What is an “Open Business”?

Posted on May 26, 2006 by Lessig

Follow the discussion at OpenBusiness.CC.

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12 Responses to What is an “Open Business”?

  1. three blind mice says:
    May 26, 2006 at 2:37 am

    So far Openbusiness.cc has, however, also found a wide range of businesses who literally give something away for free. Free then can mean not only making a song, book, movie or service available for zero cost, but also that the product is “freed” by attaching a Creative Commons license.

    zero cost and zero income does not a business make.

    In contrast to closed business models, which prefer to lock content away, on the internet business models that encourage and facilitate sharing thrive. For example, some record labels enable sharing of their recording, and only charge for high quality versions of songs.

    but, of course, to a true commons-ist, it is also wrong to lock high quality versions away. indeed, if we understand the free culture movement correctly, it is wrong to lock any content away. ever. DRM is always bad.

    Now we are beginning to understand how in the digitally networked world “attention” becomes not only a currency with which you can attract advertisement revenue,

    advertisement revenue. hmm, so the internet can be “free” and innovative like broadcast radio and television?

    but a much more diverse and crucial feature of emerging open business models built around participatory architectures, where co-creation and collaboration are the norm and not the exception.

    also known as the great leap backwards. (all those private farmers… tilling their own private fields – it would be so much more efficient if everyone tilled ONE BIG field.)

    business models are built on making profit. period. to the extent that “participatory architectures” enable a business to make profits, then fine, great, but in a free market such instances should be exceedingly rare.

    in the real world, cooperation and collaboration amongst businesses tends towards corrupt and anti-competitive abuse.
    a society committed to free market liberalism can not allow a competitive market to be replaced by kum-bah-yah economics.

  2. Joseph Reagle says:
    May 26, 2006 at 5:38 am

    This doesn’t take on business directly, but reviews some of the notions of openness out there in the context of what constitutes an open community:
    http://reagle.org/joseph/2006/02/fm10-openness.html
    The implied question when applied to an open business is … Is a business open when someone can fork their product away from them?

  3. Graham Hill says:
    May 26, 2006 at 9:27 am

    I tried to look at the OB Wiki today, but found myself locked out and an unintelligible error message instead. Let’s hope the OB Wiki overcomes these teething problems soon.

  4. somewhat annoyed says:
    May 26, 2006 at 10:38 am

    sort of a waste of my time, larry.

  5. capitalist pig says:
    May 26, 2006 at 10:54 am

    there is a great deal of inconsistency in attempting to have a more open and moral type of business atmosphere in a capitalist marketplace (re: chomsky). this is much like the inconsistency in debates over the preservation of democracy: a nation founded on doctrines spewing equality/a country built by slavery and genocide. the answer to what is an open business: just words.

  6. Evan Prodromou says:
    May 27, 2006 at 10:22 pm

    I found the Open Company Test through Wikia, and I think it’s an excellent checklist for businesspeople and for their customers.

  7. Paul M says:
    May 29, 2006 at 10:04 pm

    While the costs of Harvard in both the money and brainpower areas are both prohibitive to an person such as myself, I feel like this blog is a gift in a way. It is led by a Harvard professor with content he has chosen, and I can read it and comment on it as well as read comments from other interested individuals. We are, in fact, being educated here, and none of us has paid a penny. So thank you Prof. Lessig! Furthermore, because of our interest, we also read about, say, Gore’s global warming movie, and this could lead to change in a persons habits. So Lessig is effecting change as well. Isn’t Lessig leading an “open classroom” in a way?

  8. Paul M says:
    May 29, 2006 at 10:11 pm

    I meant Stanford, I always mix up universities such as these.

  9. Niall says:
    May 30, 2006 at 3:14 am

    open-business is a little dutch boy with his finger in the dyke, free market will drown us all, literally as environmental effects increase a pace

    democracy only works within socialism, and cannot survive within free-market capitalism

    and to Paul M, many open classrooms have developed over the net and off it, in the spirit of ‘the pedagogy of the oppressed’, we generate courseware that reflects our own needs as we experience them in our communities, without the support of ivory towers

  10. three blind mice says:
    May 30, 2006 at 7:58 am

    democracy only works within socialism, and cannot survive within free-market capitalism

    well, the economic and political history of the 20th century would seem to suggest otherwise. admittedly the evidence is empirical, but the collapse of those socialist republics at more or less the same time was rather compelling.

  11. so bored says:
    May 30, 2006 at 8:40 am

    the best way to sum up this post and comments is: garbage in = garbage out (since we’re all so into the idea of re-defining things). how about an open-brothel? can any noun be cool and politically active by calling itself open? this is why people like richard stallman think “open” is such a load of crap. it doesn’t mean anything if it means something different to everybody.

  12. photopatented says:
    June 5, 2006 at 2:35 pm

    Do you want to know what is ‘Closed business’ and how may be letters ‘cease and desist’ used against competition?

    Check sites
    http://www.abundantmedia.com/centarsia/
    http://www.kirchgessner.net/photo-mosaic.html

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