The Simple Economics of Open Source

[Glyph Lefkowitz]

I was too tempted by the philosophical sounding thread.  Forgive me
for jumping in =)

"Juergen A. Erhard" <jae at ilk.de> writes:

> Egoism is often equated with the profit motive these days (little
> wonder in our money-based society...[2])

Yes, and THIS is where the mistake is from ... there are a LARGE
number of reasons to do something for personal gain that decidedly do
NOT involve gaining money.  This is where economic models fall short,
IMHO -- the fact that they are so largely successful seems to me to be
a cynical statement on our society.  I suppose it comes from the fact
that the distinction between a corporation (whose only reason for
existance is money) and an individual (whose reason for existance I
will withhold judgement on for the time being) become somewhat
confused in that context.

For example, if I buy flowers for my lady-friend, and she is happy,
the fact that she is happy makes *me* happy, and does nothing to
improve my financial standing.  I lose money, the flowers are dead
after a month, and likely by then she's forgotten about them ... but
I'll buy them anyway.  Flowers are important.

If a corporation buys flowers for its employees, those have to be
"justified", as an "investment" in "human resources".  Happiness
doesn't matter, unless it can somehow increase productivity.

>   Xyzzy (for lack of a name[3]) is "I get *rid* of something".  Or "I
>   get something of my chest".

As I'm not doing anything altruistic when I buy flowers for a lady in
the previous example (her happiness makes me happy, for reasons having
to do with psychology too complicated to get into here) and so I'm
buying them to make myself happy, if I'm doing something to "get
something off my chest" (which I think is a horrible way of looking at
creative endeavors -- I prefer to think of them as a personal *gain*,
not a zero-sum necessity) then I'm doing it to get something off *my*
chest.  So you could express that as an egoistic motivation.

In fact, any altruistic (or xyzzyistic ^_^) motivation could be
reduced to an egoistic one -- obviously, you think that it stands to
gain you *something* by doing that thing, otherwise YOU wouldn't do
it.  Even the most self-avowedly altruistic person must be making
decisions as to what sort of altruism to engage in for themselves, and
therefore acting on some sort of self-based motivation.  The purer the
altruism, the less governance the altruist allowed over those
decisions.

The ultimate altruist is a mind-controlled zombie.

That said, the other interesting thing about open-source software is
that unlike other apparently altruistic endeavors, it requires very
little maintenance -- progress made in OSS is archived, and
effectively, anyone who wishes to follow the rules (I.E. adhere to the
license) can build upon it without wasting or duplicating any effort.

For example, if you run across some dusty two-year-old python code
that (f'rinstance) facilitates time-travel, and you hack on it for a
while, bring it up to date, but get bored or disinterested because of
more pressing concerns, like the upcoming alien invasion, you can put
your code out there and somebody else with a like mind might come
along and pick up where you left off.  Keeping the code archived in a
couple hundred places on the internet in case someone else becomes
interested is remarkably cheap.  The lower the "barrier to entry", the
more likely a random passerby is to contribute.

A soup-kitchen on the other hand, despite its more immediate (and IMHO
more deeply gratifying) effect of diminishing the horrors of poverty,
will collapse because of infrastructure expenses if the volunteers
gradually stop showing up, and won't be around for the next set of
volunteers to pick up at the point at which it left off, so it
requires more investment on their part, and more momentum to get going
again.  Real world brick-and-mortar type stuff requires significantly
more upkeep than bits, and is much harder to reproduce.

> Ranting-is-my-middle-name-(Chorus:-"Obviously!")-ly y'rs, J

Is signing with an adjective some sort of initiation rite on this list? ;-)

life-is-a-game-we-play-in-first-person-perspective-ly y'rs, Glyph

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