The Pre-Conditions of a Political TheologyA Philosophy of Open Source Software

Maarten Wisse

2004

Abstract

In the recent ‘Accra Confession’ the World Assembly of Reformed Churches has oUereda vigorous critique of neoliberal capitalism. At the same time, political theologians of todaymust confess the lack of a well-developed alternative, rendering their strong criticism of theruling paradigm problematic. In this article, the author oUers philosophical and theologicalreWections on the recent phenomenon of ‘open source software’, a paradigm of softwaredevelopment that seems to constitute an alternative to the capitalist mode of production. Onthe basis of the analysis of the phenomenon of open source software, the author developssuccess criteria for the development of a political theology.

1 Introduction

In August 2004, the World Assembly of Reformed Churches (WARC) held its 23th General As-sembly in Accra, Ghana. The remarkable result of this assembly was the acceptance of whatwas called the ‘Accra Confession’ titled ‘Covenanting for Justice in the Economy and the Earth’.1

The confession contains a penetrating critique of the ruling economic paradigm of neoliberalistcapitalism:

We see the dramatic convergence of the economic crisis with the integration of eco-nomic globalization and geopolitics backed by neoliberal ideology. This is a globalsystem that defends and protects the interests of the powerful. It aUects and capti-vates us all. Further, in biblical terms such a system of wealth accumulation at theexpense of the poor is seen as unfaithful to God and responsible for preventable hu-man suUering and is called Mammon. Jesus has told us that we cannot serve bothGod and Mammon (Lk 16.13).2

Many Western economists, philosophers and theologians will see this confession as a naiverestatement of leftish ideology critique, poorly justiVed by the facts and driven by an oversimpli-Ved view of the causes of poverty in the so-called third world. In historical terms, it can even besaid that there is little new in this confession that was not already present in liberation theology

1WARC, ‘Covenanting for Justice in the Economy and the Earth’ 〈URL: http://warc.jalb.de/warcajsp/news_file/doc-159-1.pdf〉 – visited on 2004-10-06.

2WARC, art. 14.

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of the 1960s and 70s. The most signiVcant diUerence, however, is the lack of an alternative. Thisbecomes clear in the 11th article of the confession:

We recognize the enormity and complexity of the situation. We do not seek simpleanswers.3

This last quotation indicates that while still rejecting capitalism, through the collapse of com-munist and socialist ideology, liberation theology now lacks a well-developed alternative.4 Polit-ical theology of the second half of the previous century was mostly aXliated with some form ofcommunism or socialism to develop its vision of a world bringing justice to all. This possibilitybroke down after the collapse of communism in the 1990s. In addition, the aXliation with com-munism had always been problematic for liberation theology because of its close association withthe use of violence as a means to liberation. Thus, the General Council of the WARC confesses:

Therefore, we reject the current world economic order imposed by global neoliberalcapitalism and any other economic system, including absolute planned economies,which defy God s covenant by excluding the poor, the vulnerable and the whole ofcreation from the fullness of life. We reject any claim of economic, political, andmilitary empire which subverts God s sovereignty over life and acts contrary to Gods just rule.5

What liberation theology of the year 2004 was left with, was the rejection of an immenselypowerful economic paradigm without having a clear vision of an alternative. To my mind, thiswas both its strength and weakness. It was its strength because in this way, the theological taskof the church in identifying injustice in the world did not interfere with what can be seen as theproper task of economics and politics, namely the rational reWection on the optimal organisationof economic life. At the same time, its weakness is the inability of the church to indicate aclear direction in which alternatives to capitalism should be developed. Hence, what prima facieseemed to be the confession’s strength, namely the presupposition of a strict division of labourbetween theology and economics, at the same time turns out to be impossible to maintain becauseof the clear connection the confession draws between theology and economics.

The purpose of this article is to be a step on the way towards developing alternatives to theexisting economic paradigm by providing a set of success conditions on the basis of the phe-nomenon of free software. In following this strategy, I take a standpoint somewhere in betweenboth disciplines in conWict. I take up the quest for alternatives from theology, but for the timebeing, remain outside the sphere of developing a concrete alternative to capitalism, thereby by-passing the question of what is meant by ‘alternative to capitalism’ as well. Rather, analysing aconcrete phenomenon constituting a kind of alternative to capitalism, I reWect on the questionwhat makes alternatives stronger or weaker. This has the advantage that it does not directlyinterfere with economic principles, while at the same time providing criteria on which basisalternatives can be evaluated. A disadvantage of my argument is that in being based on the con-crete example of open source software, it will be tempting to transform the set of criteria into analternative itself, thereby, to my mind, bereaving it from its power as a set of success conditions.

3WARC, art. 11.4See also, for example, Luiz Carlos Susin, ‘Diese Welt kann eine andere sein’, Concilium 40:5 (2004), 501–505.5WARC, art. 19.

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2 What is a Political Theology?

As the title of this essay states: this is an exercise in paving the way for the development of apolitical theology. The term ‘political theology’ deserves some clariVcation. As the remainder ofthis article will make clear, the direction in which my view of a political theology points is thedevelopment of economic forms of life which remain more or less independent of the politicalsystem. So, it seems more appropriate to call this essay an exercise in ‘economic theology’.6 Nev-ertheless, I chose to follow traditional terminology and speak about ‘political theology’ as a formof theology who asks for the implications of Christian faith for political and socio-economic life.Most of the time, as in my case, the term political theology stands for a type of theology aimingat the transformation of certain accepted practices in society and the economy. Hence, polit-ical theology not only fulVlls a descriptive role, but questions ruling paradigms on theologicalgrounds. In this sense, liberation theology, feminist theology and eco-theology are all sub-formsof political theology. This also means that the label ‘political theology’ does not tell us very muchabout the speciVc kind of change a particular form of political theology proposes, so that to bean essay in ‘political theology’ does not mean to be ‘communist’, ‘anarchistic’ or some similargeneralising biased verdict about it. What ‘politcal theology’ means in a speciVc context shouldbe derived from the particular form the political theology takes in that context.

The roots of political theology in theological convictions is probably what makes politicaltheology diUerent from political philosophy. In so far as this paper is concerned with the analysisof the political and socio-economic implications of a particular phenomenon in society, this paperis as much an essay in political philosophy as in political theology. It is explicitly theological inso far as explicitly theological convictions are introduced in the discussion (the notion of grace,for example), and in so far as it explicitly deals with the question of how faith should interactwith issues of economy and society.

Finally, the explicit theological conviction underlying my argument might raise to some ques-tions about the objectivity and scientiVc status of the analysis. I think this poses a false dilemma.7

The fact that I approach questions of the economy and society from an explicitly theologicalframe of reference does not automatically make my analysis subjective or biased. The factualcorrectness of the analysis oUered is a much a concern for theology as it is for the economic orsocial sciences, because a false analysis of the phenomenon under investigation will render nor-mative judgments about it meaningless. For example, if the critique of neoliberal capitalism inthe Accra confession is not warranted by the facts, this is as much a concern for the WARC and

6Some recent contributions to the debate on the relationship between theology and economics are: D. StephenLong, Divine Economy: Theology and the Market, Radical Orthodoxy Series (London: Routledge, 2000); Christopher J.Insole, The Politics of Human Frailty: a Theological Defence of Political Liberalism (Notre Dame: University of NotreDame Press, 2004, 2004); Marion Grau, Of Divine Economy: ReVnancing Redemption (London: Continuum, 2004).Long and Insole reWect on the question of how theology should validate economic life as a whole or the neoliberalparadigm in particular. Grau’s book is an attempt to use metaphors from economic life in elucidating the Christiantheology of redemption. Two recent signiVcant contributions to the theology and economy debate are Jörg Hüb-ner, Globalisierung – Herausforderung für Kirche und Theologie. Perspektiven einer menschengerechten Weltwirtschaft,Forum Systematik 19 (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 2003) and Eilert Herms, Die Wirtschaft des Menschen. Beiträge zurWirtschaftsethik (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2004).

7Cf. Maarten Wisse, Scripture between Identity and Creativity: A Hermeneutical Theory Building upon Four In-terpretations of Job, Ars Disputandi Supplement Series 1 (Utrecht: Ars Disputandi, 2003), 〈URL: http://adss.library.uu.nl〉, 146–157.

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theologians building on their work, as it is for economists. Indeed, if the information on whichthe critique is based, is false, economists can safely ignore it, and theologians must drop theircritique of capitalism and look elsewhere for the causes of poverty and injustice in the world.But if the information is correct, both economists and theologians have much reason to look foralternatives, theologians in the sense of reWecting on what their faith tells them about the justorder of society and its relation to the salvation in Christ their faith promises, and economists inthe sense of reWecting upon economic structures that better serve the needs of the people.

3 What is Open Source Software?

Due to the uncommon connection drawn between theology, philosophy, economics and opensource software, it will be necessary to explain the software phenomenon as simply as possible,enabling readers from all disciplines involved to follow the discussion. Let me Vrst explain some-thing about software in general and then afterwards explain the particular contribution opensource software makes to this Veld.

The concept of open source software is most easily understood in contradistinction to so-called proprietary software. In essence, a piece of software consists of a set of instructions,which in the case of most more sophisticated programs, have been compiled into binary formunderstandable by the machine. The commercial practice of software development is to distributecomputer programs in binary form only, thus enabling the user to deploy the program withoutbeing able to modify it. Open source software is a practice of distributing software based uponproviding the source code of the computer program for free, allowing the user to use, change andredistribute the code, provided that modiVed code is supplied under the same conditions.8

We are now in the position to introduce the phenomenon of open source software in histor-ical terms.9 In the seventies of the twentieth century, Richard Stallman worked at the MIT ofHarvard University. At that time, the MIT was a major breeding ground for the developmentof contemporary information technology. Stallman was confronted with the development of theproprietary software paradigm. He was obliged to sign non disclosure agreements for the projectshe was working on. Stallman, however, was convinced that software should be free. Therefore,he developed a new software paradigm that is now known as the free or open source sofwareparadigm.10

One of the reasons why Stallman’s approach to software did not reach the general public wasthat, at that time, personal computers were not powerful enough to enable software developmentof large applications. This changed in the early nineties with the introduction of Intel/IBM’s i386platform. With the introduction of this powerful i386 processor, the development of a completeoperating system came within the reach of the average user. One of these users was Linus Tor-valds, a Finnish computer science student who started to develop his GPL’ed Linux operating

8This is the deVnition of open source software after its most famous and popular license agreement, the so-calledGeneral Public License (http://www.opensource.org). Other open source license agreements exists, some ofwhich are more open to be mixed with closed source development methods. The most well known of these is theBSD-license. An extensive discussion of the various licenses can be found at http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/.

9Richard M. Stallman, Free Software, Free Society: Selected Essays of Richard M. Stallman, edited by Joshua Gay,intr. by Lawrence Lessig (Boston: GNU Press, 2002), 〈URL: http://notabug.com/2002/rms-essays.pdf〉.

10There are subtle diUerences between ‘free’ and ‘open source’ software, see Eric S. Raymond, ‘Goodbye, ‘freesoftware’; hello, ‘open source” 〈URL: http://www.catb.org/~esr/open-source.html〉.

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system in 1991. DissatisVed with Microsoft’s DOS environment for Intel PCs, Torvalds startedto write a clone of the much better UNIX operating system suitable for use on a personal com-puter.11 UNIX was and still is the operating system used on big servers that provide the backboneto large companies’ information technology infrastructure. Besides being unavailable on PC, itwas proprietary and extremely expensive.

The year 1991 was also the time of the rise of the Internet in university circles. With the aid ofthe internet, Torvalds was able to quickly share his development eUorts with other developers allover the world.12 So, instead of developing the operating system on his own, he quickly sharedhis source code with others. The GNU Linux community was there. From 1991 onwards, theoperating system developed from a tiny tool for nerds, to an full featured system suitable foreveryday use, and still free.

Major subsequent milestones in the development of open source software were Netscape’sdecision to develop the successor to its Netscape 4 browser – rapidly overtaken by MiscrosoftInternet Explorer – as an open source project—Mozilla (Firefox). From an end-user perspective,the Vnal gap Vlled in was Sun’s acquisition of StarOXce, a full MS OXce alternative, which Sunrelicensed as OpenOXce.org under an open source license in 2000.

Although many people still do not know about open source software, the movement as suchcan already be called a major success. The amount of code written on the basis of open sourcephilosophy is enormous, and the quality and security of its oUspring has turned out to be at leastas high as that produced through traditional development practices. The rule to give away one’scode stimulates developers to deliver the best they can, while at the same time, the communityspirit implicit in the license lets them cooperate where possible.

Rather than describing the phenomenon in greater detail, I will now move to the applicationof it to success conditions for a political theology, since in spelling these out, additional featuresof the movement will Vnd their natural place. What I will be going to do is approach the freesoftware paradigm from a very abstract point of view, namely the question what aspects of thisphenomenon make it as successful as it is. Each time I identify a speciVc success condition ofopen source software, I will apply it to the question of alternatives to capitalism and defend thatin so far as alternatives share this feature, they have a bigger chance of success.

4 Principles of a Political Theology

4.1 Scalability

In my view, the primary principle open source software has to oUer for the development of apolitical theology is the scalability principle. Scalability is always something software developersappreciate, but in this case, it seems that the scalability of the software paradigm they inventedgoes much beyond what they could have imagined.13 The scalability I have in mind resides in thevery fundamentals of the notion of free software.

11Linus Torvalds and David Diamond, Just for Fun: The Story of an Accidental Revolutionary (New York: Texere,2001).

12The famous document describing this novum is Eric S. Raymond, ‘The Cathedral and the Bazaar’ 〈URL: http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/cathedral-bazaar/〉.

13The best analysis of the scalability of open source in practical software development terms has been providedby: citeRaymond.

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Let me explain what I mean by scalability. As an alternative approach to software devel-opment, OSS is subvertive to traditional capitalist economic practices governing most softwaredevelopment. OSS posits a software utopia, where all software is free to everyone. The scalabilityprinciple becomes clear when we ask what the road towards this utopia looks like. The scalabil-ity principle is fulVlled if and only if the road towards the utopia is identical to the nature of theutopia.

Richard Stallman had a vision, namely the vision that information contained in an producedby means of software should be free. In order to realize this vision, he designed the GPL, thelicense underlying free software. This license allows every individual to start realizing the utopiaby giving away his information technology. That is the Vrst important thing to notice: oneindividual is suXcient to be on the road towards the utopia. Now, by its very nature, in start-ing to realize the utopia, the license begins to generate the community. The community is notsomething accidental to the phenomenon, it is essential to it in the sense of being its naturalimplication, although, and this is essential, it is not required to make the individual realisationof the utopia successful or possible. So the second important thing to notice is that the free soft-ware paradigm is ‘self-accumulating’, individual instances conforming to the principle will bytheir very nature create the community required to reach the utopia.

The scalability question is a question every economic or political and eve theological systemanswers, either implicitly or explicitly. Dreaming about heaven is one thing, explaining howto get there is another. If we Vrst take the two dominant economic systems, capitalism andcommunism, we see that both lack scalability in the sense deVned above. Both capitalism andcommunism project an utopia for which on the road towards it, a certain price needs to be paid.In capitalism, the utopia of a world in which every individual has suXcient Vnancial means todo whatever he or she wants, is, for the time being, compromised by the fact that in order to getat this utopia, temporary forms of poverty or at least forms of inequality must be allowed. Forcommunism, in order to reach the utopia of a world in which all are equal, it is to be temporarilyallowed that for the time being, some are more equal than others, and that few enforce the equal-ity of all by violent means. In the past, it has particularly been the connection with communismand violence that put liberation theology into disrespect.

Notwithstanding the tendency of my argument to support rather radical forms of alternativesto capitalism, the scalability principle – note that it is fundamental to my argument as a whole –entails the non-violence criterion for alternatives to capitalism.

Before we proceed to the next principle, it is interesting to reWect on the theological ramiVca-tions of the scalability principle. One of the interesting things to notice is that Christianity, beingone of the few existing utopian religions, is itself scalable. In substantial terms: the utopia of anew world full of righteousness, peace and happiness is of the same nature as the righteous andbenevolent actions of the faithful in the here and now. With the words of Jesus in the Gospel ofLuke: “Once, having been asked by the Pharisees when the kingdom of God would come, Jesusreplied, The kingdom of God does not come with your careful observation, nor will people say,‘Here it is,’ or ‘There it is,’ because the kingdom of God is within/among you.” (Lk. 17.20–1, NIV)

4.2 Independence from consensus

The biggest advantage of the scalability principle is that a political theology or philosophy that isscalable, is able to practise its utopia from day one. That is to say, in a scalable political theology,

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the vision of a just society should not Vrst be agreed on by all, or struggled for by military meansor whatever, you just start practising it.

Free software is a phenomenon that steadily transforms and in a certain sense subverts long-standing practice of proprietary software development. Nevertheless, free software developersdo not extensively ‘preach’ the virtues of their alternative. They do not seek that much activesupport for it. They do not, for example, try to raise massive support against the dominance ofMicrosoft’s closed and secret Word format, a format which makes it very hard to write programscompatible with it, or Microsoft’s Windows Media format, used for streaming audio and video onthe web.14 Instead, open source programmers collaborate to investigate these formats and clonethem in free software.15 At best, they publicly struggle against regulations that shut the door totheir alternative, the free software opposition to European patent legislation is a good example.16

Free software sells itself, as we have seen is implied in the scalability principle.The independence principle is very signiVcant as a success criterion of alternatives to capital-

ism, since it seems to me, one of the main reasons why so many voices in the struggle for a betterworld are little or not heard is because their alternatives rely on concensus, a concensus that, asmultilateral agreements like the Kyoto Protocol and the results of the World Economic Forumshow, is very hard to achieve. I do not mean to suggest that, in the future, the internationalcommunity should abstain from seeking consensus on improving the situation of the poor of theworld. Rather, my point is that proposals for change that do not or do less depend on consensus,have a better chance to survive.

The criterion of independence from concensus has also signiVcant implications for the re-lationship between economics and politics. Communism and socialism as the most extensivelypractised more or less radical alternatives to capitalism, are both based on a strong connectionbetween the economic and political system, the former in the sense of identifying economic andpolitical order, and the latter in the sense of correcting the side-eUects of capitalist economic lifeby the regulations of the government. Here, a remarkable diUerence between the now popular‘software communism’ and traditional communism comes to the fore. In communism and itsrelative socialism the economic and political system have always been closely tied together. Ibelieve this is a disadvantage. The aforementioned scalability principle prescribes that ideally,the utopia of a political system can be realised on the level of the individual and scaled up to acomplete society, all levels in between included.

What this independence principle means for theology becomes clear when we have a look atone of the novels of the Peruvian novelist José María Arguedas.El Sexto.17 In ES, Gabriel (sic!), apartyless student, is imprisoned in the most notorious prison of Peru, the Sexto prison. Therewere many political prisoners at the time, divided into two parties, the communists and theaprists (followers of the apra party). Political prisoners living on the third Woor were in a rela-

14As a humorous sidenote, due to the excellent reverse engineering activities of the open source community,Windows Media is now one of the best supported codecs on the Linux platform, even better supported than Real orApple’s Quicktime.

15From this point of view, the recent European measures against Microsoft’s abuse of its monopolist practices isof little interest to free software. The open source community would not regret these measures, of course, but theyare hardly in their interest, if in anyone’s at all.

16.17Again, no English translation is available of this work. I have used the Dutch translation: José María Arguedas,

De gevangenen van de Sexto, trans. from the Spanish by Marjolein Sabarte Belacortu (Amsterdam: MeulenhoU, 1992).ES is strongly autobiographical. In 1937–38, Arguedas was imprisoned in the Sexto prison for eight months.

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tively fortunate position – compared to other prisoners – in being strictly separated from criminalprisoners who lived on the ground and Vrst Woors.18 A condition of this situation, however, is thatthey must abstain from any aid to the people on the ground Woor, who experience extreme formsof suUering. As soon as Gabriel enters the Sexto, he begins to break the prison laws by showingcompassion with the fate of the criminals. This leads to severe disputes among the political pris-oners – communists and aprists – who see their possibility of survival challenged by the youngpartyless student.19 Arguedas makes clear what he sees as the principal diUerence between thecommunist view of liberation and the Indian view. Communism is a rigid theory and hierarchicalsystem that in being so, fails to have an eye for the particular.20 True liberation means having anon-theoretical, non-programmatic eye for the suUering of one’s neighbour.

4.3 Self-Organisation

This brings me to the third principle, that of self-organisation; one might say: the positive sideof the independence of consensus principle.21 In terms of a political theology: how should thevision of a just society be connected with politics and levels of economic organisation?

One of the things that has startled traditional software companies, Microsoft for example, hasbeen the self-organising nature of open source. Facing the increasing pressure of open source onMS’s business, Steve Ballmer, CEO of MS, said: “In fact the battle is not against Linux, becausethere is no Linux; there is no enemy.” At the same time, Linus Torvalds, being asked the everreturning question of what will happen when he left the community, usually responds: “Oh,well, nothing special. The software I write is mine as much as everybody else’s. So when I leave,others take over.”

The self-organisation principle is not only signiVcant in an external sense, in the sense ofthe government or a company being unable to direct the common goal of the movement as awhole, but also in an internal sense, in the sense of the movement being an amalgam of mutuallyindependent sub-worlds. What people nowadays call ‘Linux’ is in fact an enormous collectionof tools developed within completely independent projects. ‘Linux’, properly called, consistsonly of the so-called ‘kernel’, the core of an operating system. All other components of Linux,for example graphical user environments (two relatively well-known are GNOME and KDE) aredeveloped by independent developer communities. Not only are the projects independent, theyare also easily ‘forked’ in the case that a major part of a development community disagreeswith the course of the project. This recently happened to XFree86, the basis of the graphicaluser environment on free operating systems. This project was considered too monolithic andhierarchically organised. When the board of the project proposed a license change that wasmore restrictive than before, a fork was created called X.org, rapidly taking over the lead of the

18José María Arguedas, El Sexto (Lima: Editorial Horizonte, 1969), 14; Arguedas, De gevangenen van de Sexto, 15.19Arguedas, El Sexto, 71; Arguedas, De gevangenen van de Sexto, 72.20Arguedas, El Sexto, 101–102, 113–116, 125–126, 137–138; Arguedas, De gevangenen van de Sexto, 103, 115–118, 127–

128, 139–140. See also José María Arguedas, Todas las sangres, Novelistas de nuestra época (Buenos Aires, 1964), 432;José María Arguedas, De wegen van het bloed, trans. from the Dutch by Marjolein Sabarte Belacortu, 2nd edition(Amsterdam: MeulenhoU, 1988), 620.

21Of course, independence from consensus implies a certain level of self-organisation. For example, one coulddiscuss the relationship between economics and politics under ‘independence of concensus’ and under ‘self-organisation’. I chose to do the former because the disconnection between economics and politics correspondsto the negative character of the independence criterion.

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development process.The self-organising nature of the open source community is no doubt one of the reasons

for its success. In being so, this community is in fact a classroom example of what sociologistscall the typically postmodern network society.22 Globalisation of society does not, as the ini-tial rise of global companies (multinationals) and global institutions (United Nations, EuropeanUnion) might suggest, lead to a monolithic hierarchically organised centralised world order, butinstead lead to disintegration of society into smaller decentralised self-organised networks ofsub-societies. As computer developers are used to say: one should master the complexity of alarge system by modularising the system.

What seems an advantage and a reason of success in the open source movement, is not anevident merit in political, economic, and theological terms. To name a few examples where thedisintegration of a globalised world order makes people worry: the decreasing interest of laypeople in national or European politics and the decreasing interest of individual local churchmembers in national governmental structures of the church, and international ecumenical in-stitutions like the World Assembly of Churches. This disinterest in international institutions isbalanced by an increasing interest in ad-hoc forms of international coalition and aid in case ofdisasters, the international aid campaign for the victims of the 2004 tsunami for example.

Of course, the problem runs deeper than just being a worry about certain strands in con-temporary culture. From a theological point of view, the church has always had a particularconnection with power and hierarchical modes of organisation. This connection has been putunder pressure not only since the postmodern era, but goes at least back as far as the Reforma-tion period and only has its particular contemporary exempliVcation in the role of pentacostaland independent churches. Traditional church Christianity is still deeply institutionally embed-ded and as the rapid growth of pentacostalism shows, this might well be a major cause of itsdecline. The statement of the principle of self-organisation as a success condition to future po-litical theology marks a clear boundary to the church’s tendency towards institutionalisation. Itshould stimulate theological reWection on the relationship between the being of the church andthe nature of its organisation and, not the least, should stimulate reWection on the role of theol-ogy in a self-organising church, because there can be no doubt about the fact that an increasinglyself-organising church implies a strikingly diUerent role of (academic) theology in the life of thechurch.

4.4 Compatibility

As far as I can see, the principle of scalability and self-organisation can only be succesful if theyare combined with the principle of compatibility. Compatibility is always an important issuein computer science, but the compatibility I am aiming at has little to do with computer science.Compatibility means that, as an alternative to existing capitalist paradigms, the paradigm of opensource software, 1) has the ability to coexist peacefully with the existing paradigms and, 2) thatin coexisting with other practices, the boundaries of the alternative are clear enough to maintainthe identity of the practice. Accordingly, compatibility is not only the ability to adapt oneself

22The term is Manuel Castells’, although I am not sure whether his view of the network society corresponds tothe argument in this paper. For a brief introduction and bibliography to Castells and the network society, see thearticles on these topics in the Wikipedia Encyclopedia (http://en.wikipedia.org), another typical result of theopen source community.

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to the challenges of the confrontation with other. It is also the ability to retain one’s identity inconfrontation with the old paradigm.

Precisely this is what free software is doing quite successfully. Of course, in a practical sense,free software is very compatible with existing software in the sense of being able to exchange dataand formats with proprietary software, but that is not the kind of compatibility I have in mind.The compatibility I have in mind lies at a deeper level. Being a mode of production that remainsindependent of capitalist principles, free software is able to initiate this alternative, sustain andextend it, and gradually transform the realm of computer software development as a whole, whilenevertheless happily coexisting with existing practices. One could call this the scalability side ofthe compatibility principle, diachronical compatibility. On the synchronic level, free software iscompatible in the sense of enabling partners in the process to participate in both sides of spectrumwithout violating their rights and responsibilities to either side. IBM can be one of the biggestproprietary software developers, holding the largest number of patents in the world, while at thesame time being a major, conVdent and fair participant in the open source development process.In this openness to ‘syncretism’, the boundaries between the two worlds are so clearly deVnedthat the identity of neither one of the paradigms is at risk. To my mind, this is a major groundbehind the open source paradigm’s success.

In applying the principle of compatibility to the philosophical and theological question ofalternatives to capitalism, various aspects deserve our attention. First, it is clear that communismbiggest diXculties were connected with the lack of compatibility with existing paradigms. Thismakes clear that a certain degree of compatibility is required. At the same time, it is importantto keep the second aspect of compatibility in mind: compatibility is not only the ability to livetogether with existing paradigms, but also the ability to persist in being diUerent, the ability toretain one’s identity as an alternative.

In theological terms, the compatibility principle is the most interesting one because it raisesthe key theological question of syncretism. In some way or another, the compatibility principleas a criterion for political theology means that one must be able to serve both God and Mammon,and the political theology developed must be able to explain why that is true, in what sense it istrue, and how it can be thoughtfully combined with theology’s internal requirement of justice.This suggests that from a theological point of view, compatibility is a problem rather than abeneVt of a political or economic system. This need not be the case, though, because compatibilityis also the basis of the peaceful character of alternatives to capitalism. It seems that wheretheological questions about compatibility come in, the shape of the Christian message as a wholeis at stake. The question then is how the Christian message of good news, reconciliation andjustice for all is related to economic forms of justice. I will come back to that question below,when discussing the principle of grace, allthough I must say in advance that the scope of thisarticle precludes me to give a deVnite answer to it.

A connection may also be drawn between the compatibility principle and the utopian char-acter of Christianity. As explained above, the compatibility principle comes in particularly inconnection with the way towards the utopia, where the old and the new paradigm still interfere.In connection with political theology, one of the major theological questions has always been thequestion of activism. Although Christianity is an utopian religion, major traditions in Christian-ity have always maintained that this is an eschatological utopia in the sense that only God canrealise it. These traditions criticised political theology because in their view, political theologiesfall in the trap of aiming to realise the kingdom of God themselves, rather than letting God realise

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it. It might well be that a thoughtful understanding of the compatibility criterion might providea way out of this problem. It might even be suggested that for this criticism to be avoided, thecompatibility criterion is required—although it must be said that those who reject activism arealso those who usually reject syncretism. Be that as it may, if the compatibility criterion applies,this means that from a theological point of view, the possibility of a situation where good (thealternative) and evil (the old paradigm) still live together peacefully, is explicitly vindicated. Thatmeans that while being theologically motivated to practise the alternative for justice’s sake, po-litical theologians can leave the realisation of the kingdom to God’s eschatological activity. Inthis way, the objection of activism can be avoided.

4.5 Simplicity

Simplicity is a rather minor criterion in the sense that it can be explained with relative ease. Inthis article, I have mentioned the GPL license agreement underlying the open source softwareparadigm several times. The license agreement is about ten pages long, formatted with an non-proportional typeface at A4 paper, and like most licenses, makes for rather diXcult reading, notto say it is utterly boring. The fascinating thing about open source is that many participants inthe movement never read the document as a whole. The idea is simple: do whatever you likewith the software and give changes back to the community under the same conditions. It is thatsimple.

If we put this principle in terms of alternatives to capitalism, it seems it is enormously signif-icant for an alternative to have something of simplicity about it, particularly if it is to be carriedout by a great number of people. Both capitalism and communism in fact share this principle.Capitalism is based on the fundamental idea of ‘voor wat hoort wat’, and communism buildsupon the simple notion that all should be treated equally.

In spite of its simplicity, and therefore seemingly trivial nature, the principle of simplicity mayplay a valuable role in highlighting weaknesses in proposed alternatives to existing economicparadigms, all the more so because many proposed alternatives are rather complicated due totheir dependence on the existing capitalist paradigm. Paradigms have the tendency to fall backto their most simplistic forms, so that all alternatives that remain strongly dependent on theexisting paradigm, will mostly run into high levels of complexity.

4.6 Grace

By ‘grace’, I have the two connotations of the Latin gratia in mind, connotations that have beenretained in English: grace as mercy and grace as beauty or elegance. In the latter sense, theprinciple of grace means that in order to have a chance of success, alternatives to capitalism musthave something about them. This seems trivial but it is not, especially not when one takes a lookat proposed alternatives to capitalism, most of whom tell use that we should buy less, pay moretaxes, get less money, be more careful etcetera. In terms of success criteria, this makes manyalternatives to capitalism very unattractive to the masses.

This is very diUerent with free software. In free software, the grace as elegance of the move-ment is, at least partly, its grace as mercy. What do I mean by that? In free software, the exchangeof goods follows the rules of a good orthodox Reformed doctrine of justiVcation: grace goes be-fore works. Newcomers do not need to bring anything with them, except for their computer of

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course, to receive the beneVts of the community. They get everything the community has to oUerand in that way are invited to become participants in developing the community further after-wards. This is enormously important to appreciate the community generating role of the opensoftware phenomenon, and it is deVnitely a (partial) explanation of its success.

In stereotype theological terms: most alternatives to capitalism are of the Roman-Catholictype: the grace of God is only promised to you on the basis of your good works. The brightfuture of a just world and a clean environment can only come to us via our hard work. The samegoes for capitalism. Capitalism’s maxim is: look after yourself, and you may become rich. Thisis not merely a humorous mixture of orthodox Reformed theology and computer science. I thinkit reveals a very basic feature of the fundamentals underlying individualist capitalist societies. Itmeans that capitalist ways of economic life are fundamentally contractual: you get something, ifand only if I get something else. Of course this is not to suggest that Western society lacks thephenomenon of gift altogether. It is merely to suggest that this phenomenon of gift will, by itsvery nature, always run counter to and as a compensation of the ruling economic paradigm. Cap-italism stimulates relationships, but always relationships of a contractual kind.23 Free softwareis a brand new phenomenon, completely built on top of the technology developed by capitalistmeans, that shows that economic forms of life are possible that follow the rule of fellowshiprather than contract.

In theological terms, the principle of grace raises the interesting question of the relationshipbetween theology proper, and the ideals it attempts to realise in society. An oversimplistic re-construction of the traditional theological view of church and society is to say: in the realm ofthe vertical relationship between God and human beings and perhaps also among human be-ings in relationships of love, be it loving fellowship or brotherly love, grace goes before works –this is now a commonly held position, also among Roman-Catholics. In the realm of economics,however, works can safely go before grace. As we see in the recent protests of Churches againsteconomic globalisation, for example, this division of labour between economics, society and theChurch now comes under pressure because of the increasing importance of the economy in so-ciety. The question then is, Vrst, whether it is possible for an economy to be based on a relationof fellowship rather than contractuality, and second, whether it is theologically justiVed to applya rule originating in the restoration of the God-man relationship to the realm of economics, orshould we rather say that it always belonged there? In short, the question of what role love andgrace should play in society raises the question of what the church is, what it has to say to so-ciety, again, and with increasing urgency. Is the Gospel the church has to preach the just orderto society at the same time, or is it diUerent, and if it is diUerent, how does it relate to the justorder of society? These are questions which of course are outside the scope of the present article,because only theology proper, more speciVcally soteriology, can answer them.

5 Final considerations

Given the unusual line of argument followed in this article, let me close it with the discussion ofa number of possible misunderstandings.

A very tempting misunderstanding of my argument is to take it as the formulation of a set

23For a theological discussion of the distinction between relationships of love and contract, see Vincent Brümmer,The Model of Love: A Study in Philosophical Theology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), ??–??.

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of suXcient conditions for a future political theology. This is to say: if only these principlesare brought together and can be met in a concrete alternative to capitalism, the argument hasbeen successful. This is what comes down to transforming the free software phenomenon intoa paradigm for political theology/philosophy. As I have mentioned above, this is explicitly notmy intention, because of reasons motivated by theology as well as economics. In terms of eco-nomics, it would bypass the major question of whether in economic terms, it is possible anddesirable to transform capitalist economy into some kind of gift economy. Apart from the ques-tion of whether the economic sciences are able to answer this question reliably, given their rootsin the capitalist paradigm, this question of the possibility of a gift economy is an enormouslycomplicated question. In theological terms, I hope to have shown that, before opting for a sim-ple identiVcation between the theological and economic realm, many theological decisions haveto be taken. This means that in order to pass judgment on the truth of particular proposals forpolitical theologies or philosophies, much more criteria are needed.

Hence, rather than being intended as an alternative, I hope to have shown that the phe-nomenon of open source software can highlight a number of aspects of political philosophy andtheology that should be taken into account when developing alternatives to capitalism, and wherebuilding upon the principles underlying free software may point to success. It may well be that asuccessful future strategy to overcome the limitations of capitalism takes a rather diUerent shapethan may be expected on the basis of the argument presented above. This does not mean that theargument presented is false. It only means that the actual ways problems are solved in historyare by far not always the most probable or ideal ways.

In this respect, it is important to stress that the principles presented above should not nec-essarily be taken as a coherent set. The use of a concrete phenomenon like the free softwaremovement suggests this, but the use of the principles goes well beyond that. Each principle indi-cates a crucial point of decision in the development of a political and economic theory, and drawsattention to the decision underlying the success of the open source software movement.

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