Slashdot Mirror
Domain: benkler.org
Stories and comments across the archive that link to benkler.org.
Stories · 3
-
The Economist On The Economics of Sharing
RCulpepper writes "The Economist, reliably the most insightful English-language news publication, discusses the economics of sharing, from OSS programmers' sharing time, to P2P users' sharing disk space and bandwidth. " True indeed (about The Economist, I have to remember to renew my subscription); one of the main supports for the article comes from Yochai Benkler latest piece, which is excellent. -
How Can Companies Profit While Giving Code Away?
An anonymous reader writes "In an almost philosophical essay replete with references to everyone from Larry Lessig and Tim Bray to to Professor Yochai Benkler, Sun Micrososystems evangelist Simon Phipps explores the metaphor of subscription (well, of course it's not just a metaphor any more from Sun's point of view) as the way that companies will make money off of deploying open source solutions. His distinction between OS developer and OS deployer is useful, but the crux is his contention that, with a "system" such as Sun has put together like the JDS, 'You don't buy the software from Sun - instead you subscribe to the editorial outlook.' It's an alluring analogy - Sun as the editor-in-chief of a 'publication' (JDS) with readers who may or may not choose to subscribe. Worth reading." -
Economics and Open Source Projects
david_christie writes "Dan Gillmor has a piece on the economist Yochai Benkler's paper "Coase's Penguin, or Linux and the Nature of the Firm" which examines open source projects asan example of an emerging general model of economic behavior that is neither market nor company based. A previous version of the paper was noted in slashdot back in October, but it's been revised for upcoming publication in the Yale Law Review and is well worth a second look. Benkler attempts to explain why open source projects succeed, without falling back on theories about the special nature of software projects or hacker culture. He suggests that more general economic principles are at work, which are displacing the traditional motivations (market prices and employee relationships) that economists use to quantify individual behavior. If he's right the open source model could spread to other forms of creative work where the output is information or culture (music production comes to mind). The author thinks deeply about the information flows characterizing collaborative projects like free software development ("commons-based peer production"). That distinguishes this paper from the usual economist mumbo-jumbo about price points and such. Like Larry Lessig on the legal side of things, this is a guy who gets it and has thought deeply about how his field relates to it."