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Economist's Take On Open Source Development
An anonymous reader writes "Economist Dean Baker outlines alternative funding mechanisms for software development in a new report called "Opening Doors and Smashing Windows" [PDF Warning], available at the Center for Economic and Policy Research. One proposal is to create a US government-funded Software Development Corps of public software corporations, which compete and produce only free and open source software. Baker estimates that through the resulting lower prices in software and computers, the government would recoup its annual $2 billion appropriation to the program and US consumers would save $80-120 billion each year -- all while 20,000 software developers are supported to work specifically on open source projects."
Why wait for a personal voucher, just personally take $100 out of your wallet and give it to the project of your choosing.
"Voucher" is the new monorail.
Oh - by the way - it wouldn't work.
What genius is going to "donate" money for some software that hasn't been released yet? With the sheer amount of garbage software out there, the last thing I'm going to do is put up $10 for a piece of software that may never come (in which case my share of the money would get dumped into some frigging charity) or, when it does, is absolutely nothing like what I thought I was paying for.
Here's what I call the ransom model:
You make the software I want and if I like it, I'll buy it from you with cash. If you don't make the software I want or I don't like it, I won't buy it and will keep my cash. That's the true ransom model.
In the scenerio presented above, it's a lose/lose situation.
US government-funded Software Development Corps?
I thought they were called graduate schools?
Seriously, it's already there in the form of graduate schools. Just up the funding of graduate school science programs rather than create an artificial agency.
The last thing the free software community needs is the US government fucking it over with beauracracy and red tape and project proposals and grants, etc. The best thing the governments of the world can do to encourage and promote the free software movement is to officially adopt open standards (open protocols, open document formats, etc) for all official business. Don't screw over a good thing by trying to play parent to it. We get by fine on our own thanks.
11*43+456^2
Since when is it the job of the government to promote open source?
Do we really want the government to actively go about picking winners and losers in entire areas of the worldwide economy?
While I agree that free and open source software is fine without the governments help (in fact, we don't need it or want it), since when is it the job of the government to enforce and impose restrictions on copying for the sake of large media companies??
This first paragraph ....
Copyrights and patents are forms of government intervention in the market that are relics of the medieval guild system. They are an outdated and inefficient means to support creative and innovative work in the 21s t century. These government-granted monopolies lead protected software to sell at prices that are far above the free-market price. In most cases, in the absence of copyright and patent protection, software would be available over the Internet at zero cost.
.. blew me away and is probably the most insightfull thing I've ever read in a government publication. What a hero, the author will probably get fired for such blatnet honesty.
Yeah, absolutely! And that DARPANet thing? Total bureaucratic government waste. Never went anywhere. Stupid long-haired hippie socialists, with their dumb ideas about standardized protocols and decentralized networks. Fortunately, that failed like all wasteful government programs, and we now operate on computer networks such as Compuserve, Prodigy, and GEnie developed and run by the free-market genius of efficient private enterprise.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
It works better for requested features/improvements on existing software. For example. I'd pay a lot of money for a Tiger upgrade to the ext2fs plugin for OS X. Unfortunately, no (reasonable) amount of money will convince the author to make time for the upgrade right now.
If, however, he did perhaps have time, he could say something like, "I'll add this feature once I get X dollars of donations toward it."
Then people can chip in, he does the work, releases it open-source, and everybody wins. There's some website now that will help facilitate this -- it holds the money in escrow, and returns it if the minimum is not raised. I can't remember the name of the site though.
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Open Source is a failure. No, that's not me saying it, that's what the report says. Once you get past the rhetoric, it's essentially saying that Open Source cannot survive in the marketplace, and needs government protection.
Bullshit. Linux came about during the very decade that everyone said no one could compete against the Microsoft monopoly. It succeeded where BeOS, OS/2 and DR-DOS could not. I'm also seeing Firefix usage zooming. OpenOffice is getting noticed. And of course, the web belongs to Apache. Open Source *IS* succeeding! If you think otherwise it's because you're trying to judge its success by the failures of others. That's not how the game works.
If government wants to help, then it can help by getting out of the way! Government can stop standardizing on proprietary formats. Government can stop handing out software patents. Government can stop recognizing mouse click licensing. Government could liberalize copyright and abolish the DMCA.
Whenever you hear someone say "I'm from the government and I'm here to help," run the other way!
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
Whenever the government gets involved in franchises, subsidies, etc. the end result is a government-created monopoly.
Just remember that the government is a big stick, wielded by those in political power. A government monopoly is not sustained through economic production, but rather through the forced expropriation of taxpayer money to prop it up.
Mine is Good
Slashdot anagrams to "Sad Sloth"
I'm very seldom moved to post on Slashdot, but this article did it.
The nonsense starts with the author's blithe assertion that an asymtotic-to-zero cost of software distribution over the Internet implies zero cost of production, and proceeds from there.
In fact there are lots of goods that have a high cost to produce the first copy and near-zero-cost to produce the second copy, but any self-described 'economist' who uses that cost pattern as an excuse to ignore the production cost of the first copy is exhibiting severe brain damage.
The little that is true in this paper (the argument on the high costs of IPR) just gets overwhelmed by the tide of toxic nonsense. If anyone asks *me* what I think of this government-funding scheme, it'll get both barrels...
>>esr>>
I did RTFA. And although I was quite impressed with how the author grasps many of the underlying issues, their entanglement and complexity I was bluffed by sheer naievete(sp?) of the underlying economic assumptions and the their theoretical underpinnings.
He documents quite accurately how 'IPR' works and how it effects the development of software and the *costs* this form of development has for society, yet these *costs* are not the subject of the mathetical extrapolations which he engages in. The mathematics used in this essay as well as the entirety of latent definitions of value/waste present in the text are based on a woefully inadequate naieve economic understanding.
I am not an economist and I have never formally studied economics but the assumptions at work in the economic understanding revealed in his terminology and his calculations are baffling to say the least. If such is what is taught to students of economy is it any wonder our economy is so supremely fucked.
It is a shame that otherwise good arguments and a good grasp of the complexities involved are so thoroughly underminded by such sophmoric misuse of mathematics (with their appeal to 'empirical reality' ie. facts) and woefully inept econcomic theory.
The profound weakness of the underlining economic theory at work in his paper is that each and every argument can be turned to it's opposite and equally proven. He states that if all software were available at 0 cost and freely modifiable that there would be no duplication of software-ie. no one would bother righting something already written. Anyone who has opened their eyes knows that the reality directly contradicts such nonsense. He forgets that where economy is understood merely as a system of incentives/disincentives, and that such are purely monetary in nature, that in order to prevent people from duplicating programs one would have to a) pay them not to do so or b) not pay them for having done so(two sides of same coin). But this negates his complaint against unnecessary duplication of software because those who do duplicate software are being paid to do so. In totality the economic assumptions underlying this essay are fundamentally incapable of grasping what FOSS is and how it works.
So at once the author is capable of providing a rather damning indictment of IPR and he succeeds in painting an accuarate picture of the *costs* of this regime, but he is incapable of grasping that which he wishes to see as an alternative to IPR, namely FOSS. His argument is that one can substitute FOSS for IPR by creating public corporations which employ FOSS programmers. In so doing he ignores that it was the contention of the conditions of employment as a software developer which gave birth to FOSS.
What FOSS is, is only relevant within the terms of reference which constitute the status quo. How FOSS is, is an insight into that which already is no longer captured in our grasp of the status quo-for it is different, different in the sort of way which makes a difference for those engaged in it.
Ayn Rand... latecomer... I refer you to Adam Smith.
Capitalism would work just fine without intellectual property, in fact it would be a much better world for consumers. So much resources are diverted from otherwise useful pursuits because of corporations being able to acquire monopoly profits.
There are natural monopolies. Those we can do little about other than introduce government regulation to keep things from getting silly. But truly there is no longer a compelling reason for most intellectual property. Best case is it is abolished. Next best case is that terms are brought back onto a scale that actually strikes a reasonable balance between consumers and rights holders.
It is so out of wack with life+70 for copyright and 20 years for patents it would be funny if it weren't so disgusting. This is corruption of the government at its most apparent. The regulation of thought and action in such an incredibly insidious way... it purports to protect the individual and spur innovation but it really puts our very minds in shackles. If the government thinks a monopoly spurs innovation, great... but isn't it reasonable to only grant as much of a monopoly as is required to produce the desired effect?
As engineers we are the first to see the true issue because we are the first wave of citizens who actually create intellectual property as a matter of course. Authors and inventors used to be rare specialists. Today anyone who creates a web page is a creator. Another 20 years and I think the situation will become clear to most people. The "knowledge worker" must not be operating in a minefield, but allowed to produce freely. This will be better for everyone. I just tire of the "socialist" and "commie" comments. It is such a know-nothing attitude... the same people who spout such garbage would claim to be for a free market.
I'd be interesting in seeing a free market in intellectual property. I just don't think any politicians have the balls to give us such a free market.