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.

Comments

The real solution is really much simpler.

[Narcocide]

Large companies need to stop spending boat loads of money on buying overpriced, re-released commercial operating system and productivity software that changes absolutely nothing useful about business functionality and spend maybe say, 10% of the money from what that budget would have been on donating to or contributing to software projects that the infrastructure's critical functionality relies upon.

Seriously. The money would go further and the software would last longer and everyone would get a lot more actual work done. Every time you buy a new version of Windows its like you're paying to re-arrange the deck chairs on the Titanic.

And don't fucking reply to me saying shit like "durrr, but OpenSSL got hacked and doesn't deserve to have had more money." Maybe that's true, but probably not. Even if it were true, above, I said donating or contributing, as in - spend your own company resources auditing the software if you don't trust it. If you find enough vulnerabilities to distrust the people who make it, then FORK IT OR PAY SOMEONE TO DO SO. The bottom line is, economically even in a worst-case scenario its still cheaper than every single company rolling their own from scratch, or every single company buying the same software over and over again made (perhaps not any more securely or competently) by some completely unaccountable, inauditable closed-source company.

Re:Marketshare

[roman_mir]

wait, WHAT? A group of people releases some code without asking for any money and then if people start using the code then they will come for money later? I am with the OpenBSD team on this, not with you! What you are suggesting is actually immoral and probably cannot be legally enforced. Once you release your code under a license that allows people to use it (at least that version of it, which you released), you can't now come after those people's money!

You know you don't have to develop anything at all, you don't have to develop anything for free and you don't have to develop anything and then give it away, but if you do, don't cry if people start using it!

Now, I already mentioned that in free software community code became money long time ago, that's the point I am trying to make - code is money and we exchange it for free seemingly, but actually we are making a payment with our code to other people who also create code that we can use.

Code is money and the labour that is used to create this wealth is not taxed or regulated by government, we do it on our own around all government regulations and around taxes and that is what built a vibrant economy, which the guy in TFA doesn't understand.