Free Software/Free Science

[Seth Johnson <seth.johnson@RealMeasures.dyndns.org>]

http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue6_12/kelty/index.html

Free Software/Free Science

by Christopher M. Kelty
First Monday, volume 6, number 12 (December 2001),


This fabulous paper seems to be analyzing the right issues
throughout, but by way of preface I particularly note the
following passage:

"The locus classicus for the scientific study of scientific
institutions is Robert K. Merton, the American sociologist
who first attempted to think through what he called the
"normative structure of science" - a sociological account of
scientific action that focused on the "reward system" and
the "ethos" of science [3]. For the former Merton explicitly
dubbed such rewards "intellectual property" even though the
term could not but be used in a metaphorical sense."

-- particularly the note that the term "intellectual
property" is indubitably a scare quotes idea at the time
Merton writes.

-- Seth


Excerpt(s):

Over the last few years, as the Open Source/Free Software
movement has become a constant in the business and
technology press, generating conferences, spawning academic
investigations and business ventures alike, one single
question seems to have beguiled nearly everyone: "how do you
make money with free software?"

If the question isn't answered with a business plan, it is
inevitably directed towards some notion of "reputation". The
answer goes: Free Software programmers do what they love,
for whatever reason, and if they do it well enough they gain
a reputation for being a good coder, or at least a loud one.
Throughout the discussions, reputation functions as a kind
of metaphorical substitute for money - it can spill over
into real economies, be converted via better jobs or
consulting gigs, or be used to make decisions about software
projects or influence other coders. Like money, it is a form
of remuneration for work done, where the work done is
measured solely by the individual, each person his or her
own price for creating something. Unlike money, however, it
is also often seen as a kind of property. Reputation is
communicated by naming, and the names that count are those
of software projects and the people who contribute to them.
This sits uneasily beside the knowledge that free software
is in fact a kind of real (or legal) property (i.e.
copyrighted intellectual property). The existence of free
software relies on intellectual property and licensing law
(Kelty, forthcoming; Lessig, 1999).

In considering the issue, most commentators seem to have
been led rather directly to similar questions about the
sciences. After all, this economy of reputation sounds
extraordinarily familiar to most participants [1]. In
particular two claims are often made: 1) That free software
is somehow 'like' science, and therefore good; and, 2) That
free software is - like science - a well-functioning 'gift
economy' (a form of meta-market with its own currency) and
that the currency of payment in this economy is reputation.
These claims usually serve the purpose of countering the
assumption that nothing good can come of system where
individuals are not paid to produce. The assumption it hides
is that science is naturally and essentially an open process
- one in which truth always prevails.

The balance of this paper examines these claims, first
through a brief tour of some works in the history and social
study of science that have encountered remarkably similar
problems, and second by comparing the two realms with
respect to their "currencies" and "intellectual property"
both metaphorical and actual.


Like Science

The first response that could greet the above claims is an
empirical one: open source is not 'like' science, it is part
of science. If we ask where free software flourished in the
period from 1984 to the present, then the answer is: as part
of the institutions of science. From Stallman's office at
MIT to Torvald's class project in Finland, the participants
who make free software are drawn overwhelmingly from
universities and research labs (both private and public).
Furthermore, the funding that supports many projects (in
most cases indirectly) comes from those well-known
scientific institutions such as: national science funding
agencies, university operating budgets, royal academies,
government funding agencies and research labs, industrial
R&D labs and non-profit research organizations, governmental
and non-governmental science agencies, and private research
and development institutes.

If we trace the roots of free software (prior to Stallman's
FSF) and generously include the work of AT&T Bell Labs, Sun,
and UC Berkeley on Unix - which arguably benefited from
similar dynamics of open source code and shared projects,
even if it was not free in the strong sense - then the case
is undeniable: free software is as much a part of science as
computer science and engineering have been.

And as part of the infrastructure of science, it should not
be surprising that its circuit of value looks remarkably
similar to that of science. So why not ask the analagous
question - "how do you make money with science?"

Perhaps this question seems more familiar. The importance of
science and technology to industry is presumed to be a fact
of life - a relationship (basic research leads to applied
research leads to profits, funds, and growth) whose
direction of influence is questioned only in the doing.
Making the comparison between free software and science
gives us the chance to ask anew - just how is it that anyone
makes money from the results and products of science, when
scientists just give them away for free? Even though we know
that science is not free from the ebb and tide of corporate
capitalism, or of national political interest, should this
not be an equally perplexing question?

What is interesting about this comparison is that openness,
whether in science or in free software, is not assumed to be
moral, but rather structural, and here an interesting
conundrum appears:

When open source and free software advocates compare free
software to science, and the scientific method, they usually
make the claim, often explicitly, that through some
unspecified mechanism this open, collaborative,
non-proprietary community of software development actually
results in better software, whether indirectly through
debugging or directly through openness and deliberative
design. Indeed, even across the lines drawn between them,
the Open Source organization and the Free Software
Foundation agree on this: guaranteed openness creates
better, more stable, less buggy software - software that
does not suck [2].

However, when scientists are confronted with the
sociological insight that the socio-technical and legal
structure of science might affect the quality, or more
importantly the criteria and determination of the truth of
their results, the reaction is universally one of violent
denial. In this case social structure is assumed to be, at
best, like friction on scientific truth. Openness plays
instead a supporting role in most scientists' accounts:
without it, some important scientific truths might be
suppressed, ignored, or abused by bone-headed bureaucrats
and dim-witted politicians, but it would never be rendered
less true. Making science that does not "suck" has little to
do with such pedestrian concerns as intellectual property or
the conventions and norms of practice.

So what's going on here? If free software and science have
shared the same technical and social structure of
collaboration and dissemination for the last 20 years
(longer if you count the creation of the Internet itself),
then why would the culture of openness, collaboration, and
sharing result in creating or improving high quality complex
software, when the same system's effect on scientific
research is assumed to be negligible?

< SNIP >

Credit and Reputation in Science

The locus classicus for the scientific study of scientific
institutions is Robert K. Merton, the American sociologist
who first attempted to think through what he called the
"normative structure of science" - a sociological account of
scientific action that focused on the "reward system" and
the "ethos" of science [3]. For the former Merton explicitly
dubbed such rewards "intellectual property" even though the
term could not but be used in a metaphorical sense. The
latter, the "ethos" of science, is that set of norms and
forms of life that structure the activity of scientists
across nations, disciplines, organizations or cultures. It
bears closer scrutiny as a comparison with free software
(especially in its international, cross-organizational,
multi-disciplinary forms). Merton identified four norms:
universalism, communism, disinterestedness, and organized
skepticism.

< SN/KIP to the following passage: >

Robert Merton clearly understood the power of citation
indexing - both as currency, and as a kind of registration
of intellectual property for the purposes of establishing
priority. In the preface to Eugene Garfield's 1979 book
Citation Indexing, Merton says "[Citations in their moral
aspect] are designed to repay intellectual debts in the only
form in which this can be done: through open acknowledgment
of them" [9]. He thus makes of citations the currency of
repayment. But he goes even further, explaining scientific
intellectual property in a manner that directly parallels
the claims made for free software's success as a reputation
economy:

"We can begin with one aspect of the latent social and
cultural structure of science presupposed by the
historically evolving systematic use of references and
citations in the scientific paper and book. That aspect is
the seemingly paradoxical character of property in the
scientific enterprise: the circumstance that the more widely
scientists make their intellectual property available to
others, the more securely it becomes identified as their
property. For science is public not private knowledge. Only
by publishing their work can scientists make their
contribution (as the telling word has it) and only when it
thus becomes part of the public domain of science can they
truly lay claim to it as theirs. For the claim resides only
in the recognition of the source of the contribution by
peers" [10].

This is a remarkable claim, but not dissimilar to that
remarkable claim of free software advocates - that openess
results in the creation of better software. Merton here
claims as much for science. The incentive to produce science
depends on the public recognition of priority. The systems
involved in making this "property" stick to its owner are
reliable publishing, evaluation, transmission, dissemination
and ultimately the archiving of scientific papers,
equations, technologies, and data. As above, this priority
is inalienable: when it enters this system of registration,
it is there for good, dislodged only in cases of
undiscovered priority or hidden fraud. It is not alienable
intellectual property - but constant, irretrievably and
forever after granted.

"Intellectual Property" in these metaphorical terms,
references a curious problem of sovereignty: who grants
scientific intellectual property, who guarantees it? The
equally curious answer is that no one does: science is only
ever an ingenious evolution - a foundationless but stable
system of openness. It is public, not private knoweldge, as
Merton says. Clearly, its gyroscopic continuation depends on
a constant injection of angular momentum - usually in the
form of money, sometimes in the form of political support,
pressing demands and utopian desires - by universities,
philanthropists and other patrons. Its norms readjust over
time, credit circulates, the reputations of both individuals
and funders grow and the legitimacy of the enterprise
continues. Much like the claims made for free software, the
distributed peer-to-peer production and cross-monitoring of
science is a stable, if anarchic, way to create and
double-check the highest quality material. The 'progress' of
science knows no other way.

(. . . and so forth.  Well worth reading.  -- Seth)