by Felix Cohen at the iCommon Summit 2007
The session on the philosophy of the commons this afternoon was fascinating. Despite some high-brow (or perhaps high falutin') language in some of the discussions, the feeling one was left with was of a movement that is struggling to define itself, but slowly realising how such a thing might be possible. Too many (in my opinion) analogies were drawn with the Free Software movement, but this finlly enabled people to discuss just how similar the iCommons movement is to free software. And as Larry Lessig pointed out in the first of many comments to be made about our philosophy as a movement, we are not the free software movement.
Software is a 'domain' that lends itself particularly well to a core definition, as they have their 'leader' in Richard Stallman, and their licenses grew quite specifically from the principles that he had laid down. The Creative Commons licences, however, grew on many ways from the GNU GPL and other free/open licences for software, and the movement has never had a unversally agreed upon set of principles.
However, Lessig argues, perhaps we will not be able to come up with unifying principles for the cultural commons, or free culture, as 'culture' is not a domain like software development, but a (poorly defined) umbrella for many different cultural activities and domains: from photography to music and with a thousand things between. Only by these individual domains coming to terms with what it means for them to produce free culture will we be able to move towards a set of unifying principles, although maybe not even then.
It was great to see this pragmatism around the idea be accepted and discussed; yes, we can look to the Free software movement for inspiration and ideas, but we need not model ourselves on their stringent definitions and successful organisational structure they have, but ultimately we must become our own movement that has formed (and has emotional ownership) or a set of core principles and beliefs.
So my thoughts on the idea of a manifesto/definition/charter have definitely progressed. Had you asked me this morning, I would be quite rigidly against the idea of such a thing being possible, or wise. After hearing the views in the panel, however, I am cautiously optimistic that one day we will no longer have a 'so-called' movement, but an internationally accepted and understood movement with principles grounded in years of experience in what both creators and consumers interact with and hope for in terms of Free Culture.
