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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
... 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!
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.
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.
I consider myself a bit of a leftie, and I don't find the Economist very right wing.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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/
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.