Who speaks for the community? [LWN.net]

Recently, the "Open Forum Europe" released a statement in favor of software patents in Europe. Those signing on to the statement included Graham Taylor "...as a representative of the Linux/Opensource world." Of course, many people in the Linux community are not particularly sympathetic to an expansion of software patents, so they were something other than pleased with this "representation." Mr. Taylor has since backed off from any claims that he was representing the open source community. But the question remains: who does represent this community?

The Linux / free software / open source / whatever community does tend to share a common set of beliefs. We wish to retain control over our computers (and our lives). We have little tolerance for limits - technical or legal - on what we can program. We have, through voluntary contributions, created a vast commons of increasingly capable software, and we intend to continue doing so. We respect technical excellence and working code; we have less faith in words.

And, as a community, we have little patience with those who would position themselves as our leaders or representatives. We are a very independent-minded community that has managed to bring together a very broad spectrum of people and get them all to work together in a productive manner. But we are, as a community, not even remotely coherent enough to be represented or led by anybody.

There is a certain Wild West charm to a leaderless, institution-free community. We see an itch in need of scratching, submit our patches, and ride off into the sunset. Our code speaks for us, and we need not tolerate some bozo making statements we may not agree with in our name. It feels free.

On the other hand, we are a large community of highly talented people who have changed the software industry, and, increasingly, we are creating the software that runs the world. And, yet, our voice in political and industry circles is tiny. Governments happily adopt free software, while passing laws that make the software harder to develop and turn some of our hackers into criminals. With few exceptions, the computing industry pays little attention to free software in the development of its products.

Once you look beyond the actual code we have published, we are a marginal force, dependent upon a handful of companies to pressure representatives, obtain hardware information, and extract protocols for us. The partnership with those companies has done the community much good, but we should not confuse their agenda with ours. At some point, one can only hope that the community will develop institutions that can express our common beliefs with a louder voice. Creating those institutions is unlikely to be an easy task for anybody who tries, however.

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Who speaks for the community?

Posted May 15, 2003 12:03 UTC (Thu) by joergland (guest, #962) [Link]

> one can only hope that the community will develop institutions
> that can express our common beliefs

There are such institutions, just think of SPI or Linux International. But there have to be more power from "the community" put into those organizations. We definitely need many more people like Bruce Perens, Maddog and the like who understand the community and are brave enough to stand up and speak for us. Our competition has a lobby, we do not.

Joerg

Who speaks for the community?

Posted May 15, 2003 16:52 UTC (Thu) by iabervon (subscriber, #722) [Link]

It strikes me that the voice of our community in government and such is likely to come not from our present community, but from politicians becoming users. We've started to see some adoption, but we haven't gotten to the point where government officials are interested in Linux and want to know what they can do to help. And what these people can do is lobby.

What would be really interesting is if major lobbying groups started running their businesses on Linux. Then the groups that aren't paid to care one way or the other about freedom to write software are suddenly very much in favor of it as users, and they're large and well-connected.

Who speaks for the community?

Posted May 17, 2003 15:16 UTC (Sat) by rwmj (subscriber, #5474) [Link]

You might as well ask "Who speaks for doctors?" or "Who speaks for accountants?".

Here in the UK the answer is clear: Doctors and accountants each have a single institution to which they all subscribe. These institutions are powerful organisations who defend their members individually and collectively.

So the answer is simple: open source developers need to form an institution to defend themselves, and pay for it with a small annual subscription. The patent / lawsuit / copyright / stupid law problems won't disappear overnight, but with a powerful monied institution behind us, things will definitely improve.

Rich.

Look at the bigger picture

Posted May 20, 2003 16:29 UTC (Tue) by angdraug (subscriber, #7487) [Link]

On the other hand, we are a large community of highly talented people who have changed the software industry, and, increasingly, we are creating the software that runs the world. And, yet, our voice in political and industry circles is tiny.

To me, this seems like a problem rather with the political and industry circles, not with our community. It's not even ironic that we, a large community, need some big guys to represent us, when all we want from those circles is just to be left alone. I don't know like you, but to me this smells too much like feudal racketeering.

Decentralization is our main advantage, and we should not sell it for some illusionary protection. Or else we might risk being deprived of our independence, as it happened to medieval peasants.