Free of Value and Just for Fun! was the title of the conference that Jamie and I spoke at two weeks ago in Berlin. The orgainising group,Oekonux, was set up at a birds of a feather sesssion during the Masters of OS confernec in Berlin '99 and is dedicated to using lessons from the free software movement to devlop a borader social critique.

Stefan Meretz's interview was the first time that I cam into contact with their ideas, and the similarity to many of the threads we had been working on in the critical legal community was striking.

Our presentation described some of the legal tendencies in the last quarter century, specifically the tying of Intellectual Property Rights to trade and the targetting of individual end-users with draxonian criminal sanctions. Otherwise we gave a presentation of our proposal for the direct allocation of funds from users to producers as an alternative to copyright. The session went well, even if I felt that I ballsed up a few things, but the best aspect was th extensive audience participation. Two thirds of the people in the room took part in the discussion at one point or another and we felt proud to have been able to break from the lecture format and create an inclusive atmosphere. We met loads of cool people there as well, like Graeme, Chris, Saifi, Sven, Albrecht and Ingo (with whom I made a Spartan journey across berlin at 6.00 am, totally plastered in the vicious winter air which Berlin has a special nack at producing) and tons of others. You can see some photos of the vent at Chris's page.

Greme Seaman gave a speech entitled two economies where he described the way that transition between modes of production unfolded last time and compared it with what's happening now. He asked where might we see the voluntary non-proprietary model of free software spread into other parts of social life. As an examplele, he brought up the workers revolution in Portugal - he was living in a town under worker's control there at the time. There a plant owned by Alfa Romeo was taken over by the workers. Previously they had problems with poor part supply from other factories in France, and so one of the first things they did was to contact the other factory and demand better parts which they duely got. At a certain point they found that there wasn't really much demand left for motor cars and they decided that the production facility could be turned over to something else. An inquiry was made with the local residents as to what they felt would be useful to produce, and the answer was cookers. The plant's machinery was adapted and the factory began to produce said cookers.

The [point of this is that the workers were capable of organising production cooperatively themselves, integrate the feedback from their community and alter the tools at their disposal so as to satisfy the newly identified needs, steps very similar to what happens in free software.

Now given my own interests, this discussion left me agape. But the best was yet to come. Christain Beaupoli, an engineer, began to argue that in fact the account could be repeated for any number of tangible consumer items. From washing machines to motor cars, most of the cost, passed on to the consumer in the price, derives from the research and design part of the process, according to him up to 90% of the total costs. This R&D generates the blueprints which constitute the 'build' of the set of instructions necessary for the machine tools to produce the commodity. Furthermore, and with regards to the last 10%, most household appliances are principlally composed of common standard parts: sheets of metal, washers, nuts, bolts, simple circuit boards etc, with only a small proportion being in some sense unique to the product. In Germany -and assumably elsewhere- there already exist companies known as 'lohn-fertiger' who can produce these custom components on order. The obstacle for most putative free hardware builders is the lack of sufficient volujme to make it feasible to go to the lohn-fertiger with the prosp[ect of being taken seriously. Nonetheless in principle, the lion's share of tangible production is susceptible to the free software method, the other 9% is handled by the cheap commodity based production processes and only 1% requires dedicated development. Christain compared this 1% with the function played by the linux Distributions such as Red Hat, Suse, debian. Commercial distributoirs must collect adequate information to guide their production output of linux packages, make arrangements with distributors etc. Why not have companies which perform the same function for free hardware and allow them to make a living off the missing 1%?

You can read more about this at Christian's web page where the project has been given the provisional title of Flosh.