Dear David,<br><br>as I could not publish the comment via blogger, I add it here:<br><br>Regarding Joseph comment.<br><br><br>The open source governance ecology refers to 1) the community of contributors its code commons and collaborative infrastructure; 2) foundations and nonprofits which maintain the projects infrastructure 3) an enterpreneurial coalition. Josef's comments pertain to the first aspect, and do not exhaust the wide variety of governance modes that are for example highlighted by the research of George Dafermos. Benevolent dictatorships are but one modality and misnamed as they are not command and control hierarchies and usually involve post-facto control of the permissionless production process. Second, the foundations have a wide variety of democratic mechanisms such as election, rotation, etc ... The real issue is the third aspect, i.e. how far do the businesses influence the community, which may consist of its employees, and the foundation, which it may partly fund ...<br>
<br>But, the governance of open source models, now emigrating to physical production through shared design practices, do not have to be in any way 'perfect' in order to exert an influence. The english revolution of 1688 effected institutional change by changing power to the pre-existing manufacturing and financial/commercial networks, creating the conditions for industrial capitalism to emerge. Similary, social movements of the future may effect change by locating power in the emerging p2p civil society networks, a substantial number of them functioning in similar ways to open source projects, or as is now the case in europe, though the popular assembly model.<br>
<br>Michel Bauwens<br clear="all"><br>-- <br>P2P Foundation: <a href="http://p2pfoundation.net" target="_blank">http://p2pfoundation.net</a>� - <a href="http://blog.p2pfoundation.net" target="_blank">http://blog.p2pfoundation.net</a> <br>
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