Open Source introduced many of us to asking others for help. Now a developer might spend as much time in Google Groups as in an O'Reilly book, or trying to figure out a problem - because someone else has either asked about it, or can provide the answer. This is a great thing for development, but makes experience what economists call a "public good" - it's in the interest of hirers to get cheap, energetic talent that is willing to ask for help, rather than putting a premium on experience that they can Google or IRC for free.
So its not so much agism as experience no longer being as useful as it was. Of course there are many exceptions to this, but its prevalent enough to be visible.
Andrew Odlzyko, a researcher at Bell Labs and sa frequent contributor to First Monday, has a great paper on pricing and telecommunications, in which he concludes that as technologies mature, pricing shifts from pay-per-piece (or byte, or word, or minute) toward flat-rate or de facto flat rate, such as "block pricing" which we see in cell phone plans.
One example of macro-micro payments outside the world of telecom, the "power unit" pricing scheme that Oracle tried with Oracle 8, has since shifted to flat server-based pricing that its competitors, Microsoft and IBM, have already been employing.
The interesting item here is that the barrier to entry for the more refined pricing plans is not the lack of an instrument for measuring usage or the lack of a financial instrument for remitting payment - they both exist for telecom and enterprise software. Rather, lack of customer acceptance of a complicated pricing plan drives this simplification.
I wonder: what makes content different that per-word / per kilobyte / per article micropayment makes more sense than in these other industries?
Content may want to be free, but we all know it can't be - at least not all of it. But under block-rate pricing, it may be zero marginal cost.
Ray Deck
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This is a fantastic idea. Does anyone know if the FSF is actively soliciting or promoting this means of adding more intellectual property to OSS?
Open Source introduced many of us to asking others for help. Now a developer might spend as much time in Google Groups as in an O'Reilly book, or trying to figure out a problem - because someone else has either asked about it, or can provide the answer. This is a great thing for development, but makes experience what economists call a "public good" - it's in the interest of hirers to get cheap, energetic talent that is willing to ask for help, rather than putting a premium on experience that they can Google or IRC for free.
So its not so much agism as experience no longer being as useful as it was. Of course there are many exceptions to this, but its prevalent enough to be visible.
Andrew Odlzyko, a researcher at Bell Labs and sa frequent contributor to First Monday, has a great paper on pricing and telecommunications, in which he concludes that as technologies mature, pricing shifts from pay-per-piece (or byte, or word, or minute) toward flat-rate or de facto flat rate, such as "block pricing" which we see in cell phone plans. One example of macro-micro payments outside the world of telecom, the "power unit" pricing scheme that Oracle tried with Oracle 8, has since shifted to flat server-based pricing that its competitors, Microsoft and IBM, have already been employing. The interesting item here is that the barrier to entry for the more refined pricing plans is not the lack of an instrument for measuring usage or the lack of a financial instrument for remitting payment - they both exist for telecom and enterprise software. Rather, lack of customer acceptance of a complicated pricing plan drives this simplification. I wonder: what makes content different that per-word / per kilobyte / per article micropayment makes more sense than in these other industries? Content may want to be free, but we all know it can't be - at least not all of it. But under block-rate pricing, it may be zero marginal cost. Ray Deck