The most fundamental sources of power in society arise from the ownership and control of land, enterprises and money. The current ownership system was developed to serve the needs of past rulers who sought absolute powers. As a result, there is no limit as to the extent and value of property, which any person can possess. New rules are needed to decentralise the power of owning things. Ecological rules, which follow the self-limiting and self-regulating principles, found in all living things.

The concept of land ownership evolved from usage. In earlier society, any rights to land depended upon usage. As society developed and centralised political structures evolved, personal usage by the ruling class became impractical over the territory subjected to their power. As the ruling class made the rules, rights to land without usage were developed, maintained and furthered by force and conquest. By this means the concept of ownership was established.

Because Australian Aboriginals did not have a ruling class they did not develop the need to have a word for ownership in their many different languages. No do we have a word in modern languages to describe the Aboriginal relationship to land. In my 1978 Australian Parliamentary Papers (No. 135 & 438) on Economic Development of Aboriginal Communities in the Northern Territory, I had to invent a new word. This was “ownee” which has the same relationship to owner as appointee, licensee and franchisee has respectively, to appointor, licensor and franchisor. That is, the former is subject to the power of the latter.

The Indian leader, Mahatma Gandhi, who was educated in London as lawyer, saw the need for a “non violent” ownership paradigm different from the existing one. He developed the notion of “Trusteeship” in South Africa where traditional relationships to land are similar to those of Australian Aboriginals. He introduced the concept to India where it was seen as representing the philosophy of the Upanishads who also shared the traditional paradigm. The idea of Trusteeship is that any owner of property is only holding it as trustee for society. Gandhi saw the need for people to obtain a “legitimate” return from their property but that any surplus should belong to society.

To make the idea of Trusteeship operational and consistent with ecological principles, we need to introduce the concepts of ’stakeholders’ and ‘dynamic tenure’. Stakeholders are those people, whose lives are affected by property, be it land, enterprises or money. Dynamic tenure transfers ownership from one class of individual to another depending upon the relationship of the individual to the property. With urban land, the Stakeholders would be the occupiers and neighbours, while with corporations they would be employees, customers, and suppliers including those providing community services like health, education and social security.

With dynamic tenure, corporate stakeholders would obtain co-ownership interests only after the shareholders had obtained monopoly rights to profits for a sufficient time period to provide the incentive for them to invest. In this way shareholders would obtain the “legitimate” return described by Gandhi. It would make corporate investment consistent with the time-limited rights provided to all investors in intellectual property like patents and copyright. However, rather than lose all rights at once as for intellectual property, the rights of shareholders would gradually diminish after, say 10 years, at 5% per year, to provide stakeholders 100% ownership 20 years later without cost. All assets of the company would then be sold to a successor corporation.

Mature corporations would finance the development of new technology and market growth through transferring parts of their operations to corporate “offspring” so as to attract new investors. In this way, corporations would give birth, die and have limited size like all living things. I have described such ecological entities in my writings as Ownership Transfer Corporations (OTC’s). OTC’s would allow those people whose life was affected by corporate operations to have some say in their control. This would create feedback information and control mechanism to greatly improve self-governance and social accountability of the corporate sector.

As most stakeholders would be local residents, the introduction of such ecologically designed corporations would create a highly decentralised locally owned and controlled society. Local residents know best the type of products, services and production techniques, which could best sustain their host bioregion. This would create the basis for establishing a sustainable economic system based on highly diversified self-financing, self-governing communities.

The replacement of the current static, monopoly, perpetual shareholder system of owning corporations with a dynamic, co-ownership, time limited, stakeholder tenure could also be applied to land and buildings. Ownership of apartments would transfer to tenants as co-owners at the rate investors wrote off their value for tax purposes. Ownership of non-residential buildings would revert, after they were written off for tax purposes, to a Community Land Bank (CLB). The CLB would become the local government authority and own all land in its precinct. It would issue shares to all voting residents pro-rata to the area of land occupied by their homes, whether of not they were rented or owned.

A duplex title system would by created for homeowners. One title would be redeemable shares equal to the value of the land occupied. The second title would be a lease to the home. The negotiable lease would provide exclusive ownership rights for as long as the owners were occupiers. All tenants would acquire co-ownership rights in CLB shares and their homes, without cost as stakeholders, through dynamic tenure in much the same way as residents acquire rights in squatter settlements.

Like an OTC’s, CLB’s minimise external ownership and so vests control with resident stakeholders. All windfall gains and wipeouts in land values are averaged out over the community. Net gains in value can be used to finance community improvements to create self-financing communities. The CLB, like the OTC creates a more efficient, equitable, socially accountable, self-governing and environmental sustainable basis for structuring society.

Dynamic tenure, which is a feature of both OTC’s and CLB’s, would introduce a new way of distributing national income through property rights, rather than through the traditional ways of work and welfare. In other words, dynamic tenure creates a technique for privatising the tax and welfare system to create a new type of economic system described in my 1975 book, Democratising the Wealth of Nations.

The structure of money also needs to be based on ecological principles as described in my contributions to Building Sustainable Communities edited by Ward Morehouse. In this book, I suggested the use of energy dollars to finance power generation from sustainable sources like solar, wind and waves, etc. Selling pre-payment vouchers to consumers would finance the generators. The vouchers denominated in units of energy would become an inflation proof kilowatt-hour reserve currency.

The reserve currency would provide the backing to create hand-to-hand bearer energy notes. As the reserve currency would have limited life and operating costs would need to be covered, the hand-to-hand currency would have a negative interest rate. The theory and practice of negative interest rate money has been described by Professor Irvin Fisher in his 1933 book Stamp Scrip and more recently by Professor Dieter Suhr who describes it as “Neutral Money” in his 1989 book The Capitalistic Cost-Benefit Structure of Money.

It is the invisible structure of money, ownership, control and corporate governance, which determine the form, and content of the visible structures built by society. Considerable thought goes into designing and building the visible structures but not the invisible ones, which control them. Instead, we simply replicate the existing structures, which have evolved through a centralised political process to maintain centralised power.

There is currently a unique historical window of opportunity for countries in transition from socialism to not simply clone the existing defective system of private property rights. It was to share the concept of dynamic stakeholder tenure that I made two visits to Czechoslovakia and a visit to the Peoples Republic of China during 1991.

The political systems of the world are evolving to more democratic forms but the structure of property rights has so far remained unchanged. The existing ownership rules are inconsistent with creating an effective democracy. Too much wealth is held by too few. This is because the present rules of owning land, enterprise and money provide profits in excess of the incentive to invest and so concentrates wealth with the already rich. Such surplus incentive, or surplus profits, is created by our static perpetual rules of ownership. Dynamic tenure provides a technique to distribute surplus profits to the stakeholders and so provide community returns as envisaged by Gandhi.

The first similarity between the Free Software Foundation’s (FSF) principles and Anglican moral theology is the emphasis upon participation in community.

The foundation of free software is the formation of community. Similarly, Temple defines freedom as “self-control, self-determination, self-direction. To train citizens in the capacity for freedom and to give them scope for free action is the supreme end of all true politics” (68). So, the principles of the FSF seem to increase one’s “self-control, self-determination, self-direction” by allowing one to share what one has with peers and to take software in new directions. In this kind of interchange, the computer user and programmer “may feel that he [or she] has a real share and for which he [or she] may take some genuine responsibility” (89). Possessing the source code of a program and also having the right to modify and distribute it, one could, say, fix a crashing word processor and share one’s improved word processor with one’s friends. Rather, in the style of Jacques Maritain, the responsibility is kept at the grassroots level, that which is of closest responsibility.

With Free Software, one is able to take this responsibility that is simply not permitted with conventional software licenses. So, the computer user is not left in a state of despondency, unable to fix broken programs or unable to extended them to new purposes. In one example, Stallman tells the story of a woman working for a bank. The bank needed their software to take on some new functionality. However, their software had been purchased as object code from a company that would not share the source code. In order to get the new functionality, this woman was hired to re-write the source code, from scratch, and then to add the new feature. Such time and effort had to be wasted to protect secrets. Most good programmers, Stallman notes, “have experienced this frustration. The bank could afford to solve the problem by writing a new program from scratch, but a typical user, no matter how skilled, can only give up” (Why Software Should Be Free).

Surprisingly, Stallman, an avowed atheistic computer programmer, points out the spiritual harm in this practice. He points to despondency: “Giving up causes psychosocial harm” to the spirit of self-reliance. It is demoralizing to live in a house that you cannot rearrange to suit your needs. It leads to resignation and discouragement, which can spread to affect other aspects of one’s life.” Temple finds similar problems with long-term unemployment. For the unemployed as well as this bank programmer, they were not “happy in their idleness; most of them were conscious of futility and frustration…. They were degraded into a condition of universal dissatisfaction” (35). With closed, secret software, users arrive, as the long-term unemployed do, at “a sense that they have fallen out of the common life” (34). If, alternatively, one could contribute to the community of computer users (Free Software is a prerequisite for this), then one of Temple’s objectives would be met: “Every citizen should have a voice in the conduct of the business or industry which is carried on by means of his labor, and the satisfaction of knowing that his labor is directed to the well-being of the community” (97).

For Temple and for Stallman, working for the well being of community is a precious jewel. They both recognize the definite quality of people to be social creatures.

Temple draws on Jacques Maritain to demonstrate this:

- Personality is social, and only in his social relationships can a man be a person. Indeed, for the completeness of personality, there is needed the relationship to both God and neighbors. … These relationships exist in the whole network of communities, associations, and fellowships. It is in these that the real wealth of human life consists. (71)

Both Stallman and Temple seem to take Aristotle’s understanding of the person as zoon logikon. That is to say, a person is by definition a talking animal. Speech and socialization are emergent properties of humans not unlike spinning webs is an activity of spiders. Something that does not spin webs is difficult to classify as a spider. Likewise, something that does not socialize is difficult to classify as human. “The isolated citizen cannot effectively be free” (70). As a result, Temple recognizes that long-term unemployment pulls one out of society resulting in the loss of participation in community, the loss of self-identity and freedom, and the degrading from what God has created one to be. So also for Stallman, if one cannot freely share programs and ideas, one has lost the possibility to participate in the global community of computer users. He frames this participation as an act of service toward the neighbor, cast in the golden rule. So, “Freedom, Fellowship, and Service,” and characteristics of social order pointed out by both Temple and Stallman. Although Stallman is not explicitly Christian in his formulation, Temple’s thought is in the shadows. They would both likely agree that “these are the three principles of a Christian social order, derived from the still more fundamental Christian postulates that Man is a child of God and is destined for a life of eternal fellowship with Him.”

Above, the definition of participation has been taken for granted. From its context, participation has something to do with sharing with one’s equals and peers, a certain giving and taking, but its exact nature has not been explored. If one turns to Richard Hooker, then one finds his definition: “Participation is that mutual inward hold which Christ hath of us and we of him, in such sort that each possesseth each other by way of special interest, property, and inherent copulation” (Lawes 5.56.1). This definition carries great weight for Hooker, as he rejects how “some men expound our being in Christ to import nothing else, but only that the selfsame nature which maketh us to be men, is in him, and maketh him man as we are” (5.56.7). No, something much greater is here! He turns back to Cyprian and recognizes “the highest and truest society that can be between man and him which is both God and man in one” (5.56.8). This society indeed is found in the believer, where Creator and creature are united. But one, as a creature, only follows after the union of God and Humanity in the Incarnation. So, human participation (society) is only raised up to so fine a level as it is patterned after the participation of Christ and Christian that in turn only has its pattern in the participation of divine life economically and immanently.

To complete the chain, Stallman asserts that people (especially programmers) must be ultimately free to share computer software with one another. In his past experience as a programmer for MIT, Stallman watched his department crumble as talented workers left for higher-paying jobs. As he stayed in contact with those developers, he learned that the companies that they joined made “them to feel in conflict with other programmers in general rather than feel as comrades. The fundamental act of friendship among programmers is the sharing of programs; marketing arrangements now typically used essentially forbid programmers to treat each other as friends” (Manifesto). The end is division and not communion. Recalling Maritain, one would be caught “programming alone.”

So, he proposes an alternative:

- By working on and using [Free Software] rather than proprietary programs, we can be hospitable to everyone and obey the law. In addition, [Free Software] serves as an example to inspire and a banner to rally others to join us in sharing. This can give us a feeling of harmony which is impossible if we use software that is not free. For about half the programmers I talk to, this is an important happiness that money cannot replace. (Manifesto)

To Stallman, Free Software has a characteristic that is not unlike Hooker’s view of Sacraments. While sacraments are more than didactic (5.57.1), they are still “moral instruments of salvation, duties of service and worship” (5.57.4). For Stallman, there is a great act of hospitality and communion in this act of sharing; here participation is happening, as there is such an “interest, property, and inherent copulation.” This participation gains meaning from and gives meaning to human participation in Christ in the Holy Eucharist.

Computer programming informs and is informed by participation from Hooker’s sacramental theology in another way. He goes on to describe two parts of human participation in Christ:

- Thus we participate Christ partly by imputation, as when those things which he did and suffered for us are imputed unto us for righteousness; partly by habitual and real infusion, as when grace is inwardly bestowed while we are one earth, and afterwards more fully both our souls and bodies make like unto his in glory. (5.56.11)

The sacraments affect the Church step by step and make one gradually more a participant in the divine life. Computer programming models this process. When a programmer turns an idea into source code, the code is not immediately acceptable to the computer. The programmer must translate the source into object code, which the computer can run. The steps are traditionally this: the programmer enters the source code into the computer and edits it, the compiler refines the source code into assembly code, then the assembler assembles that into object code, then the linker connects multiple pieces of object code into an executable, finally the computer can run the executable and return results to the user. Each step refines the program a little more. Step by step, it becomes something that the computer can accept. At the end of the process, the execution of the program, the distinction between computer and program is blurred as they each participate in one another.

The process is dumb. Computer programs act slavishly to transform inputs to outputs. The conversion of source code into executable is a predictable process, without variation. But as mundane as it may be, it is also one of the most basic processes of computation. In Stallman’s initial announcement of his Free Software project, he announced that he will be making “a kernel plus all the utilities needed to write and run C programs: editor, shell, C compiler, linker, assembler, and a few other things” (“new UNIX implementation”). These basics are the sacraments of computing, effecting a sanctifying change in human ideas.

So, when one takes the process as a means to understand sanctification, one enriches the processes. In parallel, the Christian receives the grace of the Sacraments throughout life. Step by step and phase by phase, the Christian is transformed and made more acceptable to God. Then, at the last, one participates in God so fully that distinction between the two is difficult to make. Perhaps the strength of participation has lead historically to Christological and Trinitarian doctrinal battles (5.54.10).

In this way, computer programming points to something higher. There is an iconic relationship whereby the programming process becomes a window to the sanctification process. The words of George Herbert’s “The Elixir” become relevant here: “A servant with this clause makes drudgery divine: Who sweeps a room, as for they laws, makes that and th’ action fine.” So, the mundane and dumb process is lifted up to a new meaning and significance: iconographic representation of the sacramental process. Even further, the use of the software also has iconographic importance. The type of participation that Stallman encourages itself is a window onto the type of participation that humans have in society as zoon logikon, the type of participation that the persons of the Trinity share, and the type of participation that still awaits perfection in human relationships with God.

William Temple suggests “all things should be done in the Christian spirit and in accordance with Christian principles” (59). So, in the case of construction, “if a bridge is to be built, the Church may remind the engineer that it is his obligation to provide a really safe bridge; but it is not entitled to tell him whether, in fact, his design meets this requirement…. In just the same way the Church may tell the politician what ends the social order should promote; but it must leave to the politician the devising of the precise means to those ends.”

This series will consist of four separate posts: 1) this post, on sunk cost and credit, 2) a discussion of the suburbia’s economic prospects and the challenges of commuting and production after peak oil, 3) the potential and limitations of producing food, water, and energy in suburbia, and 4) the impact of decentralization, self-sufficiency, and lessons from history as they inform our “solutions” to suburbia.

More profoundly, while many people think that Obama is a gift to the Democratic Party, he could actually hasten its demise. Political parties supply brand, ground troops, money and relationships, all things that Obama already owns.

Blue State Digital had nine days to add its tools to Obama’s site before the senator announced his candidacy on February 10, 2007, in Springfield, IL. Among other preparations, the team braced for heavy traffic. “We made some projections of traffic levels, contribution amounts, and e-mail levels based on estimates from folks who worked with [John] Kerry and Dean in 2004,” recalls Franklin­-Hodge. As Obama’s Springfield speech progressed, “we were watching the traffic go up and up, surpassing all our previous records.” (He would not provide specific numbers.) It was clear that early assumptions were low. “We blew through all of those [estimates] in February,” he says. “So we had to do a lot of work to make sure we kept up with the demand his online success had placed on the system.” By July 2008, the campaign had raised more than $200 million from more than a million online donors (Obama had raised $340 million from all sources by the end of June), and MyBO had logged more than a million user accounts and facilitated 75,000 local events, according to Blue State Digital.

MyBO and the main campaign site made it easy to give money–the fuel for any campaign, because it pays for advertising and staff. Visitors could use credit cards to make one-time donations or to sign up for recurring monthly contributions. MyBO also made giving money a social event: supporters could set personal targets, run their own fund-raising efforts, and watch personal fund-­raising thermometers rise. To bring people to the site in the first place, the campaign sought to make Obama a ubiquitous presence on as many new-media platforms as possible.

The viral Internet offered myriad ways to propagate unfiltered Obama messages. The campaign posted the candidate’s speeches and linked to multimedia material generated by supporters. A music video set to an Obama speech–”Yes We Can,” by the hip-hop artist Will.i.am–has been posted repeatedly on YouTube, but the top two postings alone have been viewed 10 million times. A single YouTube posting of Obama’s March 18 speech on race has been viewed more than four million times. Similarly, the campaign regularly sent out text messages (at Obama rallies, speakers frequently asked attendees to text their contact information to his campaign) and made sure that Obama was prominent on other social-networking sites, such as Facebook and MySpace (see “New-Media King” chart above). The campaign even used the micro­blogging service Twitter, garnering about 50,000 Obama “followers” who track his short posts. “The campaign, consciously or unconsciously, became much more of a media operation than simply a presidential campaign, because they recognized that by putting their message out onto these various platforms, their supporters would spread it for them,” says Andrew Rasiej, founder of the Personal Democracy Forum, a website covering the intersection of politics and technology (and another Dean alumnus). “We are going from the era of the sound bite to the sound blast.”

Money flowed in, augmenting the haul from big-ticket fund-raisers. By the time of the Iowa caucuses on January 3, 2008, the Obama campaign had more than $35 million on hand and was able to use MyBO to organize and instruct caucus-goers. “They have done a great job in being precise in the use of the tools,” Teachout says. “In Iowa it was house parties, looking for a highly committed local network. In South Carolina, it was a massive get-out-the-vote effort.” MyBO was critical both in the early caucus states, where campaign staff was in place, and in later-­voting states like Texas, Colorado, and Wisconsin, where “we provided the tools, remote training, and opportunity for supporters to build the campaign on their own,” the Obama campaign told Technology Review in a written statement. “When the campaign eventually did deploy staff to these states, they supplemented an already-built infrastructure and volunteer network.”

The website also offered easy-to-find and easy-to-use toolkits to promote local activism, and a platform for members to create and join action groups. The Florida Veterans for Obama, for example, garnered 5157 members, hosted 521 events, made 19,598 calls and raised $27,982.59 during the campaign. There were over 35,000 of these self-organizing groups that cost the campaign nothing in terms of time or money, but that contributed energetically to its success. Scalability and hyper-efficiency are two of the key qualities of networked communications and the Obama campaign thoroughly understood their power.

This year Untangle organized two Installfests for Schools to refurbish older computers that were thrown out by their original owners with Ubuntu for schools in need. The first event took place on March 1st and the second from the show floor at LinuxWorld. In total 1,100 computers were refurbished for schools across both events.

In civilized societies, universal education is a right. In some nations, health care is a right. Some other services provided in the common good may require payment but in developed nations are nonetheless considered rights: access to clean water and electricity. In the United States, even telephones are a right, as users pay fees to subsidize the cost of getting lines to all people. In the United Kingdom, television is a right insofar as the government levies a tax to support it. Such rights may be met publicly or privately.

Access to the internet – and open, broadband internet that is neither censored nor filtered by government or business – should be seen, similarly, as a necessity and thus a right. Just as we judge nations by their literacy, we should now judge them by their connectedness.

It is in societies’ enlightened self-interest to enable such access. The WEF Global Agenda Council can demonstrate this to nations by cataloguing, quantifying, and demonstrating the many benefits that will accrue with universal access:

* In business: Jobs will be created. New and higher skills will be learned and used. Companies can find new efficiencies. Entrepreneurism will be fostered (and using web 2.0 tools, less capital – in a capital-starved time – will be needed to start new companies that create jobs and wealth). Innovation will be sparked. With access, jobs may move into once-isolated areas of the world. Businesses can, at the same time, reach worldwide markets.

* In education: Simply making the world’s digital knowledge accessible to and searchable by anyone in a nation is a huge step forward in informing and educating a people. Encouraging popular use of the internet is also a magnet drawing people toward literacy. Connecting whole populations enables anyone connected to become educated. Schools can become disaggregated and reaggregated so students can find classes anywhere and classes can find students anywhere.

* In government: Connectivity will connect citizens with more services and can bring more transparency to government as citizens come to expect accessible and open information. Citizens will become more involved in politics and will be able to coalesce and act around issues and needs.

* In society: We can only speculate on the long-term effect of universal connectivity on society, but creating more ways for more people to connect with each other over greater distances and periods of time will surely have a positive impact on understanding and even friendship.

Though it might seem a bad time to propose such an aggressive goal – in the midst of a financial meltdown – it can also be argued that this is precisely the right time. As governments spend funds on infrastructure to stimulate economies, the financial and societal benefits of building and extending the digital infrastructure – over, for example, roads and airports – would be great. Favoring digital over physical assets will also have the environmental fringe benefit of favoring online communications and collaboration over travel.

I have been asked to participate in many projects over the years that start once a bunch of departments, institutions or organizations notice that they have a lot in common with others and decide that it would be a good idea to collaborate, to share “best practices” or “data” or whatever. It always ’sounds’ like a good idea. I am big on sharing and have benefited much over the years from stuff I’ve shared and stuff shared with me by my peers.

But inevitably, with a very few exceptions, these projects spend an enormous amount of time defining what is to be shared, figuring out how to share it, setting up the mechanisms to share it, and then…not really sharing much. Or sharing once but costing so much time, effort or money that they do not get sustained. Does this sound familiar to anyone else? I don’t feel like this phenomenon is isolated to me or somehow occurs because of my own personal ineptitude, but you never know.

Now I contrast that with the learning networks which I inhabit, and in which every single day I share my learning and have knowledge and learning shared back with me. I know it works. I literally don’t think I could do my job any longer without it - the pace of change is too rapid, the number of developments I need to follow and master too great, and without my network I would drown. But I am not drowning, indeed I feel regularly that I am enjoying surfing these waves and glance over to see other surfers right there beside me, silly grins on all of our faces. So it feels to me like it’s working, like we ARE sharing, and thriving because of it.

This first started a couple of months ago, but only hit Palms Out about a month ago.

Although the initiative signals yet another movement towards openness, de-institutionalization and personalization, like Siemens, I still see it as linear, top-down and very teacher-centred. The content and design are laid down beforehand and precede the learner instead of respecting truly self-determined learning and reflection.

The Wikipedia article on social news redirects to social bookmarking, which I think is incorrect. Here’s my description: on a typical social news site, users submit URLs for Web sites, images, videos, or news articles. Other users comment on and rate the URLs — usually a binary thumbs-up/thumbs-down vote. Submitted URLs with the highest ranking are shown on the social news site’s front page, and users may also have “personalized” front pages that include only URLs recommended for them. Typically (not always) there’s a social network involved, such that a friend’s submissions or votes matter more than a stranger’s in recommending links for the user.

Digg, in particular, has become an important arbiter of popularity on the Web in 2008. Getting a new link “dugg” and ranked highly, or even put on the front page, can be a make-or-break driver of traffic for bloggers and other site owners. The once-famed Slashdot effect is now dwarfed by Digg’s ability to send traffic to a new site.

There are, of course, some serious downsides. The algorithms for ranking submitted links on most social news sites are proprietary. Data on URLs’ popularity, voting records, the social network itself and the profiles of users on the service is typically put under a strict no-reuse policy (Digg’s public domain dedication being a notable and refreshing exception) and is usually hard to retrieve in bulk. Finally, no current social news site supports a distributed model, e.g. cross-site voting or “friending” protocols.”

…

What could a social news site (or sites) that works well in an Open Software Services ecology look like? First, it’s probably clear that a single leader is necessary, to get the kind of traffic numbers that will drive people to submit and rank stories. Second, it will have to leverage its Open Source software with a networked voting system, such that adding more services to the site will stimulate a network effect. Letting groups and users create their own sites that use the same software, but feed data and users into the rest of the network, would really grow the project and make it more valuable.

How quickly people forget. We built the World Wide Web, fer cripessakes! The original browser and the original webservers were built by a hacker at CERN, not in some closed-door corporate shop. Before that, years before we got Linux and our own T-shirts, people who would later identify their own behavior correctly as open-source hacking built the Internet.

It seems to me that bringing the Internet and the World Wide Web into being ought to count as enough “innovation” for any one geological era. But it didn’t start or stop there. Nobody even conceived of cross-platform graphics engines before the X window system. The entire group of modern scripting languages descends from open-source Perl, and almost all draw critical strengths and innovative drive from the size and diversity of their open-source communities.

Even in user-interface design, much of the most innovative work going on today is in open source. Consider for example the Facades system. Or just the astonishing, eye-popping visual experimentalism of Compiz/Fusion under Linux.

It’s actually corporations who have trouble innovating. Innovation is too disruptive of established business models and practices; it’s risky, and it involves coping with those annoying prima donnas at the R&D lab. Consequently, even well-intentioned big companies like Xerox that are smart enough to fund real research centers like Xerox PARC often reject the truly groundbreaking ideas from their own researchers. Today you’d be extremely hard pressed to find any of the really cool ideas from Microsoft R&D being deployed in actual Microsoft products.

The process of innovation and deployment in open source is of course not friction-free, but it certainly looks that way when compared to the corporate world. One of my favorite current examples is the way Guido van Rossum and the Python community are gearing up to re-invent their language for its 3.0 release. Their “Python Enhancement Proposal” process for fostering and filtering novel ideas by individual contributors repays careful study; like the Internet RFC process (on which it’s clearly modeled) it produces a combination of innovative pace and successful deployment that even Bell Labs in its heyday could not have dreamed of sustaining.

de Dinechin, and people like him, have a simple and linear model of how innovation works. Pay a bright guy like de Dinechin, stand back, and watch the brilliant stuff come out and change the world. In this model, if you don’t pay bright guys like de Dinechin, innovative stuff doesn’t come out because they’re too busy grinding out COBOL or something so they can eat — no world-changes, so sad.

This model is very appealing to people like de Dinechin, who have an understandably strong desire to be paid for being smart and creative. Heck, it appeals to me for exactly the same reason. Unfortunately, and unlike de Dinechin, I know that it is seriously false-to-fact.

I have a very different model of how innovation, at least in software, actually works. One of its premises can be expressed by what I shall now dub the Iron Law of Software R&D: If you are a programmer developing innovative software, the odds that you will be permitted to finish it and it will actually be deplayed are, other things being equal, inversely proportional to the product of your depth of innovation and your job security.

That is, the cushier your corporate sinecure is, the less likely it is that you will make a difference. The more innovative your software is, the less likely it is that you will actually be supported all the way to deployment.

The reason for this is dead simple. Corporations exist to mitigate investment risk. The large and more stable a corporation is, the more resistant it is to disruption in its practices and business model including the unvoidable short-term disruptions from what might be long-term innovative gain.