The movement in support of open educational resources (OER) is perceptibly founded on noble principles of altruism. However, OER emerged out of the open source software movement, which is more specifically founded in technolibertarianism, also known as cyberlibertarianism, whose conception of \u201cfreedom\u201d derives from a libertarian rejection of government intrusion more closely related to right-wing politics than the left-wing it would otherwise be presumed to be associated with.<\/p>\n
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The technolibertarians\u2019 support for openness is not founded on an altruism normally associated with progressive causes, but rather on a repudiation of government which is the foundation of the neoliberalism, which has become the founding ideology of the American conservative movement (Ribuffo, 2011, p. 6). Neoliberalism is a right-wing ideology that begins with the Austrian economists of the Mont Pelerin Society, founded in 1947. Its leading figure was Friedrich von Hayek, who authored The Road to Serfdom<\/em> (1944), who dared to proclaim that any degree of government involvement in the economy was tantamount to totalitarianism.<\/p>\n The person most responsible for popularizing the term “libertarian” was Murray Rothbard, a prot\u00e9g\u00e9 of Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises, a co-founder of the Mont Pelerin Society and a friend of Ayn Rand (Cantor, 2012, p. 353). Rothbard founded the Ludwig von Mises Institute in 1982, which was backed by Hayek (Peterson, 2009,\u00a0pp. 18\u201319). 1974, Rothbard and Charles Koch, of the infamous Koch brothers, founded the Charles Koch Foundation, later renamed the Cato Institute, which\u00a0relocated to\u00a0San Francisco,\u00a0California\u00a0in 1977.<\/p>\n Libertarian influence in Silicon Valley gave rise to \u201ctechnolibertarianism,\u201d a term originally popularized by technology writer Wired Magazine<\/em> Paulina Borsook, author of Cyberselfish: A Critical Romp Through the Terribly Libertarian Culture of High Tech <\/em>(2000). As explained by Nathan Jurgenson and PJ Rey, cyberlibertarians \u201cembrace fluid, meritocratic hierarchies (which are believed to be best served by markets), while anarchists are distrustful of all hierarchies\u201d (Jurgenson & Rey, 2014, p. 2657).<\/p>\n Technolibertarianism represents what English media theorists of the University of Westminster, Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron, described as \u201cThe Californian Ideology\u201d published in Mute<\/em> magazine in a 1995 essay, which exposed the right-wing libertarian streak among hackers and Silicon Valley technologists. Andrew Leonard\u00a0of\u00a0Salon<\/em> referred to the essay as \u201cone of the most penetrating critiques of neo-conservative digital hypesterism yet published\u201d (1999, September 10).<\/p>\n According to Barbrook and Cameron, by combining the techno-utopianism of Marshall McLuhan and the sci-fi libertarianism of Robert Heinlein with hippie radicalism, the technolibertarians created a \u201cbizarre hybrid\u201d that melded New Left and New Right beliefs together into an anti-statist and neoliberal ideology which they popularized through Mondo 2000<\/em> and Wired Magazine <\/em>(1995, September 1).<\/p>\n Wired<\/em> magazine\u2019s libertarian founder, Louis Rossetto, was inspired the infamous Koch brothers\u2019 Reason<\/em> magazine when he was a student at Columbia in the early 1970s (Ames, 2014, July 8). Rossetto and Stan Lehr, both young student radicals from Columbia University, associated with the Radical Libertarian Alliance journal the Abolitionist<\/em>, wrote a cover story in January 1971 on the burgeoning libertarian movement for the New York Times<\/em> Sunday magazine, with themselves photographed on the cover, called \u201cThe New Right Credo: Libertarianism.\u201d Murray Rothbard celebrated by proclaiming \u201cThe movement is made\u201d (Doherty, 2007, p. 369).<\/p>\n As Jacob Silverman wrote in \u201cMeet the man whose utopian vision for the Internet conquered, and then warped, Silicon Valley\u201d for the Washington Post<\/em>, to understand where the cyber-libertarian ideology came from we have to understand the influence of John Perry Barlow\u2019s 1996 \u201cA Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace (Silverman, 2015, March 20). Barlow, a former lyricist for the Grateful Dead, and John Gilmore and Mitch Kapor were the founders of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), over their concerns about FBI suspicion of hacker activity, which they feared represented breaches of the Constitution. \u201cPerhaps more than any other, it\u2019s [Barlow\u2019s] philosophy \u2014 which melded countercultural utopianism, a rancher\u2019s skepticism toward government and a futurist\u2019s faith in the virtual world \u2014 that shaped the industry\u201d (ibid).<\/p>\n John Gilmore, Tim May and Eric Hugues started a mailing list in 1992 for radical libertarians who called themselves \u201ccypherpunks\u201d (Manne, 2011, March). May argued that, \u201cPolitics has never given anyone lasting freedom, and it never will,\u201d and proposed that new software was needed that could help people evade government surveillance (Bartlett, 2015, chap. 3, The Mailing List). The first mass media discussion of cypherpunks was in \u201cCrypto Rebels\u201d by Steven Levy, in a 1993 issue of Wired<\/em>, which featured May, Hughes and Gilmore masked on the cover. In the introduction to Cypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet<\/em>, list participant Julian Assange, who later founded Wikileaks, remarked that \u201cthe Internet, our greatest tool for emancipation, has been transformed into the most dangerous facilitator of totalitarianism we have ever seen\u201d (Assange, Appelbaum, M\u00fcller-Maguhn, & Zimmermann, 2012).<\/p>\n It was renowned hacker and anarchist Richard Stallman who clarified the meaning of \u201cfree\u201d software in the sense not of \u201cfree beer\u201d but free as in \u201cfree speech\u201d (Stallman, n.d.). Stallman is credited with founding the free software movement, drawing on anti-establishment traditions of the 1970s hacker culture and academia, which inspired the rise of technolibertarianism (Rand, n.d.). In 1983, Stallman launched the GNU Project, a free-software, mass-collaboration project. Stallman later established the Free Software Foundation in 1985 to support the movement. In 1991, Linus Torvalds used the GNU’s development tools to produce the free monolithic Linux kernel.<\/p>\n In 1997, Eric S. Raymond published the influential The Cathedral and the Bazaar<\/em>, which analyzed the hacker community and the principles of free software. Raymond and others looked for a way to rebrand the free software movement to emphasize the business potential of sharing and collaborating on software source code. The new term they chose was “open source”, which was soon adopted by Bruce Perens, publisher Tim O’Reilly, Linus Torvalds, and others (Tiemann, 2006, September 19).<\/p>\n In 1996 and 1997, while still working at Pixar, Perens served as Debian Project Leader, coordinating development of the Debian open source operating system. He replaced Debian\u2019s creator Ian Murdock. As one of the earliest operating systems based on the Linux kernel, it was decided that Debian was to be developed openly and freely distributed in the spirit of the GNU Project.<\/p>\n In 1998, Perens and Raymond established the Open Source Initiative, and published the Open Source Definition to encourage use of the new term and evangelize open source principles (Fogel, 2016, p. 233). Perens modified the Debian Free Software Guidelines into the Open Source Definition by removing Debian references and replacing them with “Open Source”. The definition is recognized by governments internationally, and by many of the world’s largest open source software projects, including Drupal, Linux, Mozilla, Wikimedia, WordPress.<\/p>\n The open educational resources (OER) movement originated from developments in open and distance learning (ODL) and in the wider context of a culture of open knowledge, open source, free sharing and peer collaboration. A connection was first established in 1998 by David Wiley, who coined the term open content and introduced the concept by analogy with open source (Wiley, n.d.).<\/p>\n A seminal event in the history of open education was a meeting convened in Cape Town on September 2007, by the Open Society Institute and the Shuttleworth Foundation. The event a manifesto titled The Cape Town Open Education Declaration<\/em>, which urged governments, educators and publishers to \u201ccommit to the pursuit and promotion of open education\u201d (The Cape Town Open Education Declaration, n.d.).<\/p>\n Open Society Foundations (OSF), formerly the Open Society Institute, was founded in 1993 by business magnate George Soros, to financially support civil society groups around the world, with a stated aim of advancing justice, education, public health and independent media (Kerric, 2013, p.\u00a0919). Soros attended the London School of Economics, where his mentor became Karl Popper, a friend of Friedrich Hayek. Popper wrote\u00a0The Open Society and Its Enemies <\/em>(1945), developing on the \u201copen society\u201d concept first conceived by Henri Bergson. As described by Nicolas Guilhot, a senior research associate of CNRS, “This ‘Austrian legacy’ is arguably a fundamental aspect of Soros\u2019 intellectual formation and of the philanthropic ideology that he would later develop (Guilhot, 2007, May, p. 460)<\/p>\n In 1984, Soros had signed a contract between the Soros Foundation (New York) and the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, the founding document of the Soros Foundation Budapest. In 1991 the foundation merged with the Fondation pour une Entraide Intellectuelle Europ\u00e9enne <\/em>(FEIE)<\/em>, created in 1966 to cultivate \u201cnon-conformist\u201d Eastern European scientists with anti-totalitarian and capitalist leanings (Nicolas, 2006, p. 380). The FEIE was an affiliate of the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF), which as Francis Stonor Saunders has demonstrated in Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War<\/em> (2000), was a CIA front funded through the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations serving as conduits, to promote left-wing intellectuals to counter Soviet influence in Europe. And, as remarked in 2007 by Guilhot,\u00a0despite their reputations as supporters of liberal causes, the Open Society Foundations serve to perpetuate institutions that reinforce the existing social order, as the Ford Foundation and Rockefeller Foundation have done before them, reinforcing the cause of capitalism and global institutions (2007, May, p. 453).<\/p>\n The Shuttleworth Foundation, the other supporter of the Cape Town conference, was established in January 2001 by South African entrepreneur Mark Shuttleworth as an experiment with the purpose of providing funding for people engaged in social change. Notable past and present fellows include Marcin Jakubowski (who develops the Open Source Ecology project), Rufus Pollock (co-founder of the Open Knowledge Foundation) and Mark Surman (now Executive Director of Mozilla Foundation). In 2003, Mitch Mitch Kapor had become the founding chair of the Mozilla Foundation, creator of the open source web browser Firefox.<\/p>\n In 2005, Rufus Pollock, by referring to the Open Source Definition, created the Open Definition, a document published by the Open Knowledge Foundation (now Open Knowledge International (OKI)), which provided the first formal definition of open content and open data, and which has remained the standard reference definition.<\/p>\n Ultimately, e-Learning presents a plethora of important developments permitting the further democratization of education. However, at the same time, the transformation is exposing a window of opportunity currently allowing for a wholesale privatization of education, often being intruded upon by private interests who have a history of suppressing alternative social experiments to the “free market,” by denouncing them as \u201ccommunism.\u201d<\/p>\n Effectively, OER is a response that attempts to provide a solution within the contradictions of capitalism. Someone has to pay for the labour of the producers of educational resources. In a society where even education is largely in private hands, the solution to providing was ought to be free resources is addressed by requesting these labourers to volunteer their time and effort. Rather, education is a right, and should be fully funded by the government. Resistance to that idea persists because of a pervasive Orwellian pessimism of the libertarian right which regards all government as a mechanism for tyranny.<\/p>\n Rather, government\u2014when it is unpolluted from the corruption of conflicts of interest or corporate greed\u2014is a public trust; a vehicle for managing the collective contributions of the society, to be spent on projects that benefit the whole. If producers of OERs were properly remunerated for their valuable contribution instead by public funds, there would be no need to then further exact monetary or in-kind contributions from the rest of the world.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Ames, Mark. (July 8, 2014). Homophobia, racism and the Kochs: The tech-libertarian \u201cReboot\u201d conference is a cesspool<\/a>. Pando<\/em>.<\/p>\n Assange, J., Appelbaum, J., M\u00fcller-Maguhn, A., & Zimmermann, J. (2012) Cypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet<\/em> (New York and London: OR Books).<\/p>\n Barbrook, R., & Cameron, A. (September 1, 1995) The Californian Ideology. Mute<\/em>. Retrieved from http:\/\/www.metamute.org\/editorial\/articles\/californian-ideology<\/p>\n Bartlett, Jamie (2015). The Dark Net: Inside the Digital Underworld<\/em>. Brooklyn, NY: Melville House Publishing.<\/p>\n Borsook, P. (2000).\u00a0Cyberselfish: A Critical Romp Through the Terribly Libertarian Culture of High Tech<\/em>. PublicAffairs.<\/p>\n Cantor, Paul. The Invisible Hand in Popular Culture: Liberty Vs. Authority in American Film and TV<\/em>. University Press of Kentucky, 2012, p. 353, n. 2.<\/p>\n Capetown Open Education Declaration (n.d.). Retrieved from http:\/\/www.capetowndeclaration.org\/read-the-declaration<\/p>\n Doherty, Brian (2007). Radicals for Capitalism: A Freewheeling History of the Modern American Libertarian Movement<\/em>. (PublicAffairs. Kindle Edition), p. 369.<\/p>\n Fogel, Karl (2016). Producing Open Source Software – How to Run a Successful Free Software Project<\/em>. Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly Media.<\/p>\n Guilhot, Nicolas (2006). A network of influential friendships: The foundation pour une entraide intellectuelle europeenne and east-west culturial dialogue. Minerva <\/em>(44<\/em>), 379-409. DOI 10.1007\/s11024-006-9014-y<\/p>\n Guilhot, Nicolas (May 2007). Reforming the World: George Soros, Global Capitalism and the Philanthropic Management of the Social Sciences. Critical Sociology<\/em>. 33<\/em> (3), 447\u2013477. doi:10.1163\/156916307X188988.<\/p>\n Harvey, Kerric (2013). Encyclopedia of Social Media and Politics<\/em>. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications.<\/p>\n Jurgenson, N., & Rey, P.J. (2014). Liquid Information Leaks. International Journal of Communication<\/em> (8<\/em>), 2651\u20132665.<\/p>\n Perens, Bruce (1999). Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution<\/a>. O’Reilly Media.<\/p>\n Peterson, William H. (2009). Mises in America<\/em>. Auburn, AL: Ludwig von Mises Institute. pp. 18\u201319.<\/p>\n Leonard, Andrew (September 10, 1999). The Cybercommunist Manifesto.<\/a> Salon.com<\/em>.<\/p>\n Levi, Ran. Richard Stallman and The History of Free Software and Open Source<\/a>. Curious Minds Podcast<\/em>.<\/p>\n Manne, Robert (March, 2011). The Cypherpunk Revolutionary – Julian Assange<\/a>. The Monthly<\/em>.<\/p>\n Stallman, Richard. (n.d.). What is free software?<\/a> GNU.org.<\/p>\n Silverman, Jacob (March 20, 2015). Meet the man whose utopian vision for the Internet conquered, and then warped, Silicon Valley<\/a>. Washington Post<\/em>.<\/p>\n Stonor Saunders, Francis (2000). Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War<\/em>. London, England: Granta Books.<\/p>\n Ribuffo, Leo P. (2011). 20 Suggestions for Studying the Right now that Studying the Right is Trendy. Historically Speaking,<\/em> 12<\/em>(1), 2\u20136.<\/p>\n Tiemann, Michael (September 19, 2006). History of the OSI<\/a>. Open Source Initiative<\/em>.<\/p>\nCypherpunks<\/h2>\n
Open Source<\/h2>\n
Open Society<\/h2>\n
Privatization of Education<\/h2>\n
References<\/strong><\/h2>\n