The Simple Economics of Open Source

[Juergen A. Erhard]

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>>>>> "Albert" == Albert Wagner <alwagner at tcac.net> writes:

    Albert> [...]  All that is required is that a "critical mass" of
    Albert> participants realize that the shared rewards of long term
    Albert> cooperation exceed the rewards of short term reward at the
    Albert> expense of others.

Right... but the more important the stock exchanges of this world
become (in the public eye), the bigger this problem gets... there seem
to be (at least to the eyes of a layman (like me ;-)) a lot of
companies which *only* look at their stock price... and thus only at
their quarterly balance report (or whatever that was called).  And not
at any long-term effects of what they're doing...

    Albert> Those with uncooperative strategies view the pie as finite
    Albert> and feel that they must optimize their slice by
    Albert> diminishing the share of others.

When money's all you see (and most of those people do...), it *is* a
zero-sum game.  So their strategies are mostly correctly adapted to
the way they see the world around them.

But when you look at the bigger picture (`Spaceship Earth' comes to
mind[2])...

    Albert> Those with cooperative strategies have discovered that
    Albert> there are an infinite number of pies.

Wrong.[1] They simply discovered (or, rather, understood) that there
are enough pies so that *everyone* can be more than satiated ("Jeder
kann sich bis zum Erbrechen den Bauch vollschlagen" I'd say in
german).

In short: They found that there's enough for everyone...

And the long-term benefits are immeasurable (simply because you can't
measure the opposite... you can't know what *would* have happened,
just what *has* :-).

Bye, J

[1] The human-accessible part of this solar system is finite, right?
So there simple cannot be an infinite number of pies, even if you
could bake a pie out of one atom... ;-)

- -- 
Jürgen A. Erhard      eMail: jae at ilk.de      phone: (GERMANY) 0721 27326
     MARS: http://members.tripod.com/Juergen_Erhard/mars_index.html
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