I met Dave in 97 when NorthPoint was starting up and we were looking for isps to partner with. Dave ran Brainstorm and was eager to give his customers faster connections. In some way I've forgotten the details we ended up building our first node in his Mountain View facility. I remember a Saturday morning, Dave dealing with network issues while I wrestled a CBX into a rack in his server room and tried to figure where they'd dropped the DS3. His router configuration management system was the best I'd seen - always kept a copy of the running config when posting a new one. He wanted network statistics for every customer mailed to him every week and he'd call me if they didn't arrive. He cared about his home as much as his business, not a trait I expected in a techie.
I lost track of him after the RCN buyout and always meant to look him up again and ask about the rumor of someone landing on a roof in SF. I'm sad.
I've been enjoying the h2o paper - wish they'd picked another name.
Interesting you should reference Harvard Law School's Berkman Center. Software development seems to me to have more in common with scientific research (a not very original observation) and the practice of law than it does with industrial production. The COSS scheme rests on the rather common assumption that writing code has similarities to industrial production (hence the appeal to capitalist economic theory). It seems to me the argument can be made that OSS is a reaction to the industrial production model (capitalist or other) implicit in what the article terms "the closed source world of traditional software vendors". I experience coding as somewhere between writing and research. Providing support for OSS software seems to me similar to what a lawyer does in making the abstraction of the law accessible. So perhaps we should look at the way writers, lawyers, and scientists are paid.
This article deserves more than a casual read. I intend to print and study it in some detail. Some questions occurred to me as I went through it,
Who contributes value, who receives value, and who pays for it dont seem to me obvious at all.
The article contains the premise that some people want or need to get paid for contributing to open software. Anyone know how many of the principle contibutors to oss fall into one of these groups? I don't know.
Is peer regard or respect the primary pay for writing oss software? I'd rate the satisfaction I get from coding for its own sake way higher than the money I receive at my day job or the peer respect I get. But I'm mostly a user and evangelizer of oss (also my interests tend to be so arcane and the results so incomplete I can't imagine anyone else being interested) so maybe I'm way atypical. I think gift culture is a simplistic explanation for a more complex reality.
What if the primary beneficiary of oss software is the society as a whole? If the outcome of all this is that oss enables an economy that eliminates scarcity altogether and makes everyone so rich they have major economic incentive not to rock the boat by going off on tribal crusades would that justify the inefficiencies in government subsidy? What level of lesser benefit would justify subsidy?
Cool article - made me think. Isn't it fun to live on the bleeding edge of change and have issues like these to puzzle over?
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I met Dave in 97 when NorthPoint was starting up and we were looking for
isps to partner with. Dave ran Brainstorm and was eager to give his
customers faster connections. In some way I've forgotten the details
we ended up building our first node in his Mountain View facility. I
remember a Saturday morning, Dave dealing with network issues while I
wrestled a CBX into a rack in his server room and tried to figure where
they'd dropped the DS3. His router configuration management system was
the best I'd seen - always kept a copy of the running config when posting
a new one. He wanted network statistics for every customer mailed to him
every week and he'd call me if they didn't arrive. He cared about his
home as much as his business, not a trait I expected in a techie.
I lost track of him after the RCN buyout and always meant to look him up
again and ask about the rumor of someone landing on a roof in SF. I'm sad.
I've been enjoying the h2o paper - wish they'd picked another name.
Interesting you should reference Harvard Law School's Berkman Center. Software development seems to me to have more in common with scientific research (a not very original observation) and the practice of law than it does with industrial production. The COSS scheme rests on the rather common assumption that writing code has similarities to industrial production (hence the appeal to capitalist economic theory). It seems to me the argument can be made that OSS is a reaction to the industrial production model (capitalist or other) implicit in what the article terms "the closed source world of traditional software vendors". I experience coding as somewhere between writing and research. Providing support for OSS software seems to me similar to what a lawyer does in making the abstraction of the law accessible. So perhaps we should look at the way writers, lawyers, and scientists are paid.
wayne
This article deserves more than a casual read. I intend to print and study it in some detail. Some questions occurred to me as I went through it,
Who contributes value, who receives value, and who pays for it dont seem to me obvious at all.
The article contains the premise that some people want or need to get paid for contributing to open software. Anyone know how many of the principle contibutors to oss fall into one of these groups? I don't know.
Is peer regard or respect the primary pay for writing oss software? I'd rate the satisfaction I get from coding for its own sake way higher than the money I receive at my day job or the peer respect I get. But I'm mostly a user and evangelizer of oss (also my interests tend to be so arcane and the results so incomplete I can't imagine anyone else being interested) so maybe I'm way atypical. I think gift culture is a simplistic explanation for a more complex reality.
What if the primary beneficiary of oss software is the society as a whole? If the outcome of all this is that oss enables an economy that eliminates scarcity altogether and makes everyone so rich they have major economic incentive not to rock the boat by going off on tribal crusades would that justify the inefficiencies in government subsidy? What level of lesser benefit would justify subsidy?
Cool article - made me think. Isn't it fun to live on the bleeding edge of change and have issues like these to puzzle over?
wayne