Property rights are often grouped together with the idea of universal human rights, rights like freedom of religion, of speech, etc. Certainly much of the world is now organized around the idea of property rights as a central idea, and well defended property rights for everyone have proven to be a pretty good driver of economic development.

Something about property rights have always felt not quite the same as the right to not be killed or tortured by your government, or the right to say what’s on your mind. I haven’t pinned it exactly, but one thing that illustrates these doubts well is the fact that many cultures in the world do not have property has a central organizing idea. The Bushmen of the Kalahari Desert are a classic, maybe cliche example. There used to be a lot more out there. Another example are the Native Americans who famously “sold” Manhattan to the white people for some beads. In their culture, they did not have the same idea of property as the white people. There was not a strong concept of individuals owning land. The land was there and people could use it. For things like hunting, where there could be contention, they negotiated who could hunt by doing things like exchanging beads to gain permission to hunt on land controlled by a different group of people (I am not a historian, so that’s my vague remembrance of the history).

The Arawaks, the people that Christopher Columbus completed wiped out in one of the largest and most effective genocides in history, also did not have a strong sense of individual property. The chroniclers of the Columbus’ voyages talked about how the people would freely share things of value. There were many other such cultures around the world, but the vast majority of them have either been wiped out by people like the conquistadores or totally subjugated during colonialism and had systems of property rights imposed on their culture.

Now that said, I am not opposed to property rights. When you look at property rights in the context of culture and history, I think it becomes clear that the right not to be murdered is universal in human cultures, but the right to own property is far from universal. So if we believe in democracy, that peoples should have a right to choose their own destinies and organize their own societies, then it seems clear that peoples should also have the right to choose how they organize use of finite resources like land.

There has been quite a bit of discussion over the years about why the world of free software is so not diverse, its really something like 90% white European males, you could probably take it even further, like 80% shy white males of European descent. The world of computer users is actually quite diverse, and even the world of proprietary programmers is actually more diverse than free software programmers. I have thought quite a bit about this, and the reasons elude me, and of course, I am one of those shy white males of European descent. So I can only really guess and make some observations.

I just had a thought while riding the subway into Manhattan on my way to teach which I think has quite a bit to do with the current culture of free software. The free software community was initiated by lots of very shy but also communally oriented white males. For many reasons, back then, engineers were already basically all white males. For someone like myself, I have always been interested in working for the good of the community, due to my mother’s constant discussion of this when she raised me, and through my direct experience at Hidden Villa, a summer camp founded as a response to the Japanese Internment during World War II. (The idea was that if children of different backgrounds became friends at a young age, then they would not form the racial biases that triggered Japanese Internment.)

So these things instilled in my a sense of wanting to work for the good of community. But being painfully shy made it very hard for me to interact in groups of the kind that normally people organize to do community-based work. So as I found these communities on BBS’s and then later the internet, I found I could interact with a large group without feeling shy at all. This is something that I still hear today. For example, I have been writing so much text and staring at screens so much that I really want to have higher bandwidth communications for meetings, like voice or in person. Many people that I work with online are resistant to that, and some have said that they think not everyone in the meeting will have their opinions heard. The preference is IRC (text chat rooms).

So you have a lot of shy people who are driven to interact via text on the internet, and these are the people who started working all this free software. There is also an aspect of geek machismo that comes into play, and gender roles in general. In the US, we are bombarded with media that portrays certain gender roles. One of those is that men should be macho to some degree. So the shy dorky males like me also have that impulse, but the expression of it is often in terms the code that we write or the debating of ideas. One other piece of this pie is that the disconnected nature of digital media also tends to lower inhibitions, so people write things in text that they would never say to someone’s face. Altogether, this makes for an intense culture that is probably very difficult to deal with for many people outside of it. But I don’t think this is “the reason”, just one piece of a complicated puzzle.