5. Locke a zemskÄËť titul
Pro porozumění plodných vzorů pomůže uvědomit si historickou analogii k těmto zvykům, která je velmi daleko od obvyklých hackerovských zájmů. Jak mohou studenti právní historie a politické filozofie rozpoznat, teorie vlastnictví, kterou zahrnují, je virtuálně identická anglo-americké "common-law" teorii půdního vlastnictví.
V této teorii jsou tři způsoby, jak získat vlastnictví země.
Na hranicích, kde existuje půda, která nikdy neměla vlastníka, může každý získat vlastnictví osídlením, zabydlením, spojujíce jeho práci s nevlastněnou zemí, oplocením a obranou jeho titulu.
Obvyklé prostředky pro předávání v osídlených oblastech je předávání titulu, to jest obdržení listiny od předešlého vlastníka. V této teorii je "řetěz titulů" důležitý. Ideální důkaz vlastnictví je řetěz smluv a předávání zpět až k době, kdy byla zem původně osídlena.
Konečně, "common-law" teorie uvažuje i případ, kdy zemský titul může být ztracen či opuštěn (např., když vlastník zemře bez dědiců, nebo když záznamy potřebné k ustavené řetězce titulů až k neobsazené zemi jsou ztraceny). Kus země, který se tak stává opuštěným, může být nárokován pomocí ??"protivného vlastnictví"?? - někdo ho obsadí, vylepší a hájí titul, jako by došlo k osídlení.
Tato teorie, stejně jako hackerovské zvyky, se vyvinula organicky v kontextu, kdy centrální autorita byla velmi slabá či neexistující. Vyvinula se za periodu tisíce let ze severského a Germánského kmenového práva. Protože byla systemizována a racionalizována v počátcích moderní éry anglickým politickým filozofem Johhem Lockem, je někdy odkazována jako "Lockeovská" teorie majetku.
Logically similar theories have tended to evolve wherever property has
high economic or survival value and no single authority is powerful
enough to force central allocation of scarce goods. This is true even
in the hunter-gatherer cultures that are sometimes romantically
thought to have no concept of `property'. For example, in the
traditions of the !Kung San bushmen of the Kalahari Desert, there is
no ownership of hunting grounds. But there is ownership of
water-holes and springs under a theory recognizably akin to Locke's.
The !Kung San example is instructive, because it shows that Lockean
property customs arise only where the expected return from the
resource exceeds the expected cost of defending it. Hunting grounds
are not property because the return from hunting is highly
unpredictable and variable, and (although highly prized) not a
necessity for day-to-day survival. Waterholes, on the other hand, are
vital to survival and small enough to defend.
The `noosphere' of this paper's title is the territory of ideas, the
space of all possible thoughts . What we see
implied in hacker ownership customs is a Lockean theory of property
rights in one subset of the noosphere, the space of all programs.
Hence `homesteading the noosphere', which is what every founder of a
new open-source project does.
Fare Rideau <rideau@ens.fr> correctly points out that hackers do
not exactly operate in the territory of pure ideas. He asserts that
what hackers own is programming projects -- intensional focus
points of material labour (development, service, etc), to which are
associated things like reputation, trustworthiness, etc. He therefore
asserts that the space spanned by hacker projects, is not the
noosphere but a sort of dual of it, the space of noosphere-exploring
program projects. (With a nod to the astrophysicists out there, it
would be etymologically correct to call this dual space the
`ergosphere' or `sphere of work'.)
In practice, the distinction between noosphere and ergosphere is not
important for the purposes of this paper. It is dubious whether the
`noosphere' in the pure sense Fare insists on can be said to exist in
any meaningful way; one would almost have to be a Platonist
philosopher to believe in it. And the distinction between noosphere
and ergosphere is only of practical importance if one wishes
to assert that ideas (the elements of the noosphere) cannot be owned,
but their instantiations as projects can. This question leads to
issues in the theory of intellectual property which are beyond the
scope of this paper.
To avoid confusion, however, it is important to note that neither the
noosphere nor the ergosphere is the same as the totality of virtual
locations in electronic media that is sometimes (to the disgust of
most hackers) called `cyberspace'. Property there is regulated by
completely different rules that are closer to those of the material
substratum -- essentially, he who owns the media and machines on which
a part of `cyberspace' is hosted owns that piece of cyberspace as a
result.
The Lockean structure suggests strongly that open-source hackers
observe the customs they do in order to defend some kind of expected
return from their effort. The return must be more significant than
the effort of homesteading projects, the cost of maintaining version
histories that document `chain of title', and the time cost of doing
public notifications and a waiting period before taking adverse
possession of an orphaned project.
Furthermore, the `yield' from open source must be something more than
simply the use of the software, something else that would be
compromised or diluted by forking. If use were the only issue, there
would be no taboo against forking, and open-source ownership would not
resemble land tenure at all. In fact, this alternate world (where use
is the only yield) is the one implied by existing open-source
licenses.
We can eliminate some candidate kinds of yield right away. Because
you can't coerce effectively over a network connection, seeking power
is right out. Likewise, the open-source culture doesn't have anything
much resembling money or an internal scarcity economy, so hackers
cannot be pursuing anything very closely analogous to material wealth.
There is one way that open-source activity can help people become
wealthier, however -- a way that provides a valuable clue to what
actually motivates it. Occasionally, the reputation one gains in the
hacker culture can spill over into the real world in economically
significant ways. It can get you a better job offer, or a consulting
contract, or a book deal.
This kind of side effect, however, is at best rare and marginal for
most hackers; far too much so to make it convincing as a sole
explanation, even if we ignore the repeated protestations by hackers that
they're doing what they do not for money but out of idealism or love.
However, the way such economic side-effects are mediated is worth
examination. Below we'll see that an understanding of the dynamics of
reputation within the open-source culture itself has
considerable explanatory power.