Money Money

By Crispin Sartwell

We Americans would be a better people if we cared a little less about money, and a little more about things like life, art, and truth.

It was only a matter of time before it occurred to someone that open-source software could be transformed into a cash cow if someone owned it. And so a company called SCO is claiming to own the code at the heart of the Linux operating system. It looked, briefly, like a free exchange of information and ingenuity could compete with the Microsoft monopoly, but that is profoundly unAmerican, achieving practical beauty by freedom and collaboration rather than hoarding and litigation.

The recording and film industries, meanwhile, having failed in their attempts to illegalize the whole concept of file sharing, are now cracking down on the people who share files. Perhaps it is the idea itself of sharing that they hate. Their argument, of course, is that they own art, and that if they can't milk it for money, art itself will suffer. But the more art people make and share for reasons such as internal necessity and communicative generosity rather than pure greed, the better it and we will be.

It is amazing what people think they can own: bits of code, for example, or digital information: abstract objects that don't even have a specific spatial location. Really it is only a matter of time before people start patenting concepts like Justice(tm) and Love(tm), and charging you every time you mention or make them.