"your legal concepts of property, self-expression, and identity
don't concern us.  They are based on material concerns.  There are
no material concerns, here."

  -- John Perry Barlow, Declaration of Independance of Cyberspace


The surge of publicity surrounding linux, which has occured over the past
few weeks, is not uniquely accredited to the exceptional qualities of
reliability of this operating system. Linux today is often employed by both
parties - used as evidence against and to the defense of microsoft in the
antitrust process.  This immense commercial success, both well publicized
and politicized, does not need to obscure the fundamental questions posed
by free information systems.  These are in effect one of the concrete
manifestations of contradiction generated by the appearance of a new
paradigm: that of human practicality, inscribed in an economy founded on
the production, distribution and utilization of immaterial goods and
services.

Resolutely opposed to all formes of monopolistic concentration in the
domain of the immaterial, the philosophies and practice of free computing
constitutes a force of destabilization for the rules and values of fordian
capitalism.  They serve to promote, in a virulent manner, a collection of
concrete alternatives to the new formes of domination which emenate from
this new post-fordian economy.  In de-equilibriating, that is in overturning,
the systems of production, property and in turn destabilizing the systems
of capital and work, does not the linux phenomenom contain the seed of a
social transformation?

Before we can look at the specifics of linux, it is necessary to examine this
new paradigm.  For certain specialists, the information economy is 
characterized initialiy by an increase in the gap between investment costs -
essentially human capital - and marginal costs of production and distribution.
By deliberately classifying work as investment, it points to one of the 
specific aspects: the emergence of the immaterial information economy tends to
dematerialize what economists call, in their jargon, the means of production.
These are in fact the collection of physical infrastructure (often burdensome)
which necessitate indispensable investment to activate a system of production.
This dematerialization of means of production, which has become symbols, codes,
linguistic signals, mathematics and logic, skills and mindsets, reverses the
traditional logic of traditional labour.  By virtue of abstract work, renewable
and interchangeable, the worker becomes co-owner of this new set of tools.

This question about the means of production, as well as the immaterial 
merchandise, creates fundamental problems for the emmergence of capitalism in
an information economy. For Phillipe Queau, "the most recent battle was held
in geneva, in december of 1996, during the diplomatic conference on certain
questions of author's rights, put in place by the world organisation on
intellectual property.  (WIPO?).  This had to do with a revision of the Berne
convention of 1886, to which the latest modification was made in 1979.  This
conference proved to reduce the public domain, under influence of certain
lobbies, and to reinforce appropriation by the private and break the equilibrium
between the owners of intellectual property and those who use it."  In this
article, Philippe Queau reminds us that intellectual property was invented to
preserve the interests of humanity, so that a work could survive its creater.
By protecting only those material forms of expression and ideas, the idea
itself remains a common good, inappropriable.  By blurring the distinction
between idea and material expression, as in the case of blocking access to
the layers of programming in computers (the source code) for example, some
try to appropriate the inappropriable:  that is the idea itself.

In the immaterial information economy, the phenomenom of monopolistic
concentration of information constitutes many obstacles, not only to 
technological, societal and cultural progress, but also to economic efficiency.
Therefore, numerous are those, Roberto di Cosmo for example, who denounce the
deeply noxious aspects of classical property concepts applied to the information
economy.  One of the main characteristics of this denounciation of the 
property regime that is salient for linux and free computing systems is that it
takes the traditional formes of contestation towards property. It resides in
effect less in the domain of (keynesien?) politics of social justice, requiring
intervention by the state for the products of growth, but rather in the domain
of competition, individual initiative and economic efficiency.

By revolution, in the proper sense, against intellectual property legislation,
and by transforming consumers into co-participants of technological progress
and the diffusion of information, free computing inaugurates, undeniably under
productive forces, a new set of attitudes towards property.  The law, if it
continues to protect the author who can sell his product and even make a 
substantial profit, also protects that of the public.  This phenomenom serves
to re-equilbrate the balance of owner/producer/consumer.  Under these 
conditions, immaterial goods, products of work and common property, can not be
considered merchandise entirely, which can be confiscated, accumulated and
capitalized for the exclusive profit of a small group.  They are the living
works embedded in the regime of public property and common human good at the
planetary scale.

Numerous are those, who exude more or less explicitely, the post-modernist
school, which takes the posture of announcing the advent of a society in which
subjectivity dissolves into individualism.  The arguments developed by the
post-modernists procede a vision the least reductionist for the notion of
informational revolution:  a revolution percieved as an uncontrolled 
acceleration of scientific innovations and technologies, notably in the domains
of computing and communications.  This acceleration articulates a total loss
of sense of society.  The post-modernists position themselves thusly as
spectators of the inevitable decline of the great values of the west: Reason,
Time, Space and Communication, Mankind...

The community of users, developpers and contributers to linux, who today, 
according to certain estimates, number close to 10 million people with a rate
of growth of 100% per year, yearn to dissolve the social links in a blind
backward-looking individualism. Are they not inaugurating new forms of social
order?

There are social considerations, which supported by free computing, far from
being founded on predatory competition, have inscribed themselves into a 
working logic of cooperation of singular micro-initiatives.  The community,
composed of producers and user-consumers, is completely mobilized, not by
the criteria of financial viability percieved as parasitic, but by quality
and social efficiency.

Economic efficiency is thus the competitional product of cooperation, a 
veritable collective mobilisation of intelligence which is displacing the
social centre of gravity.