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As I write, my Turkish team, Galatasaray, are preparing to do battle with my English team, Leeds United, in the second leg of the UEFA cup semi-final. This puts me in a position of conflicting loyalties, but I don't take it too seriously. I only support Leeds because I lived there for ten years and have fond memories of the city, and I ended up supporting Galatasaray largely because my old boss supported their arch-rivals, Fenerbahçe. The way I look at, whatever happens, my team go through to the final.
Unfortunately, as we all know, some people have been taking "do battle" rather too literally, hence the incident in Istanbul where two Leeds fans were murdered. There is already much discussion as to whether these two were model community members or the kind of Neo-Nazi thugs we used to demonstrate against at Elland Road, but let's not speak ill of the dead. They might very well have been innocent, if inebriated fans who got caught up in the fray. In the Turkish media, though, "hooligan" seems to have passed into the language as a synonym for "English football supporter". Much as I love Turkey, I have to admit that when it comes to the media, the words "impartial" and "objective" have yet to enter the dictionary. "Their" fans are hooliganlar; "our" fans are futbolsevenler (literally "football lovers"). This double standard has been matched only by The Sun's coverage of the Gulf War (or just about anything, for that matter). Aren't we forgetting who stabbed whom?
However, it does credit to Turkey that this portrayal of English football fans has not resulted in hostility to English people in general. In fact, when I walked into class the next morning, I noticed my students whispering agitatedly at one lad who had come to school in his Galatasaray shirt - I didn't catch most of it, but the impression I got was "You tactless git." Immigrants in Turkey are still regarded as guests, and, football notwithstanding, Turks are if anything nicer to foreigners than they are to each other. This contrasts rather depressingly with the English reaction, which was to trash a number of Turkish establishments and put a kebab-seller in hospital. The poor guy had been living in Leeds for nineteen years, probably getting on perfectly well with his neighbours, then suddenly found himself with broken bones because some idiots had started a fight back home (and I'm not saying who actually started the fight, because we'll probably never know for sure).
Albert Camus, who in addition to writing L'Etranger was also the goalkeeper for the Algerian national team, said that he had learnt everything he knew about ethics from football. The game must have been different in those days.
While most right-thinking people will applaud the court's decision, we cannot really rely on anti-monopoly (or "anti-trust") legislation to protect us from the big corporations, because that is simply the way the market works. While the Microsoft case was stealing the world's attention, mergers and takeovers were going on in Europe at an unprecedented rate. It is ironic for those who preach the sanctity of the free market that so much government action is necessary to preserve competition.
Similarly, we should not forget that competition is not a virtue in itself. Sometimes it has a utilitarian benefit, and is certainly preferable to monopoly (whether by corporations or the State) but it is hardly the best way for human beings to behave. Co-operation, sharing and openness are generally more beneficial than competition, acquisition and secrecy, and one of the reasons why the software market is so newsworthy is that it demonstrates both extremes *. Microsoft is not, in fact, anti-competitive. On the contrary it has competed very well; it's only crime is to be too successful, and to push competitive practices a little beyond what is accepted in the American business world. More worrying than Microsoft's excessive competitiveness, is that it has promoted a proprietary attitude to software, discouraged the sharing of information and tried to reduce choice for both consumers and software developers, an unspoken ideology which has reached the peak of absurdity with patents on algorithms (which is not the same as copyrighting programs - to give a literary analogy, it's like not only copyrighting a detective story, but patenting the idea that the butler did it).
At the other extreme, we have the world of Free Software - the guys in the white hats (or should that be RedHats? Sorry.). A number of free operating systems (notably Linux) are pushing their way into the market, which can only be good for consumers. For example, I'm writing this on a free HTML editor (Bluefish) running under a free operating system (GNU/Linux) and both work better than their Microsoft equivalents. Whether it is also good for software writers is a matter of intense debate. It will certainly benefit those who, like Richard Stallman (the guru of Free Software) see programming as a sacred vocation. These people quite genuinely put the pleasure of programming and benefitting humanity well above making money (though they don't mind the third if it's compatible with the first two). Similarly, programmers like my brother, who works for a company making specialised software for companies and institiutions, will be only indirectly affected (and may even benefit by greater access to source code). The technoserfs who work for corporations like Microsoft may well find themselves taking a wage cut or looking for another job, and some small businesses writing proprietary PC software may be unable to withstand the competition from Free Software.
At the moment quite a few companies (such as RedHat, Linuxmall and Cheapbytes) are doing comfortably selling CD-ROMs and boxed sets of Free Software, but I am not sure how long this situation will last, given the way the Internet is developing. To give an example, when I first started using Linux, I ordered a CD of RedHat 6.0, because downloading it with a modem and a rather dodgy telephone line would have been impossible. A few weeks ago, I installed RedHat 6.2 on one of the computers at work. I got the whole thing from a local university in about 40 minutes (that's for the download and the installation). Moreover, as more people get CD-writers (and later, DVD-writers) the CD market is likely to shrink even further. People don't pay for software which can be downloaded, copied off a friend or given away with a computer magazine, so the only market left may be technical support. As Linux and its relatives become more accessible and easy to use, this too may decline.
A short term solution to this marginalisation of the infocracy is to have Open Source but not Free Software. Many people are still unaware of the difference: if something is Open Source, you can see the code (rather than the unintelligible sequence of ones and zeroes known in the trade as a binary) but that doesn't give you an automatic right to copy, redistribute or alter it. For example, Star Office (now owned by Microsoft's bete noire, Sun Microsystems) is Open Source, and is also free in the sense that they don't charge you to download it, but if a certain company were to make superficial changes to the code and redistribute it as, say, Mircosoft Office 2001, they'd have a court case on their hands which would bear the same relationship to Netscape's action as World War I did to the Algeciras Incident (if you're asking what the Algeciras Incident was, then my point is made!). With Free Software, on the other hand, you can do what the hell you like with it so long as the result is still Free Software. To give an absurd example, Microsoft could, if they wanted, distribute their own version of Linux, but they couldn't then claim exclusive rights to it, which is one reason (other than pride) why they would never do it.
At the moment, I prefer not to take sides in the Free Software vs. Open Source controversy, largely because compared to the Free/Open vs. proprietary software war, it's a storm in a teacup. However, I think that in the long term more radical solutions are called for. Much more radical solutions. We can see the principle of openness being extended from software to other creative and scientific endeavours (in fact science has always had an open ethic, but is having to fight hard against the secret, proprietary nature of corporate R&D, most notably in the area of genetic research). But let's imagine a world where the principle of free information has been extended as far as possible. No one in this world can claim exclusive ownership of a piece of software, music, film or scientific research. For individuals working in these fields, the results will be mixed: the big money-makers like Michael Jackson or Steven Spielberg may make rather less money and, as in software, some creative people will find it impossible to carry on without their royalties (scientists will be less affected, since they will always have universities). On the other hand, the vast majority of musicians, artists and writers are unable to make a living out of their craft at the moment, and not just because they aren't good enough - when I was an unemployed musician in Leeds, I heard dozens of bands who were far superior to most of what you hear on the radio. At least the MP3 revolution has enabled them to be heard by a wider audience, even if they still can't give up their day-jobs. From the individual's point of view, it seems to be a swings and roundabouts situtation.
What interests me is the broader social picture. I've just been re-reading that hoary old classic The Communist Manifesto (not through choice; I have to teach it in my "Political Literacy" classes). Like most of Marx's writing, it is a mixture of flawed philosophy, the kind of rhetoric that only appeals when I'm drunk and sentimental, and a few prophetic insights. One thing that struck me was his idea that those of the petit-bourgeoisie (shop-keepers, independent craft-workers etc.) who could not rise into the ranks of the capitalists would inevitably fall into the growing proletariat. For a while, it looked like Marx was right, as giant corporations engulfed small producers and supermarket chains dominated the high street (before abandoning it for out-of-town malls).
The information revolution, however, promised to reverse this trend. All of a sudden, bright young kids in garages were rocking the world. First it was in hardware (Hewlett-Packard started with two kids in a garage, and the eighties were the heyday of the eccentric PC inventor - remember the Sinclair Spectrum?). Then we saw long-haired college kids taking over software with companies like - you guessed it - Microsoft). Now it's the dot-coms producing twenty-year-old zillionaires. What people don't seem to be noticing is that this gold-rush phenomenon only happens at the technological frontier. All these rags-to-riches stories may be very touching, but they do not change the economic reality that creative chaos is followed by corporate stagnation, and most of today's petit-bourgeoisie - sorry, "visionary entepreneurs" - will be tomorrow's techno-proletariat. The few who survive will be tomorrow's Microsofts and Amazons, trying desperately to turn their original headstart into a fully-fledged monopoly.
This new proletariat, if it happens, will be quite different from Marx's army of factory workers, though. For the most part, the industrial revolution simply exchanged unskilled farm labour for unskilled factory labour, and those of the petit-bourgeoisie who sank into the proletariat actually became de-skilled. Ideal cannon-fodder for revolutionary (or reactionary) intellectuals, in fact. If we extend the scenario I have described, however, the new proletariat will be highly skilled, highly intelligent, and possibly highly dangerous. If an American hippy and a geeky Finn can come up with a product better than that produced by the world's biggest company, we have a very volatile situation. Perhaps the corporations who are not involved in inforamtion technology will prefer to keep software free, just to stop such loose cannons getting too much economic power.
I realise I'm indulging in a flight of fancy here, but let's imagine that we have a large number of software engineers, creative workers and the like who have been economically marginalised like this. Would they want to go back to the bad old days of Microsoft and MGM, or would they look for more radical solutions? Here they are, slaving over their keyboards to produce something which is essentially free, but when their monitors or hard drives wear out, they have to go down the store and pay for them with hard cash. Marx's labour theory of value seems to have gone out of the window, since the only thing that counts now is actual, physical stuff - natural resources, in other words.
Let's take the fantasy further. Richard Stallman's grandson and Linus Thorvald's grand-daughter are shacked up in a delapidated apartment full of bits of electronics they scavenged from skips, working on a new Artificial Intelligence system.
Hey man, let's order a pizza.Well of course this is only a fantasy, and reality intrudes. I am fortunate enough to work for a university, an institution which enables unmarketable nerds like myself to make a modest living sharing ideas with bright young people. The downside is that I have a dozen term-papers to read, and even the best Free Software doesn't include doesn't include a term-paper correction algorithm. Back to the real world ....
No way, babe, remember we spent our last cash on that RAM chip.
Huh, how come we write all this free stuff, but we have to pay for food and hardware?
Natural resouces, baby, natural resources. There's an infinite amount of software out in cyberspace, but only so much land and minerals and stuff.
Yeah, but if there's a finite amount of this stuff, right, shouldn't it be shared out fairly? Like the people who write the code get first bags on the chips.
Yeah, and the pizzas.
Yeah, and the Diet Coke.
Hmm, think I'm going to call up a few of those guys on alt.hackers. Revolution's coming, man.
* Warning! Concealed rhetorical trick here! Spot the fallacy!