So it seems like in the world of free and open source law and politics at least every 8-10 weeks there is a fresh controversy to hit the press. And the current one is over Lessig’s endorsement of DRM:

“In a world where DRM has become ubiquitous, we need to ensure that the ecology for creativity is bolstered, not stifled, by technology. We applaud Sun’s efforts to rally the community around the development of open-source, royalty-free DRM standards that support “fair use” and that don’t block the development of Creative Commons ideals.”

Already on Lessig’s blog there are a few attacks and others are starting to manifest.

For now I will just display the controversy. I see this as possibly an interesting turning point for the acceptance of Lessig’s politics in the wider world of free (note not open source) politics. In my work, I characterize Lessig as the Pasteur of the open source movement, at least as described in the work of Bruno Latour . He took what was a pretty esoteric and geeky world, and initiated a series of events, projects, and translations, that helped bring free software to a wider world and audience.

Now that this domain has been unleashed, there are now responses back and as part of these, we see stronger pockets of resistance and opposition to a Lessig-like politics. I imagine they will cohere even more strongly in the coming years, reshifting, yet again, the poltics of free and open source software.