Introducing The Intercommons
the forces of strong commercial monopoly and governmental action or inaction threaten to collide head on with the vision of an open digital commons . . . We believe there is an important missing piece in these efforts to protect the digital commons: the safeguarding and strengthening of open marketplaces. . . . many entrepreneurs are going "back into the garage" to continue their craft without the encumbrance of "professional" money and management. However, they will emerge from those garages into a very different world: one dominated by a few huge monopoly players and a world where a tangled web of software patents means that any opponent with a large enough war chest for legal action can shut down or force an acquisition of any business. With this tectonic shift in how business is done in software, the openness and pace of innovation will be drastically affected. . . . We propose to create a well-designed many-to-many marketplace for the software industry, with a special emphasis on supporting open source tools and people, thereby supporting the public interest in an open digital commons. . . . Dee challenges us today to visualize new forms of organization for the benefit of humankind, warning us that it is the malfunction in our organizations that most threatens our survival and endangers the biosphere. We seek to answer that challenge and build a new organization that will protect the innovative and open spirit of the software business by helping open source and other independent developers and other free agents build their individual economic power. At the same time, this organization will be owned and governed by all who are materially affected and wish to have a role. Lastly, the many to many exchange of financial, intellectual and social power through the new organizations' digital commons will create substantial collective resources which can be put into service of the entire membership. . . . The health of our civilization and its institutions may be better served by the civic, not commercial control of Cyberspace.
posted by Lorenzo 4:06 PM
