Free At Last!

By Leif Utne, Utne. Posted May 23, 2002.

Move over Coke (and Pepsi), there's a new player in the cola wars. Meet OpenCola.

Okay, that may be a bit of an overstatement, but the new soft drink is different from others in one key respect: It's the world's first "open-source" consumer product, writes Graham Lawton in the British magazine New Scientist (Feb. 2, 2002). While Coca-Cola and PepsiCo jealously guard their secret formulas, the makers of OpenCola give their recipe away on their Web site, www.open cola.org. Not only that, they encourage people to make the stuff at home, and to modify and improve the recipe at will. There's one caveat: The modified formulas must also be freely available to the public. Why? Because, as the open-source argument goes, if you let your customers play with the formula for your product-whether it's software code or a soft drink recipe-they'll find and fix flaws quicker and cheaper, and think up more creative improvements, than you ever could on your own, even with a huge R&D budget and a team of engineers. In the end, everybody benefits from better software, or better cola, as the case may be.

The open-source movement traces its roots to 1984, when MIT computer scientist Richard Stallman quit his job in academia to start the Free Software Foundation. In the '60s and early '70s, virtually all software was in the public domain, and thus open for constant revision and review. But by the early '80s, nearly all new software was proprietary, or "closed-source"-its underlying code copyrighted and guarded as closely as the Coke recipe. Stallman felt that this approach hampered the free flow of ideas and ultimately delivered bad software, so he devised a clever legal device known as a General Public License (GPL), or "copyleft." Software that is licensed under a copyleft is in the public domain, and any derivative works that use a piece of copylefted code must also be in the public domain. Thus, the copyleft is like a virus, passing itself on to its descendents.

In fact, this article is an example of this process at work. Since Lawton's New Scientist article included a copy of the OpenCola recipe, the article was published under a copyleft. And since I've summarized several passages from that article (mea culpa!), we're publishing this one under a copyleft as well (see the copyleft notice at the end).

Stallman's concept has taken a firm hold in the computer industry. Thousands of open-source computer programs are now available. The most famous of these is Linux, an operating system that runs more than 18 million computers worldwide, including dozens of Fortune 500 companies' Web servers.

Stallman's idea has spawned a number of creative projects beyond software; OpenCola, originally conceived by a Toronto-based software company as a marketing gimmick, is just the best known. Other projects could have a much more profound impact on the intellectual property landscape. They include:

-- OpenLaw (http://eon.law.harvard .edu/openlaw/). This Web site allows the entire Internet community to help a team of Harvard Law School professors and students craft legal arguments in a series of cases that pit the public domain against corporate copyright holders. The briefs developed through this project have been credited with convincing the Supreme Court to grant a hearing in Eldred v. Ashcroft, a landmark copyright case seeking to overturn a recent congressional vote extending copyright protection.

-- OpenAudio (http://www.openmusic registry.org). An experiment created by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, OpenAudio is designed to promote sharing and collaboration among musicians and listeners by getting artists to copyleft their work.

-- Wikipedia (http://www.wikipedia .com). Launched in January 2001, this collaborative, copylefted, Web-based encyclopedia already has collected more than 26,000 articles on everything from astrophysics to Enron, with an eventual goal of 100,000 articles.

Since Lawton's article appeared in New Scientist, the magazine's Web site has posted a number of letters from readers proposing other open-source projects, from collaboratively maintained online textbooks to shared knitting patterns.

Coca-Cola may not have to worry much about competition from OpenCola in the near future, but industries whose fortunes are built on intellectual property-software, music, film, pharmaceuticals-should take heed. In barely a decade the open-source movement has grown from a small faction in the halls of university computer science departments into a potent political force. Citizens are increasingly fed up with multinational corporations expanding their control over ideas through patents, trademarks, and copyrights. The open-source spirit and the copyleft may be just the tools we need to tip the scales back in favor of the beleaguered public domain.

The information in this article is free. It may be copied, distributed, and/or modified under the conditions set down in the Design Science License published by Michael Stutz at http://dsl.org/copyleft/dsl.txt.

Liked this story? Get top stories in your inbox each week from AlterNet! Sign up now »