Frequently when we're talking about free math or free content in general, we almost seem to assume that we're talking about something "really real". It is important to bear in mind that ideas, for example, are only "common property" because the law says that they are. In general, you could have a legal system that said that once a theorem had been published, no one else was allowed to publish the same theorem. And indeed this idea might not be so unrealistic: even though people can republish theorems, the extra-legal arrangements of mathematical culture say that you can't republish an existing theorem "as your own". Legally, there's no problem; but if you got caught doing this knowingly, it could be as bad for your career as it would be if you were caught faking data in the biology lab.
Or the law could say "if you publish it and it is mathematical, your text automatically becomes public domain." The HDM would make it so that there would always be a free semantic equivalent available (even though it might not be obtainable as such); currently, formulas that only have trivial "expression" associated with them are public domain. The "commons" depends on what is technologically possible and on what people want. Do people really want non-free math? Its a little hard to tell. Sometimes it seems like there is some conflict of interest. How is this conflict decided? Currently it is decided along with other abstractly similar conflicts from other domains (e.g. Hollywood).
As another example, while I don't think that the free software movement really wants to make non-free software illegal, the typical proponent of this movement will say that they wouldn't mind at all if no more non-free software was written. Again, extra-legal forces would presumably be the ones at work to bring this about. But you never know - science fiction has come up with some pretty weird ideas, and the idea of a world in which proprietary software was illegal is less weird than some. It might be fun to try writing a short SF story about a world that goes the opposite direction of the world in "The Right to Read".
The idea that expression is not part of the commons is interesting - people have their own expressions, that they own. In the current culture in the US, people actually own their expressions by default (whereas previously they had to assert ownership by filing a copyright claim).
When we talk about "Commons-Based Peer Production", we should probably acknowledge that the "commons" in question is always a cultural construct. For example, in the current abstract of the scholium system paper, I say that modern science and the state of human knowledge are candidates for CBPP domains. But there's nothing particular that says that all worlds would have the property that "modern science" was common. In some worlds, science could be owned by an elite group, and anyone outside of this group who was caught doing scientific things could be executed. In some worlds, humans might be allotted a certain sphere of knowledge (their "specialty") and knowledge outside of this sphere would be the property of others.
Cults, guilds and trade secrets make these weird ideas seem a little less weird. There's nothing to guarantee that any particular kind of content is "common". Practice law or medicine without a proper license and no matter how good you are at what you're doing, you could go to jail.
Why do we have the version of the "information commons" that we currently have? Clearly this question is complex; I'm not going to try to answer it tonight. I'm not even sure it is a good question to ask. Maybe it is better to end with an assertion: that we should be aware of people thinking of the commons as something "essential". No. It is always dependent on other things - on laws or practices. The same goes for "content hoarders" - their "right to hoard" is culturally constructed. Similarly for the right to privacy (which may just be the right to hoard applied to a certain class of data).
Why do commonses come into being in the first place? Maybe this is a better question. More later.
--jcorneli Tue Jun 07 06:32:19 2005 UTC (inspired by a lecture I went to today that was given by my mentor from several years back, Luther Gerlach)
One thing to note is the difference between "common property" and "open access resource" in the anthropological lingo. The first generally denotes something that is scarce and has to be managed, whereas the second denotes something that is a free for all. For example, for a long time the sky was "open access" but now there are emission standards and so forth, and clean air is managed as a common resource. Many resources are recognized as scarce and are managed as property, but a few open access things still exist. Notably, mathematics and the historical record seem to be examples of resources that have more in common with the "open access" mentality than with the "commons" mentality. Anyone can read any book they can find and say anything they want to about the content. Copyright comes into play, so the contemporary sphere of discourse begins to have a few more commons-like aspects to it. But copyright specifically does not apply to ideas or formulas or theorems or algorithms. It applies to code, papers, letters, documents, and forms of speech or expression. Copyright says that while anyone can read the text in question, only the copyright holder can distribute it en masse. Maybe the text is managed as a commons: you have to pay to get entry, but once you get entry, you can do what you like within certain reasonable limits.
When we make the move to the internet, copyrighted works aren't "scarce" in the same sense of having limited copies printed up. Evolving texts are limited in another way, however: there are limits to the amount of time that the producer has to expend on producing the text. PlanetMath, for example, can be replicated without any theoretical limit, and it can be populated by a group of people of theoretically unlimited size. But in the real world, the actual PM population does have some fixed number, and the number of copies of PM pages in circulation is finite too. Scarcity of producers is obvious enough, but we can "dualize" and look at scarcity of consumers too. Consumers are less scarce than producers, but the producers are frequently involved with the process of looking for more consumers, i.e., ways of reaching more people. Still, the actual web pages that make up PM are not "scarce" in the traditional sense. Nevertheless, it seems clear enough to me that PM is managed as a commons. There are rules to follow when you post, and so on. Perhaps the scarce resource is again, attention (on the producer side), but also recognition (on the consumer side). None of the producers wants PM to "look bad", because they want to have other people see PM as a valuable thing. So they put a lot of effort into making it look good.
With PM, academia, or the HDM, one can say that attention of the people who work on the project is a limited good. When there is more than one person working on the project, "attention" may be managed as a commons, much more so than the actual mathematical content. There are rules about going to class and getting degrees. There are rules about publication standards and quantity of research output. There are (often unwritten) rules about the sorts of content that can be produced that are independent of "mathematical quality", but relate more to "what people want to see."
HDM might be asserting that we should manage mathematics itself as a commons, while still retaining certain open access features. In the HDM there would be standards for expression: the contents would be computer understandable. But this rule has more to do with the computer system that underlies the HDM than anything else - if this system doesn't understand a given piece of mathematics, it is a shortcoming of the system, not of the math. The system itself is supposed to be a free software project, and that's maybe where the real "commons-like" features obtain. For any free software project, there is a scarcity of skilled developers, a scarcity of namespace, a scarcity of time for maintenance, and so on. The HDM software would structure the sorts of things you could do inside the system. There would still be plenty of other things you could do outside the system, and some of these things would work their way back into the system. (And presumably the system itself would be flexible enough to accomodate lots and lots of very creative things that people might like to do.)
Is there really a "drive" to make math into a commons? Maybe: right now, mathematical content seems sort of like fallow land, and the HDM project would seek to make something more of this content. But I'm not sure if this is the key motivation or not. Certainly one motivation of the HDM project is to open mathematics up to more people; the HDM says, access to mathematics is limited by the technology, now it is pretty much only accessible to an elite, but in the future it could be accessible to everyone. This is making it sound sort of like we'd be working on making a commons into an open access resource! The distinctions grow fuzzy as the heat in my apartment increases… ah, the fan.
The HDM project certainly says that there should be a new "job" - that of managing the existing mathematical resources. When we talk about "managing resources" that's talk about a commons, plain and simple. Right now, our mathematical history is probably managed for the most part by being warehoused in libraries. (Note how I say our mathematical history, there's some commons-speak for you.) This is very similar to the ecosystem idea: whenever ecosystems appear on the societal map, there are going to be people there talking about how to manage them. Since the idea of top-down management is sometimes somewhat unpalatable (e.g. we would hate it if Elsevier took over some kind of extra-mojo rights in mathematics and meted it out to the rest of the world in $24.99 installments), we say that the HDM will be managed as a free software project, with active participation from anyone who wants to join in the fun (and passive participation from anyone who chooses to ignore us; we get them coming and going). Rather than being managed by a cadre of professors and publishers, mathematical knowledge would be managed by hackers and users. (We aren't just managing information any more, we're managing knowledge.)
Thus, I'd have to say that HDM is about constructing a mathematical commons. Scarcity is relevant, not in terms of replicability, but primarily in terms of the commons-management infrastructure itself. However, I would also say that "real mathematics" is about a mathematical commons too. While these two systems have some similarities and some overlap, they seem to offer different interpretations of what mathematics is, and what, as a social practice, it has to offer.
--jcorneli Tue Jun 07 20:35:23 2005 UTC (second installment following second lecture)
Note: good mathematical knowledge is often scarce; think of the Carr quote. --jcorneli
Here is a little footnote. The receipt for my copy of Marvin Minsky's "The Emotion Machine: Commonsense Thinking, Artificial Intelligence, and the Future of the Human Mind" abbreviated the title to "The Emotion Machine: Commons", which I thought was an interesting occurance. Although I had talked about a commons-based approach to building a Cyc-like knowledgebase, and about the importance of "parallax", I don't know if I ever noticed the linguistic connection between "commons" and "commonsense". So here it is, for the record! Here's one group that found the same pun: (spoken word for sale) -- but thinks about it in a different way. You can also get some paronomasic value from this work written by Thomas Paine: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Sense
--jcorneli