very, very bad at doing anything that requires real cooperation with one another. So you have some kinds of products, and I think this is software products and I think it's going to increase in the future, that will exist as free software that do not exist as proprietary software, and won't ever exist as proprietary software. Second, and this is especially for Stefan here, I would say that as software industries become the leading sector of the economy, in many ways they're a sector which is not really producing profits; they're a sector which is taking profits from other parts of the economy. When, say, you have a company which is using something simple like Word on a large scale in their offices, the more they pay for Word, the more their profits are reduced, the more the software houses' profits are increased; but it's just the reshuffling of profits from one sector to another. It's not, on the whole - commercial software, I do not believe, is on the whole, a large-scale creator of profits in itself. It's a reorganizer, redistributor of profits held by monopoly and the law of copyright, though this is not the standard Oekonux opinion, and I know Stefan disagrees totally with this point. I said I wouldn't say much.

[Audience member speaks]

Seaman: Well for example, if have a factory, if I own a factory making washing machines and I have offices that need standard software: I have spreadsheets, I have Word, I have et cetera, I have Windows itself, which I've paid the licenses for. That washing machine company makes a profit. The part of the profit that goes in overheads - I have to spend so much on my administration, on my staff costs, and part of that is going to software. If you've gone back, say, 30 years, I would have had a typing pool that sat there; I would have employed maybe 50 women - if it's a large factory, I employ 50 women - who sit there and type all day. Okay. So a proportion of my profits is being subtracted to go there. Somebody comes along and says, "Oh, you can do that with software: you can get rid of your staff who have been employed just to do that; you can spread the job out so that everybody does a bit of it; and you can save yourself money." Because the software would cost less than it costs to employ the typing pool. So, I have a kind of upper bound on the price of the software; if the supplier says "I'll charge you so much it costs - I'll charge you as much as it costs to employ your typing pool", I won't pay. So the price has got to be lower than that. It's got to be less than it would cost me, say, to employ somebody to write my own software to do it. So there are a series of bounds, limits on how much the price can be. But it's not completely limited;

[Audience member speaks]

Seaman: So my washing machine company is making profits from selling washing machines; part of that profit is going to Microsoft or whoever. If that's within one country, what is also happening is you have entire countries which do not produce software. So in that case you have the profits coming from an entire country being moved out into the States or into parts of Europe and so on. So that's where the profits are coming from.

[Audience member speaks]

Seaman: It's similar but it's not - I don't know. Can I spend five minutes on this and add it to the end of my allowed time?

[Audience member speaks]

Seaman: Yes, it's similar, but it's also different. If I buy a machine to help, say the computer itself; I've bought two things in my office; I now have - instead of my typing pool I have 10 computers and I have Word, et cetera, or these computers. Now, not allowing for Moore's law, just saying I could potentially keep the computers for the next 20 years - eventually they'll wear out, the cathode ray tubes will break down; the chips will start overheating and so on; they'll need to be replaced. You can handle that perfectly conventionally in terms of Marxist economics by saying, "that's fixed capital; the value of the fixed capital bit by bit has been lost". It's not actually being transferred to my profit though, because it's still part of my office, it's not...

[Audience member speaks]

Seaman: Yeah.

[Audience member speaks]

Seaman: In production. I'm not talking about production. I'm talking about the administrative office. This is something that is only necessary to keep the accounts because I have to sell it, my washing machines for a certain price.

[Audience member speaks]

Seaman: Well, yes. It's the combination of the two things that go completely together. That it doesn't wear out and that it's always reproducible. So I could just make another copy any time I need another copy. That's the core part of my argument, yeah. I realize there are complications with this, but I'm not really capable of dealing with the whole thing about what is productive labor, what is non-productive labor in the office without writing a book about it; I don't know if anybody is. Yeah, sorry...

[Audience member speaks]

Seaman: Personally - and this is, again, pretty much the same in spirit - I think that the value of that software is the value of the CD that it's on, it's the value of the work that went into copying the CD, and so on; and is absolutely minimal. So, in my opinion, nearly all of the price of that comes purely from laws which allow monopolies over software, it comes from copyright laws and so on. That's what gives firms the ability to charge any price over the cost of the CD. If you go to Russia, you could go to Moscow and look around the markets. You'll find software - I don't know if this is still true, but the last time I was there was a few years ago - people really did not care about laws on copyright and so on. So they would freely copy software, and you would find whatever piece of software you wanted in the market very, very easily: perfectly good, no problems with it; and it would sell for a price. The price was quite small. Maybe it's fifty Euros, or a hundred - do I mean 50 Euros? - no, not fifty Euros, sorry - converting from pounds to Euros. Maybe a Euro for a CD, or 5 Euros for a CD, something like this. So I think that, yes, there is an actual price, and that was it. That's the price of the true market, the market where copyright laws and so on have been taken away. As soon as you add copyright laws in, then the prices goes back up to 500 pounds for a piece of software. Yeah, Stefan's...

[Stefan speaks]

Seaman: I think that there's two separate things there. First, I disagree with the second thing; I don't think that's the reason for most software industry in Russia. I think there is a software industry in Russia, and that it's just not that kind of software industry. The first thing is a real problem for me. In my opinion, which I cannot justify very, very well, but my guess is that producing software is something like, say, designing this tap. Writing software is something like designing this tap. When I buy the tap, I really do not expect to be taking much account into the work that went into creating this design. Sure, there was work that went into creating this design, but it's quite a small thing, compared with what... I mean, for me as a consumer, what I think I'm buying is, I am buying the matter that went into this, somebody's work in the mine to dig out the metal that went into this; I'm paying for the cost of the machines that stamped this out; I'm paying for the wages that were paid to the man who has to stand by the machine stamping these out all day; and for me the design, I think, is going to be a very small part of this cost. And I think, for me I think the same thing applies to software. The CD, the labor that goes into ... for me, it's more of a miracle the labor that goes into creating the CD, because I have this piece of complex chemical, stamped in an incredibly intricate pattern, that is produced by machines which are so easy to use you can just set it. I don't need to do anything; I can send the electronic part of the machine that produces the CD. For me, that's the miracle: the fact that that can be done so cheaply, for so little money. I don't find the fact that the value of the design of something is so small surprising.

[Audience member speaks]

Seaman: I'm only talking about commodity software. I don't mean the majority of software is written for a specific purpose; it's written to do something by somebody who's paid a wage to do that. That is not what I'm talking about; I'm talking about software that is sold on the market. So I'm talking about things like Word, which is sold millions and millions and millions of times. I'm not talking about something that one author [words that are hard to hear] package which only makes sense for my firm, and no other firm, that was written by my employee for my firm. That's a separate issue that I...

[Audience member speaks]

Seaman: Okay, so...

[Audience member speaks]

Seaman: Okay. I'm happy to talk after that. As you can hear, I'm not - I don't have something completely coherent to say in answer to those questions, just a set of opinions.

[Audience member speaks]

Seaman: Okay, so you have a market; you have some elements of the old system being unable to actually continue making a profit in the leading sector of its economy without the help of quite repressive, and increasingly repressive laws, that as far as I can see are going to go on to become even more repressive and interfering in ever-larger areas of peoples' lives, that go well beyond these non-material products themselves. You have people working completely outside that system producing products which become very difficult for the old system to produce and you have the old system being forced by standard economic reasons to take up the new products. You have free software working its way into the old economy, spreading throughout it at quite a high rate, not just people; partly this is because firms are, especially over the last couple of years, have been forced to reduce their IT costs, so there is a big temptation, especially for the bigger firms, to say "Well, why can't we use free software instead of paying for the new Microsoft licensing system?" So that's happening. You have companies that are starting to say, "How can we as a small company compete with the big software houses?" One way to do that is to use free software as a kind of tool for competition. So you have an increasing amount; and this applies to IBM, which in a sense is an absolutely enormous company, and in another sense, compared to Microsoft, in one specific market is quite a small company. If they want to compete with Microsoft in that area, then using free software is a useful tool for them. But in doing so, they bring free software practices inside their own companies; they start to lose control. This gets to a point where, to some extent, managers just can no longer make arbitrary decisions about the form of software, about the contents, about the way it's developed, because they can't alienate the external people who work with them; they have to conform to their ideas, practices of free software developers. So you have the new system spreading back into the old, and starting to affect it.

But the new system is still very, very much dependent on the old one, because the new system is still only a fragment; it's only affecting immaterial goods at the moment, not material goods. For each one of those points that make free software a different mode of production or a fragment of a different mode of production, different from the old one, you have a dependence. You have people working without wages for those people: they need to eat. They need money. They need food, they need an income from the old system. That is the most obvious, biggest dependence. The second one is, it depends on people owning their own means of production, having their own computers. Now that means mass production; that means the computers have to be so cheap that I can be paid, I can take the price of the computer out of my wage without really suffering from it. So that means that either somebody, somewhere else in the world, is working for very low wages, or you have production on a very, very large scale to reduce the costs, and that means maybe somebody not working for low wages, but somebody probably doing quite a boring job creating them. So that's the second dependence. The third one is communication, is mediation by technology. I don't own the technology. If I want to talk to you over the Internet, then I'm going over wires that we don't own together, which means there's always potential for somebody else in the middle to say, "Let's interfere with this communication in some way. Let's not allow encryption on it". Or "Let's charge people so much that they can't afford to use it." Or whatever. It's an aspect that is not under our control.

[Audience member speaks]

Seaman: No, what I want to do is, I should have said in the beginning: this is in three parts. That was the introduction. The next thing I want to do is to look at those dependencies and finally suggest some things that are happening to change the situation. Out of those dependencies, I'm going to talk mainly about work. But the other two - the second two dependencies - the manufacturer and the networks - aren't stable. The networks are the smallest of our problems in a way because the solution is already potentially visible and it is wireless. In an emergency we have FidoNet. There was FidoNet before. We can create something to bypass it. If they really, really somehow mess things up for us in the existing physical infrastructure, we have ways around it. And we may have ways around it even without doing that. We may be able to create our own through wireless. You want to talk to [person's name that is hard to hear] about Consume, which is a London-based organization who are trying to network London in a wireless way, independent of the commercial Internet, then okay, fine. Then you have two people who are really - one person who's really involved with that at the moment here so ask them about it.

Okay, so the first of the dependences is what I want to talk most about, is work, and how that affects free software. This is one point where having the overhead would be really a help. There's a chart in the FLOSS survey which shows what people working in free software do. And they - I guess everybody knows the free software - the FLOSS survey; some of you were here this morning when Richard Ghosh was talking about it. This was a survey of software developers which included some questions about what people did for a living. And, in my opinion, was, I think, confirmed that this morning, that people who write free software, writing free software is strongly correlated with both working in the software industry and working in the parts of the software industry which uses free software to some extent. It's not 100% correlated, and there are a small minority of people who are not in that situation, but generally, creating free software correlates with working in the software industry. So how to [some words that are hard to hear] the free software writers? [Sound of writing on a board] They surveyed, they had employed 65% who were so small I missed it, unemployed 2%, students, this chunk, and "I do not work, but I'm not unemployed" was another 2%, and the remaining - the second percent were self-employed, which was 14%. Now that is a very large proportion compared with most; if you took - I'm not sure what it is exactly, especially here in Germany, what the proportion of self-employed people there is taken over the economy as a whole. It is not going to be 14%. This survey was mostly Europeans: they had 12% of American respondents; I think if they had gotten the equivalent American jobs, I would guess the self-employed fraction would be even larger than this. There are a very large proportion of developers who move between programming for a company and becoming consultants, and back into programming for a company, to doing freelance to having small companies of their own, people setting up companies who have 2 or 3 people, and so on.

[Audience member speaks]

Seaman: At the moment it's not self-sustaining. Yes, I agree with you [on] that and I think that a big problem is to make it self-sustaining. At the moment, I'm saying that it's not self-sustaining. Because it's not self-sustaining it's dependent, heavily dependent on the old system, and in ways that affect it quite strongly. So what I want to talk about now is how it affects it, and this I think is one of the ways. Now this is something that I think, again, you may very well disagree with this, but I don't know, I wanted to ask people what they thought about this idea.

So you have free software developers [sound of writing on a board]. You have employed people. A subset of that are free software developers. A subset of that are programmers; a subset of those are free software developers and you have - whoops, this... This one should be smaller than that one. Maybe I'll take [sound of erasing and rewriting] Now, [sound of writing] So now programmers, and in there is a subset of those producing free software. So there's at least two different groups involved. People producing free software generally feel themselves to be a kind of unity. We are a group in ourselves.

Looking at self-employed generally - the politics of the self-employed, small businessmen, this is, if you were really going to go to town on Marxist terminology, we'd say "petit-bourgeoisie". What the typical political, general ideologies of the petit-bourgeoisie is probably going to be fairly conservative on the whole. We do have some radicals, but the kind of radical ideas you get from that area were, traditionally I'd suppose, Proudhon, to give an obvious 19th-century example coming from that area of the coppers, the ideologies of the coppers and so on. Ideas of, "We want complete freedom from state control. We don't want to be paying taxes for these scrounges. We don't want the state interfering with our goods. We can survive on our own, thank you very much". You get these on the radical end of this, this social group, you tend to get quite anarchist ideas of a very particular type which I guess nowadays, especially in the States would be described as Libertarian and usually with the word capitalist added. Libertarian capitalist ideas of freedom, freedom from taxes in particular, but freedom in general, the freedom from state interference. This is supposed to be self-employed, small, very small businesses, people working freelance, surviving on their own.

[Audience member speaks]

Seaman: Okay, yeah, okay, forget this. This was - I don't care what we call these people, I'm saying that I think that you can treat it as a social group. It's not a coherent social group, but it's not the same; taking that group as a whole, you tend to have different political attitudes from people in steady jobs, especially people in State employment, people in the universities and so on, who tend to have different political attitudes. In the States, you get people on this side, maybe if they're on the left they tend to be liberal in the American sense of "liberal", and - say you've got people working in MIT like Chomsky, or Stallman and so on; you tend to get fairly left-wing - not necessarily radical, but fairly left-wing in general type of attitude, which is not anti-state in the way that the groups on the other side are often anti-state, even though they're not rabid anarchists who go around throwing bombs or anything, there is just in general attitude against State interference which isn't necessarily present here.

[Audience member speaks]

Seaman: I work for a company with four employees. We used to have nearly twenty; now we have four. We worry an awful lot about profits and how the company will survive, how to pay our wages next month. I would classify my particular company in this group; although I'm an employee, I think it's very small and that my employer works with me. He programs as well; we generally work together; but he is my employer. He pays me a wage, and if we're not making a profit he doesn't pay me a wage. And that's happened; that why we're four and not twenty. So that's one person, so I don't know how... I do know personally quite a large number of people in similar situations, so... OK, this is slightly... can I ask how many people know people working in programming in that kind of situation: very small company, but... How many people know programmers working in small companies is what I'm asking. Ten, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, right, thank you. How many people know programmers working in places like IBM and so on, places where programmers have to turn up every morning in a tie, who work in a big office in a cubicle-type system? One, two, three, four, five. Okay, so in this random selection we have a slight majority for that side. I don't know if that means anything.

[Audience member speaks]

Seaman: Do you think that my description of Libertarian capitalist ideas is going more with this kind of group, including your completely free-lance guy applies, or not? Do you think that the completely free-lance guy is just not in this picture?

[Audience member speaks]

Seaman: Yes. So there's definitely a left and a right side to here. I would say there is [sound of writing on a board] on this side labor traditions of all times. Unemployed, liberal as a central, and there are also conservative traditions. So there are range on both sides. I think - in my opinion, my guess is that free software producers are generally pushed towards the more left-wing of... that's that; that's a big question. Why it goes that way, and not that way. I don't know. Maybe, I think, this is also very biased, but a lot of my impressions of what I read about what's happening in the States rather than in Europe, just because more is published.

[Audience member speaks]

Seaman: People move; this is in no way rigid. People move across between the boundaries back and forth all the time. The thing that I'm trying to get to with this, though, is to say that, "Is it possible that this then reacts back, [sound of writing on a board] not here?" Now this is no way; these free software and open source in no way no way coincide with Libertarian capitalism and liberal MIT-type ideas, but they have some kind of relationship with... they are... These are independent ideas; these are ideas of the free software movement. I would guess that they're affected by having - in fact we have large numbers of Libertarian capitalists, or we have large numbers of Richard Stallman types around, not that there are large numbers of Richard Stallman [laughter]... say "Thank God!"... but there are people sort of working in universities and so on who have similar ideas about other parts, other aspects of life, not the free software side.

So, at the risk of being even more ridiculous than saying that these people are petit-bourgeois, saying this is an alliance of two fragments of a class. It's a "workers and peasants" alliance. But it's an alliance of a sort. It's an alliance between people who are making their incomes from two slightly different sources. Although they're both working within software, they're making their incomes from slightly different sources. But it's an alliance that holds together. It has a permanent tension in it, because of the influence of the ideas from outside. This tension between open source and free software is there, and it's going to stay there, because it's renewed by its dependence on their jobs, and people [making a] living through actually slightly different situations from one another, outside free software. The tensions is going to stay there. There's no point in saying, "Let's destroy the idea of open source because it's wrong, and we all know that free software is the true savior". There is no point in saying, "Free software completely destroys the possibility of making a living out of open source software, let's kill Richard Stallman". Neither is going to go away. There's permanently reproduced as part of this alliance between two slightly different groups which holds together in spite of it. And that alliance that these two ends of the spectrum reflect the fact that this is an actual working alliance of two groups. It's possible that it will get pushed too far, and at some point, it will split. And I really hope that doesn't happen. I don't think it's particularly likely to happen. This - I said at the beginning that a lot of this is reflected in the arguments with Oekonux - this is partly an answer to the Lessig argument. Not an answer but a question. It's this possible valid, other way of looking at it. Not saying, "These people are right and those people are wrong," but "This relates two slightly different ways of making a living, of surviving, and still managing to produce free software". And it's going to stay there, so there's no point in one side trying to kill off the other. It doesn't mean that it can't - if Richard Stallman stops arguing for free software, then we have a major problem, because that would also kill off this alliance. If Eric Raymond gets shot by some idiot on the farther right... [laughter] Well, maybe not so much [words that are hard to hear]. Anyway, so that's one impact of the fact - as you were saying - this is not self-sustaining, it is dependent on the old economy. So the old economy has an impact back on it, even into the ideology of the free software.

The next thing I wanted to point out - this one I can't really draw on the board, I'm afraid, so I'll just tell you what I did. Free software is not totally independent of the business cycle. I thought it might be. I thought it might - well, I wanted to - when I originally started this, I thought I'll do something to show that although there is a dependence, free software does not suffer from a business cycle; that's already something to show that it's a slightly different mode of production. To me, that's the key, recognizing thing about capitalism: it has this weird business cycle which nobody at all seems to be able to explain properly, but it's there. So what I did was, I went to Freshmeat and got all the stats for Freshmeat of the projects that were added over the life of Freshmeat, to see whether it reflected the current downturn in the economy and in IT and commercial IT in particular, hoping that it would show a line like that. But it didn't. The first thing I did was, I looked at free software, just entries into Freshmeat. There's a period, going up to 1999, where it's very low and it suddenly goes up; that's just Freshmeat; they had a change in the layout and in doing so they destroyed a lot of their own data, the time stamps on their database entries, that's my guess. So there's the first part of the data which is rubbish, and then from late 1999 to now, it's flat, almost flat; a round, steady 500 new projects added per month. A lot of rubbish on Freshmeat; there are things that get on there that never get updated; but this was already taking out anything that didn't have a free software license. And the other things - although when you read Freshmeat you think there's an awful lot here without a free software license, in fact when you count them, it is actually a very, very small proportion. So I'll remove those anyway. So the next thing I did was say, "Well, how alive are these projects? Let's only count projects that are being put on Freshmeat and have been updated at least once since they've been on there". I don't care when; it could have been put on there and then updated a week later. It's a sign that somebody used it, got back and said "You've got a bug in that. Didn't work. Please change it". So, at least once is a criterion.

And what happens is, you look at that, you have 2000, the first half of 2000 is fairly flat, the second half of 2000, beginning in 2001, it nosedives. It goes from 450 down to 200 entries above; and over the last [year], over 2002, it's stabilized again slightly, very slightly, which to me reflects my experience of what's happened with the general software industry. Now this is very odd for me, because the FLOSS survey said unemployment plays no part in free software. Basically, people in free software don't get out of work; and my guess, especially for people I've noticed, is that people who are out of work treat it as temporary. And the first thing they do is to put more time into writing free software anyway. But it appears that that's not the case, that free software is still, somehow, dependent on the business cycle. Freshmeat is not the most reliable source of data so I'm sure there would be better ways of looking at this. I would like to know if anybody knows of any other surveys that have tried to look that kind of thing, whether it has broken free of the business cycle or not. Yep.

[Audience member speaks]

Seaman: I think if the question was something like, "Are you finding it easy to make a living at the moment?" Then you might find that the people who said, "No, it's difficult, because I had one contract for 3 days last week and I've got something I might do for a week next month", and so on, would actually be quite high at the time when unemployment generally for other people is high but, yeah, it depends on the question I think you're right.

[Audience member speaks]

Seaman: Freshmeat doesn't keep that information; you can't get it. Or if they keep it they don't distribute it. So, I didn't...

[Audience member speaks]

Seaman: There are other very silly things about looking at Freshmeat, for your data on this. One is, that for example, Linux is on Freshmeat; it's one entry. So is a tool to visit a particular website and download a page, download an IDF [?] thing that displays in a box, that's also one entry. You can't compare those two things. But just counting them like I did compares them. So it's not a good way of doing it. I think maybe the research that some, I forgot his name, but this morning... Robles the Spanish speaker this morning what they're doing. I think that maybe it might be possible to get more sensible answers because they're looking at lines of code and lots of other measures. If they include data information, as well, then it would be possible to go back to that for this kind of information, then.

Okay, one other thing. I think I've taken too long, I'm going to skip some bits. So, for instance, there is this big dependence there, and clearly it's something that is going to stay there, but the ways that we may find a way around parts of the dependence, like for example wireless, things that may help to make free software stronger. They're not things in themselves that are going to spread free software, from being free software to being free everything. So we still have the question, "How do we get from free software to free everything?" In other words, "How do you get ways that people produce free software reproduced in creating other things, in creating material goods?"

Now I would claim that it has been done before, that people have produced material goods on free software principles before, and quite regularly, but for very short periods of time. Basically, during every left-wing revolution this century, there has been a period where it's happened. It doesn't happen for very long: if the revolution loses, it gets squashed; if the revolution wins, it's being squashed; but it happens for a short period. There is an enormous amount of creativity, of wanting to do things, that is in people. So this is something that does not seem to get documented. I thought this would be so easy to find out about, getting lots of examples of from books. I found it very hard to get many examples of this from books, but I'm quite certain it's something that happened. I can tell from my own experience where I have seen, for example, people working in a Peugeot car factory that was under worker's control and were getting poor quality input parts coming from a French factory; communicated with the French factory and telling them, "We're running this now. Please, we're having major problems because you're sending us bad parts". And they got good parts, fixed it. Those same people then found that Peugeot didn't want anything to do, after a few months with the factory, with worker's control. They went around the area and said, "What is most in demand here?" And this was a city on the edge of a farming area. And they got the reply that there was a real shortage of fridges, so they converted - especially for people who were in the local farms that found fridges too expensive to buy - there was a need for fridges. They converted the car plant to fridge production. God knows how they did that. I knew people who worked in there, but I don't know anything about how the thing actually worked. All I can say is, during that time, people were working on what I think of as free software principles: they were cooperating with one another to do things, asking one another what they wanted. I have no idea what the techniques are involved. I know a little bit about software, I know absolutely nothing about fridge manufacture. The fridges were a complete coincidence; it really was fridges, not washing machines; but it was very, very close.

I couldn't tell them how to do that; people find their own solutions; people in that situation find their solutions. Yep.

[Audience member speaks]

Seaman: Sorry.

[Audience member speaks]

Seaman: I'm sorry, that's my fault, because I asked for the talk to be mixed with the questions, so I was expecting no questions at the end. I thought I could have longer.

[Audience member speaks]

Seaman: Okay, so I'll carry on, let me see how it goes.

So, another example which I have seen more of - I should say this, to give this some context, this was in Portugal in 1975 - people building their own houses, people living in slum areas, with cooperation from architects, getting together, and on a really large scale, actually building housing estates. Very good housing estates, housing estates that I have found - I have relations who are living in one of these houses still. It's very solid; they built it very well. But it was built by local people; it was built with the design that was done together with architects. So there were people who came and gave their skills as well. But it wasn't somebody coming in from outside and saying, "I'm doing a bit of slum clearance here. I'm gonna give you new houses." People actually built the houses themselves.

So, I mean these things can be done; but, I've said, that has been happening in the middle of revolution. We have here a group of people, mostly with slightly to the left end but fairly conventional ideas. You tell people in free software, "You are gonna go out and spread these ideas to other sectors of the economy; the way you do that is by joining your local ultra-left party" [laughter] "and start a revolution." Yes? Maybe 2% of these people will go, maybe, if you're very lucky. Or you make a lot of noise about it and break this splint. It's too big a jump. You can't get there from where we are now. Not only that, but I think the whole idea would be completely against free software principles. For me, the big part about free software principles or the kind of principles that were described in the talk before this, which was talking about music sharing, is that people decide for themselves how they're gonna do things. They don't have somebody coming in from outside to tell them how to do things. And that concludes: they don't have free software developers going into factories and saying, "You change the way you do things; we know how to do it better." It's not that. Whoever does it, that is not the way things work.

So, what you have to be talking about instead is some way of actually spreading from this small social group here, to larger social groups. Now these are gonna be - if you're starting to talk about spreading to other groups, and they're probably still gonna be in these circles of unemployed, self-employed still, although not in the programming sector. You're talking about people who don't necessarily know how to program, or have any interest in programs, programming, or want to become programmers. If there's going to be a world based on free software principles, it will not be a world which is entirely composed of programmers. Most people find it incredibly tedious and boring and don't even want to understand it. So you have to talk about spreading in stages from this; you have to talk about defining, how is it possible to get to other groups? Eventually, you hope it will have spread far enough that the ideas and practices become commonplace for people. And then, the person stuck in the factory making washing machines can say, "Well, yes, but in the factory I do this, but when I'm outside here I want to listen to some music, I do something quite different. And if I need a program for my computer and it doesn't work, I ask somebody and they tell me. Why is it in here that I do everything by orders?" And once large chunks of people's lives have become the other way, then there's the possibility that they might start to think, "How do I organize this other stuff that I'm doing differently?" But it's not going to come all at once. So...

[Audience member speaks]

Seaman: I'm talking about the third one. I agree with - both of those are possibilities, but I'm talking about - the examples I want to give are two other things. So, I'm gonna stick to my examples and then maybe if it doesn't answer you ask again in the end.

Okay, so there's a question of spread. How does it spread to new groups? Well, to some extent I would say the work is being done for us. The kind of things that Alan was talking about yesterday with the law, for example, you talked about Brazil and the law in Brazil; and I had an email about a year ago from a guy in Brazil; I'll read you the chunk of the email. "The police have been implacable here lately. They come in with their foot in the door, a 765 in the hand, and get everybody up against the wall. Next they get the IT staff, search them, and take all the software. Then they very politely call the boss and ask about the licenses. If there's even one missing, he gets a charge of violation of author's rights, illegal profiteering, and God knows what else. In this government, they want to get rid of the image of Brazil as a pirate's haven. And there's a lot of money in it for the lawyers and the BSA, and the police get a cut as well." And what you were talking about was Sklyarov and so on, you were talking about individuals. That's what's happening here, in America, in the rich countries. What's happening in places like Brazil is mass repression, because of Microsoft. And the reaction of those particular people - this was somebody in a group of small engineering companies in an industrial state - most [some words are hard to hear] engineering and electronics. What they've done, is they've started working with free software to produce their electronics stuff. They have given a real big boost to one of the main EDA software tools, gEDA, they've been producing standards. They've been more concerned because they're immediately involved in manufacturing. They've been much more concerned with sticking to standards for things like layout, footprints for electronic devices and so on, than the original authors were. They've internationalized it, because a lot of them can't speak English, and so they needed it in Brazilian. Because they internationalized it, it's in Brazilian; there are now also Polish, and other versions. But the actual basic work of putting inside the possibility of localization in place was done by them. And there is now a small movement, a fairly thriving small community of people - their own websites, their own communication and so on in the small industrial states in this part of Brazil. And that's just one example. This kind of thing is happening. The fact that to maintain their profits they have to keep up with these kind of repressive laws has such bad effects on so many people that it's absolutely forcing them into this kind of situation where they have to start doing things. Then again it's still on the edge of software, but it's moving slightly further from pure software, to a situation which is more - and this is small companies; it's the edge of engineering companies. It's not a radical jump, but it's an illustration of a move towards something more different, something further from traditional software.

Another example of the way they are actually doing work for us. This is a quote from a Microsoft survey, so this is a Microsoft press release from April the 16th this year. "Microsoft commissioned IDC to conduct in-depth examinations of the IT industries in 28 countries and regions. From 1995 to 2001 IT spending grew in each of the 28 countries and regions at compound annual rates ranging from 4.1% in Japan to 43.7% in Venezuela. Latin America's IT spending was particularly significant. In addition to Venezuela, Mexico, Colombia, and Costa Rica were in the top five countries in the world with a highest percentage of growth. The fifth country was China." Okay, so this is spending on IT in countries which do not have a native IT industry. 90% of that growth, that money is going outside the country - mainly to Microsoft, some to HP or a few other companies, but I would bet that most of that money has gone to Microsoft.

So from that list of countries, if you look what's happened, the topmost spending one, Venezuela. Venezuela is a poor country. It has significant political problems at the moment. They can't afford to be spending that kind of money. It is the only country in the world where the Minister of Technology has announced that their technology plans for the future are to be based on free software. Okay, I don't know how realistic that is, but the fact that they've been pushed to that situation certainly says something about the importance of this level of profits being shifted out of the country.

Okay, where else was on the list? Mexico. Mexico was the first country to have a law of the use of free software. It was badly implemented; it was done from above; they hadn't yet learned that these things have to be done with local Linux User Groups and so on from below, at the same time; and Vincente Fox is now - this year he was Chief Guest of Honor at Microsoft's International Statesman Award - I can't remember exactly what the meeting was called. So in Mexico things went forward and then went back. But the fact that they were the first country that I know of with a free software law of some kind is still significant. They're in the top five list, the top five spenders.

Colombia, the next one, they have a law on the use of free software by the State pending at the moment. It's not - I don't know whether it will be passed, but it's a very developed law. It's not a rabid thing that a few local people have thrown together. It's something that has come out of long discussions in Latin America, and long attempts with other groups, particularly coming from Argentina, on what the best way to get together laws on use of free software by the State are. It's an extremely practical law, but that doesn't necessarily mean it will be passed.

China: China, as far as I know, doesn't have any laws on free software but they've certainly been making moves to use Linux on a larger scale within the State. The only one out of that list of top spenders that, as far as I know where it's had no free software effect is Costa Rica.

So, the pressure on a lot of countries is to move towards free software, use of free software in the State, partly on purely cost grounds. That's the immediate push. There are a lot of ethical grounds that they can justify it on as well. In particular, that citizens have a right to be able to get at State information without having to buy copies of Word or whatever. Things should be in accessible format; it's a duty to the taxpayer that where there is information, whether of processes that citizens have a right to control, that things need to be in a transparent format. That's been applied to vote-counting and I think has been used in Mexico, not as a general rule about using free software, but as a specific thing where the vote-counting software was actually made open to the public and actually looked at; and people said, "Yes, there's nothing in here to rig the vote in this particular software." And there are arguments about the information being shipped out of countries, whether there are back doors in software, and Microsoft has back doors in software, and that software is running in a government department, does that mean that Microsoft can then look at what's happening in the government department. And that also applies to things like Word which keep hidden records of information and so on.

So there are a lot of other arguments apart from the argument with money. And one of the main ones being, "How do these countries develop their own software industry?" They're not going to produce a local Word which sells as a proprietary product. Brazil will not produce Word. Well, Brazil's a bad example; it might be big enough to do it. Colombia is not going to produce its own version of Word which sells worldwide and will compete with Microsoft. They can't create a software industry that way. They can have the government which needs free software for its own purposes, which appoints local firms to create that free software, which has people who know free software well and have a worldwide reputation; which has consulting firms which people come to from other local countries that people cross the border from other Latin American countries if they want to hire people and so on. There is a visible way of creating local software industries through free software that is really closed to a lot of countries through the proprietary software route. So that's another incentive for them to do this.

Now, that in itself doesn't magically bring free software principles to peoples' lives. If the government - if my government adopts a law saying, "Everyone working in local government offices must use free software," it would be a complete imposition of everybody, and it would be a complete disaster. People have spent quite a lot of time learning to use Word, and they're quite proud that they can. In a lot of cases, people who do not otherwise have any interest in computers and have to use them for work should not be treated like that. They cannot suddenly be told, from above, "You must do this". And in fact, they can't be told, "You will do this", because what immediately happens is you are gonna have breakdown. That to some extent is what happened in Mexico, as I'm told with the school system where the schools were suddenly sent out huge stacks of Red Hat CDs and told, "You have no IT budget this year, you're using Red Hat instead, these copies are free". There were no - there weren't the people with Linux experience in the schools to actually use it, so it backfired, and that was one of the reasons that Microsoft could very easily take advantage of that situation to come in, and Microsoft now uses Mexico as their standard argument why free software use by States is a bad thing. I don't have detailed personal knowledge of this, so there may be that I'm mistakenly mis-repeating some of the things that Microsoft said that aren't true. But this is my impression of what happened there.

So for this to work, you need it to come from below; and the most successful cases where free software is now in use by the State are actually on much lower levels than national. They're not national laws. In fact, there is - at the moment, most of the national laws look like they're fairly unlikely to pass. There are about thirty countries with laws, national laws on the use of free software by the State but I don't think that most of them, most of those laws will pass. What has passed are laws on the local level, at provincial level. In Brazil, there is Rio Grande del Sur, which is a largish province which uses free software by policy. In Spain, there is Estremadura, which is one of the poorer areas in Spain, which has a policy of using free software. Now in those cases - also in Venezuela, there's a similar situation where the change has been very closely tied in with local Linux [User] Groups, and local Linux Groups have been largely responsible for saying what's possible and what isn't, and working with local people to work out how to make the transition from one type of software to the other without causing major problems for everybody. The Estremadura example, they have a localized Debian distribution in the local dialect, which as I understand Microsoft was not prepared to produce any versions of anything, because the dialect is not that different from Spanish and it's not used by huge numbers of people. There's been a big argument in Spain over this, especially in Catalonia where the government paid Microsoft to develop localized versions of the things, but Microsoft didn't do it. And then the free software bill was presented to Parliament; then three weeks later, Microsoft produced a localized version. But this is a big issue of localization in some of these smaller areas, which is something that is so natural to free software, because free software people, [if] they're living locally, they'll do it. It's a useful thing, it's an easy thing, and it's a good way of getting people involved who are not full-time programmers as well.

So in Estremadura they have their own localized Debian, and they have - at the moment have installed 4,000 - have installed this in 4,000 machines with a target of 80,000. They're combining it with a push for computer education in schools, where in a lot of cases they're installing computers for the first time in many of them. These schools, I think the target is one computer for each two students. So they're starting from scratch, and that's the situation. They don't have people who have to relearn large amounts. They have free access to it; there are - they've linked it with alphabetization campaigns - I don't know, does that make sense in German, alphabetization? - literacy campaigns. They teach the old people who don't know how to read and write and also don't have computing skills. There is free training for them for Linux-based. And they used entirely local firms for development, the idea being they were going to encourage the local economy. And so anything specific, anything that they need that's not avaliable generally as free software, they will try and get local companies to cooperate with it and so on, and they're training the teachers in using it. I have a photo of the teachers sitting there training. They don't look very happy to me, but I think that the difference comes after. Not the fact that they've got yet another thing to learn - and teachers generally have too many new things to learn, anyway, imposed on them - but at the moment they have another thing to learn. After six months, they're going to be saying things like, "I really need a better program to do the register", or "I would like something that would test this particular thing that's on. How do I find it?" The answer is, you go and ask people, you go and look around these places where it's available for you. You do not have to go through catalogs and rely on Microsoft and try and find out, "Can I buy it and can I afford it?" You go and look for it; and maybe there's somebody in the school who knows a bit better than other people, who can actually say, "Well, I know this is not exactly what you want, but I can change this thing to work the way you want."

So this is one of my examples of new social groups. [sound of writing] Teachers who are maybe not going to be, mostly never going to be full-time programmers are being brought into this. There are other new groups within local governments who will be in the same situation. This - the change in the law - this change in the law in some of these countries - I think will have quite big effects if it's successfully creating larger industries, larger software industries within those countries. It may change the balance of software industries within those countries. It may change the balance of it, in the number of developers which come from the States in the First World, and the number of developers who come from other parts of the world. But it probably also will also continue to reproduce this split, if this argument is correct, because there will be this same mix of some employees, particularly some government employees, there will be some people working in small local companies and so on. That is not going to go away.

So should I stop there? I think I've gone on for long enough. The other thing I was going to talk about was universities and the change of ideology in the universities. The universities where they used to talk about academic freedom; now people in the most diverse subjects, including the last Nobel prize winner in biology, are talking about sharing. They've adopted the rhetoric of free software, and it's yet another group that's being pulled into the fold. Eventually, as the number of groups that move in expands, eventually this will get closer enough to the real key problems, the really difficult things - manufacture - that people would start to say, those people themselves will start saying, "How can we change this to work better? How can we change this to work like everything else does, and not this way which is broken. It's obviously broken, because everything else works, and this doesn't."

Okay, that was a very optimistic ending. [Applause]

Announcer: So, at this point we have about twenty minutes for discussion.

[Audience member speaks]

Seaman: Would you rather have questions or a discussion now? Because I think I've answered everything I can say; I rather see a discussion than...

[Audience member speaks]

Seaman: Don't I need the mine, as well? What about raw materials? Does that argument work all the way back down the chain of parts? To the oil that goes into the plastics? To the metal that goes into the chassis, and so on? Does that actually apply all down the way down the line?

[Audience member speaks]

Seaman: So you reply that we could very easily go from where we are now to complete automation of everything, so there is not...

[Audience member speaks]

Seaman: Okay, the reason - I'm going to argue with it and you can come back to me if I'm wrong. One of the things I'm interested in is open source electronics. Now we have a problem with manufacture. We can design chips - we have problems with mass production [?] but generally we can design chips - but we can't get chips made; because to get them made we need the volume to get the price down. Now to get that kind of volume we need millions of pounds. There is no way for us to get that kind of money whatsoever, although technically we know that everything could be done. In fact, socially we can't, because money is the barrier, but if you think you can jump around this...

[Audience member speaks]

Seaman: I'd like the URLs afterwards of anything to do with the things you're talking about; I don't know if anybody else is interested in it. Anybody else?

[Audience member speaks]

Seaman: I think that that's exactly the kinds of things Stefan was talking about in birds of a feather. If you can get something together to do a short presentation, stick it on the birds of a feather list outside and try to get something going tomorrow.

[Audience member speaks]

Seaman: I'm idealistic on the issue that we have a world revolution that changes absolutely everything, at which point patents become a minor problem; but at the moment in the real world, yes. Patents, changes to copyright law, and so on are absolutely one of the biggest problems there is.

[Audience member speaks]

Seaman: I focus very much on people who are free software developers. There are also - something I didn't talk about is free music, or any other kind of culture; but I didn't talk about people like Lessig and so on who are not developers, but are working on the legal front with exactly the same thing, exactly the same laws. I think that most definitely they are out there. I talk about free software because it's what I, personally, am more into. I don't know the details of the law.

[Audience member speaks]

Seaman: This is free hardware, the electronics part of that is really going to test the law and they don't know what's coming. They have the same problem with the guy that I was talking about, with trying to present a way music sharing works to businessmen; businessmen don't understand. The same thing with patents, with designs for free chips that are going onto the Open Cores site. Companies are looking at those; they don't know if it's good or bad. They are not actual production of the chips, so they're not distribution, but they enable other people to distribute them. Should they distribute them? And they possibly enable somebody in Taiwan to take it and run off huge numbers of copies in their factory. Should the companies sue them? Sue Open Cores? They'll look really bad going after a little group of people without money. Should they encourage them? Because if people do copy them, then it will increase the stake of their particular product, even though they're a minor manufacturer. And that's something that's also happened, and some people are actually encouraging it. They're all over the place. It's not only our site that has weaknesses; they also don't know exactly what they're doing. And they're in a much stronger position because in theory, the law is behind them, but the law isn't yet set up to deal with exactly this situation. And there is going to be - I think that in the next couple of years, in a lot of maneuvering and a lot of possibly room to outmaneuver them to some extent.

There are also things that are not patented for other reasons, like, for example, the only GPL processor that's around that's actually an existing physical processor, the whole design of which is under the GPL, is the SPARC processor. Now, the reason that's possible is because Sun was trying to compete with Intel, and very early on before free software really got well known, certainly before free hardware designs, the idea got well known, SPARC thought the only way to guarantee to get these devices second sourced is by saying, "We will disclaim any patent rights over this architecture, we will let anybody copy it". Now there are always going to be smaller firms in that position as well, and that's a traditional capitalist tool for small companies to gain entry to a market. They're not going to stop using that. That's another point; they have this set of weak points, these identified weak points, and we're finding ways to use them. I don't think it's totally black. Yes, patents are a major, major problem, much more than copyright. It's not all society...

[Audience member speaks]

Seaman: I think it's possible that it will be crushed. If it's crushed, I think the world will be a very, very unpleasant place. Not only for people who want to write free software, but for other reasons. The best way not to let it be crushed is to try to carry on with it, to try to spread it, to try to make it stronger. So yes, I agree that it's a theoretical possibility but I don't see much to gain in discussing it, really. Anything could go wrong. We all know that, but...

[Audience member speaks]

Seaman: So you have two parts to what you said. The first was a question of individuals. I'm sorry if I gave the impression I was talking about individual things. For me, one of the important parts about free software is that it shows that it's possible for large numbers of people to cooperate in a very practical way to make things together, without having a centralized authority that is imposed from outside. And that's what I'm talking about extending it to other things. That's what I think of with other things as well, as a core part of it. I'm not talking about every individual going into their own home and having some way to push a button and out comes a new Porsche, or... I'm talking about people working together, firstly. So I don't believe it's going backwards in terms of division of labor. I think it's going forwards. I think it's showing that people can cooperate without a need for an imposed authority, in very effective ways. And that it's self-maintaining. It's more efficient. It doesn't need a whole layer of supervisors and other people to make your life unpleasant to force you to do it. It's a more efficient division of labor than the old way.

The second thing, the question about politics. No, I don't think you can avoid politics, but I think that the politics of the people involved in the free software movement, at the moment, it's about issues, like - particularly - law. Law is incredibly important to us for all kinds of reasons at the moment. It's both copyright and patent law; the thing that I was talking about in Latin American countries isn't done by people being apolitical. It's done by people being very political. What I don't think at the moment is, there is room for people to say, "Let's go and try and persuade all free software developers that they should become Marxists, or Communists, or something". That is just, seems to me so unreal that I don't - it's not only unreal, but I don't think it's - I can't see any way it could be constructive or helpful, or lead to anything much.

So, I think there is a real role for politics, and if what I'm talking about is all extremely utopian, and in the end things need a world revolution to do it, it's just what the important thing is at the moment. At the moment, I think the important things are things like copyright law, patent law, and laws governing free software. That's for me, for people looking at music; looking at, I don't know, Wi-Fi; or looking at a whole range of other things; that may be more pressing issues for them, but they are along the same kinds of lines. They're not rushing out to join, to create the World Revolutionary Party.

[Audience member speaks]

Seaman: I can't think of an example. Can you explain? [Laughter]

[Audience member speaks]

Seaman: I think it's a very interesting idea; it's one I hadn't really thought of before, but I'll go away and think about that, because...

[Audience member speaks]

Seaman: I haven't read it, but it's very much in line with what Microsoft is doing. I wouldn't be surprised if that means that Nigeria has a law planned [laughter]. Seriously, at the moment it's their first reaction. Let's give money to schools because they can do it very quickly... for doing that. As soon as they hear about the need for free software in a country they give money to schools. Not money, but they give software, and if they're lucky, the arrange for somebody else to donate the equipment. They talk to somebody else, sort of like HP, into providing the hardware, and they give what they say is millions of dollars worth of software, which in my argument is worthless software. [Laughter]

[Audience member speaks]

Seaman: I was trying desperately to remember this. There was an example in The Economist where - it was an article about companies that were trying to get together to organize, I think it was the picture management, and they could not agree upon a standard with it, because - this was, I think, camera companies - they couldn't agree on standard formats for it. I don't remember the details of it. It's a real problem. At the time I wrote that part of the talk, I had two or three examples in my head, and they're all gone now. And generally cooperative stuff, things like Jabber, for example, is a more general example. You are not going to find, as far as,

[Audience member speaks]

Seaman: But the original idea of Jabber, I think that would be developed by - because it's a protocol; the design standard would carry any of the protocols, would carry Q board or Microsoft. That would be in a commercial software product, and beginning with it, but it's not those companies. Now, I'm sorry, it's something I've said. I think it's probably true, but I haven't got a convincing example of it at all. I think if I go away I could find one, possibly.