Microfactoria Blog

Mid March it was my turn to provide the session in the Escuela de los Commons (School of Commons) in Barcelona. I had promised to present (see slides) the perspectives of commons and free knowledge applied to “industrial production”. In this post I will try to summarise the session.

Introduction

Wikipedia has won much “marketshare” (or: “mindshare”) while the Encyclopedia Britannica has stopped the presses. Their production model – so called “commons-based peer production” – is proving hegemonic at least in the area of encyclopedias. This logically draws resources from the market into the commons.

Something similar has happened in the domain of software. Over the last 3 decades, Free Software (a.k.a. Libre Software or Open Source) has shown the success of commons-based software projects. Studies have shown that Free Software has reduced the size of the software market by an average factor of 10. Of course people can earn…

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