Free Software Revolution in the Americas

Free software in socialist countries could fit in with government management of the economy but it does little to undermine Capitalism and has a bit of a corporatist/plutocracy feel to it at times if you imagine giving away labor that can mainly be used by industry as something that could potentially help undermine attempts to unionize software developers. To develop free software requires skills and free time to work without pay. Free software can be used by nonprofits and the like but the need overall seems higher in corporate circles than among the poor. Linux has brought in money to IBM in terms of consulting and while it perhaps undermines Microsoft a bit it is mainly used now to run servers to save big businesses money more than to free poorer users from control by an OS vendor.

Free software is not bad and for those outside the US Linux does free countries up from risks that could come from control by a US company but since some free technologies such as DES3 were developed by the NSA and the CIA and DARPA seems to invest more in Bay Area startups than in companies like Microsoft I wouldnt call the free software movement a threat to US interests. I wouldnt be surprised if the NSA used Linux (or some other free OS) as its OS of choice for security reasons since it reduces the needs for security leaks through a private sector software vendor (it also wouldnt be surprising if they used open source databases and the like for similar reasons).

Free work on software that can mainly be used by large businesses and governments could be see as a civil service that benefits society but it has a bias toward governments and industry so its definitely not revolutionary. Again, that doesnt make it bad... Basic research in science and technology that exposes new ideas to the world public tends to benefit the rich more than the poor but that is less the fault of science and technology than the fault of an economic system where such advances are more likely to widen rather than shrink income inequalities (in the US, Latin America, India or anywhere else)

Z says:
Free work on software that can mainly be used by large businesses and governments could be see as a civil service that benefits society but it has a bias toward governments and industry so its definitely not revolutionary.
The revolutionary aspects comes from the radical departure from the traditional attempts to "own" intellectual property, knowledge, algorithms, etc. It's for this reason that we've seen open source applied outside of software -- "open source hardware" (knowledge that is normally kept very secret from people who would like to build their own computers), "open source government" (policies which remove the secrecy surrounding governmental decisions and processes, like sunshine laws), "open source culture" (creative commons & other attempts to liberate art/music from the stranglehold of the RIAA mafia).

Furthermore, the application of free software in Latin America shows that free software is a practical tool of revolutionary social changes. Many of the radical changes in Brazil and Venezuela are made possible by free software (50,000 new computer labs throughout Brazil intended to serve poor students who will end up being uber-Unix geeks (compared to the students in the US who can barely figure out how to uninstall a program from Windows), or Brazil's impressive digital inclusion program which uses free software to bridge the digital divide), etc).

The final analysis should be that free software is founded on a radically free philosophy and we're seeing that the application of free software is most useful to people in countries where they are starving for technological knowledge that is often freely available to the rich in places like the Bay Area. It's understandable why you wouldn't see why this as impressive if this knowledge has always been freely available to you (or, maybe not FREE but you could afford the tuition) and this is why free software is so wildly popular in South America. For instance, an Ubuntu install open to the public at the WSF saw dozens and dozens of the city's poor lining up with their old desktops to get Ubuntu installed on it, giving them access to streaming radio, sophisticated desktop environments, etc for the first time. Of course this isn't impressive to someone who has grown up in a technological society and always had the latest toys to play with. But for people throughout Latin America, the perspective is quite different, of course.

If a resource is free,
and costs almost nothing to copy,
and has almost no ecological effect --

then its
economics
seems to
transcend both capitalism
and classical Marxism....???

For the most part free software is now a business model where the idea is that you can increase your user base fast and then make money off support. Eclipse, MySQL, Java, PHP, etc.. are useful to a wide variety of people but the goal behind the projects is mainly one of making money. Is this so different than providing free magazines, TV or radio supported by ad revenue. Anyone no mater how poor can use the product but the goal is one where the company providing the software hopes to benefit from the use.

Technology is definitely changing things in developing countries and open source and free software helps speed things up. Activists even from poor backgrounds can use free software (although rather expensive electricity, internet connections and hardware) to communicate with each other. On the other hand in India, China, and probably S American too the new educated technical classes add to income inequality. In India the far right tends to get much of its support from software developers. In the US the same was definitely true in the 1990s and is probably still true today (the digital divide tends to be based around income even though some poor people are self taught).

In much of the world the barriers to use of technology are stark enough that it isnt just a question of access. In countries like Afghanistan with low literacy rates aside from access costs (especially since many villages have no electricity) you face the fact that you would need to train people to type and read to make computers useful (and even then there would be language barriers for most sites).

Communication is both revolutionary and reactionary. Phones and telegraphs were similar. Quick communications allowed for both radical change and organized oppression. Technolgical change in the 1800s created robber barons but also brought about organized Communist movements. Technological changes in the early 1900s allowed for both the Russian Revolution, the rise of the Nazis and the rise of anticolonial movements around the world. The internet revolution of the 1990s was definitely mixed and mainly benefitted the rich although thing like Chavez's resistance to the coup and the backlash against Bush's oppression came out of the internet based organizing as well..

Free labor is always a mixed blessing. Working for the PeaceCorp in a poor country can displace work and undercut organized labor. Free software is also somewhat mixed. Microsoft charges for their OS but by bundling in free add-ons they managed to undercut smaller companies. IBM sortof uses Linux and some of their free software products in a similar way. Sun has managed to make more off Java by having it be free than they ever could if they charged for it. I guess the difference between free software and other types of free charity work is that at least for now software development pays ok (so the fear of undercutting labor is not yet real), but you also have to take into account that among the worlds poorest software is way down the list of needed services (after food, shelter, water, medicine, literacy, electricity, computer hardware etc...).

Can you say cult of personality? Communism was never intended to be just another Scientology like religion for stars....