[AktiviX] Re: [FSC-Fsact] Abstract: comments welcome/requested..

[Robin Green]

Fascinating abstract! I look forward to reading your paper, especially
the bit about a new ownership configuration!

On Thu, Feb 19, 2004 at 11:48:44PM +0000, mp wrote:
> For this conference:
> http://www.lancs.ac.uk/depts/politics/rsch/security%20bytes.htm
> ________________________________________________________________
> 
> Lessons from Cyberspace: The Political Economy of Free Software and Its
> Implications For Security.
> 
> That human societies are technologically embedded it is difficult to
> argue against; and it is easy to argue that much of this embedding
> relies upon Information and Communication Technology (ICT), which in
> turn finds its foundation in computer code. Because human societies are
> reliant upon a techno-structural underpinning it is in order to devote
> attention to the code that sustains it. Code is the essence of what is
> generally called software. There is a significant conceptual difference
> between software that is distributed with and software that is
> distributed without its code. This conceptual difference is at the heart
> of the socalled software wars and represents, I will argue, a
> qualitative difference in terms of security and reliability of software.
> 
> Two propositions, I suggest, can be juxtaposed for the purpose of an
> investigation of software security: (i) that free, open, co-created code
> debugged collectively within a paradigm of community-based
> self-organisation/-regulation/-control, which allows for modification
> and customisation to the level of security desired in local context, is
> the more secure and reliable option; (ii) that a black-box technology
> provided by security experts with a declared set of functions,
> mechanisms and output is more secure, since your enemy cannot fully
> comprehend its workings and hence will find it more difficult to crack.
> 
> It seems that both of these propositions are instrumental in a wider
> ideological conflict: how is software ownership configured most
> appropriately? Moreover, the question concerning software security
> cannot be viewed in isolation from its social, economic and cultural
> implications, and through an appreciation of these matters we shall see
> that proposition (i), which promotes free open structures, is
> constitutive of an ownership configuration that transgresses the
> boundaries between Capitalist, Communist and Corporate modalities, which
> appear to have historically defined the limits of 'kinds of ownership'
> in the Western imagination.
> 
> This phenomenon is both the point of departure and the conclusion of the
> discussion and should be understood as preliminary steps towards a
> disclosure of the novelty of, the lessons that can be learned from, and
> the potentials for human development inherent in the political economy
> of Free Software.
> 
> /mp
> 
> 
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