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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.
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
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.
and /. editors have to remember to remove personal notes from the stories.
/. is not a news organization, not in the sense you're apparently thinking. It's not The Economist or the NYT or Reuters or even, God help me, USA Today. It's basically a blog, where people write in with things they, in their personal opinions, consider interesting, and other people respond with their own opinions. If what you want is Just The Facts, Ma'am, then read the "Technology" section on the Yahoo newsfeed.
Why?
Folks,
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
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.
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?
Generally, they favor whatever they think will be good for business...
While, I agree that The Economist is generally 'pro-capitalist', I would not call them pro-business, but rather pro-competition; a distinction most people miss. Most businesses, ironically enough, dislike competition and are therefore anti-capitalists.
PCB
'Men never commit evil so fully and joyfully as when they do it for religious convictions.' B. Pascal
If you have read the Economist and don't realize how important free markets and trade are to them, then there is no hammer big enough to hit you over the head with.
I always think it is a shame that this county (US) doesn't have a party that thinks like the Economist. Bush might like to claim this philosphy, but his strain of Republicanism is to concerned about what you do in the bedroom to fit this model.
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/