Slashdot Mirror
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."
All this time Windows has been saying that Free/Open Source Software will disapear because there is no economic background..... Microsoft also sold me parts of the Golden Gate Bridge.
This is how you know you're a geek the power goes out and you are unemployed and unemployable. Yes I know I can't spell
But then, most open source programmers are, I would guess, full-time programmers. Which helps pay for all those neat toys. None of the professional musicians I know (and I know quite a few, session & orchestral players) would record music and give it away.
What does that leave us? Amateur musicians like myself pimping their home-grown stuff. Which in some cases will be as good as or better than the pros, but the vast majority of it will be as cruddy as all those non-updated open source projects on Sourceforge...
Game dev and music blog
Open source projects succeed because the people working on them actually enjoy working on them. They can take the project in the correct direction, instead of the corporate direction.
Open-source projects cannot be sold.
Therefore there are no economics of it.
Therefore this story is useless.
Good thing I didn't read it... otherwise it would try to influence me by their left-wing marxist bias
The freeloader problem: people who take without contributing, because there is no reward for contributing and conversely, no punishment for not contributing. As such, people tend towards taking without giving back, lessening and lessening the amount of contributors.
Forbes has a great article looking at OS businesses as the market faces current tribulations. They objectively look at the financials and give a good overview based on history and performance. They disclose upfront that they have a feed from slashdot.
A very good read, and it supports the partnership that VA and Forbes have made.
If we don't fight for ourselves no one will.
1. Publish ads featuring lightsabers
2. ?
3. Profit
A random thought: The barn-raising example from Gilmour really seems to me like communism at its best: People in the community volunteering, without being forced, to a common project, because of the pride, etc. it gives them.
:-) but my main point is that the forced nature of many public-welfare-type projects seems to necessarily lead to resentment and division.
It's what always seemed to me flawed with other (arguably) noble Communist experiments, like the Soviet Union. Specifically, that all citizens were forced to participate in this system, in effect with a gun to their head. (You will help! We will be happy, dammit!) Over-simplifying possibly
Given that volunteers to an Open Source project are just that: volunteers, it seems possible that these projects may come much closer to the spirit and the ideal of communism. So the article seems optimistic and hope-ful. And very cool.
Just my $.02--
If music artists started their own OS projects. Imagine a world where music was free, to make, to listen to, to change.
I remember reading/using an official music book that had the all the songs ever recorded by Stan Rogers (a Canadian folk musician). In his forward, he said feel free to learn these songs, and play them as you want, in the great tradition of folk music. He even ended with if you find a better way to play them, let me know.
I hope the OSS model does in fact become common-place in other parts of culture and public works.
"The large print giveth, and the small print taketh away" -Tom Waits
"an emerging general model of economic behavior that is neither market nor company based"
Open Source is merely a variant of the way modern western science has behaved for the last four centuries. Everything is open and published.
The only blot is that there is patenting, but even patents are openly published albeit restricting those that can exploit them for a limited time.
Economics is still largely based on theorisation of 19th century economics. This is the 21st century, and no longer does all economic produce have to have any material/physical/medium/transportation cost.
Software isn't yarn. We don't need companies producing music, movies, art and movies for us - it'll happen by itself anyway.
The movies would be bad without big bugets you say? Maybe it is because we've become acustomed to quantifying how 'good' a movie is by how flashy its special effects are and not its actual storyline. The music would be bad? Why? True market forces, no distortion by lowest-common-demoninator exploitative marketdroids; production by those who use and love it.
Many areas of economics are like this. But companies are te real power, not the citizens, because the citizens are too ignorant. The coporations would rather have us all under some sort of security & surveyance nightmare than let go of their exploitation of us. And I'm not even a communist.
Open source is successful even though it's just done by hobbyists, in their free time, who spend the rest of their time making money from a salary.
Imagine if public organizations funded open source programming, kind of like how universities are funded to do research. This would mean that these people who love doing open source work would be able to devote their time to it. That would be really great.
For some reason, I read that as "Goatse's Penguin"
Guess I've been reading at -1 too much lately...
This article violates my filter to disregard the ideas of anyone who uses the term "so-called"...
If your bitterest enemies are people who hack the heads off civilians, then I would say you're doing something right.
Open source is the definition of Market Economics. It does not need its own theory- it proves the Marekt theory in the most divergent context imaginable.
If you have an idea and you open source it, you get free engineering. People contribute their engineering and get the utility of yours and others in response. This is a free exchange of value in a free market.
IF your terms suck, or you change direction in mid stream, the others are free to leave your project and start their own, or go along with you if they like your direction.
Linux is a consistant linus kernel because people like linus's direction-- not because he "owns" it. That is direct market feed back to linus.
If you are selling your product to people who are contributing nothing but money to the process, and are just using it, then you are in the traditional software model. but Open source works here as well-- you can incorporate open source into your product and leverage others work to make more money off of your work. At the same time, the MARKET FORCES (not the GPL) will force you to contribute your improvements back to the community. And finally, you're not profiting unfairly from others work because the others contributed freely, and were compensated... and also can sell the results in the market place against you, so if your product is PURELY reselling open source, then you'll loose the inevitable price war-- its hard to beat free.
If, however, you actually add value to the product, on top of the open source, then you CAN charge for that value and everybody wins-- your customer gets a better product with more features and testing than you could otherwise do yourself, the other os developers get the benefit of your improvements and you get more money for selling a better product that cost you less to develop.
This is all free market economics.
The differnce between open source (free market) and communism is that under communism you are forced to work for the state against your will. Here in america, we are %50 forced to work for the state against your will, but they cleverly let us work for private companies and only took the product of half our work in taxes (fees, etc. And yes, last time I did my taxes, my total payments to the state were over %50, and I'm in a medium tax bracket.)
Even with the GPL, however, you are not compelled to work for the "State"... you can choose to not use the GPL for your code, or go make code to replace whats' in the GPL, or just use the gPL code and not change it. ITs a free market of licenses.
Since the government isn't (Yet) regulating software, the emergence of the open source movement proves that free markets work-- whenever one company gets to monopolistic, under free market theory, competitors emerge. Lots of competitors have emerged to Microsoft, but Open Source is the first one to really sustain a battle and change the terms of the war.
As long as the state doesn't mandate Microsoft control (As they may wit palladium) the free market will prevail and the products that offer the most utility value will succeed. For a long time Microsoft was able to distort the market with anti-market means, and also provide sufficent value to have locked up much of the market--- a great example of the market under a lot of stress.
But the emergence of the free market, the resurgence of a variety of MS competitors- from Sun to Apple to IBM to me, shows that the free market does work-- even with the governments help for microsoft, the market is beating them.
Not financially right now, but in terms of brainshare and technology, MS is currently loosing. In order to win, or even survive, they will have to deliver better value for their prices... and since open source software is free, the competition is stiff.
So, no, there isn't a new theory needed-- The Free market works and has been validated, yet again, by opensource. (So stop voting republican or democrat and become a libertarian already.)
Yeah, and you guys panned the ipod too: http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/10/23
Mozilla.
four years from a working codebase to a (barely) shippable product.
Mozilla certainly eschewed the "corporate" direction, refusing still to fix rendering bugs which MSIE does not share and instead babbling about "standards". But instead of choosing one correct direction, the Mozilla team chose ten or fifteen of them, selected an obscure computer language which nobody knew, demanded 8-way cross-platform compatibility, and then proceeded to code all of this without once dropping below an 0.12% blood alcohol level. Then the code was united from all its inferior "components" (Chatzilla, Gecko, Galeon, etc) into one monolith of binary terror, poised and crouching, just waiting to take a giant memory leak and a huge core dump on your desktop.
Microsoft, on the other hand, honed IE into a product which both advances their political and economic goals, and also doesn't suck balls.
Corporate 1, OSS 0.
I hope Gene Roddenberry is getting a credit on the paper.
-Peter
There are more than just those "commons-based" motivations in open source.
I would even argue that isn't a main motivation.
Motivations to go open source:
1. Get your name out there
Something to put on a resume, a way to build relationships with companies who may later hire you.
2. Other people do some of the work
Whereas freeware might get your name out there and satisfy the first advantage, it does not allow other people to help you debug and build the work very much.
3. Makes money through contracts
Many people contract with open source developers to add features or fix specific bugs that have lingered. This benefits the company which spends way less money than on the closed source alternatives, and also benefits the programmer, by letting them take 100% of the money rather than some corporation only giving them a fixed paycheck. This 100% performance based reward system creates a very efficient marketplace. The programmer also generally gets to keep ownership of the added code, which is a plus.
Anyway, my point is, one doesn't have to believe in anything but selfish motivations, and old fashioned rational economic behaviors to see that open source is win-win for everyone involved.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
Coase described the size of the firm within the market, and claimed that with competition it would gravitate to the most efficient size.
So if one can call, for instance, the Linux kernel folks a firm, their fixed costs are fixed, but their marginal costs are zero. (barring Linus's scaling issues of course).
Marginal costs being the added cost of each extra unit of "firm size".
So organizations will scale to be quite big over the 'net because of low marginal costs.
And this is what we have witnessed.
I hope the paper has graphs. I like graphs.
-b
Anytime that economists start to see that maybe money/greed isn't everything, I get the creeps.
Which can only mean that asteroid will hit in 2019. Oh well, still 17 years left to party...
I would conjecture that the open source economy is naivity and "my parents pay my bills" based.
You are the dot in slashdot !
Open-Source doesn't really attack corporatism as it does attack Mass-Production Media.
Software, Music, Movies, Books, etc. Are all money makers based on the fact that they can mass produce a product that people will pay for. On an individual basis, the $16 or so made off of a single CD, book or movie doesn't matter unless they can product millions of these $16 products and sell them.
With the internet though, it has opened the possibility of distribution of IP products for free or near free prices. Thus the business model of these IP companies is not applicable anymore without forcing the public to play by their rules by legislating laws into place.
The Open Source Movement has a weird effect of showing what happens when people can produce the same products and share it with everyone else, allowing them to improve on it. Before hte internet, when I coded a small program I could only share it among my close friends easily. Now I can share it with everyone, and if it is useful, everyone can contribute to it.
In a way it is like the folksongs from way back. Somebody thought it up, and shared it among his friends and family, or in performance, thus making his money from his actual work and not a 'photocopy' of his work. Then other musicians got it, and would play with it, producing even better music. Some of the great classical pieces are basically open source folk songs that have been improved upon by the masters. Since folk songs could easily spread by word of mouth, and didn't cost anything to spread, these songs became the equivalent of Open Source Music. Everyone was able to enjoy it, and no one had to pay anyone for the right to hear, see, learn or play the song themselves.
Now, we can pass programs, books, poetry and more using the internet and allow others who may be better (may be worse) then us to improve on them and create a better product in the long run. It's not a new economic model, it's just an old one coming back in a new form.
I heard once that people don't like change, they like things to remain the same as long as possible. I think it would be more correct to say people with power and money don't like change, and will go to great lengths to prevent it.
Some interesting thoughts.
~ kjrose
There's no need to mess with economic theory to explain Open Source. There's nothing new there. Each programmer, as a rational operator, contributes for a number of possible reasons. For example, they may value creative control and consulting opportunities more than they value a salary. In other words, someone who waits tables at night and codes for free during the day isn't necessarily a radical leftwing crackpot--as long as they are doing it for the future hope of consulting $$$ and/or the right to maintain control of their work (witness the not insignificant number of people who have un-Opened their work).
Corporate sponsors have rational reasons too. IBM doesn't support Linux to join the lovefest. They think it's better for some applications, they want to offer consulting for it, they don't like being tied to a proprietary vendor, etc. Any contributions they make are made because they realize it's the price of doing business under the Linux model--they would lose business due to bad PR if they didn't.
As for software being "special", there isn't any need to appeal to such an idea. Coffee is a good example. Generic not-so-tasty coffee is often given away in waiting rooms, hotel lobbies, places like that. Same deal with those little mints on pillows. Same deal with free samples at the grocery store (I've known people who make a meal of free samples on Saturdays at Fresh Fields). In all of these cases, software included, there is a rational economic model that has given rise to support for some free riders. People still have to pay for these products. The payers have deemed that they are better off paying the free riders, much as society has decided that some taxation is better than none.
The OSS model could be regarded as a "natural tax". Once again, there is nothing irrational about it. Advocates just have to realize that neither model is "superior". The free market sometimes moves us towards paying for goods directly. Other times it moves us towards indirect payment (somebody pays for OSS, because TANSTAAFL).
Of course, I doubt that advocates will stop advocating. There is a demand for politics just like anything else, and they supply it. It's just that I hate to see it when the supply-demand for politics pushes the supply-demand for other things out of equilibrium.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Perhaps we're seeing the reemergence of a cottage industry in software development.
Back in previous centuries, whole villages of craftsmen and women would do finishing work on mass-produced pieces that were then sold by a large retail company. The garment industry still operates this way in many instances.
As long as software remains a craft rather than a formal engineering discipline (it has elements of both, but each software project is pretty much unique to this day), then the economics of software will probably most resemble the crafts industry rather than industries based on mass production.
If you post it, they will read.
The Economist has just put up an article about how Open Source's future in the world, and how bright it looks.
It is actually Corporate 2, OSS 0.
Mozilla made it this far only because AOL/TW is paying most of the Mozilla developers to program Mozilla.
Actually you were right for the wrong reason. Mozilla eschewed the "corporate" direction & promply died. They regained the "corporate" direction & came back to life.
I started to read and maybe I am jaded, but when I hear the dawning of the new "pure" culture of ideas and intangibles over material good, I just hear "blah".
I am a mortal, material being, and I don't see any kind of glorious end to materialism, to be replaced by a utopian "economy of ideas".
"Sig free in '03!"
Don't call them Open Source Programmers, call them volunteer programmers. Everybody knows what a volunteer is, and almost everybody has volunteered at some time. Who the hell knows what Open Source or Sores or whatever is?
As a volunteer, you're also covered under each state's Good Samaritan Laws, and you're generally immune from being sued, as under UCITA for a non-disclaimable Merchantibility clause.
Geez, does everything have to be spelled out for you?
Wow, the mods like to smoke their crack rocks. No wonder there is so much trolling here.
Commons-based peer-production? How about an enjoyable hobby?
While the focus of academic specialization has contributed countless practical ideas to our civilization, people have a very hard time working in new concepts within any given academic paradigm. Why is so uncomfortable for an economist to work in the concept of people having a hobby into his specialty?
Academia needs to work on some intellectual APIs that allow for a more practical invocation of "foreign" concepts within any given specialty. Otherwise, we will continue to slide into the cellular isolation of Vinge's "focus".
- James
We humans have come so far, it's difficult to put a new idea into practice anymore without making specialized contributions on top of a mountain of work of others. And it's hard to pin down where the good ideas are going to come from.
Corporations keep their mountain of work secret, so only their employees can build on top of it. Often they're even more restrictive, the only person allowed to build on top of any piece is the person the company assigns to own that piece. Open source in general, and Linux in specific, make the mountain of work public. Anyone can contribute anywhere they see fit. The pool of potentially inspired and motivated people is just so much bigger.
There's no reason to limit that to software. I hear progress in steel manufacturing follows a similar pattern. The steelmaking process is public. Whoever gets an idea finds an existing steel company and tacks it on.
The real trick, economicowise, is to allow motivated people to do what they want to do and monetarily reward them for doing it.
...check out his disclaimer:
"One important caveat is necessary. I am not suggesting that peer-production will supplant markets or firms. I am not suggesting that it is always the more efficient model of production for information and culture. What I am saying is that this emerging third model is (a) distinct from the other two, and (b) has certain systematic advantages over the other two in clearing human capital/creativity. When these advantages will outweigh the advantages that the other two models may have in triggering or directing human behavior with relatively reliable and reasonably wellunderstood triggers of money and hierarchy is a matter for more detailed study. I offer some lines of understanding the limitations of this model of production in Part III, but do not attempt a full answer to these questions here."
So does your blustering comment about "the realities of the marketblah blah blah rabble rabble" seem so worthwhile now?
I'm a fairly smart guy, and I have a degree in Computer Science. It is reasonable to assume that I can write and OS from scratch, throw a GUI on it, write my own web browser, and word processor. However to do the above all on my own takes too long. I'm not satisfied with with the commercially avaiable equivelents that I can afford so ecconomics suggests that I will do something else. Since it would take me years to write all the above (1 year each for minimal: os, compiler, GUI, gui toolkit, device drivers... working full time).
I can do it though. However by using open source I can get help. Linux/*BSD are good OSes, by starting with them I can take a good network stack, and replace the schedular with one that is better, and have a good OS. In the mean time someone else can fix a bug I haven't seen yet in the network stack... If I don't like my desktop, KDE/GNOME are good starting places to make things better, without spending years getting to where they are first. And they provide things I consider nice but not critical that I would never touch on my own.
Open source makes sense, so long as I have income, and there is something I need that I can't get.
I seriously doubt that we are ever going to have a completely "economic" explanation of open-source. I can't see an integrated explanation of the phenomenon without significant reference and fallback to psychological/ego factors.
Of course, many open-source advocates are wont to believe that this proposition is false, because to believe so is a tacit admission that some (but not necessarily all) part of their motivations involves the (some might say shallow) gratifications that comes for leading something, or from having their name "known" and praised, or even, from following someone else - it's an admission that we crave peer-approval/recognition. Now, you can assign economic utilities to this sort of peer-gratification, but that means the economic theory MUST fall back on a psychological theory.
Just look at the case of Slashdot, which is discussed at some length in the paper. There's NO way to explain why people contribute lengthy posts from a purely "economic" viewpoint and without reference to very subjective terms. You can't get a job or contracts because of your insightful Slashdot posts. You can't make business contacts through Slashdot posts.
What would happen if Slashdot were anonymized, or if changes were made so that people couldn't receive gratification from moderation ?
Imagine that Slashdot started running threads, sorted and nested as they are now, but with NO moderation totals and NO comments ("Funny/redundant/Interesting/etc"). I bet that posting would become much less popular...but I can't see how you could explain that without psychological reference. It is clear that many if not most posters derive significant psychological gratification from getting the "pat-on-the-back" of an up-moderation and "Interesting" tag...But is there an economic explanation ?
Similarly with the notion of karma. I've gone on too long already, but suffice to say I can't see how you can explain how carefullly many users tender to and monitor their karma without capitulating to the notion that they derive significant gratification from peer-approval.
We may seem shallow for it, and hence we might not want to believe it, but I think it's true.
Yochai Benkler is NOT an economist. He's a law professor at NYU. He has a J.D. and an LL.B. He has no professional or academic credentials in economics whatsoever.
And it shows!
You know, I never see economics professors credited as lawyers....
I hope Open Source doesn't then turn out to be the "new economy" of the 1990's! That was one paradigm that isn't aging too well at the moment.
As an economist, the very concept disgusts me.
YOU CANNOT QUANTIFY HUMAN BEHAVIOR.
The insistence that you can is at the root of much of the politico-economic evils of the modern era.
The paper predicts that novels wouldn't do well, and I'd extend that to music.
Here's an excerpt from the paper:
"This suggests that peer-production will thrive where projects have three characteristics. First, they must be modular. That is, they can be broken up into variously sized components, each of which can be produced independently of the production of the others. This enables people with different levels of motivation to collaborate by contributing variously-sized contributions, consistent with their level of motivation. Second, modules must be relatively fine-grained. That is, the smallest-grained contributions need to be relatively small, so as to capture contributions from very large numbers of contributors whose motivation level will not sustain anything more than quite small efforts towards the project. Novels, for example, at least those that look like our current conception of a novel, are likely to prove resistant to peer-production. Third, and finally, the cost of integrating the contribution needs to be relatively low. If the cost of integration is too high, integration will either fail or will force the integrator to appropriate the residual value of the common project- usually leading to a dissipation of the motivations ex ante. Where the cost of integration is sufficiently low, or where integration itself can be iteratively peer-produced, as where free software is used to integrate the peer-production effort, integration need not appropriately the residual category, and the peer-production enterprise can succeed and sustain itself." (page 8)
So the three requirements are modularity, fine-grained smallest modules, and low cost of integration.
Organizing communication by topic, like on Slashdot or K5 clearly meets these three requirements. DMOZ clearly meets the requirements. Free Software projects clearly meet the requirements.
Music production, however, does not.
Making music modular is difficult. Sure, music comes in tracks, but those are hardly fine-grained modules, and they are very tightly coupled- so tightly, that I would say that they are a cohesive unit, and not really modules at all.
This is the same difficulty with novels, alluded to before.
In the far future, we may have a modular description of music and novels,. Imagine that you paint a novel with a toolkit of styles, characters, events, messages, etc.,. I think it might be possible, but I also think that's a looong ways off.
A graphic illustration of the hopelessness of a Unix hardware vendor other than IBM trying to sell middleware for Java can be seen in the collapse of HP's NetAction Software Suite. There is simply no place for HP at the Java table.
But as IBM long ago realized it would be wise to give Sun something to worry about. The remnants of the former Oppose Sun Forever coalition have re-formed, this time with Linux as their project to humble Sun.
I'm a little worried about history repeating itself. Once again an industry consortium is banding together without a good sense of how to improve computing for everyone. Before Oppose Sun Forever the Unix companies employed researchers whose interests ranged over all of computing and who contributed to the community through papers, code, informal cooperation. There has been a tremendous narrowing of focus in favor of corporate IT computing. But IT spending is not exactly increasing, nor will it increase while the telecom industry is so deeply in debt.
While Oppose Sun Forever and Sun were fighting the last time, computing for non-business users was ceded to Microsoft. X was a monstrous bureacratic compromise, and there was no equivalent of X for audio or video.
What indication is there that these clowns aren't just going to create another version of the Open Group while standards go uncreated for natural language processing and artificial intelligence, once again ceding the field to what Microsoft does at Microsoft's pace?
Anthropologists will tell you that the traditional or customary pattern of human life is long-ish periods of inactivity or mild activity, punctuated by short periods of backbreaking labour (the "punctuated equilibrium" I tossed off in the title). Even today, farming works this way, as many things only need to be done three or four weeks a year, and only can be done between sunup and sundown.
"Free time" (not a commodity, by the way) is what produced those astonishing paleolithic art objects (such as the Willendorf "Venus" or the Lascaux cave paintings), the first textiles (and most textile products [weaving, spinning, embroidering, sewing] until well into the 20th century), music, and religion. Depending on where you live, those winter nights (and days) are long, and there's not much to do, really, or those summer days are long, and it's too hot to do much. These types of patterns continue even today in many, if not most, cultures around the world.
What has this to do with Open Source? Well, Open Source in and of itself is not precisely a new idea, just sort of a new variation on and old idea. In earlier times, anyone would be free to look at anything produced by a local artist, artisan, or crafter, and imitate it/improve upon it as best he or she could. (In fact, some cultures, such as among the habitant girls in New France, improvements [in this case, in embroidery skills and patterns] are/were ritualized into a game, often with very specific social meaning.)
So if you want to build yourself a bog dress from someone else's pattern, you can (and you could if you lived in Moy centuries ago, too), just as you can take someone else's source code and build yourself a customized program that fits your needs like a tailored garment fits your body.
All of these endeavours take (free) time, though.
I'm not a geek, I'm just a clever script.
The problem is that our market is hardly "unregulated". On the contrary, the U.S. market is very heavily regulated. As it was pointed out, government takes nearly 50% of the average individual's earnings per year. This is hardly what I would consider "free market economics", which is defined by the *voluntary* transfer of assets.
While a useful current metaphor for the difficulties in managing a shared resource without it being exploited to extinction, the original "tragedy of the commons" was a rationalization for the walling off (actually hedging off) of common lands in Britain.
Basically, your local potentate would do a favor for the crown, and receive a grant of lands that were previously "common". The first thing the new landowner would do was grow impassable hedges around his new lands, effectively walling of a 500-2000 acre chunk of the commons. The concept of the "tragedy of the commons" was invented as an excuse to take the land away from those commoners, who were "obviously" not going to use it effectively anyway.
As more and more land was removed from the commons (by the aristocracy, *not* despoiled by commoner overuse), problems of resources to feed the populace arose. But the overpopulation problems did not start until well after much of the prize real estate was placed in private hands.
So, something to think about when you hear "The Tragedy of the Commons" cliche trotted out--the concept was invented to blame the prior holders of the common for an economic crime being committed against them. Kind of like how the internet needs to taken away from its creators and placed in private hands, because the current situation is, well, too "anarchic".
Remain calm! All is well!
It's what always seemed to me flawed with other (arguably) noble Communist experiments, like the Soviet Union.
The Soviet Union was *not* a noble experiment, nor can it even really be considered "communist" in the Marxist sense; it was "communist" in the Stalinist sense (meaning state-sponsored terror on a scale never before seen.) Even early on, the people who cared about the possibilities of the revolution (like Emma Goldman) were completely disheartened by 1918; Lenin was about as "communist" as a Rockefeller (talk of "vanguards" is eerily echoed in groups like the Trilateral Commission and Bilderberg.)
Belief in Open Source is a leap of faith: if a person believes that his fellow humans are naturally industrious, then the world of free software and free information is a natural realization. However, if you believe humans are mean-spirited lazy people, unable to overcome the demons programmed into their DNA millions of years ago, then you have the world as described by economics.
"What the the Thinker thinks, the Prover proves."
there is NO BUSINESS in the open source for the independent software developer. This model only undemines commercial or shareware model that is the only workable way ( and i doubt even this models, look at that peer to peer frenzy ).
There are only FEW, only few that actually making some money like Red Hat, Suse and other OS providers, this is also with much struggle and their prices are not truly fair to the GPL license.
Only if there are economic motivational factors to make it happen.
This ia a good idea that should be pursued by the FSF. Make the contribution tax-deductable!
His consistant use of the term mars an otherwise fine paper.
I have discovered a truly marvelous sig, unfortunately the sig limit is too small to contain i
There really isn't any disconnect between O'ism and open source. If you want to get all textual, consider "Atlas Shrugged"; Ragnar Danneskjold (*cough*) donates (*cough*) his extremely hard-won gold to the people of Galt's Gulch, because in his opinion it will have a beneficial effect. If anything, the OS development model is very Randian... everyone contributes as he listeth; if he doesn't like the way things are run, he forks and founds his own valley-- er, project.
Something you may want to worry about is if OS ever really takes off it could take a lot of money out of commercial software development.
As a technology professional myself, I appreciate having lots of free tools et al., but I worry seriously about an open-source project undercutting my product.
I don't think that there is any (valid) question as to whether or not open source works under our economic models. The question lies in why, when given the choice, developers choose to contribute their valuable free time and brain power to a project that gives them no short-term direct benefit. It's a question of maximizing utility. We know that open source progammers do maximize their utility (they must), but the difficulty lies in explaining exactly how this occurs.
I'm currently working on my senior thesis which attempts to model this behavior in participants in open source programming (ideas and help appreciated gt9977b@prism.gatech.edu) As an economist, I'm arrogant enough to believe that there's a way to model just about everything mathematically, and so I'm attempting to do this with open source. I'm currently working under the assumption that there are 3 types of people: strictly non-programming users, programmers who contribute to a project, and programmers who free-ride on the project. My purpose is to try to determine what causes a distinction between the 2 types of programmers, and if one programmer is motivated to free-ride, why all programmers aren't also motivated to do the same thing, thus causing a collapse of the whole system. (I know that all programmers aren't the same, but a model needs some sort of simplification, and part of what I'm trying to explain is exactly what makes these types of people different.)
Anyway, its easy to say that everything works because of free markets or supply and demand, or something equally simplistic, but a lot of economic thought goes into exactly what goes on behind the scenes that makes this all work in the first place. We always say that there's this invisible hand that makes everything work because when everybody works in their own self-interest, society as a whole benefits. It's up to the economist to question this at all times and attempt to explain apparent anomalies. It's kind of like the world as a whole accepts economic principles as "binaries", but economists like the author of this article, myself, and many others are attempting to delve into the "source code" of economic theories and principles, attempting to tweak them in order to better function in our world.
Fiction, but dead-on, if you ask me.
While you're at it, read everything else Lem ever read.
Except "Solaris". That's a book about a huge planet-sized bloated mass that thinks in incomprehensible inhuman terms and drives insane anyone who has to deal with it.
I suppose I didn't have to warn the Slashdot crowd about that, now did I?
Interesting this should come up, a few muso friends were talking about P2P distribution and how it can be best used.
If you are not in london a muso has no chance of getting a deal so selling CDs in HMV isnt realy an option.
We concluded that there needs to be a P2P friendly licence for underground musos to distribute under.
I explained the viral nature of GPL and they had some useful insights.
There is obviously no point in GPLing (for want of a better word) a medium that is not meant to be altered, so it would not be logical for end user files.
A viral licence could be more useful for samples, loops, wierd acid noises and midi files that could be free and non commercial on P2P networks. Tracks including these elements need to be released under a P2P friendly licence.
This could become something real as we have hours of music,
I like the idea facilitating a backlash against the RIAA fatcats and the syrupy shit they flood our airways with.
What do you think? Will it work? Is it happening elsewhere?
This perpetual motion machine Lisa made is a joke, it just keeps getting faster and faster. - Homer
Marx said capitalism was bad because it offered to much choice. You're saying its bad because it offers not choice enough.
Which is it?
A very interesting paper. However, when the author talks about the motivations of contributors to OSS projects, I think he misses out on a fundamental "economic" motive: the cost of the product.
Just as value can be defined in many ways, including cash, so can cost. If the total cost of contributing to an OSS project is less than the total cost of purchasing a similar commercial product (of course both balanced by the resulting value as well), then the selfish consumer will choose the OSS route.
How can contributing to an OSS project cost less than smacking down some bucks for a commercial product, one might ask?
(1) For skilled developers, the cost of contribution is significantly less than for the average consumer. This lowers the cost of contribution.
(2) Purchasing a commercial product can have costs which are not directly related to the dollar price of the software. For example, one might consider purchasing software from a certain company as contributing to that company's damaging one's own environment, that is, decreasing the value of the consumer's other assets (be they tangible, like clean air, or not, like fair use & free speech rights).
On the value of the product side, actual contribution to an OSS project provides value to the contributor in forms additional to the actual final product, such as entertainment, networking, increasing one's skills, fame, etc., which means that often an OSS product doesn't have to even have the same intrinsic value as a commercial competitor to attract contributors. (And since the source is available to all, the *potential* long-term value for sustained contribution/"purchasing" is much higher)
Benkler discusses how new firms emerge when the cost of creating a new firm is less than the cost of growing the existing firm. So obviously, as we have seen in the marketplace, a monopolist is encouraged to make the cost of creating a new firm as high as possible.
We are seeing with OSS that the same scenario is true on the consumer side: As the cost of purchasing a company's products rises higher (through intangibles like "environmental cost" etc.), and it becomes cheaper to simply "roll your own" (as more & more developers are available), people begin to choose the latter.
The motivation for free software developers has never seemed mysterious to me; apparently they enjoy making code. ( I agree with the hobby analysis, above.) A more interesting economic question would be: What is the motivation for non-coder/users to use free software?
I don't code a lick. I can't write a bash script. I'm a lawyer not a coder, Jim. So, why the heck would anyone like me want to use free software?
I don't know. It's certainly not because its "free." If I had been able to bill someone for all the hours I've spent dickering with GNU/Linux I'd be a rich man. Yeah, I hate M$, but not enough to motivate me to sepnd all the time/effort to get linux going on various boxes over the last couple of years. (I once almost got a divorce by reason of a linux-from-scratch install.)
I guess the bottom-line reason is just that I think linux is cool. It works and I can talk to live people who understand what's going on even if I don't. And those people are generally pretty cool.
Now, is there an economic theory in that?
The open source, free software movement is very simply an attempt by the technicians to wrest control of the industry from the PHBs and sales pukes.
Look where the industry was three, four years ago. MS was preparing another nauseating release of it's consumer OS. No competition. No choice in platform. Even tools were tied up. What if you didn't like the win32 api? Maybe you could pick up some OS/2 work left, or after a while break into the unix world that was shrinking.
Now the technicians rule. Even MS is catering to them. If I don't like an application, desktop, vendor, whatever, I choose a better one, or organise a few like minded to write a better one.
Guess where the PHB's are turning with their tails between their legs because their lies are exposed, and they actually have to make some real money? The tech's.
I like it this way.
Derek
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
You can find my paper on Open Source Economics at here