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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?"
I've asked a lot of people and it seems to me that most people who evangelize and use OSS are using it because OSS projects are usually (but not always) free software (as in free beer not free-dom). Why did Loki fall into trouble? Because the million linux kids out there use linux because its free of cost and wouldn't spend a dime to keep a great company alive. As such, I think OSS is failing...
"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?"
It seems to me there are two factors in the creation of open source projects:
Many open source programmers (Linus, the guy who started PHP, and others) say they set out simply to "scratch an itch." This is the desire/need that underlies so much of what's been done...a small number of individuals who have a burning idea, and who start making it happen for their own reasons.
But not all programmers are free to spend endless time and money on their pet ideas. If you have a very tolerant and generous employer or a lot of free time (and no spouse/girlfriend/boyfriend), I guess that helps. But it also helps if you are working in an environment -- university, gov. agency, etc. -- where the prevailing values support your work.
I.e., in a for-profit company, you are unlikely to get official recognition/resources for your open source work. But in an academic or government setting, where profit is less important than the usefulness of the software, you may well be able to pursue your personal "itch" with the backing of the institution.
Just my $0.02...
you can't label it as being done purely for joy or purely for economic reasons.
some people do it for the love of the art.
some people do it to make a political statement about our economic system.
some people do it as pure research to benefit the body of knowledge in the software development field.
to try to say that all open source software is done for reason X is a little shortsighted.
It's precisely that type of linear thinking that makes other people say 'open source is communism' or 'open source can be taken seriously because it's done as a hobby'.
as with anything in life, the motivations for any one movement are so complex that pinning them down is something of an impossible task.
Interestingly, he picked GNOME and Linux as the projects to analyze -- had he used KDE instead of GNOME the numbers would have come out much more strongly in favor of his hypothesis.
I dunno, though -- I do it for fun, not because I expect any financial gain from it.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
I only do it because it turns me on. The way those letters roll on the monitor while I'm typing, so sensual :) And how about that Shell? Simply gorgeous.
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.
Well, if I had a job where I had to read articles like that I would most certainly pick up writing encryption algorithms as a diversion that I can understand.
I could be wrong, but I swear this article was "written" by the Postmodernism generator.
Blah.
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.
It seems to me that the hypothesis of the gift culture and the findings of this study are entirely compatible. This research does not show, as it author seems to be suggesting, that "scratching an itch" is not the primary motivation for free software development. Rather, it shows that this motivation does not trump traditional economics.
... if only they had a bit more time, or wouldn't be giving up tremendous potential income if they did...? How many times have you thought that yourself?
How many people do you know who would work on projects X, Y, and Z
Since many will post without actually reading the study, everyone should note that the raw data came only from the kernel and GNOME. I doubt that kernel+GNOME developers make up the majority of open source developers. And I wouldn't consider it an accurate sample set of developer's either. Kernel hackers are a special breed, to say the least. And GNOME developers certainly don't completely encompass the average application developer, such as command-line, internet, or just plain x-window.
I'm an open source application developer (in my personal time), and find this study does not at all include my perspective. Obviously I'm not the majority, but I think it's missing a lot.
Developers: We can use your help.
It is important to fully evolve to the correct paradigm when thinking outside of the box. How will we ever fully synthesize the correct model for stabilizing the algorithm for a disruptive system?
"People that quote themselves in their signatures bother me" - athakur999
This discussion comes up on Slashdot every couple of months or so.
The article's assumptions might be true for some people, but there are still many, many people who still develop out of love for doing something useful. In fact, there are probably more today because the Internet has allowed people to contribute and connect that never could before. The network effect has been made possible by the Internet.
I develop open source software because, yes, I do love it and I want to do something useful. One of the primary reasons I got a PhD and live an academic life is so I can do this and still support my family. I have must students contribute to my projects as part of their assignments, as well. Many of them have gotten the open source bug and are contributing now as well.
I develop open source because:
1. I don't want to support it. Let people find usefulness in it. Let them contribute as well. But I don't want to spend 80 percent of my waking hours solving naive questions.
2. I don't want the risk that comes with marketing software for money. I don't want to risk my livelihood by starting a business to support my software, either. Really marketing something takes 3-5 good years of your life to do it right, and it involves risk.
3. Yes, I like to help people and I benefit from what they contribute. I'm not anal about having to have GNU software only, but I do support what they do. I feel like I am giving back to the common pool when I develop open source apps.
4. I am not a competitive person. In fact, I absolutely dislike it. I prefer to develop a useful app to the best of my abilities. I find joy in the fact that if someone else solves the same problem I do, we can e-mail each other and combine our efforts and be friendly to each other rather than compete and try to drive one another out of business. Everyone benefits when we work together.
Disclaimer: I am not socialist. I love free and open economies. IMHO, competitive business economies are the best thing we've come up with yet. They keep people honest. But in those economies, there is plenty of room for community-welfare ideas as well.
I've always seen parallels between people who contribute to open source projects and people who build their own airplanes, boats and cars. They get pleasure from creating something useful or beautiful. The pleasure is enhanced by sharing it with others, receiving positive feedback and belonging to a group.
Some manage to convert their hobby into a business, occasionally a thriving business. Sometimes they make an important contribution to the field. Mostly, they just enjoy creating and sharing.
This is not a topic for economic analysis. This is not a topic for any kind of analysis. It is something that is rewarding to its participants and that's enough for them.
Why do you think Linus is still plugging away at the Linux kernel? Not because he's absolutely needed, but because he likes to do it.
In other words, he finds it desirable. I would include that under "need/desire."
(Blanket assertion about the inherent superiority of free/open-source software)
[Optional rant about how author personally will stick with free/open-source software come what may]
(Cheap, yet not undeserved shot at a large, famous software company (guess who!))
(Angry rant about unfair biz practices of aforementioned company)
(Random mispelling due to unusable nature of free/open-source spell checker)
[Optional signature that you've seen before]
21. Critics of KDE focused in particular on its reliance on the QT library, which was not wholly free at the time of initial Gnome development, although it has since been released into the public domain. It seems reasonable to speculate that Gnome development influenced the decision of QT developers to release their software under a general public license.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Is the open source movement about the joy of hacking? The latest edition of FirstMonday has an interesting academic study that says "No!"
.com company [probably] but there is economic incentive in that people with winmodems wouldn't have to purchase regular modems if they could get their winmodems to work.
If this is the question the statisticians had in mind when composing the study, then they started from a logically flawed position. This study supposes an either-or dichotomy, which is not atypical of this type of study. A good deal of open-source work, according to those who work it, is done for altruistic reasons, even if there are [potential] commercial benefits. For instance, getting Winmodems to work in Linux isn't going to spawn another
Moral of story, open source development done for the reasons of economic benefit or open source development done for reasons of pleasure are not necessarily mutually-exclusive entities. There is more often than not a middle road, wherein it seems the majority of developer's intentions lie.
For the most part, if I'm interested in substance and functionality over glitz, OpenSource projects have what I want -- with the added benefit that if it isn't precisely what I want, I can fix that. If there's a problem, it usually gets noticed and fixed sooner. Authors take pride in their work, as their very name and reputation is attached. And amazingly enough, all this comes at a very low price tag.
That doesn't say that OpenSource comes at no cost. The economics are slightly different. To be a consumer in this market, I have to have about the same amount of knowledge in my head about how my computer worked when I was running DOS back in the '80s. I recognize my computer is not a do-all appliance with pre-canned solutions I have to accept or not use. I can mold it to my will... and surprisingly with relatively little effort. OpenSource lets me venture into the realm of the unexplored if I so choose, or I can stay well within my comfort zone.
On the flip side, to be a contributor, I recognize I may never get rich directly from my contributions. However, I can get noticed. I can get famous. I can get appreciated. I can be worth more to my employer, whether from experience or name recognition.
It's personally rewarding, providing personal growth, a sense of community, and is fun to boot. I've yet to get this experience out off a sealed package off the shelf.
If you're the type of person who find yourself doing a View Source when you visit an interesting website, then you've got enough of a streak of curiosity to survive consuming OpenSource.
With familiarity and tmie, it's easy to contribute. Contributions don't have to be just code. They can be suggesting ideas, reporting bugs, play testing, or even proof reading.
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.
Most of what this guy has written could have been hacked together by any literate Slashdot reader.
And he needs to provide a color key for his maps.
It's no surprise that free/open source software thrives in the academic community, and is treated with suspicion by the business community.
Software companies make their money by selling copies of software. Obviously, for a software company to make money, it can't give away its primary product. Otherwise, it won't make money! Duh!
Academic institutions, on the other hand, make their money not by selling products, but by selling access to their prestigious programs/courses/professors/faculty in the form of tuition. A university can give away computer source code written by its faculty and staff, because they make their money not by selling software, but by attracting students, and creating incentives for those students to spend ever increasing amounts of tuition money to attend the institution.
The way that professors build their reputation and prestige is by having their work published openly in peer-reviewed journals. This leads to tenure, job security, and, in the long run, career satisfaction. Gift Culture, Schmift Culture. The correct term is "publish or perish", and university scientists don't make their money on sales of their research papers.
So why is it so mysterious and incomprehensible (to Eric Raymond, at least) that young computer programmers, fresh out of four years of immersion in the university "publication = prestige" culture, would be interested in openly publishing their programming work for peer review? No mysterious "gift culture" convolutions are necessary to explain things. Just the understanding that some business ventures produce software as a primary product for sale. Others produce software as a by-product, and actually benefit in giving it away by increased sales of their primary product.
Boring old capitalism.
- "The 'utility function' Linux hackers are maximizing is not classically economic, but is the intangible [product] of their own ego satisfaction and reputation among other hackers."
and then saysIn other words, if Linus Torvalds says he does it just for fun, he must be lying because fun is hard for an economist to quantify. Likewise if Eric Raymond says he does it for ego, he must be lying, based on the same reasoning. Personally, I write open-source textbooks because I hated all the choices from the big publishers -- my motivation is my own professional satisfaction and maximizing the enjoyment of the work I do as a teacher. But don't believe me. I must be lying, because professional satisfaction and enjoyment are hard for economists to measure.
If we don't want to admit that fun is an economic motivator, then why do people go to Las Vegas to gamble? They lose money on the average, but the point is that it's fun.
The author doesn't make his point very clearly, but he seems to be saying that there is more open-source development per capita outside the US because programmers in the US can make loads of money, so they want to do that instead of relaxing with a nice free software project. OK, so there are differences in the amounts of money lost by doing free software, but what do these people gain by doing free software? The author only seems to want to talk about the loss, because the gain is cultural and personal, and hard to measure. But if he believes the gain doesn't exist, then why doesn't open-source software development cease immediately?
Find free books.
The notion of "gift culture" isn't the author's, it's ESR's [tuxedo.org] (at least as applied to the open source movement).
Too bad ESR didn't really define it very clearly. Not that I have anything against amateur anthropologists, but I don't really think he was qualified to come up with grand cultural theories like that.
Typical academic economist. Always saying what everyone else already knows. Let's get a real working stiff economist in there and we'll get some real analysis.
Why do people work on Open Source projects?
Because they are self-interested individuals. They do it because it's fun, they need the program/fix/feature and no one has written it yet, they figured out a way to sucker folks out of their money with free-beer software, they get paid to do so, or someone has duped them into thinking they can get paid to do so. And a million other reasons besides. But it all boils down to: if there is no perceived benefit to the coder, they won't work on the project. Period.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
There's too much of a rush to justify Open Source. Just looking through the responses here shows that. Most of the justifications are self-serving and romantic. It's great and all to talk about scratching itches, millions of eyes, and survival of the fittest, but those are not what make or break programs. Think about it: Is some middling coding-job from a bored 17 year old with no software engineering experience whatsoever going to be more significant just because the source is available? That's overly cynical, but there's truth in there.
Also remember that very few people give a damn about open source. People who *use* programs sure don't (read: "the 99.9% of Windows users and the 99% of Linux users that are not programmers"). I'm a programmer who works on large (usually commercial) projects. I only looked at the gcc source once, just to see what it was like, and besides being repulsed at the verbosity of the code, it made no difference to me. I'm not going to hack up hundreds of thousands of lines of code without understanding the architecture.
Open source is a small issue, but it's still the path of least resistance. If 99% or more people don't give a hoot about the source, you might as well ship it because it's easier than being paranoid about trade secrets. But there's no reason to endlessly rant about the new economy and sticking it to the man and all that. How boring can you get?
Hasn't it been obvious? Open-source developers are Marxists, working towards a common good, trying to move software development along to benefit everyone.
If Carl Marx were alive today, he would probably be astounded. His ideas have lead to failed societies, and much suffering. Yet his ideas prevail among a group of geeks working in capitalists societies, collaborating all over the world.
I think that it's only possible to be a partial Marxist. I develop open-source software because other people are developing software that I use for free. They use mine for free in return. However every other aspect of my life is capitalist, and I am cool with that.
One thing that will be interesting is to see how open-source affects the software industry over the long term. States are proposing that Microsoft spill out the source code for some of their products, and also Micrsoft has the lame shared source thing going on. These are baby steps towards a big revolution, IMHO.
The ego boost you get from people telling you how much they like your software ain't bad either.
However, you can note that in one country, 60% of the work is being done for pleasure, 20% for scratching an itch, and 20% for other reasons, while in another country, those same distributions are 30%, 50%, and 20%. And then you can make observations about the amount of development done in those countries and the different factors behind them. Oh, that's what the writer did, isn't it?
...throws doubt on the Schumpeterian assumption...
(fscking lameness filter.)
This study is not about the motivations or economic implications of open source.
Neither is it about our "having moved into a post-scarcity gift culture".
Face it. I bet you 20$ that the author just really wanted to use the word "Schumpeterian" in a research document. (and maybe to have it posted to slashdot.)
(Seriosuly, can you imagine someone beign named Mr. Schumpet? Sounds like a promo character for a cookie company.)
I said this a couple of weeks ago. OSS programmers develop because OSS programmers want the recognition and the prestige of having written something 'kewl'. This is meaningless prestige in the real world, but to the academic halls and places where they live, it means something.
It's like doing things for 'school spirit' in high school - means nothing after you graduate, but it's the world you're in at the time.
I don't think there's anything wrong with this, if that's what you choose, but don't think that one hierarchical structure is inherently better than another. Linus or RMS are at the top of the OSS totem pole, just like the captain of the football team was at the top of the high school totem pole.
Humans are followers and tend to latch onto leaders and examples, it's as simple as that. I do it, you do it, your mom and dad do it.
Thinking about this should give one great confidence in OSS's ability to weather Microsoft's attacks, since in order to win they need to destroy all of the contributing factors.
This becomes a really hard thing to do when many motivating factors turn out to contradict (e.g. some people contribute for fun, others because they have to (work not fun) in order to make something that they need work; some people use it 'coz it's free, others couldn't care less about the price; some like it for its disregard of borders, others like it because of significant local content; sometimes being on the bleeding edge attracts, sometimes stability is the drawcard).
Pinning down your own reasons isn't that hard, cataloging them all might be a different story. I like OS for a wide variety of reasons, but mostly for the ability to tinker with it.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
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.
[orig author reply]
:) There's nothing honest about capitalism here. They bribe politicians, destroy small companies, propagandize until the public doesn't know anything about anything. I oppose capitalism gladly. I consider it a point of pride, just as I take pride in opposing the lowly thugs who mug people in dark alleys."
>>>"Apparently you haven't been to America
Yes, I agree with you here. FYI, I grew up and live in the USA. I'm as American as anyone else. However, my point is that capitalism is the best thing yet. I know it has *serious* drawbacks. But I take it any day over communism, pure socialism, or anything else history has to show us. I hope for the day when scarce resources are a thing of the past and we no longer need capitalism to keep people and companies in check.
I realize that many companies are totally unethical (I dislike MS vehemently), but at least our system keeps them in check to some level. Capitalism makes for a great life because it caters to people's greed. On the whole, people want to work and innovate because they want $. Capitalism works because it accepts this fact at our society's current stage of development. Most other systems that have been tried give people too much ethical credit.
It looks fine to me; all you have to is read the abstract. This isn't a grand attempt to describe the history of the open source movement, it's a questioning of an assumption that ESR made and most other scholars accepted uncritically (which is why ESR's work is so prominent in the article). He's simply saying that classical economic theory might hold true where ESR and the rest of the OS proponents claim it fails.
One of my biggest reasons for working on open source projects is that the software world is driven by network effects. If my employer had decided to go with ActiveDirectory for everything instead of developing Ganymede (if ActiveDirectory had even existed when we needed a solution), we would have tied ourselves to the wheel of Microsoft fees and upgrades, in perpetuity, forever. I personally didn't want to see that happen, for ego reasons and for the sake of my l33t UNIX job skills. My employer didn't want to see that happen, because it might have given far too much power to Microsoft over our operations. No sense being too dependent on any one vendor when you can do something about it.
It's the exact same reason why AOL is supporting the Mozilla project.. if AOL had to depend on Microsoft's good will to provide Internet services to its customers, it might at any time have its customers taken away from it, assuming a compliant DOJ.
So, yes, there's economic rationality there, there's also cultural issues, there's also ego, and pride of work, all of it.
- jon
Ganymede, a GPL'ed metadirectory for UNIX
The only difference between now, movable press, and a room full of monks is the cost involved. Lower costs made comercial publishing for entertainment possible. Now it's making it a difficult proposition again.
Oh well. Lately, it's the publishers that have enjoyed the proffits at the expense of the artist. Once upon a time someone like Poe could open up a magazine of his own and almost make a living at it. Hemingway, Thompson and others managed to get by. These days, forget it. Warner Brothers vrs. the author of Harry Potter, who's got the profits? When then the comercial rewards have become so poor, why not just give your work away? I've always enjoyed the works of love better anyhow. Hesiod, Homer, Virgil, Dante, RMS.
The danger comes from those who would keep you from sharing to protect their interests. This has happened before, but never on such a wide scale as popular culture. In the west, the church has fought specific puclications on natural philosophy and governments have fought political tracts. Today, however, many people can only hum tunes sold to them by five music publishers, have images placed into their heads by four different media giants, and so their very hopes and dreams forged by a small number of corporate interests. As these attack all forms of knowledge trasmision, including Public Libraries, private devices even private thoughts, and we might do best to avoid helping those who would tax us. Why not preferentially use free works?
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
In the end I think it's not possible to draw conclusions about the communist system because it hasn't been tried long enough and because of lack of support of capitalist countries (not that you could espect anything else). You can't instate communism/socialism in a poor country and espect to have all problems resolved in half a century if there's no help from the outside to bootstrap their society into first world 20/21st century wealth.
That's not to say there haven't been successes with planned economies but I'd espect an immediate result of instating equality in a poor country (with very rich and very poor people) to be that the average wealth drops phenominally. A possitive result would be that there should be no more hunger and everyone can get a decent education. Over time quality education and adaptation by the previous rich (as far as they don't flee elsewhere) should get society further in the long run... ignoring for a moment that communism does have a ruling class which tends to get corrupt but true socialism should solve that.
I don't think scare resources are a problem. After all the very rich have the money to claim these resources for themselves yet they don't do that, and I do not believe that's because of "with power/money comes responsibility" as capitalists like to say.
I'm not sure I understand how capitalism keeps people in check? Isn't this the job of governments?
Or if you mean that capitalism works because it gives an intensity for people to work, to that I'd reply that it gives this intensity only to the worker class, the majority of the rich also tend to work while they don't need the money (which from your point of view is especially strange for children of the rich).
BTW, by your logic you could also say slavery works because it gives an intensity for people to work, and this would be true if it weren't that in slavery people work because of fear for punnishment as in capitalism people work because of fear for poverty - why can't they do work for enjoyment as the rich do?
I also don't think socialism gives people to much ethical credit. I've heard many of the working (older) adults around me say that they'd feel useless if they didn't work and I've heard the same people claim that they'd keep on working if they won the lotery - at a slower pace alas but that could compensate nicely with those unemployed that want to work.Further I'd like to remark that capitalism does in fact not work - it's a broken system for the vast majority of people on this planet because it relies too much on exploitation and unemployment (because you want people to be scared of getting fired).
I'm looking forward to hear some insight from you. Oh yeah, try the link that my sig is, it complements this post :).
Monkey sense
Wasn't Linux Linus's thesis project?
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Oh well, Americans and geography don't mix apparently!
> On the whole, people want to work and innovate because they want $
/can/ choose to support it, in a 3rd party manner, if they want; and given a sufficient level of knowedge, and a wider enough user base, they even make a living from it, resulting in an increased sense of return on investment by the owner/user of said software, thus ensuring that they will spend on support in the future. This is as opposed to spending on the 'invention', only to discover that they don't know how to use it, and no one can help them. The chance of them repeat spending more on that branch of technology must be lower than in the successful support scenario. I suppose that the only thing that scares the innovation pundits is that this money goes back to the people supporting the status quo rather than the companies furiously trying to file their latest patent, even tho both paths contribute to the overall health of the economy. And here's where the ugly truth is .. I think countries see the innovation in their economies not meant to keep the domestic economy strong, but rather to stay ahead of /other/ economies. I think this is the true point of globalism as it relates to innovation and IP. As nations, we havn't gotten over our geocentric biases yet (I have a hard time picturing an IBM exec feeling good about bringing technologies to a foreign land, as opposed to feeling good about opening up yet another market to IBM), so how on earth is globalism meant to benifit everybody if it's only being used as a means of protecting IP and ensuring that one country must start contributing to anothers economy until the patent expires (and at the rate we're going, it seems like patents will never expire in the not-so-distant future).
.. in other words .. no economic system is an island, and I believe the blind belief of innovation as our salvation is responsible for that. There seems to be no place in our world for cultures who simply wish to live happily without innovating, and, unfrotunately, those countries are being punished for it daily due to their lack of desire to grow economically on the world stage. I believe many of the values OS echews is a desire to grow and innovate at a natural level, as people see fit to contribute; not as a means of 'staying ahead of the competition', which, of course, is primarily why the vast majority of software being sold is closed.
I'm not sure where along the way we decided that people want to innovate. Some people do, sure. Inventors have existed in every culture, every age, to varying degrees. However, I'm of the opinion that this sweeping assumption, coupled with current copyright and patent laws, causes our countries to invent useless technologies, or at least technologies which cause as many short term problems as those they purpot to solve, while ensuring that you cannot make a decent living independant of the IP-owning corperate body, contributing domain knowldge, slight improvements, or supporting it.
Obviously, it's a vast oversimplification, but my point is that there is no money, currently, in smart technophiles going into support. I feel that if enough importance was placed on it, in terms of salary, working environment, and responsibility and accountibility, I'd wager that people wouldn't feel half as disillusioned by technology than they feel today; and would likely be in a better position to see where/how they could contribute to the economy.
This is one of the things, I think, that is attractive to OS developers. Other people
> at least our system keeps them in check to some level
I'd agree with this if you're referring to keeping them in check on the soil of the country it is based in. However, look no furthur than Nike, Starbucks, The Gap, etc. They're very existance has spelled the death of numerous economies, industries, markets, children, etc in other markets where there is no one to defend them. All because those cultures and economies were based not on innovation, but the maintenance of quality of life (for which there is far less a dependance on the growth of wealth). I agree that Capitalism has been the best system for those who live in it, but don't forget for all the 'freedom flag' waving the US does, it's very obvious that they are in no hurry to bring regulated democratic capitalism to countries which are suffering due to its existance unless they represent a potential future economic or political (read: communism, dictatorship) threat, sometimes even going so far as to silently lobby for governments (check out the NED) that do little but provide social and economic laws that permit US based companies to make large profits. From slaves to sweat shops abroad, capitalism has always depended on populations, cultures, and people who are not granted the same checks and balances as those who live in it's homeland.
Whew
"Old man yells at systemd"
To understand open source, you half to understand that copyrights ard patents are not free market, but government monopolies that artificially manipulate the market. 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. 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.
So here you are, too poorly educated to make sense of perfectly understandable expressions used in the article. You're the idiot, not him.
The author presents essentially two pieces of evidence:
:-) growth in economic opportunities for programmers.
the historical migration of free software development from US to worldwide, and
the fact that being a programmer in the US has become a good gig lately
then jumps to the conclusion that this means that US programmers weren't altruistic, merely opportunistic (worked for universities before, corps now).
But he doesn't examine other areas:
the US/Europe ratio may be declining over time, but the US hacker/US population ratio has likely been increasing -- overall free software activity in the US has certainly not been overrun by the lure of proprietary software's lucre.
the appearance of free software predated widespread online use in US -- maybe the story will be the same elsewhere. That is, is the situation in Hungary today similar to US in 1984 -- only the hackers are online, so the hacker/online ratio is very high?
But I think the main flaw in his argument is inflating ESR's gift-economy rationale (which I suppose he does so purposely to puff up the importance of his conclusion). Even ESR isn't so much saying that free software hacking is completely without regard to economic conditions, but that it's an unexpected response to these conditions (hence post-industrial).
I'd claim, and I think ESR might agree, that free software is an efficient means of production (shared resources), niche penetration (scratching itches), and market penetration (network effect) made possible by BOTH the economic (free time + university grants + young single contributors) AND cultural (want props + want to contribute + crave technical knowledge) situations of hackers.
In other words, the fact that hackers could do some coding for free without starving, and that they were wont to do so, ran into the happy accident that doing so could produce some really good shit.
This would explain the experience of the 1990's -- unbelievable growth in free software and simultaneous insane (literally
The author's argument might lead one to believe that open source would wither and die if the corporate world paid programmers well enough. The simultaneity of the dot-com boom and the Linux boom deny that.
I'll grant to the author that the European countries present an economic situation more favorable to free software. In fact, I'd amplify the fact by saying that European government support for free software has largely economic motivations -- they don't want to lose to MS/Sun/Oracle/IBM any longer.
But this fact may support a post-industrial thesis as well -- workers in northern European countries enjoy more free time and have a better safety net than US workers -- so they have less to lose from partaking in a little free coding.
This is the crucial distinction: a post-industrial explanation for free software contributions doesn't put them outside of the economic situation -- it relies on the coders having the opportunity to engage in non-economic activity.
That still leaves intact two "revolutionary" conclusions from the history of free software -- that significant production can occur outside of the wealth motive (if the survival motive has been taken care of and the infrastructure exists), and that that production can (in the case of software) be more efficient in creating use value than a wealth-driven model.
"You can't get something for nothing." - my grandfather, on the stock market and Reaganomics.
- Some people want to make public some idea, but:
- There is not a viable commercial market for the idea.
- The person can't find someone to look after the comercial market
- altristic and ethical reasons: one or more of
- "ideas should be free"
- "commercialisation is evil"
- "should not charge for god-given ideas"
- "giving" culture
- tactical reasons
- By giving the stuff away, you deny others the right to sell [eg MS giving away IE to kill Netscape: but they have the resources to not have to open source it.]
- fear of the legal quagmire
There are lots of different reasons, just as there are lots of reasons to be at different places. Open source is an outcome, not an input. That is, it is something that one does, not a reasonOS/2 - because choice is a terrible thing to waste.
Don't forget that it isn't necessarily the case that the economic factor (develop portfolio to get well-paying job) is a -conscious- factor. The author expressely stated this. It makes sense that what we like to do may at some level be dictated by what will make us successful. There's no reason to doubt the sincerity of the enjoyment of the task, but that doesn't mean there aren't underlying socio-economic factors.
:)
After all, I made a free Quake mod (Archmage) that I loved making and would never have turned commercial. But I couldn't help but be aware at some level that the mod might attract the attention of a game maker and land me a job. I didn't get a job (I'm in hardware now anyway), but isn't it plausible that part of the reason I enjoyed it was knowing what I was doing could make me desireable in the market?
Though, on the other hand, I didn't actually know you could make a good living as a programmer until I'd already declared my major in college. so I guess it goes both ways
The enemies of Democracy are
Using the number of people connected to the internet as a measure of the population that each country is able to contribute to OSS projects is just plain nonsense.
The USA has a much higher proportion of 'programing illiterate' on the internet than any other country in the world.
Of course it would then appear that the USA isn't keeping up with the rest of Europe.
The underlying statistics he uses are meaningless and as we all know you can create any conclusion you want from false data.
- AndrewN
Therefore, users are free but programmers must be lured and kept. Without users a project can continue -- for a while, at least, or if the goals of the programmers don't require users -- but without programmers, the project will die.
Many people make the mistake of assuming that if the software is free for users then everything about it is free. Nothing could be further from the truth.
While it's refreshing to learn that Open Source has matured enough to garner some interest in the academic Economics community, the author's admitted lack of familiarity with the subject of his thesis--that exotic and enigmatic creature, the Open Source Developer, comes through. Less pretentious jargon in the vein of "the gift-economy" (is this some economist appropriation of Claude Levi-Strauss that I missed in the sixties?) and more pragmatic observation would have been welcome.
:)
1)The importance of the English language. Completely underestimated in this study. Why else would France, a very Socialist economy with a 35-hour work week have such a low level of Open Source activity? Compared to Sweden and Germany, the English language proficiency in France is extremely low.
2)Personal fulfilment. Most dedicated Open Source developers share a joy in creation. Ego is involved, but not so much as related to recognition from others, but a desire to prove something to themselves.
3)Desire for a community of peers. Once you create something you want to be able to share it with people capable of appreciating it. If your expertise is pretty obscure or high level, you're going to have to go to an online virtual community to find people with the same interest or proficiency.
4)The Corporate IT world is a cubicle wasteland. From a personal point of view, this is hardly a validating world for engineers. Even at so-called "technology" companies, it's rare to see engineers promoted to any positions of true importance. It's all about marketing sales and MBAs. Engineers tend to see something in scientific terms, things either work or they don't. This makes most of them poor players in corporate politics. Even if they are any good, they are likely to be pretty turned off by the process. How many technology decisions are dictated by top-down partnerships, which make absolutely zero sense from a technological point of view? Far too many.
If I were to profile the Open Source developer, the person most susceptible to the phenomenon would be an individual with something to prove, someone not experiencing any (or much) fulfilment in their day job, where they feel isolated, not in contact with their true professional peers, someone who is given insufficient control over and ownership of their work.
Abstract economic theory is well and good, but it very often fails to credibly explain human behavior.
As for de-bunking myths about Open Source, a far more interesting story was Slashdot's post a week ago on Marc Fleury, leader of the JBoss project. http://www.jboss.org/vision.jsp. JBoss delivers Enterprise class software. You'll have to get past the J2EE jargon and the ego, but Marc makes some interesting points: he and his developers are mostly not students, they have worked in the corporate IT world, they do care making money, and thus have a vested interest in delivering solutions that meet the needs of the corporate IT community.
While I feel basic psychology as opposed to economics has far more to do with the source of Open Source contribution, economics has everything to do with Open Source success--but that's another thread
The reason people work on OSS is really quite simple: It's the only place where you can escape Microsoft's dominance. OSS is primarily a non-Microsoft phenomenon; there are few major (emphasis on "major") OSS apps that originated and are primarily Windows-centric, usually because Microsoft typically already has solutions for such things.
One of the effects of a monopoly is that innovation in that particular industry ceases. Microsoft has no real drive to do true innovation. As a result, people who want to do things that are interesting flock to OSS.
It's simply about wanting to do cool things. You can't do them and make money as long as Microsoft has a monopoly; thus, OSS flourishes.
I'm willing to wager that the end of the Microsoft monopoly (inevitable, IMHO, but that's another topic) will also bring about the end of the OSS development explosion we see right now. Because people will HAVE an alternative where they can do innovative things AND make money.
But right now, you can't really do both on the desktop. You're either pushing the envelope, XOR making money.
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.
Although Marx was pretty pathetic if judged in modern scientific terms, he did have at least one good insight, which is that historical development determines what kind of economy you can have. You can quibble with his classification of feudal/capitalist/socialist, but it's certainly true that your average peasant of millenia past could never have conceived of going to the library and reading Consumer Reports to decide what kind of refrigerator to buy. Capitalism isn't a natural phenomenon -- it had to be invented, and someday it may become obsolete. Maybe the free information movement is a sign of something like this, although I don't think I'll really see it in historical perspective in my own lifetime.
Another important thing to realize is that even after the advent of capitalism, there have always been pockets of noncapitalism. No, hippies didn't invent the concept of a commune in the 60's -- it goes back at least to 1920's-era anarcho-syndicalism. Then you have the shakers, the amish, the amanas, etc. So even if the talk of "the new economy" is overblown, that doesn't mean the whole world and everyone in it is behaving like some kind of textbook idealization of capitalist economics.
BTW, on the off chance that the parent post was really meant seriously...sorry, nope. Marx conceived of a dictatorship of the proletariat, not a let-it-all-hang-out, find-your-own-bliss nonconformist hippie-hacker paradise. He also theorized that capitalism would be destroyed by its own internal contradictions: as the poor got poorer and the rich got richer, increasing class antagonism would result in revolution, led by the factory workers, who are the most politically advanced part of the proletariat. Even if you want to argue that his prediction came true in some cases, I hardly think kernel hackers fit the profile.
Find free books.
That's basically what I got out of the article. Tough read, but really detailed.
ANYway, I do agree with his points to a degree, as it's consistent with the way some hackers behave. An important point to make that is not stated so bluntly in his article is that the hacker community is large, chaotic, and variable. Hackers tend to have a few signature traits in common, but are often motivated for different reasons. Some hack to learn, others to stroke their egos, others for self promotion to other hackers, others still for self promotion to employers, others for the belief that software should be free (think RMS), etc.
There is no unified reason why hackers hack, and why OSS works... except maybe just because it can work. What other industry could this be possible in? Open hardware isn't practicle because we don't all have the cash around to have chips and boards fabbed. Software is freely replicatable, so there are fewer barriers of entry for Joe Hacker.
Just my $0.02...
Lex orandi, lex credendi.
Wanna make money from writing Open Source software? Do OSS consulting and provide people with complete hardware/software solutions for all their needs. If something doesn't exist, develop it yourself and somehow tack that onto their bill, even if it's just labeled as a raw labor cost. Guaranteed, they'll still be saving boatloads of money in comparison to proprietary solutions which must be replaced every couple years. And if enough OSS geeks start doing this, it'll become easier for everyone since less of the needed software will be missing when starting out on a job. Granted, there will always be in-house programming customizations to do, but they too will become smaller.
If you truly believe in Open Source, become a master programmer make it your livelihood. Word will spread quickly if you do a much better job than all those MSCE certified dolts and help businesses reduce their fixed costs in the process. And if you find yourself earning too much money, you can always take a year off for leisure, personal education, and coding on pet projects. Sounds like a dream, but its not. However, first you must move beyond the mental box that says the only "stable job" is working 9-5 making somebody else rich. Small, flexible business are the key to the further expansion of already successful OSS. I'll let y'all know when I finish my book. (-:
I really don't understand how someone gets +3 interesting for reading the title of the article and then replying to it, and naturally coming to completely the wrong conclusions about what it says.
My Karma: ran over your Dogma
StrawberryFrog
But slavery has been exceptable for a long time too, and at that time people didn't say "hey -- we're exploiting those people. Let's stop doing that" en masse.
The comparision to slavery isn't that far fetched I believe, in the Roman age there were few rich ones and many slaves and the rich men and women had created a really fine system for themselves. But slavery was ended because the suppressed revolted and because the exploiters didn't like being bad people (which many of them might not have thought about before). It is to be expected that one day the poor in our society will stand up to capitalist that dictactated their lives so far with abstract notions and rules such as money, patents and private ownership. When that day comes I espect many capitalists themselves to realize what is wrong.
So the question really isn't if socialism/communism is going to work. The issue is that there are classes in our society and they must be abolished -- that can only be done by removing all monopolies on ideas, land and natural resources and deciding democraticly over them. You believe in democracy I assume?
I know you espected me to defend what is commonly called communism but I really can't because I don't believe in that system. It's a class based system with no seperation between government and monopolists, which is very bad.
In conclusion, what I really meant to say in my previous post was that communism might work if the state doesn't get corrupt, i.e. that the people themselves may really do good work. Socialism might be the answer. Note that Marckx himself also wanted an evolution towards a governmentless society.
Monkey sense