Linux is the most widely-used operating system in the world, with both an incredibly democratic aspect (the cheapest Android phones on the planet run on Linux) and specific (every single one of the top 10 supercomputers in the world run Linux). It's also the only operating system running on the International Station, and the only operating system which went to Mars.

The intersection of all these domains is due to very special conjunction: Linux is both amongst the best operating systems, and the cheapest.

As the flagship example of open-source, it also represents a new way to create value in an information economy.

The story behind Wikipedia is that of the surprise that a lot of people responsible in a distributed manner are much more efficient than a few, centralized ones.

However, for such an organizational model to improve, one needs to adapt the rules. Indeed, Wikipedia's editing practices are very different from that of a journal.

While first coming into the spotlight with the article "Tragedy of the Commons", commons is that which belongs to all: ideas, sunsets, water, air, etc. The question then arises regarding how do we manage these? Based on Harding, the assumption was that commons was a doomed endeavour, since humans are essentially selfish (see: game theory & the prisoner's dilemma). However, Ostrom led an empirical study on how fisheries (also commons) were managed by fishermen and won a Nobel Prize for her work on commons management, highlighting 8 principles—spoiler: people manage their commons quite well.

In the cultural sense, commons took a different turn when articulated with communication technologies. The commons now had a possibility to be manifested in different areas. One of these areas is, for instance, the circulating of academic materials amongst the public.

Commons-based peer-production of value is a term coined by Yochai Benkler. It is due to the falling costs of production means that digital information goods are increasingly produced in lieu of market compensation and property incentives. In other words, because individuals require so few resources to contribute to informational projects, they do not expect payment or property rights. Individuals essentially ‘gift’ their knowledge and informational labor to the public on sites including Wikipedia in return for ‘psychological well-being and gratification’ and ‘social connectedness’. For Benkler, this is nothing short of a new non-market and cooperative mode of producing economic value that is transforming Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations into The Wealth of Networks.

source: Kreiss, Finn, Turner, The Limits of Peer-Production

On one side, open-source retains some rights for use and distribution of the software (with possibly still traditional licenses), while free software doesn't have any conditions attached to it, except that anything created with its help should also be made publicly available.

Free software's approach is that there is no real reason for an economic incentive to be required when it comes to making software; people made software before it was commercial, and arguably people make better software when it is not commercial.

Related is how the software is built: both involved decentralized collaboration, but can still have a core team of contributors.

Some of the advantages to using open-source software is the externalization of costs. The disadvantage is the dependency on external factors.

For journalism, it's things like the HuffPost and Rue89 and Global Voices.

For culture, it's the collaboration around videogames, music tracks (Soundcloud), fan fictions (Harry Potter, Star Wars) or bottom-up classification models (folksonomies, used in places like Tumblr and Twitter, with trending topics)

For science, it's SETI@Home, or the folding of molecules

Both the consumption and creation of culture were heavily influenced by other technological advances which weren't related to communication technology (i.e. the internet). It stands in the wake of similar technological revolutions, such as the printing press (for books) as well as the gramophone (for music) and the film (for visual arts). As such, it is not so much the internet, but the computer which enabled a new way of doing things; with computing, it became incredibly easier to receive, create and distribute user-generated content.

To protect the invention of an individual, to act as an incentive to put in the work to "advance the arts and sciences".

Is it stealing if the original owner doesn't lose their copy? The criminalization of computers and computer use, the downloading and uploading of copyrighted files, came at a moment when the entertainment industry failed to adjust to the new modes of distribution. It is with the advent of iTunes, and Digital Rights Management (DRM), that it became possible to enforce copyright law as it existed. In parallel with these DRM tools, the development of streaming, and thus the rise of lending over owning switched the market; it is now more important to have access to something, rather than to own it.

So copyright in itself is not technically censorship, as the only reasons for copyright to exist are monetary profit and "the advancement of the arts", but copyright holders were the first to show that you can tie someone's digital identity to someone's legal identity. This is what iTunes did: you have a digital product tied to your account.

The question is also raised about cultural appropriation: how come copyright doesn't apply to Gucci when they copy the style of a homeless person?

The battle for copyright today is also the battle for the freedom of information. Because computers are by definition copying machines, making them more restrictive stifles their overall abilities (technical drawback) and because the penalties are so huge for copyright infrigements (legal drawback) that all actors would rather be overshooting their censorship target than undershooting their censorship target.

a platform is an infrastructure which connects different actors (most often, sellers and buyers), and therefore has a unique economic component, and depends heavily on the network effect (the more people use it, the more attractive the platform becomes).

It also has a governance component: it decides how users should interact with one another.

Finally, it has a cultural impact: it changes how users behave in their lives and interactions with one another (twitter, tiktok, etc.)

they have had an impact on the development of markets: connecting everyone, and therefore redistributing power and agency (no middle-management, for instance, in uber).

Particularly, information asymmetry is a significant issue. Because platform users are always individualized, they are the only ones who have full visibility of the ecosystem, and therefore can manipulate it at their own advantage:

• amazon market place promotes its own products
• apple store arbitrarily allows access to publishers
• spotify includes tracks in their sponsored playlists
• uber forces drivers to work longer than they want through gamification mechanics

-> through an automatic share of the transaction

-> through venture funds waiting for advertisement revenue

-> through user contribution

facebook is considering charging 11$/month

The bizarre point is that this is when code directly controls humans. We start to have a direct conflict of interest between the strive for software to be optimized and the need for humans to be respected. We've moved from Charlie Chaplin's cogs to Lidl's voice commands.

some of the tasks that have shifted include management and evaluation.

nothing more than a hyper-liberalization of the workforce.

in the end, platforms are very much still dependent on legislation (which is why they spend so much money on either lobbying or voluntary spending on social contributions)

These legislations will make Uber and co. comply. The biggest challenge now in the EU is not the legal framework, but the actual application. Right now, it's limited to the country hosting the company, and this country is usually Ireland which, for tax reasons, doesn't want to prosecute too harshly. As a response, the EU is currently (fall 2022) working on the Digital Markets Act to regulate competition.