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For The Love Of Open Source
Jim Madison writes: "Is the open source movement about the joy of hacking? The latest edition of FirstMonday has an interesting academic study that says "No!", it is only natural in our traditional political economy that software be developed with public funding in the safety of academia when the markets are immature. Have moved into a post-scarcity gift culture or is the report correct that open source uses and needs the subsidy of public investment to grow within traditional industrial capitalism?"
Anyway, the author is making the following points (see the last part of the essay):
1. Hackers who write open source software seem to do so where there is no mature market for that software (i.e., they do it for free because no one will pay them to do it, not because they are motivated more by ego gratification than by money, as ESR suggests).
2. Funding by government and academic bodies has significantly contributed to the development of open source software, and to that extent government intervention in the software market (i.e., by directly or indirectly subsidizing the writing of open source software) may be desirable. (Contra ESR?)
3. To the extent that software companies try to co-opt open source developers by hiring them, they undermine themselves by encouraging more people to become open source developers (i.e., so they can get hired).
4. Programmers in countries such as Canada and Scandinavia contribute more per capita to free software than programmers in the USA, perhaps because there isn't a ready market for their skills in their home countries, which suggests that wealthier countries won't necessarily move toward developing more open source software. The breakdown of labor market barriers in a united Europe may therefore affect the rate of development of open source software (i.e., by encouraging those programmers to go where there are jobs rather than stay in grad school hacking kernels or whatever).
5. It might be a useful strategy for some software companies to permit some level of piracy rather than crack down on all piracy and thereby encourage development of open source alternatives.
1. Hackers who write open source software seem to do so where there is no mature market for that software (i.e., they do it for free because no one will pay them to do it, not because they are motivated more by ego gratification than by money, as ESR suggests).
2. Funding by government and academic bodies has significantly contributed to the development of open source software, and to that extent government intervention in the software market (i.e., by directly or indirectly subsidizing the writing of open source software) may be desirable. (Contra ESR?)
3. To the extent that software companies try to co-opt open source developers by hiring them, they undermine themselves by encouraging more people to become open source developers (i.e., so they can get hired).
4. Programmers in countries such as Canada and Scandinavia contribute more per capita to free software than programmers in the USA, perhaps because there isn't a ready market for their skills in their home countries, which suggests that wealthier countries won't necessarily move toward developing more open source software. The breakdown of labor market barriers in a united Europe may therefore affect the rate of development of open source software (i.e., by encouraging those programmers to go where there are jobs rather than stay in grad school hacking kernels or whatever).
5. It might be a useful strategy for some software companies to permit some level of piracy rather than crack down on all piracy and thereby encourage development of open source alternatives.
P.S. Most of this is econ terminology, not poli sci.