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["Charles Brown" <CharlesB@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

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@Title: The Great Giveaway

@Intro: Good ideas are worth money. So why are hard
headed operators giving them away for free? Join our
experiment to find out says Graham Lawton

@Body: IF YOU'VE BEEN to a computer show in recent
months you might have seen it: a shiny silver drinks
can with a ring-pull logo and the words "opencola" on
the side. Inside is a fizzy drink that tastes very much
like Coca-Cola. Or is it Pepsi?

There's something else written on the can, though,
which sets the drink apart. It says "check out the
source at opencola.com". Go to that Web address and
you'll see something that's not available on Coca-
Cola's website, or Pepsi's--the recipe for cola. For
the first time ever, you can make the real thing in
your own home.

OpenCola is the world's first "open source" consumer
product. By calling it open source, its manufacturer is
saying that instructions for making it are freely
available. Anybody can make the drink, and anyone can
modify and improve on the recipe as long as they, too,
release their recipe into the public domain. As a way
of doing business it's rather unusual--the Coca-Cola
Company doesn't make a habit of giving away precious
commercial secrets. But that's the point.

OpenCola is the most prominent sign yet that a long-
running battle between rival philosophies in software
development has spilt over into the rest of the world.
What started as a technical debate over the best way to
debug computer programs is developing into a political
battle over the ownership of knowledge and how it is
used, between those who put their faith in the free
circulation of ideas and those who prefer to designate
them "intellectual property". No one knows what the
outcome will be. But in a world of growing opposition
to corporate power, restrictive intellectual property
rights and globalisation, open source is emerging as a
possible alternative, a potentially potent means of
fighting back. And you're helping to test its value
right now.

The open source movement originated in 1984 when
computer scientist Richard Stallman quit his job at MIT
and set up the Free Software Foundation. His aim was to
create high-quality software that was freely available
to everybody. Stallman's beef was with commercial
companies that smother their software with patents and
copyrights and keep the source code--the original
program, written in a computer language such as C++--a
closely guarded secret. Stallman saw this as damaging.
It generated poor-quality, bug-ridden software. And
worse, it choked off the free flow of ideas. Stallman
fretted that if computer scientists could no longer
learn from one another's code, the art of programming
would stagnate (New Scientist, 12 December 1998, p 42).

Stallman's move resonated round the computer science
community and now there are thousands of similar
projects. The star of the movement is Linux, an
operating system created by Finnish student Linus
Torvalds in the early 1990s and installed on around 18
million computers worldwide.

What sets open source software apart from commercial
software is the fact that it's free, in both the
political and the economic sense. If you want to use a
commercial product such as Windows XP or Mac OS X you
have to pay a fee and agree to abide by a licence that
stops you from modifying or sharing the software. But
if you want to run Linux or another open source
package, you can do so without paying a penny--although
several companies will sell you the software bundled
with support services. You can also modify the software
in any way you choose, copy it and share it without
restrictions. This freedom acts as an open invitation--
some say challenge--to its users to make improvements.
As a result, thousands of volunteers are constantly
working on Linux, adding new features and winkling out
bugs. Their contributions are reviewed by a panel and
the best ones are added to Linux. For programmers, the
kudos of a successful contribution is its own reward.
The result is a stable, powerful system that adapts
rapidly to technological change. Linux is so successful
that even IBM installs it on the computers it sells.

To maintain this benign state of affairs, open source
software is covered by a special legal instrument
called the General Public License. Instead of
restricting how the software can be used, as a standard
software license does, the GPL--often known as a
"copyleft"--grants as much freedom as possible (see
http://www.fsf.org/licenses/gpl.html). Software
released under the GPL (or a similar copyleft licence)
can be copied, modified and distributed by anyone, as
long as they, too, release it under a copyleft. That
restriction is crucial, because it prevents the
material from being co-opted into later proprietary
products. It also makes open source software different
from programs that are merely distributed free of
charge. In FSF's words, the GPL "makes it free and
guarantees it remains free".

Open source has proved a very successful way of writing
software. But it has also come to embody a political
stand--one that values freedom of expression, mistrusts
corporate power, and is uncomfortable with private
ownership of knowledge. It's "a broadly libertarian
view of the proper relationship between individuals and
institutions", according to open source guru Eric
Raymond.

But it's not just software companies that lock
knowledge away and release it only to those prepared to
pay. Every time you buy a CD, a book, a copy of New
Scientist, even a can of Coca-Cola, you're forking out
for access to someone else's intellectual property.
Your money buys you the right to listen to, read or
consume the contents, but not to rework them, or make
copies and redistribute them. No surprise, then, that
people within the open source movement have asked
whether their methods would work on other products. As
yet no one's sure--but plenty of people are trying it.

Take OpenCola. Although originally intended as a
promotional tool to explain open source software, the
drink has taken on a life of its own. The Toronto-based
OpenCola company has become better known for the drink
than the software it was supposed to promote. Laird
Brown, the company's senior strategist, attributes its
success to a widespread mistrust of big corporations
and the "proprietary nature of almost everything". A
website selling the stuff has shifted 150,000 cans.
Politically minded students in the US have started
mixing up the recipe for parties.

OpenCola is a happy accident and poses no real threat
to Coke or Pepsi, but elsewhere people are deliberately
using the open source model to challenge entrenched
interests. One popular target is the music industry. At
the forefront of the attack is the Electronic Frontier
Foundation, a San Francisco group set up to defend
civil liberties in the digital society. In April of
last year, the EFF published a model copyleft called
the Open Audio License (OAL). The idea is to let
musicians take advantage of digital music's
properties--ease of copying and distribution--rather
than fighting against them. Musicians who release music
under an OAL consent to their work being freely copied,
performed, reworked and reissued, as long as these new
products are released under the same licence. They can
then rely on "viral distribution" to get heard. "If the
people like the music, they will support the artist to
ensure the artist can continue to make music," says
Robin Gross of the EFF.

It's a little early to judge whether the OAL will
capture imaginations in the same way as OpenCola. But
it's already clear that some of the strengths of open
source software simply don't apply to music. In
computing, the open source method lets users improve
software by eliminating errors and inefficient bits of
code, but it's not obvious how that might happen with
music. In fact, the music is not really "open source"
at all. The files posted on the OAL music website
http://www.openmusicregistry.org so far are all MP3s
and Ogg Vorbises--formats which allow you to listen but
not to modify.

It's also not clear why any mainstream artists would
ever choose to release music under an OAL. Many bands
objected to the way Napster members circulated their
music behind their backs, so why would they now allow
unrestricted distribution, or consent to strangers
fiddling round with their music? Sure enough, you're
unlikely to have heard of any of the 20 bands that have
posted music on the registry. It's hard to avoid the
conclusion that Open Audio amounts to little more than
an opportunity for obscure artists to put themselves in
the shop window.

The problems with open music, however, haven't put
people off trying open source methods elsewhere.
Encyclopedias, for example, look like fertile ground.
Like software, they're collaborative and modular, need
regular upgrading, and improve with peer review. But
the first attempt, a free online reference called
Nupedia, hasn't exactly taken off. Two years on, only
25 of its target 60,000 articles have been completed.
"At the current rate it will never be a large
encyclopedia," says editor-in-chief Larry Sanger. The
main problem is that the experts Sanger wants to
recruit to write articles have little incentive to
participate. They don't score academic brownie points
in the same way software engineers do for upgrading
Linux, and Nupedia can't pay them.

It's a problem that's inherent to most open source
products: how do you get people to chip in? Sanger says
he's exploring ways to make money out of Nupedia while
preserving the freedom of its content. Banner adverts
are a possibility. But his best hope is that academics
start citing Nupedia articles so authors can earn
academic credit.

There's another possibility: trust the collective
goodwill of the open source community. A year ago,
frustrated by the treacle-like progress of Nupedia,
Sanger started another encyclopedia named Wikipedia
(the name is taken from open source Web software called
WikiWiki that allows pages to be edited by anyone on
the Web). It's a lot less formal than Nupedia: anyone
can write or edit an article on any topic, which
probably explains the entries on beer and Star Trek.
But it also explains its success. Wikipedia already
contains 19,000 articles and is acquiring several
thousand more each month. "People like the idea that
knowledge can and should be freely distributed and
developed," says Sanger. Over time, he reckons,
thousands of dabblers should gradually fix any errors
and fill in any gaps in the articles until Wikipedia
evolves into an authoritative encyclopedia with
hundreds of thousands of entries.

Another experiment that's proved its worth is the
OpenLaw project at the Berkman Center for Internet and
Society at Harvard Law School. Berkman lawyers
specialise in cyberlaw--hacking, copyright, encryption
and so on--and the centre has strong ties with the EFF
and the open source software community. In 1998 faculty
member Lawrence Lessig, now at Stanford Law School, was
asked by online publisher Eldritch Press to mount a
legal challenge to US copyright law. Eldritch takes
books whose copyright has expired and publishes them on
the Web, but new legislation to extend copyright from
50 to 70 years after the author's death was cutting off
its supply of new material. Lessig invited law students
at Harvard and elsewhere to help craft legal arguments
challenging the new law on an online forum, which
evolved into OpenLaw.

Normal law firms write arguments the way commercial
software companies write code. Lawyers discuss a case
behind closed doors, and although their final product
is released in court, the discussions or "source code"
that produced it remain secret. In contrast, OpenLaw
crafts its arguments in public and releases them under
a copyleft. "We deliberately used free software as a
model," says Wendy Selzer, who took over OpenLaw when
Lessig moved to Stanford. Around 50 legal scholars now
work on Eldritch's case, and OpenLaw has taken other
cases, too.

"The gains are much the same as for software," Selzer
says. "Hundreds of people scrutinise the 'code' for
bugs, and make suggestions how to fix it. And people
will take underdeveloped parts of the argument, work on
them, then patch them in." Armed with arguments crafted
in this way, OpenLaw has taken Eldritch's case--deemed
unwinnable at the outset--right through the system and
is now seeking a hearing in the Supreme Court.

There are drawbacks, though. The arguments are in the
public domain right from the start, so OpenLaw can't
spring a surprise in court. For the same reason, it
can't take on cases where confidentiality is important.
But where there's a strong public interest element,
open sourcing has big advantages. Citizens' rights
groups, for example, have taken parts of OpenLaw's
legal arguments and used them elsewhere. "People use
them on letters to Congress, or put them on flyers,"
Selzer says.

The open content movement is still at an early stage
and it's hard to predict how far it will spread. "I'm
not sure there are other areas where open source would
work," says Sanger. "If there were, we might have
started it ourselves." Eric Raymond has also expressed
doubts. In his much-quoted 1997 essay, The Cathedral
and the Bazaar, he warned against applying open source
methods to other products. "Music and most books are
not like software, because they don't generally need to
be debugged or maintained," he wrote. Without that
need, the products gain little from others' scrutiny
and reworking, so there's little benefit in open
sourcing. "I do not want to weaken the winning argument
for open sourcing software by tying it to a potential
loser," he wrote.

But Raymond's views have now shifted subtly. "I'm more
willing to admit that I might talk about areas other
than software someday," he told New Scientist. "But not
now." The right time will be once open source software
has won the battle of ideas, he says. He expects that
to happen around 2005.

And so the experiment goes on. As a contribution to it,
New Scientist has agreed to issue this article under a
copyleft. That means you can copy it, redistribute it,
reprint it in whole or in part, and generally play
around with it as long as you, too, release your
version under a copyleft and abide by the other terms
and conditions in the licence. We also ask that you
inform us of any use you make of the article, by e-
mailing copyleft@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

One reason for doing so is that by releasing it under a
copyleft, we can print the recipe for OpenCola without
violating its copyleft. If nothing else, that
demonstrates the power of the copyleft to spread
itself. But there's another reason, too: to see what
happens. To my knowledge this is the first magazine
article published under a copyleft. Who knows what the
outcome will be? Perhaps the article will disappear
without a trace. Perhaps it will be photocopied,
redistributed, re-edited, rewritten, cut and pasted
onto websites, handbills and articles all over the
world. I don't know--but that's the point. It's not up
to me any more. The decision belongs to all of us.


@Furtherreading: The source code of this article plus
details of the conditions can be found at
http://www.newscientist.com/hottopics/copyleft
For a selection of copylefts, see
http://www.eff.org/IP/Open_licenses/open_alternatives.h
tml
The Cathedral and the Bazaar by Eric Raymond is
available at
http://tuxedo.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/


@BoxTitle: Copyright © 2002 Reed Business Information
Ltd, England
@BoxBody:THE INFORMATION IN THIS ARTICLE IS FREE. It
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conditions set down in the Design Science License
published by Michael Stutz at
http://dsl.org/copyleft/dsl.txt





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