Le logiciel libre et les communs

Abstract

Cet article porte sur les liens qui se sont tissés entre le mouvement du logiciel libre initié par Richard Stallman, les juristes anglo-saxons défendant le domaine public (Lawrence Lessig, James Boyle, Yochai Benkler, etc.) et les chercheurs réunis autour de l’économiste Elinor Ostrom. Il retrace l’histoire de la rencontre entre ces trois groupes d’acteurs au début des années 2000 et en dégage les enjeux : la construction d’une théorie des communs à même d’embrasser ressources physiques et contenus numériques ; le dépassement de certaines limites liées à l’hégémonie de la propriété exclusive. Nous analysons ces questions à travers une approche de la propriété comme faisceau de droits ( bundle of rights ) et en étudiant les exemples de la licence GPL et des licences Creative Commons.

The controversy over intellectual property in nineteenth-century France: a comparative analysis between Proudhon and Walras

“…These are embodied in cognitive frames and values that are ontologically distinct from individuals. This framework echoes recent work by Ostrom (2007) challenging the Samuelsonian classification of economic goods: the commons are not defined by their immanent properties (namely rivalry and non-excludability) but by the way resources are regulated (Harribey, 2011;Allaire, 2013;Coriat, 2015;Broca & Coriat, 2015). Notably, on Ostrom's view the commons are characterized by three criteria which match Proudhon's view (Ostrom, 1990).…”

Co-producing industrial public goods on GitHub: Selective firm cooperation, volunteer-employee labour and participation inequality

“…Furthermore, the acquisition of a reusable set of skills leads to increased freedom in working wherever they choose (Eghbal, 2016). This is different from the traditional situation of proletarians who are dispossessed from the fruits of their labour, as here the exchange seems to be mutually profitable, even if the goods being swapped – economic profits for the firms, self-realisation and other advantages for volunteers – are different (Broca, 2018). However, the question of developer exploitation must be left open for now, as determining whether an exploitative relationship exists would require empirical evidence of the concrete benefits involved: how much programmers benefit from participating in FOSS versus how much firms benefit, for example.…”

“…The adoption by IT firms of open source licences subsequently enabled the full integration of FOSS into the IT industry. This constituted an evolution between what Broca (2018) defined as Microsoft’s ‘informational capitalism’ – in which the firm seeks to protect the value of its closed proprietary systems – to Google’s more flexible ‘digital capitalism’ – whereby the firm integrates the commons into its business model and prioritises mobile and cloud business models using big data and artificial intelligence (Rikap and Lundvall, 2020; see also Birkinbine, 2020; Lund and Zukerfeld, 2020). Another integrating factor was the creation of online platforms such as GitHub (in 2005) and Stack Overflow (in 2008).…”

Commoning with blockchain. The Ğ1 libre currency/Duniter case

“…Studies have therefore focused on defining these new information commons (Broca & Coriat, 2015;Coriat, 2015;Hess & Ostrom, 2007;Zimmermann, 2020), better locating where the scarcity in these digital commons lies in order to help understand the conditions of their existence (Jullien & Roudaut, 2020), and questioning their sustainability (Greco & Floridi, 2004;Potts, 2018). To an extent, some of the analyses suggest that the production of intangible commons may be associated with a new model of socio-economic production, that of commons-based peer production (CBPP) (Arvidsson et al, 2017;Benkler, 2006;Hippel & Krogh, 2003).…”