Open Source Everything
As the open source has been highly successful in Internet – and elsewhere – it should to be considered if the practices of open source production should be adopted more widely. Open source as a practice of a social producing could provide us with model of organizing the society. We can take for granted that it could be adopted on different areas of social and economical production, the areas that are very similar to the information technology where it has been previously adopted.
As the example of “Vores Ol” [link to freebeer.org] shows, the idea is that the intellectual property is shared, so that anybody can develop it without any privilege. The buyers of the “free beer” will get all information about the procedure of brewing this beer they need to brew their own – the information more commonly known as the recipe. This follows the basic idea of the open source: the development of the product is facilitated by sharing the information on the procedure of creating it, and the creators of a new versions of the product also pay their tribute to the community that has provided them with the conditions necessary to the creation. Importantly, the ideas, such as recipes, compositions and theories, can be easily held as commons, since they are “nonrivalrous”: that they are used by someone, doesn't reduce their usability to others. Coca-cola is a well known example of a product that has it's recipe kept as a secret. It is as if J.S. Pemberton had invented coca-cola without any models in history (like the use of coca-leaves for refreshment and use of cocaine as a medicine), and as if it would be better for the innovativeness that we can't know what the original coca-cola has been made of.
The practices of an open society can be extended from Internet and informational technologies to any other environment in order to produce anything else – as the example of free beer proves.