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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.
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.
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
... 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.
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, 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.
I consider myself a bit of a leftie, and I don't find the Economist very right wing.
And I *really* would not appreciate having to come in to work on a Monday morning a kick a bum out of my desk. And God knows what he was doing on my computer...
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.
The two basic problems are sanitation and security. Who cleans the place up if a homeless guy pisses in the stairwell? Who cleans the place up if beer is spilled on your chair? Is the office bathroom designed to handle a dozen people washing themselves in the sinks every night?
As for security, unless every single thing is bolted down, your office will suddenly need a much larger budget to replace disappearing paper, pens, coffee, computer parts and the like. And considering that a typical PC is completely vulnerable to physical access attacks - would you feel comfortable typing anything secure on a keyboard in an office that is lived in by unknown non-company-employees?
I am not saying that your idea is impossible - however, it will not be easy to implement, especially in a way that office occupants find agreeable.
I think you're mistaking them for Forbes, maybe.
Actually, they're pretty moderate and reasonable with their analyses, they advocate market solutions for problems that a market can solve i.e. most things.
They go with the least-worst economic system (free-market with a small dash of government regulation to stop the worse excesses of capitalism) since that appears to have won the argument so far. So they obsess about what Greenspan says, but isn't that their job? That's the "Economist" bit in "The Economist".
And hindsight is a wonderful thing. Nobody else was worrying about the Taliban at the time, either.
Please remain calm, there is no reason to pani... wait, where are you all going?
What is considered "left wing" in the US, is considered far right wing in the rest of the world.
No, I've been reading it for over 15 years. Their articles are mostly in the category of "stress relief" - harmless editorials that give their readers the sense that they've got a conscience, without harming the machine. Otherwise we'd see some effects of their rhetoric, increased (truly) free markets of leveled competition, reduced exec pay, the death of underperforming corporations, etc. I think you haven't read Manufacturing Consent.
--
make install -not war
The problem is unlike information the distribution method is non trivial. For sharing to occur you need to have excess resources and a means to distribute with negligable cost.
Yes there is extra space, but the cost to get homeless people there, maintain the building, ensure those people do not do things that would disrupt during business hours, is quite high. The same reason there is excess food, yet people starve. The cost to get the food to the starving people becomes prohibitive in some areas.
D6 63 0D 70 89 81 BB 8E 7B 7C 5F 5D 54 EA AB 73
A couple of reasons why sausage manufacturers want drop-in-for-free bun-replacements easily available: Buns are a necessary prerequisite for consumption of sausages, but buns are not the competitive expertise of the sausage maker, and a closed-source bun puts them at the mercy of a bun-manufacturer taking over the bun-market and then using that leverage to expand into sausage. See, for example, Web servers. If you want to use the new fancy bells and whistles from IBM, you *need* a web server, period, but IBM doesn't have web servers and has no interest in rolling its own. MS does, and of course Apache is the OSS alternative. Why back Apache? Because otherwise Microsoft, a company which may be a strategic competitor at some point, is in the critical-path of your *entire product line*. IBM gets the hedge against strategic risk without having to develop or maintain a product with cruddy margins which they would have to keep competitive with MS's core applications tech to have any utility to them at all (its not useful having an IBM branded server if only 2% of the market uses it). Support OSS, and the strategic hedge writes itself! Then you can redeploy your engineers on projects which actually make you money. OSS buns change the dynamics of the IT market to reward not primarily application design (software) but "total solution providers" or "consultants" or "whatever the heck they're calling themselves these days". Sure, you can get the bun for free, but do you know the proper way to situate the sausage, bun, and optional $.05 ketchup such that it is Kosher in your Israeli market and and meets the meatpacking laws in California? Well, suprise suprise, Sausage Inc. has teams of well-trained engineers and IT specialists waiting on call to help you integrate Sausage 2005 with Bun 2.42b (now with added anti-yeast protection -- don't be fooled by our full-solution competitor, he doesn't have this technology yet!) at any location you desire and they work at incredibly reasonable hourly rates.
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
I will quote my sources on the explanation for these journalistic positions:
[In response to an anonymous reporter's question "Why do you rob banks?"]:
"Because that's where the money is." - Willie Sutton
[from the bottom of the current Slashdot page in which I'm submitting this post]:
"I don't have any solution but I certainly admire the problem. -- Ashleigh Brilliant"
--
make install -not war
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
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.
Nobody else was worrying about the Taliban at the time, either.
Well, gee, with the collusion of apathy and cheerleading amongst news sources, it becomes difficult for the common man to become educated enough about things like future Talibans in order to become concerned.
The American CIA is similarly insulated from public worry. People commonly go about their lives utterly unconcerned about the documented offenses of this agency. In part, that's because of the press blackout.
The old sentiments are quite correct on this matter: Without a free (or diverse) press, our democracies simply cannot function.
[You have a stable society when some nut guns down a schoolyard and the law doesn't change.]
The problem is that most people who are in the middle consider The Economist fair. It's generally people way out on either side politically that suggest The Economist is unfair. Knowing what I do of you from your history, it seems you are one of those people. No flame, mind you, but your politics are not... centrist.
For most of the people doing reviewing, the Economist is really very fair and reasonable in its reporting.
Is it possible you are just politically marginalized, and that your views differ significantly from the rest of ours?
Is there a publication you recommend? That isn't filled with lunatic fringe ravings? Seriously, I would like to try it.
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.
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.
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.
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.