The Simple Economics of Open Source

[Robin Becker]

In article <FtDG4z.774 at world.std.com>, Will Ware <wware at world.std.com>
writes
>Ed (elb at cfdrc.com) wrote:
>> ... I didn't think much of the article...
>> ...they gave the impression that programmers behave
>> somewhat like monkeys, motivated primarily by concerns
>> about group status and dominance...
>
>They also mentioned, but immediately belittled, the possibility
>that altruism might be a real motivation. They may have been
>projecting their own thinking upon programmers in doing so. I'm
>not an open source purist, but I can easily see that a future world
>with a lot of free software will be a lot more pleasant for me to
>live in than one from which free software is absent. Benefits to
>the rest of society and to myself are not in conflict here. Maybe
>that's not really altruism, maybe it's just long-term thinking, a
>motivation they didn't mention at all.

I'm afraid your desire for a better world reduces your altruism
quotient.
Doing it because it helps others is altruism, doing it to help your self
and or relatives isn't really. The indian otters which help injured
friends were thought to be altruists until it was shown that by doing so
they reduced their own risk of predation (the slow one attracted the
predators most). Real altruism is rare.

I think the main self benefit that open sourcerers get is simple
enjoyment; rather like doing a cross-word with others. There may be side
benefits like getting kudos or a few million dollars as well. I would
hate to be Linus Torvalds at this point in time. I wonder how many
emails he gets each day; no wonder he now gets snappy with co-
developers.

I think arguing that we get better software is a bit spurious since it's
very difficult to compare things like operating systems or office
packages. It may well be true that we get more secure software as more
eyes get to see inside, but I don't think it's a guarantee that no
backdoors etc will be left in code. Few people other than applied
mathematicians will look at linear programming algorithms, many of the
mathematicians will 'turn off' when they come to deep magic (say related
to memory allocation or shared memory files or threading). In real
science, a rule of thumb is that 3 people read each paper (including
author and reviewers); perhaps one understands it.
-- 
Robin Becker