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

I am no economist, but as a geek ...

[Taco Cowboy]

As a little toddler I already developed signs of geekiness. As I grew older, my geekiness ballooned so much so that I could not, even if I want to, deny that in this life, I am a geek

Now that I am old, as an old geek, I still think that what we geek do, what we truly enjoy doing, often goes counter to the outside rule

That is why, when that guy is telling me (and other geeks) that we live by a "failed economic commons", hey, I am not surprised

If we geeks are to live by a "successful economic commons" many of the geeky things that we do, and many of the geeky creations that we have created, would not exist

The gist of the whole thing is this --- economy, whether it be "failed" or "successful" --- is in eye of the beholder

One can say that the economy of a certain country/region is good --- but good for whom? For the general populace, or for the 0.1%?

That is why, we geek don't give a flying fuck about the economy. We do what we do because we enjoy what we do. That is all

If they (and when I say "they" I mean those who look down on the geeks) don't like it, they can go jump into the sea

Re:I am no economist, but as a geek ...

[roman_mir]

Well, he is wrong, but your feeling about the economy do not matter one way or another, it operates outside of your sentiment, a failing economy would not allow you to be a developer.

Imagine if the economy was such that for you to be able to do all the 'geeky' stuff you do, you'd literally have to starve yourself to death and/or use up 99% of your normal sleeping time. I mean if you had no choice but to gather/hunt for food the entire day or otherwise you wouldn't survive, that would be the economy dictating to you that you cannot really do much of anything beyond just surviving.

The economy as is allows people to spend their time however they feel like, some forego entertainment and leisure to work on their favourite pet projects. It's like telling a stamp collector that his hobby is a failed idea economically... he'd just laugh at the guy.

You do what you have to do to survive in the economy, so you do care, you are just not necessarily aware of it, but everything you do in life is based on the health / state of the economy.

All goes according to plan

[Sneftel]

If you don't want free riders, don't make free software.

You get to choose your license. You don't get to complain that people are following it.

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.

Summary, or tl;dr

[phantomfive]

The article is long and poorly organized (that is, the organization is stream of conscious writing like most bloggers; he goes off into a mini-rant about how much he hates CSS/HTML, for example). Here is a summary, as well as I can understand it:

1) A new non-profit is trying to make it easy to fund open-source software, with a new donation method. You can donate, but your donation doesn't go through until ten (or X) other people donate the same amount.

2) This will increase funding for open source projects because:
* Companies don't want to fund open source if someone else will do it.
* It will be cheaper TCO for companies to fund open source projects they use. For example, if OpenSSL had been given more money, they would have fewer bugs (probably by rewriting everything in Erlang; really, that's what he said).

That is literally it. In all 2000 words he wrote, I cannot find another single point that supports his main thesis, that the new non-profit will increase funding for open source-projects. He however did spend a lot of words explaining that popular open source projects should get more money from the companies that use them, so that's something.