Describe the community around Open Source. Have we passed the threshold of acceptance? What are the key attributes?
Well, there are many different communities. They have some attributes in common. You have communities of software developers who work on large projects, whether it’s Linux (an open-source operating system enabling computers to perform multiple tasks), or the Mozilla project (providing intellectual property and funds to develop open-source software projects), or the Firefox Web browser. You also have a community of people who contribute to Wikipedia. They don’t have the same technical skills, they don’t write code. They actually write text and edit and so on. But they’re all collaborative undertakings, meaning they succeed because people are able to cooperate voluntarily. There’s no hierarchy. There’s nobody in charge. It’s not a business. People are there because they want to be there. But the interesting thing is, unlike a lot of groups and discourse on the Internet that is very fractious, these communities actually work. They’re tied together by values and practices and they get things done. But how do they manage this? What is it like as a production process? What are the motivations? How is the activity coordinated if nobody’s in charge? That’s worth studying.

In an open-source era, where will a proprietary power such as Microsoft stand?
Well, it’s antithetical to their business models. They’re going to shift to providing services. I think it’s important, actually, not to make a complete dichotomy between Open Source and Microsoft because you have a variety of very popular kinds of services, like the Google services— Gmail and Google maps—that are free. They are open to that extent, because if you are a developer, you can remix or you can match using Google maps and so on. But they’re not fully open. The source code isn’t open. They control the data. So here’s the question: What will be the most stable, profitable new forms? And to what extent are some of them going to be more purely Open Source? Will everything be open? To what extent are some of them going to be intermediate kinds of things?

What about Google. Is Google evil?
(Laughing) Ask a metaphysician.

It’s a rhetorical play on their motto— Don’t do evil.
The founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, grew up around the Internet. They could not imagine life without it. And the Internet has to be open and participatory. A Google search engine makes no sense if there isn’t this large, vibrant Internet. So in that sense, they can never take over the Internet. The thought wouldn’t occur to them to do that, whereas Microsoft, and others, in earlier phases, actually had the aspiration to take over the Internet, which would have been a very bad thing. So Google’s aspirations, in my view, are not for the kind of complete world domination that you sometimes see. On the other hand, they have a large, overarching ambition to exercise dominion in ways that there’s no guarantee would be in everybody else’s interests. The jury is still out. They’ll be judged—not by the slogan—but by their actions and their impact. The problem, as John Perry Barlow has pointed out, is that corporations are like organisms: They fight for their own survival. Large organizations have a way of becoming self-referential—what matters is their success. And in the course of pursuing what large corporations assume to be their rightful destiny, they’ve often done great amounts of harm and damage.

You didn’t even mention their lack of transparency. They don’t want anybody cracking their code, including the Justice Department.
Right. It’s like, how open should things be? I’ll tell you where I think the rubber may hit the road on that. They have services. Yahoo has services. But the data in those services, even if it is created by individual users, is owned by them, and you can’t get at it in its entirety. Not so with Wikipedia. You can, by virtue of its license, download the whole Wikipedia. There are 200 websites that just mirror Wikipedia and sell ads. It’s not a value-added kind of thing, but they do it because they can. The value in Wikipedia is the community. You can get what everyone has already contributed for free. But the real value of these peer-production systems is that they’re ongoing, that they have a community that contributes not only today but will contribute tomorrow, and the next week, and the next week. If they don’t stop doing that, the service retains its value. And there are benefits to making it totally open, which will be a competitive advantage against those who don’t. So the long-term future favors more radical openness, but that could be a long way off.

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