One Loaf Per Child

[Patrick Anderson]

Originally posted Jun-14-2007 to http://Blog.P2PFoundation.net/one-loaf-per-child/2007/06/14

One Loaf Per Child

Bread and software are more the same than different.

We tend to think of software as a special product because it appears
to exist in a virtual world of zero rivalry. But that is incorrect.
While any digital information can be quickly and almost effortlessly
copied from one physical medium to another, the costs to store and
express it are not even close to zero. One of the largest costs is
the computer itself.

The genetics of wheat, the designs of the tools and the plan or
instructions used to plant, harvest, grind, mix and bake are the
virtual parts of bread. The physical parts are the actual seeds (the
mass which contains that data called DNA), land (surface area of the
earth), soil (both minerals and rotting organic matter), water, energy
(including the SUN), petrol for plastics and metals (and recursively
the virtual and physical parts of the machines used to extract these
from the earth and form them), etc.

A computer also needs land (rackspace - which also implies a
building), energy (electricity), plastic and metals; plus the virtual
designs needed to assemble those raw materials into motherboards, CPU,
RAM, Hard Drive, Optical Media read/writer, fans, screws, etc.

Moglen claims it would be evil to not give bread away if it were as
cheap to produce, yet, if we step through the costs of production we
find the physical resouces needed to host the production of bread are
much smaller than those needed to host instances of software.

When he says nobody owns Free Software he is referring to the virtual
part, but when it comes to the physical material required to host
(store and express) that software, it is primarily the end-users that
own. OLPC was started to address that very issue for those that don't
have a home machine.

So for computing the problem is hidden in plain sight - in that we
overlook those costs maybe because we have the attitude "well, I would
have bought the computer either way". But that same reasoning could
be applied to your yard. If you own land that is not covered by
asphalt, concrete or continually poisoned with weed killer then it
will probably be growing something, and that something very well could
be the extremely easy to grow grass called Wheat. You could grow
enough in 1 square foot to make a loaf, but most people don't because
it is too clumsy, but even if we limit ourselves to the small-scale
production where physical Sources are only individually owned (such as
Mao's back-yard steel furnaces) the cost is still less than software.
The simple hand tools required over the entire production of bread are
very rudimentary and orders of magnitude less complex than the
electronics required to store and express software.

But this is even easier to prove for large scale, corporate owned
agriculture where the costs are so small that the US government
actually PAYS farmers to NOT grow wheat. They (the supposed "we") use
federal tax dollars to keep wheat (and therefore bread) artificially
expensive so that price does not reach cost. This also causes US to
'dump' this food in foreign countries for prices less than what the
local producer can charge.

You may think "It's not our fault, why don't they just grow their own
damn food?". But the trouble there is our universal misconception of
profit as goal instead of production. So, while a small farmer who
owns the physical Sources of Production can grow some wheat for
himself, once he begins trading with neighbors he must take a stance
AGAINST them because ownership of those Sources do not 'flow' to the
consumers of the objects of that production.

This is the same lack of control we see and are beginning to complain
about with SaaS hosts such as MySpace, Feedburner, Google, etc. and
all other industry such as cell-phone 'service', gasoline producers,
DRM laden electronics, etc. who offer deals that appears to be "good
enough", but can pull the rug out whenever they please and can charge
a price far above cost, as they are the owners.

This is the core issue of what is wrong with the structure of our
economy. Prices must be "protected" from reaching cost because
businesses define their success by the profit they extract, not by
production itself.

Confusingly, the word "producer" sometimes denotes the Owners, and
sometimes denotes the Workers. For a small business where the owner
is also a worker the line is even more blurry. Workers receive wages,
and are not generally involved with profit, while owners usually
invest for the long term goal of profit. This is a precarious
situation that destroys small business that play that game, since
efficiency in scale causes only the largest corporations to survive.
This is why we see fewer and fewer farm owners and our food supply
being controlled by a handful of powerful corporations that barely
need answer to our supposed consumer 'demands'.

But there is a special case where price can reach cost - where
production and abundance is always good and profit is actually
meaningless. This condition occurs when the Object Users (consumers)
also happen to be the very Owners of the physical Sources (Means of
Production).

When you OWN the land, water, seed, tractor, thresher, grinder, mixer,
stove, pans, buildings needed to make bread you may hire someone to
operate those things (and would pay that wage as a cost), but you
can't pay price above cost, as it doesn't make even sense at that
point; profit is undefined.

Owning the Sources of Production is easy when the operation is small
and you don't need to share, but in many cases it is more efficient or
even mandatory that the physical Sources be jointly owned because each
person just can't afford (and it would be terribly wastful) to Own the
land, buildings, tools, etc. to make (for instance) laptops - we tend
to leave that to a random group of owners that intend to keep price
above cost.

The argument against adressing this issue usually revolves around the
idea "Well, who in the world would invest if there will be no
profit?". The surprising answer is: *The Consumer* will invest, since
production is already their only motive.

So now the question of how to make this occur without coercion - since
any other way would be not only unfair, but, as Moglen states, would
not have enough momentum to continue anyway.

A solution patterned after the GNU General Public License trade
agreement would be some kind of contract that owners could CHOOSE to
apply to physical property. That contract might say something to the
effect of:

: If you share this object (say an apple), you must ensure the end
user (the consumer) has access to the Sources of that object (the
land, water, trees, tools). One way to accomplish this is through a
revenue sharing scheme that causes any amount paid above costs (what
would usually be called profit) to become an investment in the name of
that User toward the purchase of more physical Sources required for
future production of that same object.