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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.
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.
I don't remember the last time the Economist attacked anything as "communistic excess" -- and they're not a "tool of international corporatism" because they actually like true free markets without competition. Notice their articles on excessive executive pay, underperforming corporations, etc.
I think that you probably haven't really read too much of it.
Small potatoes make the steak look bigger.
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".
Even as a socialist, I think one can appreciate The Economist's slant towards liberty/freedom and individual responsibility. They might write about economic issues one week that would make an American Republican proud, yet in the same publication come out strongly in support of same-sex marriage. They often discuss our rights, but nearly always counter-balanced by our obligations - this isn't always popular with many people as it's common in modern society to demand one's rights, but ignore one's responsibilities. Personally I find it can be read from the point of view of a scientist: they seem to write things up in a clinical detached way whether or not the author actually believes it or not. I can then take the facts as presented and decide whether I want to agree or not with any opinions presented.