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."
Actually most professional musicians does not get paid by recording CDs - they get paid by performing music at clubs and other venues.
I.e. basically they have a salary paid by others and not by people buying their recorded music.
It's actually very few people who make money selling records - most of them actually work at the record company and are not musicians at all. They are mostly managers, agents and record bosses.
Just saying it like it are.
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.
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.
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.
Yes, and they don't make a great deal of money doing that - I've gigged with a few bands in my time. However, you can't make enough gigging (unless you're prepared to do that full-time) to do much studio recording, which is why many bands go for the explotative record deals in the first place. They don't just do it for fun! :(
Game dev and music blog
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...
And the system certainly also inherits communisms inherent flaws. In the end, communism not only failed because people were forced into it, but because true communism only can work if people in general are acting completely altruistic which they usually aren't. So people tend to press everything they can out from a system that allows them to do it while trying to contribute as less as possible. So sooner or later, the system runs of of money and other resources needed to power the system. Game over. Everybody lost.
Even in the Open Source world, most developers don't write programs for the good of mankind but to scratch an itch, to show that they can be better than closed source software or for the fun of it. And most users usually give a damn about the free speech aspect, they only want to get really drunk hard with the free beer.
Sure there are a lot of "cruddy non-updated open source projects on Sourceforge", but I myself would love it if musicians were free to get together and play what they want with whom they want and create truly great music.
At the moment, if you are a pro musician, you're probably signed to someone, and so you have to do what they say. You can't get together with someone you met at a concert and do a project together unless your label approves it (which is unlikely). That was why even Eric Clapton and George Harrison played under psuedonyms(sp?) on for each others labels, so as not to infringe on the labels that owned their works.
Not every musician needs to give away their music, but I bet a fair amount would. It would sure lead to some great stuff. The cream would rise to the top (just like OSS) and we would all be beter for it.
"The large print giveth, and the small print taketh away" -Tom Waits
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.
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!
Would it really improve if someone took it and came out with Toccata & Fuge 1.1?
This does actually happen in the music industry. A recent BBC radio documentary pointed out that the Beatles and the Stones based a lot of their early music on American Jazz (and even recommended the original recordings to audiences).
The questions that arise from this are;
Should people like Muddy Waters have received a share of their income ?
Why has no Open Source based business broken through to the kind of success enjoyed by those groups ?