Open source = ability to fork
News, Technical ·Saturday September 29, 2012 @ 15:56 EDT (link)
My response to a TED talk How the Internet will (one day) transform government by Clay Shirky:
The fundamental misunderstanding between open source projects and law is that open source projects are private property (and by that I mean the main repository, not the content) whereas law is imposed on people by force. This so extremely dwarfs how either are produced that it amounts to a red herring, a mere distraction. And it's shatteringly depressing that he almost got it, too; because if he had talked about forking (where someone takes a copy of an open source project and makes a new "main" repository going a different way, because they disagree with the existing owners), then he would have almost made it.
If you talk about open source and don't talk about forking, you don't understand open source. Even if an open source project never forks, the ability to do so—the threat—keeps the keepers honest. And even if a fork doesn't attract many people, or is entirely private, it represents ultimate control over the configuration of a project that you run on your system without having to be dependent on anyone else's vision.
So all he's really got is: law and its composition (inputs) should be more open, such that it's clear where inputs come from, and, in the other direction, what its effects are. But that doesn't change the fundamentals of democracy, which is majorities (or plutocracies) forcing their will on other individuals.
If he actually took the lesson of open source projects to heart, though, he'd be able to make a much more powerful point. First, he needs to understand that open source projects are not democratic: they are focused on a privately-owned main repository. Sometimes democracy (but not of everyone, but of people admitted to the inner circle, usually from the value of their changes, i.e., on merit) is used, but it is far from central. Linus (and other open source project leaders) are referred to as a BDFL—Benevolent Dictator For Life. But the ever-present threat is that someone can take the code and start a new "main" repository and that he'll be the dictator of a kingdom of 1, or at least that there will be kingdoms outside his control.
Now, what do you get if you apply "forking" to law? Recall what it means in the software context: if a person doesn't like the "main repository" of a program, or that their ideas are not being incorporated, they make a copy, publish it as a new "main repository" (usually under a different name to avoid confusion), possibly attract others that prefer their version, and, most importantly, use that version of the software. For example, if people thought that Apache (a web server) should instead be a mail server (silly example), then they could branch it and call it "Comanche" or something, and start working on it, and they could run their version on their computer and nothing compels them to keep running Apache. (And since Apache's changes are still being published, if they see changes they like they can incorporate them back into "Comanche", and vice versa.)
So apply that to law: if a person doesn't like the main repository of law (the state's version), or their ideas aren't being incorporated, they could make a copy, publish it as a new set of laws ("Dave's Law", which, say, strips out all victimless "crime" laws, leaving the other 12 pages alone for now), possibly attract other people that like Dave's Law, and, most importantly, only _follow_ "Dave's Law". (Note also that a person doesn't have to be a contributor to a project to use it, and similarly, a person would not have to contribute to "Dave's Law" to elect to follow it instead of the state's law.)
To answer our original question ("What do you get?"), the answer is, of course, anarchy. Possibly, just done exactly like this, anarchy in the sense of "chaos" as well as "no (imposed) masters". For example, (as written) people could opt out of murder laws and, if law is the only reason a murderer can be brought to justice (it isn't; see the Voluntaryist wiki page on Justice), there would be no penalty. So clearly that wouldn't quite work. In fact, anyone about to commit a premeditated crime would naturally opt out of the law against it! Yet this works both ways (somewhat like Molyneux describing someone dropping their DRO coverage, which you can read about in his book Practical Anarchy): it is a signal that some mischief may be planned. Others might refuse to do business with someone who has chosen to be bound to a system of law that they disagree with. And which law would the police enforce? It's easy for victimless crimes: that of the actor (if you choose to follow a law that says you can be jailed for 10 years for using drugs, then so be it, but if I don't, then leave me alone); what about at the boundaries (my law says I can sleep on your lawn, your law says you can shoot me if I try)? (Butler Shaffer's Boundaries of Order comes to mind: rights are all about boundaries.) (Especially consider if my law says I don't need to pay taxes to fund your police….)
So two things would come from this: distributed law (see, e.g., Hasnas' "The Myth of the Rule of Law"), and an appreciation that justice (right to restitution and retribution) does not come from arbitrary words on a page. We'd be getting into an anarchist private law (DRO, private protection agency, rights enforcement agency, etc.) system.
That is the parallel to distributed version control, not merely that people can see where the bits of text come from and who contributed. The guy misses the forest for the trees.
