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."
You know, people are always saying that the problem with amateur (i.e. non-corporate) music/art/software/whatever is that the vast majority of it is cruddy. Pick any artist from MP3.com at random, or any project from Sourceforge at random, and chances are the music will be pretty cruddy, or the project will be lifeless...
But you know what all this is? It's called CHOICE. And it has always been there. Corporate sponsorship of creativity and ideas makes it easy for people who don't like to deal with choice to find a couple of good things here and there. But it doesn't particularly foster the best creativity or ideas, only the easiest to market. It doesn't make the world a better place, it only makes shareholders and CEOs richer.
Choice is good, but it does take effort to appreciate.
As the parent acknowledged, in some cases amateur stuff is as good as or better than the pros. People have become so used to being force-fed their ideas that they can't believe that the good ones might also rise to the top in a truly free idea market. But they will - in a free idea market, without corporate sponsorship, the most visible art and ideas will be the ones you hear about most from other people, some of whom you will trust more than others. Much like internet memes, a good artist will quickly and easily become well known in an absense of corporate interest. Unfortunately, as things stand now, corporate interests drown out amateur efforts.
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"?
No, this is wrong...
The freeloader problem really manifests itself only in the Tragedy of the Commons. That is, freeloaders are only a problem when resources are scarce.
If we assume the marginal cost of distributing free software is 0 (which is probably true for the developer as there a many sites that will mirror popular software distributions), then why does it matter if 100 or 1000 or 1 million people download it?
I think most open source developers would be happier to have a popular application with 10mm freeloaders, rather than pulling a Bill Gates and bitching about all the ungrateful pirates out there.
The real viability issue for open source is whether it is possible to maintain a stable base of developers for an application -- not the number of freeriders.