How do open source projects survive?

I spent a very pleasant and interesting Friday evening last week with some acquaintances of my son’s – a left group consisting mainly of under-30s – and they were discussing the open source movement.  It was an informative meeting, not only by virtue of the well-informed presentation by Martin and Lambert, our German hosts, but also the contributions from the floor. Some were interestingly informed, not least by direct experience of open source development, but also in some cases because of the misunderstandings.

One issue that occurred to me is why, once they have reached a certain level of maturity, the employers of the individuals who actually create open source products like Linux or WordPress do not claim their property rights over the result. After all, who would not want to own Linux or WordPress as a commercial property?

So is there a legal basis for claiming rights over open source systems? I have no idea really, but some years ago, when I was working for a large consultancy, the partnership forced one of its own members to relinquish rights to a very successful book he had written on the grounds that, although he had written it in his own time, they still owned the IPR in anything he developed. This may be a peculiarity of American law, but they certainly won.

So why not Linux or WordPress, or any other open source system? Given that pretty much all such products are probably made by employees of existing companies, presumably they would have the same claim on the end-product as the consultancy I mentioned above. Given the maturity and value of such systems, it is surely time for them to insist on their (piratical, exploitative, deeply immoral) ‘rights’.

When I raised this issue with Martin and Lambert, they replied that it is still in these companies interests to leave these systems under open source control, and point out that many of them actually assign staff to working on open source systems. But I am not convinced that they have any such interests: these are now very mature products, there is a vast market of current and prospective users, and all the risk involved in creating a popular, industrial-strength system has already been taken by unpaid volunteers. And if employers are funding this even more directly, by paying individuals to work on open source projects, I cannot believe that this is for any reason but their own self-interest. In most cases (I would guess) the products are indirectly beneficial to them, as valuable auxiliaries and conduits to their own products and services.

So why aren’t WordPress & Linux and all the rest being claimed as the rightful property of the big corporates? Primarily, I would guess, because they are not easily fitted not their current business models, or even more simply, because it is impossible to divided them up between the various claimants – we simply have no idea who contributed what. It’s not a very good model for a more libertarian approach to development – the result escapes corporate control only because the wolves can’t work out which parts they can rightfully carry off.

(Incidentally, this gives the lie to the idea that open source systems are free or that they represent what could be done if a free community were to set to work on a give problem. Open source projects are funded by companies, whether or not they want to be. It’s just that the funding consists of paying people so much that they are still willing and able to carry out yet more serious development outside work. So open source remains a radically dependent model of development, not a genuine breakthrough from capitalist property rights.)

Computing a sense of proportion

The wor;d's single biggest problem is...? Climate change. So, when a list of the world's biggest computers is released, lo and behold, just a handful of the world's top 500 are devoted to weather, let alone climate change.

The Limits to Growth

Just about the most convincing – and scary - book I ever read about the environment was The Limits to Growth. I would guess that everyone has heard of this book but my impression is that relatively few people have ever read it, or the two follow-up volumes. I read it when it first came out – almost four decades ago – and then again a few months back.

The book was written by a group of MIT researchers - Donella and Dennis Meadows, Jorgen Randers and William Behrens – and published in 1972 by the Club of Rome. The timing is interesting, as the first edition of The Limits to Growth is roughly contemporary with a number of other foundation texts in the overall environmental movement. 1971 saw the publication of Paul Ehrlich’s Population Bomb, which gave the growing concern with population growth a kick start. Then in 1972 Barbara Ward and the well-known anthropologists René Dubos published Only One Earth – a sort of semi-official UN report that attracted a lot of attention. And then in 1974, M. King Hubbard gave what was perhaps his most important summary of the position on oil and energy production, namely his testimony to Congress on the peaking of US oil production.

The reason I found The Limits to Growth so compelling – even more than Only One Earth or Silent Spring - was the simplicity and centrality of the question it posed and the directness of the method its authors used to answer it. Instead of endless facts and figures and yet another multi-faceted discussion of our environmental predicament, they simply asked what would happen if humanity at large continued with a small number of key trends:

• World population.
• Industrialization.
• Pollution.
• Food production.
• Resource depletion.

Their method was equally straightforward – so much so that, had I felt very doubtful about its validity when I first heard about it. They started with a very generalised model of these factors - the ‘World3’ model developed by Professor Jay Forrester (also from MIT). This is described in Forrester’s World Dynamics (published the previous year), which used a ‘system dynamics’ approach. This was really a very simple model - basically a suite of functional interactions (circular, interlocking, sometimes time-delayed relationships, etc.) between what the modellers regarded as the key social and natural phenomena. World3 was based on large, long-term factors, which it defined in self-consciously simple and gross terms, without much detail. It made little attempt to explain why these interactions were as they were.

When tracking what happened when the trends they were interested in unfolded, the Limits to Growth team were not looking for trouble. They made strongly optimistic assumptions when in doubt, and took into account most of the qualifications critics usually offer about predictions of environmental doom and gloom – resource substitution, the power of innovation, and so on. On the other hand, they did assume that all these factors tend towards compound growth - which is to say, that they grow by a constant percentage, and constantly accelerate, not by a constant amount, which would lead only to regular increments of the same size. They also interact with one another, which has the effect of overshoots and disruptions in one undermining the others.

A typical outcome of the model went like this:

1. Population cannot grow without food.
2. Food production can only be increased by growth of capital.
3. Creating more capital requires extracting and processing more resources.
4. Discarded waste from resource extraction, refining and usage become pollution.
5. Pollution interferes with the growth of both population and food.
6. So the system tends towards eventual collapse of both population and food production.

It’s crucial to understand that this collapse happens not only because a specific input is damaged or reduced (which might be ameliorated by resource substitution, innovation, etc.) but because the system undermines itself. That is, the initial success of the system destroys the conditions for its continuing success. This is, I think, why it makes relatively little difference to assume that we will eventually find far more resources than are currently expected, or that we can continue to have cheap energy.

The authors made multiple runs of the model based on different assumptions. Although, like most futurologists, they avoided claiming to be making strict predictions, the consistency of the outcomes is quite frightening enough.

The book analyses quite a few scenarios (though only a fraction of those actually run, apparently). The starting point was ‘business as usual’, which led to the following outcomes:

1. Massive industrial growth depletes resources.
2. Resource prices then rise and stocks are depleted.
3. So more capital used for obtaining resources, leaving less for growth.
4. Eventually investment cannot keep up with depreciation.
5. With that, the industrial base collapses, taking with it the service and agricultural systems, the tax base for government, and so on.
6. However, population keeps rising, so the death rate is driven upward by lack of food and health services.

Radical collapse comes ‘well before the year 2100’.

As I say, the authors presented other scenarios in which:

• Nuclear power is cheap and safe.
• We manage to discover vastly increased resources.
• Innovation and technology allow much reduced pollution.
• Agricultural yields are greatly improved.

And so on. By and large, these optimistic assumptions mean that the eventual collapse is delayed by a decade or two – never more.

Here’s another typical example: the Green Revolution. This has indisputably increased food production, but at a price. The specialised seeds require a great deal of fertiliser and water. The former accelerates fossil fuel use and depletion, while the latter extracts more water than natural systems can sustain. In addition, the need for extensive capital also leads to peasant farmers being evicted from the land by their landlords, and hundreds of thousands of landless peasants end up in Mumbai, Kolkata, Sao Paulo or Mexico City, where they have no resources and no relevant skills from what they might earn a living. This increases pressure on urban systems and causes fertile land to be built over by slums.

The increase in capital requirements – tractors, petrol, fertiliser, shipping etc. – needed to operate the Green Revolution hugely depletes resources, including oil and natural gas. What is worse, the intensive treatment of the soil under a monoculture régime means that it becomes less able to support any other sort of agriculture, so the system becomes even more locked into an inherently unsustainable ‘solution’, and by this remarkable ‘advance’ we have managed to convert what one would have thought was an inherently renewable resource – fertile soil – into a non-renewable resource. Aren’t we clever? Meanwhile, the planet’s carbon footprint is made that little bit bigger, global warming is given that small extra shove upwards, and the glaciers that feed the irrigation systems that feed the crops melt that little bit faster. More jam today, but not only less jam tomorrow but also a lot less ability to manage having less jam tomorrow.

More generally, the consistent result reported by The Limits to Growth was overshoot and collapse. If the present trends in world population, industrialization, pollution, food production, and resource depletion continue, the limits to growth will be reached by 2070. The alternative scenarios only delay collapse: all end by 2100. The most probable direct outcome will be sudden, uncontrollable falls in population and industry – in other words, the ‘hundreds of millions’ of deaths predicted by the Stern Report. Only The Limits to Growth predicted it all three and a half decades earlier.

The authors conclusions about the ‘business as usual’ scenario are stark:

The unspoken assumption behind all of the model runs we have presented in this chapter is that population and capital growth should be allowed to continue until they reach some ‘natural’ limit. This assumption also appears to be a basic part of the human value system currently operational in the real world. Given that first assumption, that population and capital growth should not be deliberately limited but should be left to ‘seek their own levels’, we have not been able to find a set of policies that avoids the collapse mode of behavior.

As so often, the reactions to the original publication illuminating not only for the welcome offered to this absolutely vital book but also by the disdain expressed by those who could see no further than the status quo. It was described as ‘the most fascinating and the most disturbing book’, and it was said that ‘if this doesn't blow everybody's mind who can read without moving his lips, then the earth is kaput’. But it was also described as ‘a piece of irresponsible nonsense’ and ‘an empty and misleading work’.

The authors reviewed their findings in updates published in 1992 and 2004. These books are worth reading in their own right, as they both go far beyond updating the original methods and finding. Their original conclusions, they find, were sound. They needed some qualifications, but by comparison with the critics who greeted the original publication with such scorn and the deniers by whom they are still surrounded, they seem to have been pretty much spot-on.

Nor is this merely their own opinion. In 2008 Graham Turner published a comprehensive re-evaluation of the data, and concluded that:

The analysis shows that 30 years of historical data compares favorably with key features of a business-as-usual scenario…, which results in the collapse of the global system midway through the 21^st century.

In other words, we have done nothing significant to deflect our fate.

So are there no scenarios that lead to a happy ending? Maybe - it depends on what makes you happy. If you want interminable consumerism, then no, there aren’t. If you ever wanted a ringside seat at the end of the world, consumerism represents the front row. But if you are willing to settle for mere sufficiency, to imagine that there might actually be an ‘enough’, then yes, a somewhat reduced standard of living – something like the 1940s or 1950s, it is said – is available for all. Not bad, given the alternative, and hardly desperate poverty by any standard. It’s not as though we are any happier than we were then, though it might take a bit of getting used to. Nor need it look quite like that slightly dismal era – we start from here, not there, and a great deal can be done with a 1950s carbon footprint, give the science and technology of the 21^st century.

But there is a lot to be done – population control, the end of ‘the American Way of Life’ (which surely represents the biggest threat to the planet since the last ice age), serious support for developing countries, and so on. But it’s hardly worth thinking about – we never have done anything about these things, we show no signs of doing anything about it, and we are led by politicians, media and business people with as much grasp of our situation and as much interest in dealing with it as a bucketful of molluscs.

But not to worry – it will soon be too late to deflect the worst effects of our own actions, so we won’t have to worry about it any more. Just die in our millions. If you have ever wondered what the fall of the Roman Empire looked like, stay tuned.

Read this book.

References

Ehrlich, P. (1971). The Population Bomb. Cutchogue, N.Y.: Buccaneer Books.

Forrester, J.W. (1971) World Dynamics. Cambridge, Mass.: Wright-Allen Press.

Hubbert, M.K. (1974). Testimony to Hearing on the National Energy Conservation Policy Act of 1974, hearings before the Subcommittee on the Environment of the committee on Interior and Insular Affairs House of Representatives. June 6, 1974. Published as The Nature Of Growth by Technocracy.org.

Meadows, D.H., Meadows, D.L., Randers, J. and Behrens III, W.W. (1972). The Limits to Growth. A Report for the Club of Rome’s Project on the Predicament of Mankind. New York: Universe Books.

Meadows, D.H., Meadows, D.L., Randers, and J. (1992). Beyond the Limits: Confronting Global Collapse, Envisioning a Sustainable Future. Earthscan.

Meadows, D.H., Randers, J., and Meadows, D.L. (2004). The Limits to Growth: The 30-year Update. Earthscan.

Turner, G. (2008). A comparison of the Limits of Growth with thirty years of reality. CSIRO Working Paper Series 2008-2009.

Ward, B., and Dubos, R. (1972). Only One Earth. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.

Duck!

My love affair with the Financial Times continues unabated, and this time I find that their scientific reporting is as spot-on as their analysis of business and capitalism. In today’s on-line edition, Clive Cookson’s report on the huge new European telescopes launched yesterday from Guyana (‘Huge telescopes aim to solve mysteries’) tells us that the telescopes ‘will operate in close proximity at a point in space called L2, 1.5km from earth’.

I hope they chose their orbit carefully. 1.5 km means that they will miss Ben Nevis pretty comfortably, but as Everest is rather over 5 times that height, it might be a bit of a white-knuckle ride elsewhere. The authoritative SatNews.com suggests that 1.5 million kilometres may be nearer the mark.

Of course, the FT is not a science paper, but you’d hope journalists and editors could manage to spot such a blindingly wrong number. It also raises the question of whether the current economy downturn is in fact a very reasonable reaction to the FT misreporting economic data by six orders of magnitude?

I am Jack the Ripper

Although my personal life is pretty dull, family mythology claims that I am related to some pretty exotic characters.

My father once told me that somewhere back there we are related to William Palmer – one of Britain’s more prolific murderers. He also told me that an uncle of his had once been chased through the streets of Whitechapel (where, by coincidence, I am writing these words) by a lynch mob eager to avenge the latest of Jack the Ripper’s crimes, which had taken place that just evening. It was foggy and my uncle, a craftsman, carried his tools in a Gladstone bag just like the one Jack was supposed to keep his tools in. He only escaped by running into a police station.

So was my great-uncle a suspicious character? I suppose so – hadn’t he been ‘linked’ to the unsolved Jack the Ripper murders? So was my father a suspect too – a ‘relative’ who might have led him into evil ways - suspicious? Am I too suspect – after all, I am a 'known associate' of my father’s?

Presumably so, if America’s Black Helix system is to be the judge. This is the very hush-hush database that currently being populated with up to 9000 new sets of DNA each year, taken from terrorist ‘suspects’.

Based on Guantanamo, the very word ‘suspect’ is suspect. Who says they are a suspect? Any old soldier who rounded them up and chucked them into the military paddy-wagon for ‘processing’ – and six years of imprisonment and abuse without charge? Who is suspect here – the ‘suspect’ or the soldier? Or the soldier's officers? Or the military command structure? Or the US government?

So the basis on which such suspects are ‘suspect’ is doubtful. But over and above that, what they are often suspected of is resisting a foreign invasion of their homeland. Which is not, as far as I can tell, a crime. Certainly not in the USA, where I doubt that many would resist the call to arms merely because the United Nations had said that invading them was OK or they didn't have a current set of dog-tags.

So many of these suspects are not really suspected of anything, and the thing of which they are not really suspected isn't actually a crime. But they are suspects anyway. We know - they are in a very hush-hush database. So they must be. No smoke without fire.

And so they will remain, dogged by this label for the rest of their days.

I can’t imagine how many things I must have done that would render me suspicious to the American authorities. Demonstrating against the war in Vietnam. Demonstrating against apartheid. Being rude about George Bush. Comparing Sarah Palin to a pitbull (hang on a minute...). This blog generally.

So someone gets a sample of my DNA and puts it into Black Helix. Thus am I branded for life. Just ask the right people and they will tell you, Oh no, he’s a bit ... suspect. Quite right too – wasn't there something about being connected to someone who was ‘linked’ with Jack the Ripper? Haven't I even ‘confessed’ to it - right here?

I'm all in favour of using databases to keep the world safe from terrorists. I just want them to pay some attention to the people who terrify me. Which right now doesn' t include anyone from Iraq or Afghanistan or any normal Americans. But it does include quite a few people from the US government.

The most important event in history. And Diana's dead too.

Today is the anniversary of the most important event in history: the day humanity took its first step towards living in the universe rather than just on this planet. On October 4 1957, human beings launched the Sputnik, the first artificial satellite. Within 12 years we were walking around the surface of our celestial next-door neighbour. Two wonderful moments.

If the flight of Sputnik represents the most important event in history, the death of Princess Diana continues to be treated as though it was pretty vital too. And as it happens, the 50th anniversary of Sputnik happen to coincide with the start of Princess Diana’s inquest.

Like most people, I'm not very interested in dead princesses. Although the media would have you believe otherwise, practically no one I knew thought that Diana's death was anything but a tragic but, from any impersonal point of view, relatively inconsequential event. True, Radio 4 went completely gaga for a week, with literally not a single non-Diana programme for days on end. The other media were almost equally deranged. Collectively they managed to create the impression that the world had gone into shock, whereas I knew only a single person who thought there was anything special going on.

So why the furore all those years ago, and the continuing media fascination? To which I reply, what furore?

Here is some simple arithmetic. Suppose that when Diana died there were a little less than 60 million people in Britain. Suppose also that about 2% of them were much affected by her death. That’s about 1,200,000 people – quite a number, but a tiny fraction of the population as a whole. Assume also that 5% of those affected individuals bothered to express their feelings in some public way. That’s still 60,000 people. I don’t know how many wreaths and crosses were laid for Diana, but 60,000 sounds about right.

So 0.1% of the population of Britain were affected enough to do something about it? Why would anyone imagine that this was the earth-shaking historical event it was reported as? Evidently a million people marching against war in Iraq wasn't significant enough for the government to notice it, so why should 60,000 be taken as so much more seriously?

But there is another lesson to be learned from these events, which is tied directly to the discrepancy between the public image and the numerical facts. This is that, although the death of The People's Princess was nothing special from the point of view of history, it was a fabulous story. And the media are interested not in what is important but what sells copy and puts bums of seats. And so are politicians, starting with the buffoon who invented that ludicrous soubriquet.

On the other hand, if there is a competition for the most boring media event in history, then surely one very powerful contender would be that climactic event of the First Space Age, the first Moon landing.

I sat there that night, expecting to be enthralled, but in reality it turned into five or more hours of grainy images and nothing happening, waiting while they got ready to open the door. It was a complete drag, as we used to say. I was even tempted to go to bed (though I resisted – just).

So I have always felt that there was a strange paradoxical tie between Princess Diana and Neil Armstrong’s respective entries into history. Armstrong’s was assuredly one that will be remembered for centuries, yet it was excruciatingly tiresome to observe and of no obvious significance in itself, while Diana’s will be forgotten by everyone but cultural historians in due course, but has been amazing (or, I should say, appalling) to witness.

Which only goes to prove that great history and a great story are only tangentially related phenomena. And that we generally don’t give a damn about the for history, while a good story has quite a few people gaga too.

So where are the social systems that help us to appreciate the history through which we are living? Certainly not the media or our education systems. And there is no folk history worth the name any more. And what is the fate of those who are ignorant of history?

Oil not very slick

Oil companies go out of their way to make themselves seem greedy and irresponsible. Well, maybe not seem greedy and irresponsible - more like prove it.

It’s not as if they are inherently easy to criticise – after all, they may make a lot of mess, but they do it in an industry that a) is inherently messy, and b) makes products (petrol plastics, and so on) we could do without only if we gave up most of the modern world. It’s appalling that Shell’s CO2 emissions exceed those of 150 countries, but it sounds decidedly ‘holier than thou’ to complain about it when there is little evidence that the issue has really been taken to heart by the population as a whole.

So you have to admire their determination to make the worst of a bad job. Here are a few facts reported in today’s Guardian (a leading UK liberal paper):

• Shell made $25 billion in profits in 2006 – a 21% increase on 2005.
• They claim “it would be ‘pointless’ to say how much of Shell’s $23 billion capital expenditure is going into renewable energy schemes” (p28-29). CEO Jeroen van der Veer “indicated that the investment in renewables was small, saying it would be ‘throwing money away’ to invest in alternative energy projects that were uncommercial and people could not afford to buy. ‘We have to put more into research and get a value proposition’”
• Meanwhile, on p.29, a US Government environmental agency has reported that there are still more than 26,ooo gallons of oil from the 1989 Exxon Valdez disaster - the worst single pollution incident in history - in Prince William Sound, Alaska, and the spillage is shrinking by a neglegible 4% each year. Exxon Mobil's profits last topped $39 billion - the largest of any company, anywhere, ever. According to Exxon Mobil, "there is nothing newsworthy or significant in the report that had not already been addressed... The existence... of oil on two tenths of 1% of the shore of the sound is not a surprise, is not disputed and was fully anticipated". Yes, and the melting of the Greenland icecaps is fully 'anticipated' too, but that doesn't mean you do nothing. I live next to a small town park, and two tenths of 1% of that would be a very big mess indeed. Perhaps the CEO of Exxon Mobil would be happy if someone covered two tenths of 1% of his home with oil. And that's only one Exxon's spills.
• Meanwhile, the American Enterprise Institute (a conservative think tank) Kenneth P. Green and Stephen F. Hayward “have launched a major project to review and critique the report of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to be issued in 2007” (AEI Annual Report: 10). The AEI, which has received about $1.6 million from Exxon Mobile, was on the Guardian’s front page for be offering $10,000 to scientists to rubbish the IPPC report, which estimates that it is 90% likely that major climate change is being caused by human actions. Not least the results of oil extraction, refining, distribution and use.

We all need to take action on climate change and the amount of oil we use, and that will almost certainly demand serious sacrifice. But companies that make vast profits out of this process bear an equally vast responsibility. If they want to be left alone, they have to act out that responsibly and invest a great deal more of their almost unimaginably huge profits in research – not just to create “value propositions” but to alter the fundamental balance of human beings and the environment.

Perhaps oil executives everywhere need to be reminded of the words of the American millionaire who said that he did not mind that the American public took 50% of his money in tax, given that he got 100% of his money from them.

Undo undo...

Am I alone in pressing a mental Ctrl-Z or Esc key when something goes wrong in everyday life? I don't mean metaphorically - I really do press the key in my head in order to fix breakages, undo something I just did, and so on – even when I break a glass or say something I shouldn’t have.

It's beginning to worry me. Does anyone else out there have this problem?