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.
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.