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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?"
Personally, I release my simulation software in the hope that another researcher continuing my work won't have to waste six months writing his/her own software from scratch.
Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
Free software is no more "communism" than, say, commercial software (by which I mean the Microsoft, Adobe, Oracle, etc. business model) is "fascism," or the academic (e.g. BSD) model is "theocracy." Using terms which invoke the suffering and death of millions of people to argue about software isn't just absurd; it insults the memory of those who suffered and died under the real thing. People who call Linux "commie software" ought to try living in Cuba or the PRC for a while to learn what real communism is like.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
Commercial software companies are an inefficient means to avoid the tragedy of the commons for a good that otherwise costs essentially nothing for the public to enjoy. But with software, as opposed to many other goods, it turns out that development costs are so low that the benefit you derive from non-programming users, who still contribute bug reports and suggestions for enhancements out of self-interest, usually more than makes up for the development costs. And open source software as a marketing tool, as a tool to establish standards, and for establishing reputations is also very valuable.
Considering the title of the paper: The Fading Altruism of Open Source Development
I think it's safe to say that this is just another of those anti-oss works designed to discourage OSS.
But the thing is, OSS evolution has many variables that each contributor only needs enought to inspire them to do it. Which may be a very small number compaired to the list of reasons total.
But the fact of the matter is that OSS is a natural evolution in software development. And as such it will not be addhearent to the wishes, desires and attempts to control it by those who find it threatening. For if that could be done then MS would have been able to do something to indicate this to all those in opposition to OSS.
The natural place for OSS is that of establishing the common base of software development. For without such an OSS baseline the actual potential as to how far we can really take software would be a great deal less. The Baseline of OSS will advance and as such the proprietary industry will have to continue to move forward themselves. It's called competition in an industry where the proprietary holders thoiught they cornered the industry with control over it. Only people, developer, students, users can't be so easily cornered in mass. For you'd have to get them all in the same mass first.
It should not be supprising to see stuff like this article and there will be more, until the hard reality of nature is finally accepted by those who want to deny nature of humans to not be constrained by false limits.
To understand open source, you half to understand that copyrights ard patents are not free market, but government monopolies that artificially manipulate the market.
No. Copyrights and patents were (originally) demanded by inventors, artists, and authors so that they might enjoy the fruit of their works free of pirates, and go on to produce more works. By the 17-1800's almost all goverments realized that protecting the people who produce their economic and intellectual gold was a Good Thing, this protection created jobs and engendered trade and economic prosperity.
The current OSS movement exists from that prosperity and the time available in modern society for people to work on OSS in their 'free' time, or to be 'paid' to create it using other peoples money for which they are not expected to produce actual product.
In order to get arround the damage this causes, an established and well founded University system is required to get information and knowledge out into the open.
No. Universities were created to, and function best, when they train the minds of the younger generation and pass on the learning of the older generations in an organized fashion. They were originally created to share existing knowledge, 'publish or perish', the creation of knowledge is a rather recent development historically speaking. The effect has been to warp education and to transform schools into economic entities.
Now the GPL and internet are changing this and making it so that people can actually learn, share, and apply knowledge in the free market way it was always intended to be.
A simple minded restatement of the Hacker Ethos, which was created by students searching for a justification for stealing other peoples work. There is nothing inherent in information that causes it to 'want' to be free.