The software works are not concerned only

Elinor Ostrom is a name unknown to the general public, and something surprising, many economists. The Nobel award with this Professor, Indiana University Bloomington but also with his co-winner, Oliver Williamson, as with the last Prize awarded to Paul Krugman and Muhammad Yunus (which was ultimately the Nobel Peace Prize) another vision of the discipline economic than that which is fatty sprouts policies all - market. It recognizes the need for multidisciplinarity (Elinor Ostrom is not Professor of political science) and empirical research. It is awarded for the first time in a woman. The very rich production of Elinor Ostrom, include the common theory, developed in his book "Governing the Commons." The field of the common covers all of the assets that must be exempt from the property of one or some to become the property of a community, or all. The common, were in their time the land on which the poor could pick up wood or to graze their animals and which were conjoined in 13th century England, throwing in misery all those who had these places shared feed. The base of the 21st century, are the productions of the spirit when they join the public domain, the ideas, knowledge, the living.

Elinor Ostrom, the common are not that case property, they refer to a mode of governance, a liability of those who manage them to protect them. However, the common were questioned by biologist Garrett Hardin, who intended exempt them from the use of all to avoid exhaustion, highlighting what he called the "tragedy of the common".

Where are we The logiques of the huge field of research and knowledge development show was in need of the knowledge economy relies on the Exchange, on knowledge shared and patiently constructed of all those who work there. From this point of view, the tragedy of Commons becomes the "anticommuns", that of the temptation of patent allowing the advance of science, to benefit from a short-term perspective that ignores the good of all. The question of the patentability of life illustrates the danger of barter the field of the common against the privatization of basic resources.

Similarly, the adventure of the free software whose source code is made publicly available and can be freely reused, is the collective construction of an alternative to the propensity of some to dominate the market of numériques technologies. The strength of free software is the pooling of knowledge to improve the quality of the product; the French administration understood when it decided to adopt the Linux operating system.

The software works are not concerned only. As of 2001, the American Lawrence Lessig proposed licence "creative commons". The use of the work is libre; It can be transformed and reissued, and challenged again, once improved, available to all. One could also mention the adventure of the Wikipedia Encyclopedia, often criticized because it was able to publish incorrect information, but an article in the journal "Nature" showed that the articles did not more errors than the elegant and highly respected Encyclopedia Britannica. Add that the question of the management of the common is more than ever timely, to the temptation of Google to ask in predator world editorial production, or, in other areas, with the extension notions of heritage and public good world.

Not that the scope of the common must become the alpha and the Omega of the contemporary immaterial production. But the contribution of the new winner of the Nobel Prize is significant in economies which we are reminded, as a refrain, that they are all based on knowledge, knowledge and research: "We should understand knowledge as a common", says Professor Elinor Ostrom. This is a lesson to remember.