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The Failed Economics of Our Software Commons
An anonymous reader writes: Most software developers are intimately familiar with having to waste time implementing something they probably shouldn't need to implement, or spending countless hours making their code work with bad (but required) software. Developer Paul Chiusano says this is because the economic model we use for building software just doesn't work. He writes, "What's the problem? In software, everyone is solving similar problems, and software makes it trivial to share solutions to these problems (unlike physical goods), in the form of common libraries, tools, etc. This ease of sharing means it makes perfect sense for actors to cooperate on the development of solutions to common problems. ... Obviously, it would be crazy to staff such critical projects largely with a handful of unpaid volunteers working in their spare time. Er, right?? Yet that is what projects like OpenSSL do. A huge number of people and businesses ostensibly benefit from these projects, and the vast majority are freeriders that contribute nothing to their development. This problem of freeriders is something that has plagued open source software for a very long time." Chiusano has some suggestions on how we can improve the way we allocate resources to software development.
In this case the loss leader may just be a payment on other projects.
When Elon Musk develops his Tesla thing that I do not own, does this change things for me, does it make me poorer or wealthier? Well, it's making the economy more productive, it's making the overall economy wealthier because of this new product that people want and a generally wealthier economy allows people to pursue their hobbies and in the case of free software developers the hobbies are developing free software (excuse me for that), so when I say a "loss leader", maybe another way to put it is a payment.
In the software world code because currency itself. Code is something tangible, code has intrinsic value to people who want to use that code for something, so code is actually money. We exchange code, we exchange money, we make payments to each other this way.
In fact us not charging for our code in some fiat government currency but instead just using each other's code, we are going around the government taxation and various business regulations.
For all the talk about so many programmers being 'socialists', we are actually doing everything we can to avoid paying taxes, if the politicians only understood what kind of an economy is running right under their noses in this so called "free" software community, they'd be screaming murder! There would be Obama on the stage, talking about "paying fair share" and throwing "you didn't build that" slogans, while pointing fingers at a community that exchanges what basically amounts to labour without allowing government to skim off the top.
You can't handle the truth.