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The Economist On The Economics of Sharing
RCulpepper writes "The Economist, reliably the most insightful English-language news publication, discusses the economics of sharing, from OSS programmers' sharing time, to P2P users' sharing disk space and bandwidth. " True indeed (about The Economist, I have to remember to renew my subscription); one of the main supports for the article comes from Yochai Benkler latest piece, which is excellent.
as long as it is seen as a way to get people criticism instead of just as theft.
of course, the public needs to be educated about paying what they think desserves it.
Trolling using another account since 2005.
about The Economist, I have to remember to renew my subscription
/. editors have to remember to remove personal notes from the stories.
and
Most open source projects revolve around a core of developers with the odd donation of time and code from users who extend the code to suit their needs. Ditto with most P2P networks, most casual users are happy to leach whilst most of the bandwidth is provided by hardcore users. Perhaps the exception to this is Bittorrent where users are more inclinded to share fairly.
"reliably the most insightful English-language news publication"
What? They're reliably the most right-wing propagandistic tool of international corporatism. They might smell new profits in P2P now, build it up before they attack it for communistic excess. I remember them saluting the Taliban as they rolled into Kabul, bringing "order" and "stability" to the region. They brought Osama, too. And no apologies from the Economist for cheerleading the thugs.
--
make install -not war
Why does the /. story have to mainly concern itself with word-of-mouth advertising about the publication rather than the article?
Sharing of information has proven very beneficial in science and there is no mention of this in the article. You'd think that this would be one of the first things that would come to mind when one thinks about innovation in ideas.
UBU
http://www.john-neal.com/
... for the flood of right-wing complaints about the "liberal media." Expect challenges to the "most insightful English-language news publication" from devotees of the Washington Times and Little Green Footballs. ;)
Pre-emptive strike: when The Economist, which is the leading voice of center-right journalism, speaks favorably of F/OSS, it's time to drop the "communism" line and come up with something else, folks.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
I'm not sure presenting OSS and P2P in the same context of sharing is appropriate - sharing something you wrote yourself is one thing, sharing something some others wrote without those others' consent is another.
Tyranny isn't the worst enemy of a democracy. Cynicism is.
I'm not saying it would be easy, but imagine if...
The CB App. What's your 20?
WooHoo!
We are the /. editors.
/. but it seems like a random system to me (especially with the amount of duplicate, fudd or bad stories)
I have no Idea how stories go from email to
Try posing a few different stories from different email accounts and see which ones get through.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
Sure, the Economist has an obvious bias (free markets, privatized everything, western democracy, and modest but well-enforced government regulation). Sure, it makes mistakes (lauding Taliban, the invasion of Iraq, etc.) However, if you compare it to pretty much any other English-language press -- the BBC, any American newspaper or magazine, or (deity forbid) American television -- you will see that it stands out as the lone isle in a sea of shite.
If the only language is English, and you have any ability at all to filter editorial statements out of news stories, you should subscribe to the economist -- and I say this even though I am a registered pinko commie bastard.
The Economist is a weekly magazine with hundreds of pages of world news. I had a subscription for a couple years before I realized I just could not keep up reading it. Before I stopped subscribing I even tried skipping over those things that held little interest for me. I found it far better to let other people find the interesting things (like this article) and have them eventually posted on Slashdot where I could then read them.
It's a very interesting magazine though if you can find the time to commit to it.
I'm a big tall mofo.
Something that the article doesn't really mention, that helped explain a lot of things about corporate support of OSS, is a theory that (as far as I remember) Joel Spolsky wrote about. It's best explained by an analogy.
The analogy runs as follows. Suppose that a street has a bunch of bun vendors and a bunch of people who sell sausages to put in the buns (wow, talk about decoupled designs). People might be willing to spend $1.50 for a bun plus a sausage - nominally $1 for the sausage and $0.50 for the bun.
Now, suppose that someone in the sausage industry comes up with a way of "open-sourcing" buns - now buns are free! This happening, you've got a bunch of customers wandering around buying sausages with an extra $0.50 in their pockets. They were clearly willing to spend more on the sausage+bun combination, so maybe you can jack up your price to $1.10 or $1.20 (very unlikely you'll be able to go to $1.50).
Of course, like all simplistic analogies, this depends on a lot of assumptions. For instance, we
expect that the customer won't go off and buy something new (a 50 cent Coke, maybe).
Now, think about companies that have major OSS support. The best example is IBM - which makes its money of hardware and services. Are they the sausage vendors in this case?
I don't know if this is nonsense, but it's an interesting theory. If anyone has a good counter-argument, let's hear it. If anyone has a silly pun about "open-saucing" hot dogs, well, remember that I'm a computer scientist and can generate an enormous static charge from your keyboard to Get You.
Sharing becomes prevalent only when it 1) close to free and 2) earns kudos/buying power for the sharer. Unfortunately, in today's global society of mass production and mass distribution, this is largely impossible. What we need for sharing to regain prevalence is the rejection of the idea that it's OK that almost everything we consume comes from far, far away.
The Economist, reliably the most insightful English-language news publication
Gee, what an unbiased way to present an article for discussion.
True indeed
Coming to a conclusion in an article summary stifles discussion. Stop doing that.
This would only be a problem if everyone RTFA. However, as that is rarely a problem, there is nothing to worry about.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
Less Economist circle-jerking, more article summary please. This is one of the lamest story headers that has come down the pipe in a while. Yes, I'm sure Hemos and RCulpepper are quite refined and intellectual individuals. Thanks for rubbing our faces in the fact.
From hell's heart I fstab at /dev/hdc
It certainly is difficult to stay informed about news the world over, but it beats the alternative.
I read the old "stone soup" story in school when I was a kid. The teacher and rest of the students didn't seem to see the inherent flaw in the story: an entire village ended up with one stinking pot of soup. Fortunately for Linux, there's plenty of "soup" to go around. Our bowl can be indefinitely replenished. It's worked, so far, because greed and the GPL have been motivating factors in furthering software development.
It should also be noted that not all sharing is good.
with some of the posts. I like the Economist (my dad has a subscription and he gives them to me when he's done), but, geez, get a room already. They've had their share of flakey opinions.
--- Ban humanity.
It seems to me that it just described that way it is without some worthwhile analyis what motivates people to share or why should be people reading economiast concerned
...), and that being selfish (wealth stocpiling, idea holding) is not way to become succesfull. and that sharing with poor does not mean beeing stupid.
Well, here are my 0.02:
Why is sharing important:
It breaks down traditional corporate moloch, it teaches that anarchy-like goal-driven structures are perfectly viable and can outperform hierarchical companies.
It teaches that inforamation must be free (both as beer and as freedom), if it isnt, there will always be ways to free it.
It practicaly demonstrates that acting selfish is not way to go (try throttling bt upload to 1kb/s, see results
All in all, its kind of hippie like philosophy crossed with viable economy (thats not based around money, but around ideas).
-- Technology for the sake of technology is as pathetic as eschewing technology because it's technology.
After many years of reading the Economist, I agree with their self-assessment.
Having said that, I've never been comfortable with the 1-dimensional right/left political categorizations. People and politics are far more complicated than that.
Is he talking about CDMA? This really sounds odd to say it's a kind of "sharing" spectrum and compare it with open source and P2P.
We do this for fun.
Their Taliban and Iraq invasion editorial enthusiasm, not mistakes at all, reveals their true ideology: multinational corporatism, best represented by global energy companies. That includes nuclear power - and weapons - and oil, coal and other lethal pollution. Their idea of "free markets" is that corporations shouldn't have to pay to own a market. And the role of government is corporate welfare to indemnify risk for the biggest and sloppiest, and "national defense" to underwrite the entire edifice of fear, destruction and extortion.
They're better than the rest of the "journalism" at their scale of distribution. Because all at their scale are house organs for multinational corporatism. At least read them after penetrating their cryptofascist bias, to scale/translate their spin and get a bearing on where their facts are coming from. I prefer the Financial Times - they're less coy about their corporatism, they're daily, and they're actually pink.
--
make install -not war
I remember an Economist article which, essentially, attacked parents for the drain on productivity that they caused: time off work, annoyances to more productive non-parents, etc. The article's argument was that highly productive single people shouldn't in any way have to share the costs of society's need to raise children, right down to not having to put up with children in public spaces.
I came away with the impression that the article's author would love it if all new children were banned, and we had one glorious generation of super-high productivity before the human race died out completely. The Economist's last issue would be a glowing analysis of this golden age, sort of like Tom Brokaw's "The Greatest Generation" meets Tom Wolfe's "Bonfire of the Vanities".
That all said, The Economist is often worth reading, but heaven's sake, all the impressionable kiddies out there (RCulpepper, this means you) should take it with large quantities of salt.
of Raymond's book. "Dated" comes to mind rather than "insightful", considering this information has been available to the masses since 1997.
It essentially describes what amounts to Raymond's concept of "egoboo" -unaccredited, by way- and openly wonders about the possibility of this "sharing" paradigm contaiging human endeavors different from symbol manipulation -without even suggesting where does a sound foundation for such ideas lie-.
HAD
Economies of sharing, as socialism moves forward.
:)
V1.0 - I have axe, you have club, therefore you share everything with me.
V2.0 - I am the government, therefore you share part of everything with me and I decide who to share with.
V3.0 - I have fileserver, you have connection, therefore I share everyone else's stuff with you whether they gave me permission or not.
V4.0 - I have everything you have. You have everything I have. Everyone has shared everything. Life is meaningless.
TFA draws a flawed conclusion as the final paragraph. Suggesting that superfunky microprocessors enable radio spectrum to be shared like finite but abundant beer is daft. For reliable QOS, modern information theory (should instead be/ IS) used to ensure that what expensive spectrum has been aquired is used efficiently. Eg DAB radio. For CB or the ISM band, then fine, share it - by definition.
The Economist, as someone else posted, certainly has their opinion of the world around them, like we all do. I do not always agree with their opinion, but rarely do I find what they have to say is grounded purely in ideology, without some decent reasoning and thought behind it. From what I have read, they tend to weigh each situation or leader, rather than stamping them "ok" or "not" according to whatever faction they belong to. For instance, despite being center-right in their politics, and despite supporting the war in Iraq (something I did not agree with myself), they have not spared the Bush administration criticism for making a mess of the situation.
As to the "right wing propagandistic tool of international corporatism". Wow, good line if it's some sort of attempt at ironic hip retro-sixties radical leftism, but it doesn't have much to do with...well, reality.
The Economist supported Kerry, after all, in the US elections. They have been quite positive about Linux for a long time. They are being sued by Silvio Berlusconi, Italy's right wing leader, because of their scathing attacks on his corruptness. This is hardly the sort of independant thoughts and writing that one would expect from a "propogandistic tool".
This works untiol SCO shows up and claims ownership of the lentils found in every bowl served, and demands that each soup-eater pay them $699.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
This has been bugging me for a long time - communism is not a bad thing if you can find a setting in which it works. The Internet is the first such setting, to my knowledge. Any software offerred for free, is part of the new communism - the good kind, the kind where it actually reaches its ideal phase.
The US government slapped such a negative connotation to the word "communist" during the Cold War, a connotation that belongs to "socialist". Not one of the countries we were against during the cold war was ever a really communist state, because a real communist state is impossible in this world.
I've got more mod points and GMail invi
This article is entirely about Open Source, not P2P? P2P is not sharing, it's merely allowing someone to duplicate your file collection. Sharing involves giving up something, such as work time (Open Source) or processor time (SETI).
Here, you can borrow mine...
Are we to take your word for it that communism will work if given the proper setting, when all previous attempts to achieve communism failed? By definition, communism does not allow for capitalism to coexist with it. You can have one, but not the other. To call the Internet "the new communism" is to portray the term "communism" as something other than inherently all-encompassing.
Also, the US government (and quite a few others that were threatened by the Soviet Union) didn't slap the term "communist" on the USSR. It was in 1918 that the Bolshevik Party changed its name to Russian Communist Party of the Bolsheviks. So the misnomer started with the would-be communists themselves, who were already trying to con people into believing that their attempt at communism was successful.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
That about sums it up, doesn't it?
There are things to like and dislike about the newspaper, however you don't seem to be raising the level of debate much. "fascist poser" "corporate tool", "criminal complicity". Whatever...
This guy is a professional troll of some sort.
"The characteristics of information--be it software, text or even biotech research--make it an economically obvious thing to share. It is a "non-rival" good: ie, your use of it does not interfere with my use." How exactly is information a "non-rival" good??? Sharing info can interfere with someone else's life... Maybe sharing absolutely original info can be non-rival good...but sharing unrestricted info has legal implications right? You cannot just join another company and share your previous company's trade secrets, can you? One can argue that it was this free sharing that interfered with the proprietary SW of corporations...
"The characteristics of information?be it software, text or even biotech research?make it an economically obvious thing to share."
Step carefull around the ravenous wolves.
"News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters"
One of those is incorrect. Plz fix, kthx, bye.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Uh, there's always the potential "loss" of the credit for other discoveries based on that knowledge. Think Rosalind Franklin and the discovery of DNA; "competitors" saw her crucial photograph and some unpublished work, and she's never really gotten some credit she deserved. Even when you're formally releasing whatever information you have, by publishing it, there's a certain loss in that sense -- of control, or something close to it.
The scientific method transcends those petty human "losses" in a larger sense, but they sure do affect how people within the scientific world behave. People are very conscious of the tradeoffs between sharing information and withholding it.
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
The trick is to pause before each article long enough to recollect what has been going on there, then skim the article to see what's changed. Do NOT get bogged down in reading every word. For instance, an article on Nigeria appears every few issues. Don't read it word for word. Recollect that they have a "new" president who has promised to eliminate corruption, that there are problems in the boonies with locals extorting money from the pipeline operators, etc. Then skim the article with that in mind. Usually it's just an update ... new ministers making more promises about corruption, some stats to back it up or refute it, more stats on pipeline problems ... you can finish an entire issue in just a couple of hours that way :-) It's not as satisfying as reading every word, but it gets you thru an issue in a reasonable time. I have to choose between skimming and cancelling the subscription.
Infuriate left and right
Actually it would be The Financial Times.
Am I the only one who thinks that the article is completely void of substance?
The author barely even mentions what Open Source is, does not analyse the reasons for Open Source, and gives two-three obvious explanations. Then he attempts to compare Open Source programming with file sharing and SETI@Home. It is wrong to compare these two examples since they're based on unused resources. Spare time is not an unused resource.
The last time I check distributing goods which you don't own the rights to has nothing to do with the open source movement. The OSS movement is sharing resources which the party has full ownership over, however the distributing music is mostly distributing goods to which the user has no rights. Is it me or do people compare everything to OSS in order to get their paper recognized. All publicity isn't good publicity. This is slanderous and furthermore hardly speaks of the economic impact of the OSS and distribution of music. Joe
Math
I read the Guardian Weekly. Quite basic news. Real insights are in the Z - Magazine If you're up for a subscription, subscribe here. The Economist mostly offers straightforward right-wing myths and propaganda. Quite easy to spot, so Hemos surprise me.
Stephan
http://stephan.sugarmotor.org
But I don't agree with that point in the least.
Communism is all about the "common good" and giving to the collectivity. OSS and free-sharing knowledge is just what Science has been for a very, very long time. It's sharing knowledge freely with one another, so that knowledge can grow. It's not giving blindly to the collectivity. Big difference. I surely would hope nobody (nobody decent, at least) would claim that Science is communism.
Actually, most harsh defenders of industrial IP rights "against" OSS and patent-free stuff are the ones who act more for the "collective good" in mind, even if that's not their primary intend. They are defending the rights of their company, or sometimes a whole industry, sometimes in a forceful mamner: to me, that closely looks a lot more soviet-like than the spirit behind OSS. They also are often the ones who stole stuff from others: but in a legal way. All you have to do is patent it first - even if you didn't invent it.
It's a pity, but at least it means that in an Economist article you can usually identify the compulsory editorial slant bit and discount it. And the Economist has a chance of perceiving how FOSS and the prevention of governments from allowing software parents have beneficial free-market implications. But just one day I would like an Economist article which, say, admits how limited protectionism can have benefits for the environment or the protection of the rights of the poor in some countries.
Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.
maybe you should tell us about your boss' turn ons and favorite foods in order to get modded up some more...
In the context of open source, much has been written about why people would share technical talent, giving away something that they also sell by holding a job in the information-technology industry.
Unless he/she is completely oblivious the vast amount of paid work done on Free Software, how did the author manage to miss the obvious dichotomy underlying this: Creative labour must be paid for because it is scarce, but the fruits of the labour are infinitely reproducible and must be shared freely in order for their full potential to be reaped. It's only the "intellectual property" regime that is preventing this from being only the natural, evident way to do things.
As I understand it, "liberal" once meant simple "freedom", even in political terms. In the US it came to mean "freedom from corporate oppression" back in the mid-to-late 19th century, when the workers were heavily victimized by powerful rich factory owners (who were often not all that readily distinguishable from the government.)
Later, that became associated with fighting for other sorts of freedom, such as civil rights for minority groups.
The association of "liberal" with "poor and minority groups" has led the term somewhat away from its original meaning. Over time, it's become associated with improving the lot of poor people even where they're not activily being oppressed but merely poor: welfare, medical care, affirmative action, etc.
Liberals argue that the causes of poverty are side-effects of less obvious rights violations by rich people and companies. They'd argue that a company which employs many people in a town has an obligation to those people to continue to employ them, even when that factory is no longer profitable. That obligation by the company is the right of the people.
I wouldn't say that the Economist is "all for" corporate tyranny. They'd say that a factory which isn't profitable cannot employ those workers because there simply is no money to pay them. That strikes them as simple level-headedness: you cannot pay workers from nonexistent money.
But they do hold the company responsible for its non-economic externalities. If the company is dumping cadmium into the water and poisoning those workers, even if it's proftable for the company it is wrong to do so. Simple economics will not prevent that, so they recommend well-chosen and well-enforced government regulation.
I often find myself disagreeing with them. Their notion of free-market capitalism often assumes frictionless changes that are untrue. If a company moves a factory from Flint, Michigan to Bangladesh, yes, I suppose it does improve the US economy by allowing Americans to purchase the goods more cheaply, thus freeing up their capital for investment in other things.
But the people of Flint, Michigan don't realize those improvements directly; they don't immediately acquire programming skills and move to San Francisco to get better jobs. Nor do they disappear. Even if the simple "invisble hand" argument works for the good of the country as a whole, it can cause vicious harm in microeconomic terms, and those are externalities which shouldn't be ignored.
I can think of a lot of other examples of successful sharing in meatspace. Just a random off the top of my head list, not extensive:
Food banks, share surplus food around, everything from surplus garden produce to hunters harvested game meat to "normal" food so it gets used and not wasted
Seed banks, many gardeners share seeds with each other, helps to maintain long term biodiversity and a hedge against catstrophic failures with bioengineered seeds possibly in the future
Volunteer fire departments, obvious good advantages there
Not for profit "thrift" stores, allow folks to donate useful but surplus items so they can be reused by other people cheaply instead of contributing to landfill mess
Orgs that do work like Habitat for Humanity, besides sharing labor to help folks out immediately by providing affordable to them shelter, down the road it's psychologically good to have children raised in decent homes and not in slumlord run cheap no win rental housing. hard to put an exact economic price on that, but I would bet it's pretty useful for society as a whole
Normal neighborly collaborative work, the concept of the "barn raising" is still there all over. Everything from Joe down the block is a good mechanic and helps his neighbors out to neighbors helping neighbors with community watch or shared child care, etc. Still alive and well all over.
Community free concerts, still a phenomenon practiced all over, most any weekend across the US you can go find free music and art that is "shared"
and etc etc
I would imagine there are way more examples of "sharing" that go on voluntarily that don't make it into the raw economic figures but contribute to the basic over all health of the economy and society.
I read the initial opinion section, and the letters, then the US news. Those are the parts that get me what I don't read in my daily paper and the online news feeds. Then I'm afraid I skip over Europe and Latin America and Asia and read the science and glance at the arts.
If I have time I go back and skim the headlines of the rest, and read the articles on rare occasions. I'm ashamed to admit that I really don't much care about the workers strike in Bolivia or the folding of the soccer teams in Albania. I realize that makes me a bad person.
I live in Massachusetts, that most liberal of states (Barney Frank is my congressional representative) and even I don't know a single person who sees Communism as "centrist".
I don't even know more than a handful of people who are for either socialized medicine or organized labor, two bulworks of liberalism.
By either current world standards, or US standards of the last 70 years, even "lefties" in the US are very, very far to the right.
I had been reading the Economist for several years, but it didn't dawn on me what a difference it made until I took a taxi ride and inquired about the driver's accent --- he was from Nigeria, I think, and we spent the rest of the ride (10-15 minutes) talking about Nigerian politics, and I was flat amazed at how much I knew without realizing it (I think he was too :-). That convinced me to keep the subscription going.
The value of the Economist is just absorbing general knowledge, not the specific details. What matters about the Nigerian example is that things are better, but still not good, it is no longer a dictatorship, but it is still corrupt. The exact stats and names don't matter.
Infuriate left and right
Here's a reality check for you :
you do not speak for anyone but yourself.
Your opinion is that of an idiotic self-centered child.
Slashdot continues to deteriorate because of people like you, and soon it will only be visited by such bottom-dwellers.
Answer carefully.
--- Ban humanity.
For a lot of open source project's and P2P networks it's not the case that developers and users are really sharing fairly.
Most open source projects revolve around a core of developers with the odd donation of time and code from users who extend the code to suit their needs. Ditto with most P2P networks, most casual users are happy to leach whilst most of the bandwidth is provided by hardcore users. Perhaps the exception to this is Bittorrent where users are more inclinded to share fairly.
It's not greed, since it's about sharing.
I don't know what to call it, fear of leeching or something?
To sum it up: When you share, if you constantly think about if everybody else is sharing as much as you, you'll end up not sharing.
Period.
When you share, you share.
If people leech, don't bother.
If they spam or hog resources, limit the resources with technical solutions, but you still don't bother.
This is the truth of sharing. The more you give, the more you get. Karma is absolute truth, but you don't give a damn about it. If you do, you get in trouble. If you analyse it all, you will stop the process itself.
So what if you share more than the next guy for some times? If you think about it, worrying about who is on top is really capitalism.
Strange thought, huh?
If you happen to have more / willing to share more, for some time, then just think what an opportunity!
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/
Professor Benkler's article refers here to Slashdot...
/. 'ers actually agree with sharing their "intellectual goods" when responses are written on company time. An IT professional making $60,000 a year is paid $.50 per minute (hourly liberties taken). If it takes that person 10 minutes to author content for Slashdot they are in effect making a company donation of $5.00. The shareable good is actually paid for by the company who itself hopes the salary investment in the employee returns a greater ROI. For example, receiving valuable IT experience worth more than what the employee is paid and perhaps less expensive than an outside contractor. But the ten minutes is still brought to us by the company.
In this case, the "shareable good" involved is
the time, education, and effort of the users who participate. It is combined
with a public good--existing information--to form what is also itself a
public good--a topical news and commentary source.
The question tho' is whether the employers of many
I am not opposed to the OSS model but I would like to see more analysis of its true economic cost as I was always taught "there is no such thing as a free lunch." The fact that it does seem to produce a superior product is all the more reason to better understand its true costs.
Professor Benkler's 10/22/2004 article is a good read. Thanks for posting a reference to it.
Hopefully this was worth more than $.02
Economists have not always found it easy to explain why self-interested people would freely share scarce, privately owned resources.
In the case of programmers and open source, it is easy to explain. By taking control of the programming environment (i.e. by developing open source operating systems), the software community is organizing to expand their productivity in a way that the corporate environment has always refused to do.
Companies have always routinely forced programmers to adopt the tools and software language that the companies aquire at the least cost. The efficency of the programmer's skills has always been a secondary consideration.
For example, a programmer spends five years mastering C++. Then the company they work for goes bankrupt. In the next job, that company uses Z-- as the development language. The new company judges the programmer to be second rate until they have mastered this new language.
After forty years of having to learn arbitrary new software development systems and tools, the software development community has said, "Enough!". "Now, we will develop the software envirnment, languages, and OS. And you will use it. And it will be free so you can't use the argument that it would cost too much to implement".
They have had to do this in their own best self interest because companies will always be changing the software development environment when this environment is bought and sold as a product.
Everyone originally went to Microsoft because they promised standardization at an acceptable cost. But that is no longer the case in a global network.
For The Economist to claim that the software developers of open source are not acting in their best lnng-run interest is naive of them.
It's really everywhere: parents share their experience with their children, friends rely on each others advice, gouvernments may (or may not) listen to their advisors, pointy-haired bosses listen (but may act contrary to) expert advice from employees.
Sharing is what turns individuals into societies, a pre-requisite for cultural achievements far beyond what a single person could achieve.
-- Nuggets: Your free SMS search engine for the UK
The Economist is brought to you buy the same people who think labor unions are evil, privatization always works (they never mention it only works for the rich), and the WTO/IMF/WorldBank unholy triad deserves to enslave poor countries with massive loans OK'd by bribed leaders.
If you want the facts, read
The Ecologist
Economists have not always found it easy to explain why self-interested people would freely share scarce, privately owned resources.
In the case of programmers and open source, it is easy to explain. By taking control of the programming environment (i.e. by developing open source operating systems), the software community is organizing to expand their productivity in a way that the corporate environment has always refused to do.
Companies have always routinely forced programmers to adopt the tools and software language that the companies acquire at the least cost. The efficiency of the programmer's skills has always been a secondary consideration.
For example, a programmer spends five years mastering C++. Then the company they work for goes bankrupt. In the next job, that company uses Z-- as the development language. The new company judges the programmer to be second rate until they have mastered this new language.
After forty years of having to learn arbitrary new software development systems and tools, the software development community has said, "Enough!". "Now, we will develop the software environment, languages, and OS. And you will use it. And it will be free so you can't use the argument that it would cost too much to implement".
They have had to do this in their own best self interest because companies will always be changing the software development environment when this environment is bought and sold as a product.
Everyone originally went to Microsoft because they promised standardization at an acceptable cost. But that is no longer the case in a global network.
For The Economist to claim that the software developers of open source are not acting in their best long-run interest is naive of them.
"The Economist, reliably the most insightful English-language news publication"....
As a good Brit would say: "Utter rubbish"
Of course, Ferengi social constructs as to clothing and wimmyn.... hmmmmm maybe we can work out some sort of compromise here.....
That's about what I meant when I said the scientific method got past the human side -- it works to allay those problems, eventually.
But you have to admit that, for her and her "competing" people at Cambridge, the free sharing of information wasn't completely free and freaky and in the general public interest only. It's totally possible that, if she'd been freer sharing her information, the structure of DNA would have been known earlier because lots more people would have been involved, at Cambridge at elsewhere. Why do you think she wasn't freely passing all her research around? Because there was a potential cost to her career.
The people working on the Dead Sea Scrolls have been criticized a ton for withholding information. Scientists who sign up to work with certain NASA missions sign exclusivity agreements for publishing some of the results. There are lots of examples of this. There's a tension in scientific ranks over when to publish. It's plainly not "free as in beer."
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
Truly classic "I didn't quite read that" response from an AC...
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
- It is a newspaper, not a magazine, and so most of its content is reportage and not opinion
- It is the local newspaper of Washington, DC (de facto capital of the world), and so has better access to important stories than other newspapers
- Its reportage is very detailed and I have yet to come across any signficant information in a downstream publication (e.g. The Economist) that was not also mentioned in a Washington Post story
Basically The Economist is the Bose Speakers of news sources- lots of marketing and slick packaging convince people who don't know any better that it is the best and by buying it they are joining some kind of elite.Yeah, and by some of your slang I'm guessing probably an English one at that. I sometimes read left-wing opinion magazines like Dissent or The Nation and their articles seem like pretty sad and worn-out stuff- all written by people whose intellectual horizons haven't grown since the end of the Cold War and who seem to know a lot more about 1904 than they do about 2004. The British left-wing stuff is even more stuck in a time warp, though, as if Dickens was still an accurate observer of industrial relations and half the work force was composed of coal miners.
V5.0 - I have everything you have so now you have no value to me. Patriot Act 7 kills anyone that wants freedom from tyrants.
It is, in my view, inevitable that no matter what your starting conditions are, the socio-economic progress will lead to convergence of all systems to communism, a more advanced one than traditional capitalism or (horror!) information society.
Many people still don't realise it, but our world is changing. And it doesn't take a genius to understand where we are going. Combine MIT's 'Fab Labs' (not the implementation, the idea), nanotechnology and sharing and you get sharing for physical goods. Add to that AI and robotics and you don't even need to share, because everyone basically has everything he needs. Which is, in very simple terms, what communism is about.
In about 5-10 years it will be possible to have personal manufacturing plants - first for some limited classes of products, then for pretty much everything. That would bring sharing of designs, often "illegal", but always beneficial to people. It is likely to be combined with open source leading to even more efficiency and choice.
Then in about 15-20 years robots will become a very significant part of the workforce, with construction robots, transportation robots, loading/unloading and various other robots. Not sure how it will work out, but clearly this will lead to 1) greater wealth for some and 2) demand to do something so that even the unemployed people could share the wealth. It might be possible that robots could be produced using personal manufacturing plants, in that case the capitalist economy will quickly collapse, as capital (robots) will become in a sense free (there still be energy and resources issues). That might be when the new communism, finally succeeds.
Finally, in 20-30 years nanotechnology will succeed in producing its Holy Grail - the universal assembler. This would bring sharing to its ultimate triumph, as information would finally be the only thing of value and at the same time the information will finish becoming free, in the process freeing us, the humans. This will also end the short communist era, as we humans quickly become self-sufficient. That would be the culmination of the new communism, which will then gradually disappear, as humans move into posthuman state.
In 2030 our current debates about sharing and whether it's stealing or not will probably seem rather funny.
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.
Yeah, it's amazing that people still use the "liberal media" cliche every time reality doesn't support conservative gospel. Maybe they don't know that 95% of American mass media is owned by seven big corporations, or they think guys like Rupert Murdock who run those outfits are flaming liberals. Or they just don't think period. I'm guessing number 3.
Economists believe everything we do is rooted in self-interest the way Freud believed everything we do is rooted in sex. People with a religious devotion to a single idea often have trouble seeing the truth. They have their hammer, and everything looks a nail.
Economists have not always found it easy to explain why self-interested people would freely share scarce, privately owned resources... The reason often seems to be that writing open-source software increases the authors' prestige among their peers or gains them experience that might help them in the job market, not to mention that they also find it fun.
Yeah, not to mention that they also find it fun. The pure pleasure of accomplishment and the satisfaction of doing something for others is hard for pointy haired economists to grasp, but I think these are they primary reasons people write oss. But then I got a D in Econ 101, re-took it from a different prof and got a C. So what could I possibly know about human nature?
I'd classify it as 'South-American-military-junta-style'. (E.g. characterized by low taxes, heavy military spending, big contracts to the friends of those in charge and a whopping foreign debt.)
Thank you. I've been looking for a simple term to catch all of that and with a quick machette edit, Junta Encomics it is.
Historical context:
In the days before canning armies would starve when on the move, unless they could steal food from villages that they passed. If they did, the villagers would starve.
So, three soldiers show up in a village... of course the villagers don't know that there are only three, and they don't know that they CAN'T just steal all their food. So they pretend that they've already been robbed, and don't have any left. The stone soup is a con game to allow people to safely contribute without being robbed blind.
One reason that potatoes were so valuable is that they could be left in the ground until you were ready to dig them up. This made it quite difficult for an army to just march through and steal your entire food supply, leaving you to starve to death. And to death is NOT a figure of speech, but rather a frequent fate of the villages that were robbed.
In this context the story makes perfect sense. The villagers had time to make sure that they were safe. The soldiers didn't have to split up into small(er) ambushable groups. The locations of the villagers food remained secret. Nobody was forced to contribute more than he could spare. Etc.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
When in danger or in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout!
In my country, the government provides heavy disincentives that make car sharing difficult, although hitchhiking used to be a common form of car sharing. Food sharing is quite common. In my town one of the food sharing groups does some bike sharing. Food sharing examples: lecture is free, comes with free pizza. Food banks and food pantries.
Pot-luck dinners. Setting an extra plate at dinner.
Beer nuts. Bread not bombs.
A doctor, a lawyer and an economist are adrift at sea in a raft without oars. Spotting land they try to decide the best course of action.
The doctor says "I think it best that we take turns using our arms as oars. That way we maximize our physiological abilities to efficiently propel the raft towards the land."
The lawyer says "Yes, I think that is a good idea but I propose that we must first agree as to how long each person will work and that we hold each other to those committments."
The doctor and lawyer look to the economist and after a couple of minutes ask "Well, what do YOU think?" The economist says "Well, suppose for a moment that we have two oars..."
Clearly this is why you now read /.
Very insightful comment.....
Wanted : A Signature.
Perhaps you should contemplate the difference between the GPL and the BSD license. And note that while both are popular, the GPL is more popular.
Not everybody might agree with me, but I see the GPL as a political tool. It is a license that shows the hybris behind the idea that you can own information and knowledge. It is really copyright turned back on itself, therefore humourously called copyleft.
GPL do what public domain and BSD cannot, namely form a competition against proprietary and closed source software. This is the design principle behind the GPL, and the other two "licenses" (why do we need a license anyways?), cannot do this.
I like to think the GPL is popular because most of these people who are knowledgeable about computers, feel deep down inside themselves that copyright and restrictions do not serve the higher goal of developing better programs. There is already competition between open- and free software, while standards and source helps bring interoperability on levels that closed source cannot easily match. These people do not want to support a world with strict IP-laws and companies selling snake oil to its customers, holding them ransom and hostage over time.
I suspect you disagree with me, because you brought up the BSD-license. That's okay: You want to share it all with everybody, which is a perfectly laudable goal. While I prefer the GPL because I want to contribute to an alternative to proprietary software, without accidentally supporting it.
You might also call the GPL a platform for forced-sharing, but I see it mostly as a political weapon against corporate appropriation of our culture and science.
Now you might mistake me for a leftist, but I also think proprietary software should exist as long as it can support itself. Obviously, numerous advancements have been made from that avenue that would otherwise be lost. But to protect its monopoly through stricter laws and draconian enforcements, I do not support.
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/
Since taxes are extracted by force, they are not an example of sharing.
Otherwise, I agree with your post. The sharing of information goes way back, as do the efforts to prevent it by the vested interests. Recall the horror that some groups professed when the Christian scriptures were translated into the vernacular that just anyone could read!
Bob-
The Ludwig von Mises Institute. The reasoning individuals economics