Culture Matters
The mid-week sojourn to Thailand gave me an opportunity to finish “Culture Matters: How Values Shape Human Progress“, a collection of essays by reknowned scholars (Francis Fukuyama, Nathan Glazer, David Landes etc) on the impact of culture on human societies. It was slow reading at the start, until I came across a fantastic paper by Mariano Grondona titled “A Cultural Typology of Economic Development“.
Mariano’s analysis revolves around how cultural factors affect economic development. I loved his analysis on the importance of the culture of trusting individuals as an engine of economic growth and innovation:
“The principle engine of economic development is the work and creativity of individuals. What induces them to strive and invent is a climate of liberty that leaves them in control of their own destiny. If individuals feel that others are responsible for them, the effort of individuals will ebb. If others tell them what to think and believe, the consequence is either a loss of motivation and creativity or a choice between submission or rebellion. However, neither submission nor rebellion generates development. Submission leaves a society without innovators, and rebellion diverts energies away from constructive effort toward resistance, throwing up obstacles and destruction.
To trust the individual, to have faith in the individual, is one of the elements of a value system that favours development. In contrast, mistrust of the individual, reflected in oversight and control, is typical of societies that resist development. Implicit in the trusting society is the willingness to accept the risk that the individual will make choices contrary to the desires of government. If this risk is not accepted and the individual is subjected to a network of controls, the society loses the essential engine of economic development namely, the aspiration of each of us to live and think as we wish, to be who we are, to transform ourselves into unique beings. Where there are no individuals, only “peoples” and “masses”, development does not occur. What takes place instead is either obedience or uprising.“
This remains the single most concise explanation I’ve seen to date on the positive impact of liberal culture on innovation and the economy. The author is making an argument that a vibrant and progressive economy depends strictly on a progressive liberal set of values and that it is simply not possible to sacrifice liberty without impacting economic growth and innovation. In other words, individual liberty is far more important when compared to other factors such as strong intellectual right laws.
Free software is about freedom. Think free speech, not free beer.
Looking at the free software and proprietary software worlds from this perspective, plenty suddenly makes sense. Free software maps to a progressive development-oriented society where freedom of thought and opinion (freedom of speech) and the ability to contributed freely without hindrance (freedom of ownership) and the enshrined right for a group of like-minded individuals to collaborate and build software which meets their needs (freedom of assembly) is simply the dominant and expected culture.
This has directly translated to a rapid rate of innovation and creativity, resulting in the explosion of high quality free software we’ve seen in the last decade. Sure, there were infrastructure reasons for the explosive growth - namely, TCP/IP, the commodotization of Internet access and the availability of cheap computers - but infrastructure alone cannot explain the the willingness of the hundreds of thousands of people to contribute to free software collaboration. It required a libertation culture to facilitate the explosion in creativity, the birth of whom we can directly attribute to the principles of software freedom as articulated by Richard Matthew Stallman.
Let’s modify the first two lines from Mariano’s quoted paragraphs as follows:
The principle engine of software development is the work and creativity of hackers. What induces them to strive and invent is a climate of liberty that leaves them in control of their own software.
Stallman’s magnum opus, the GNU General Public License, the very constitution of the free software movement, is built on such a libertarian culture. It starts off as follows:
“The licenses for most software and other practical works are designed to take away your freedom to share and change the works. By contrast, the GNU General Public License is intended to guarantee your freedom to share and change all versions of a program–to make sure it remains free software for all its users.“
The libertarian cultural foundations of the free software movement were cured solidly in place in those few lines of the GPL.
KDE 1.0
KDE 4.0
We were reminiscing last night that scarcely 10 years ago, whilst KDE 1.0 provided basic desktop manager features and functionality, it was thoroughly fugly and light years behind Microsoft Windows (then the market leader). But it was pretty much the best we had then (GNOME, at that point, was buggy to the point of being unusable). KDE 4.0 available today shows how technologically far KDE has come since those early days. It really is at the forefront of the GUI revolution, and Microsoft Windows Vista doesn’t even come close in comparison. Such rapid development and innovation could have only taken place in a culture which celebrated the ethos and creativity of hackers; and, it’s important to emphasize this, the only culture that can facilitate this today is the liberal free software culture which allows hackers full development control over their software.
The great 1990’s divide over the Free Software enthusiasts and the Open Source guys was framed in terms of religion versus pragmatism. I think the debate was pretty much a NoOp in the sense that nothing useful came out of it and that pretty much everybody overlooked the cultural aspect of sharing. I’m going to state here that without the philosophy of free software (succintly represented as the four free software laws), the free software or open source community would simply not have come to fruition because the philosophy of free software underpins a liberal framework of cooperation and competition within a social contract between an individual and the society:
- The freedom to run the program, for any purpose (freedom 0).
- The freedom to study how the program works, and adapt it to your needs (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
- The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor (freedom 2).
- The freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements to the public, so that the whole community benefits (freedom 3). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
Let me rephrase Mariano’s second paragraph as follows:
To trust the hacker, to have faith in the hacker, is one of the elements of a value system that favours development. In contrast, mistrust of the hacker, reflected in oversight and control, is typical of corporations that resist development. Implicit in the trusting corporation is the willingness to accept the risk that the hacker will make choices contrary to the desires of corporation.
A corporation’s end goal is maximizing shareholder value. This not necessarily require innovation on the part of the corporation. In fact, the best method to maximize shareholder value is have a lockhold on the market, and as liberal culture works in breaking down barriers to facilitate innovation, maximizing shareholder value may be viewed as being antithetical to liberal culture and facilitating.
After all, innovation breeds competition and competition driven by a liberal culture will produce changes in the market that can only work to drive down shareholder value of the proprietary incumbent in the short term. In view of this, the free software culture, in particular the share-alike restrictive free software copyright licenses such as the GPL, were specifically designed to circumvent any form of control that corporations may decide to impose on the hacker.
Part 2 on the libertarian free software culture will be posted at some point.