If Open Source has won the argument, I'd like some clarification of what "The Argument" is, or was. That an open source product has been reasonably successful is fine, good luck to them, but there's nothing new about Open Source. It's simply voluntary work, which has always played a part in societies.

Looked at cynically, we can argue that Firefox is a system in which naive idealists are exploited by a central selfish authority (Mozilla). The reality is, most people working on Firefox, and most of the users, are driven more by a zealous anti-Microsoft agenda than anything else. Whether Firefox is actually "better" is subjective. I used it for a while, but eventually switched to Opera. For instance, Firefox has (or still had, last I looked) a broken cache which means backing into a form leads to that "page has expired from cache, if you go back it will be reposted to the server) message. Wise coders tell me this is a fundamental brokeness in the code that would require a complete rewrite to fix. I also didn't personally like the need to hunt around for plugins, which I think appeals rather to geeks and people who buy different coloured fronts for their mobile phones. If that's the product they like, great. But it's not objectively better than, say IE or Opera.

Anyway, back with the business model. It doesn't really prove anything. All we've seen is that netgeeks, driven by an abiding hatred of the market leader, will devote their valuable time to attempting to undercut it with a free product. That's a considerable expenditure of opportunity cost. As such, Firefox is parasitic on the productive economy; its coders need some other income to subsidise their hobby, be that from other jobs, or the state, or their parents. They can only do it because they exist in a massive productive economy that works on conventional lines. There aren't many Ghanain subsistence farmers coding for Open Source, because they're too busy growing food to avoid starving to death. Firefox's free workforce can only do that because they've got another income.

So any voluntary software sector can only be limited in size. It can only be parasitic on the real economy. And as I said above, the main thing driving it anyway is a kind of religious socialist zeal against Evil Corporations.

So, from a classical liberal perspective, the Firefoxers aren't acting as rational agents. They're giving away the products of their work to somebody else who profits from it (Mozilla), just as say a Wikipedia contributor is giving away their work to somebody else who profits from it (Jimbo Wales). When that opportunity cost is sustainable, fair enough, if that's what they want to do with their time. But it's not economically rational and can thus only succeed as a small sideshow to the real economy.

It hasn't proved anything, let alone won an argument.

Posted by Ian B at December 22, 2007 03:25 PM

hey're giving away the products of their work to somebody else who profits from it...

Is gaining more money the only form of "profit" that there is? There are various reasons that open source coders will write code, including the enhancement of their reputation in having written it or simply the pleasure of having created software that does what they want.
In some cases people may be paid for writing open source code, and the cost of paying these wages may be recovered by charging for services. Red Hat, for example, makes huge sums of money from training courses and Linux certification.
At present we have various forms of open source and proprietary software available (including such things as "shareware"), and this is as it should be. Anyone who creates anything should have the right to dispose of it as they wish, in exchange for money or otherwise. Customers should be able to choose whatever software product they like, based on either the quality of the product or the terms on which they may use it.

Posted by knirirr at December 22, 2007 03:46 PM

I have to strongly disagree with Ian at being labeled a "naive idealist" for contributing for no pay to open source projects. I knew exactly what I was doing and made a rational economic decision to do so. The key thing Ian is neglecting is the cost to me of not contributing. In my case, I had task A to accomplish, which was very important. I could spend N hours working, for no pay, to contribute code that would let me do A in some open source project. Or I could have spent 10N hours doing something from scratch. The economic benefit to me of contributing "free" code should be obvious. The only reason not to have done so would be spite at the "parasites". But frankly, I don't care about them. I just needed to get task A done with the least effort.

We can see that one thing Open Source does is allow the pooling of such minor, individual needs in to a single large effort. Open Source is not a panacea, but it works in situations in which a large number of people have strongly overlapping but not quite identical requirements. Each person, individually, spends a moderate amount of effort in return for a much larger solution. I.e., each individual can see a positive economic return. No parasitism is required.

P.S. One can also view the controllers of an Open Source project the same way as editors for a link weblog. The reason search engines and editors generate value for surfers and readers, despite not generating any content, is the same reason that Red Hat generates value customers will pay for.

Posted by Annoying Old Guy at December 22, 2007 04:11 PM

Open Source ... works in situations in which a large number of people have strongly overlapping but not quite identical requirements.

Ah, yes. That is a good point. BOINC">http://boinc.berkeley.edu/">BOINC is a good example (due to which I have a job ;-).

Posted by knirirr at December 22, 2007 04:18 PM

Knirirr, I'm not suggesting anyone should tell you what to do with your time. I'm a libertarian. You have every right to do as you wish, to give away what you wish, or sell it, or raffle it, or hide the things you create in a hole in the ground. It's nothing to do with me or anyone else.

I was discussing what Open Source "proves" and I don't think it proves anything. I draw rude cartoons for a living. I give some away for free, just for fun. I charge for others. Some of my work is motivated entirely by a desire for a round of applause from people who like rude cartoons. I'm certainly not saying people should be obligated to charge money for anything. In such terms, kudos is indeed a form of "profit", and seeking it is not irrational, because it provides a personal gain in terms of pleasure, besides all else.

But economically the OS movement doesn't really prove anything at all. It's not an alternative model to the paid economy. It has no means of support. It can only support itself, like a church, by asking for voluntary donations, so rather than being a new model it's just a very old model called charity. One lazy pastime of mine is, when I visit old churches, to read the old plaques on the walls that describe bequests "John De Courcey haf bequefed 10 fhillings, that 4 warm coatf each year be profided to the cronef of the parifh", and those detail somebody doing a charitable act in return for, not money, but a place in heaven, or kudos from parishioners, or so forth.

But economically Open Source can only function within a productive economy parasitically, just as any other form of voluntary or charity work. If there is nobody charging, if everybody everywhere, gave their work for free, we'd all starve to death. Without sales, profit, competition, the economy wouldn't work. Any libertarian understands this, which is why we're all free market fans.

And as I've pointed out, the particular irrationality of the Firefox movement is it's entirely driven by loathing of Microsoft orchestrated by the descendents of Netscape, who were beaten out of the market by a better business model. Look at it- browsers aren't even particularly important. It's just a thing that displays web pages. The "beat microsoft" fervour is close to religious in nature. If it weren't for that anti-corporate zealotry, would anyone really care that much about such a dull product as a browser?

So what I'm saying is that it hasn't won an argument. It isn't something that's better than free market profit-driven capitalism let alone a replacement for it. It's just a voluntary sector enterprise which can only exist because the rest of the market generates the actually money to pay for it.

As such, it's not economically rational.

Posted by Ian B at December 22, 2007 04:41 PM

Interestingly (and I write as an Opera user), Opera have just gone to the European Court with a demand that Microsoft be forced to abide by "web standards". I suspect there will be much cheering about this, especially if they win. But what, from a libertarian perspective, is really going on?

Well of course they're rent seeking. Firstly, they hope to damage Microsoft, using State power to harm Microsoft's business, and thus improve Opera's market position.

Secondly, they're attempting to provide state backing for the private bureaucracy of the w3c, to elevate it to a state-backed bureaurcacy who will have the legal power to manage the internet. Opera are significant w3c players, of course.

It's classic corporate socialism, a desire to place a special interest group into a position of governmental power as regulators, while reducing freedom and competition in the market. Why should the w3c have some special authority to impose its view of how the web should develop upon the entire marketplace? Why should a bureaucracy be able to order manufacturers to make their products work in particular ways, or ban features, or force inclusion of others? Who are these w3c guys anyway?

Tim Berners Lee invented the internets, we're told. Does this give him some special authority? Must we ask Mr Marconi how we may use our wireless sets? (I add here I'm particularly wary as TBL seems to be a buffoonish academic with, like most bureaucrats, no understanding of the issues, as his bizarrely impracticable dream of The Semantic Web demonstrates).

But back to the thing. Libertarians believe in freedom within the marketplace so should oppose this attempt to use the courts to impose a regulatory regime. But I suspect, with the strange confusion libertarians have in seeing OS as libertarian, rather than the collectivist-driven ideology it is, they'll be cheering. Sadly.

Posted by Ian B at December 22, 2007 05:02 PM

Ian: The point about Mozilla and Red Hat - and IBM and Sun and Novell etc - is that they are also *paying* programmers to write open source code.

Posted by Clued at December 22, 2007 05:04 PM

"If Open Source has won the argument, I'd like some clarification of what "The Argument" is, or was. That an open source product has been reasonably successful is fine, good luck to them, but there's nothing new about Open Source. It's simply voluntary work, which has always played a part in societies."

The argument is about whether open source can be economically sustainable.

Open source is *not* just about voluntary work: it's a model in which people are earning a living off the back of writing open source code.

Posted by Alex Singleton at December 22, 2007 05:07 PM

So you're saying that the movement would be economically sustainable without the voluntary element? Has that been demonstrated?

Posted by Ian B at December 22, 2007 05:12 PM

the main thing driving it anyway is a kind of religious socialist zeal against Evil Corporations.

Yet strangely, wild eyed dedicated capitalists are often pro open source (Alex Singleton, for example). In fact most of the open source code geeks I know are pro-capitalist libertarians and would probably bash you in the face with their Hewlett-Packard button boxes if you called them a socialist.

So, from a classical liberal perspective, the Firefoxers aren't acting as rational agents.

Then I would say your definition is wrong. Clearly they feel they are getting value, so they are hardly acting irrationally. The fact they chose to measure that value in a different way to you does not make them irrational agents. It all makes perfect sense to this particular classical liberal.

Posted by Perry de Havilland at December 22, 2007 05:41 PM

Ian,

If you ever read an EULA, you would have lost any belief that you had that the major software makers are less collectivist than the open source movement. In fact, where you are totally off base is that there are open source projects which license their code under commerce-friendly licenses like the BSD license. The businesses that use their code are frequently quite generous in terms of giving back and supporting the hobbyists ranging from paying for the costs of the hardware and bandwidth to develop the product, to giving full-time employment to the better developers to work 40+ hours a week on their hobby. In some cases, those same hobbyists turn around and develop a whole business around extensions and services, and their name carries a lot of weight in terms of getting customers.

Even the GPL is nowhere near as onerous as the average EULA. It even says that if you are just an end user, stop reading it because you're free to do as you please. EULAs are shackles that take a product which should be free to use within the limits of copyright law, and make you a sharecropper on your own computer.

The day that these companies stop restricting their users beyond the basic limits of copyright law, is the day that I'll be a lot more enthusiastic about their position.

Posted by MikeT at December 22, 2007 05:41 PM

So, from a classical liberal perspective, the Firefoxers aren't acting as rational agents.

The idea of humanity as rational agents is largely specious anyway. The majority of economic decisions are irrational. It is not rational to pay $4 at Starbucks for a latte that you could make at home for less than $1. Get a nespresso system and a milk frother, and you don't need Starbucks, but how many people (in America, anyway) make that rational decision to save serious cash? Very few.

Man is a rationalizing animal, and most of the time that rationalization is just a thin wrapper around emotion.

Posted by MikeT at December 22, 2007 05:45 PM

Ian;

I addressed that in my earlier comment. I claim that Open Source can exist, not as a parasite, nor as a replacement, but as a adjunct mechanism in a free market. I.e., that it can be economically rational to contribute to an Open Source project. I.e., I do work an in return obtain something of personal, economic value. Whether money is literally involved or not seems a minor point, though you seem to view it as somehow essential.

P.S. "Voluntary" is a bad choice of term. Is not the very essence of a free market that everything is voluntary?

Posted by Annoying Old Guy at December 22, 2007 05:57 PM

Yet strangely, wild eyed dedicated capitalists are often pro open source (Alex Singleton, for example). In fact most of the open source code geeks I know are pro-capitalist libertarians and would probably bash you in the face with their Hewlett-Packard button boxes if you called them a socialist.

I know a lot of socialists who spit blood if you call them a socialist, too, heh. I'd suggest that a lot of libertarians are libertarians-except-this-thing-that-affects-me-personally. There are lots of people calling themselves libertarians; take the Randians for instance, who are really following a kind of snobbish personality cult. That seems to be quite popular among "net libertarians".

Then I would say your definition is wrong. Clearly they feel they are getting value, so they are hardly acting irrationally. The fact they chose to measure that value in a different way to you does not make them irrational agents. It all makes perfect sense to this particular classical liberal.

But don't socialists feel they're getting value too?

I'm not discussing rationality in a grand objective sense of trying to define some mindset as objectively rational (ooh, Rand again). I'm talking about a straightforward economic definition of rationality i.e. maximising one's own economic benefit.

All sorts of things are irrational in the general perspective, from somebody's point of view, from enjoying getting drunk to collecting beer mats. It's a question of whether the OS movement (and the fact that it's a "movement" is a clue here) is more or equally economically rational than the capitalist free market. I contend that it is not.

Imagine, for a moment, that the government declared all software to be free. They pay some programmers, put moral pressure on other ordinary citizen programmers to contribute "for the national good", then hand out the resultant products to everybody for no cost. How would that affect the private sector software industry? Would it be ultimately good for the economy as a whole? Would there be an ultimate net benefit, or loss?

Posted by Ian B at December 22, 2007 06:00 PM

Annoying Old Guy:

My argument would be that indeed the OS movement can exist happily as an adjunct to the free market, as can many other things in life. Life is more than the market. Life is about living. We're human beings, not numbers.

I merely contend that it can only ever be an adjunct; and it the word parasitic is too harsh I simply mean that it needs the free market, the booming real economy, as a "host".

We know that the free market can and does supply every material need that government doesn't prevent it from supplying. The OS model cannot do that. It can only be some part which is too small that it doesn't seriously damage the host economy. It's inherently limited by that.

I say again; I'm not arguing that it should be banned or people shouldn't be allowed to contribute, simply that it's not some kind of replacement for the free market model, which OS fans seem to claim often; that it proves that commercial software companies don't need to exist since the OS movement and the Free Software Movement produce software; ergo they could produce it all. I don't think that's even vaguely true.

That's why I'm saying the existence of Linux and Firefox doesn't "prove" anything other than that a successful economy gives citizens time to have hobbies, which I think we all kind of knew already.

It's kind of like my local steam railway preservation society. A lot of people there enjoy that and I'm certainly not arguing they shouldn't! But it doesn't prove that a steam railway run by enthusiasts in their spare time would be able to effectively serve the transport needs of the entire country.

Posted by Ian B at December 22, 2007 06:11 PM

MikeT:

I entirely agree with you about EULAs. Since I've typed a lot here, I won't this time. My general view is that I don't think they're fair contracts and I'd argue that in a libertarian society they wouldn't even be legal, since they infringe my property rights as owner of my computer. I don't see as a libetarian how a company can have a right to dictate what is done with a product after they have sold it.

Posted by Ian B at December 22, 2007 06:17 PM

I'm not discussing rationality in a grand objective sense of trying to define some mindset as objectively rational (ooh, Rand again). I'm talking about a straightforward economic definition of rationality i.e. maximising one's own economic benefit.

And that is where you go off the rails. Your definitions are simplistic to the point I think it has led you into error. In a non-subsistence economy, profit maximisation is often not rational behaviour and sometimes it is in fact a sign of mental and philosophical derangement (I speak as a former commodity broker and investment banker who knows of such things).

People enter markets as buyers and sellers for a great many reasons and maximisation of dollars in the bank is only one of several motivations. Any analysis that reduces markets to the desire for profit maximisation as expressed by exchanges of money, is not a very deep analysis.

Posted by Perry de Havilland at December 22, 2007 06:32 PM

oh, and as Rand could not get her head around the conjectural nature of our understanding of reality, I would hardly hold her up as a paragon of rationality :-P

Posted by Perry de Havilland at December 22, 2007 06:34 PM

Any analysis that reduces markets to the desire for profit maximisation as expressed by exchanges of money, is not a very deep analysis.

Perhaps, but it's quanitifiable. Beyond that, you end up wandering into Keynesian babble about investors' "wild animal spirits" or whatever it was he burbled. If we don't start from a reasonable assumption that actors in the economy are attempting to maximise their economic success, we have no basis and may as well read tea leaves.

People, as human beings, have many motivations. We can most of us sustain some degree of economic irrationality (indeed, I do this myself by choosing to be a low paid creator of rude cartoons, rather than the engineer I was which earned me more moolah). But ultimately we can reasonably expect that businesses are motivated by a desire to increase their profits, and that a business which, for instance, seeks to minimise them would have a similar level of success to a species which evolves to enjoy hurling itself off cliffs.

So in a sense you're parodying my POV. We can recognise that most agents will act sub-optimally (even if trying to act optimally, being flawed humans with incomplete knowledge they will fail to be optimal) without having to believe that the agents aren't competing on the basis of economic success.

The economist analyses their economic behaviour. Bottom line is, most people are trying to make more money, one way or another, even if they're rubbish at it like what I am. :)

Posted by Ian B at December 22, 2007 06:40 PM

Ian,

Then consider that many of the people who came to the open source camp came there because it offers much more freedom than they get from proprietary software. Open source as we know it wouldn't even be an issue if EULAs were entirely legally unenforceable, and the states were quite willing to punish software companies that tried to enforce them through code instead of courts.

A lot of the hatred of these companies is only partially irrational, as a lot of it comes from a hatred of their attitude that they own the copy you are using at that moment. One of the areas where many libertarians lose legitimacy with the public is when they argue that contract law is super sacred, and that it would be "statist" for the state to put regulations into the contract law to not enforce licenses that deny basic property rights to buyers. Bitterly ironic, to argue that it is statist for the state to choose to simply not enforce some contracts, but there you have it.

As a software engineer, I am sick and tired of the parasites that work at these think tanks who come out with their whacked social engineering plans for how to tell me what to do.

Posted by MikeT at December 22, 2007 07:08 PM

Personally, I've always believed many of the EULA terms are borderline insane. I have to say I've never been troubled by them either, but it's absurd that I've agreed to the contract inside the box when I take the shrinkwrap off.

I do think much of the hatred of Microsoft is irrational, since it's accused of "authoritarian" practices which other companies aren't accused of. Nobody minds Apple or *nix companies bundling browsers and the multitude of extras common in modern OS's. It's simply cool to hate microsoft, and that seems to stretch all the way back to the days of the Homebrew Computer Club and a generalised idea that capitalism is, like, wrong, and everything should be free and shared and so on. When I see that "information should be free, and like bits and bytes are information so, like, software should be free, mm'kay?" argument- well that goes back a long way and it's absurd, and it long predates the corporate EULAs we all laugh at before tossing them on the fire.

I agree that libertarians are often moonbatty in their purism; sometimes reading Rothbard makes my eyes roll skwards in despair (not least because having abolished the state I've yet to find him explain what is going to prevent another one arising) but I think part of it is that libertarians have been outside the mainstream so long that it's easy to lose touch with reality and a purist approach develops which ends up with them being no more credible than the wild eyed loon selling Socialist Worker on a street corner.

Ooh, I'm waffling again. Back to the point.

I don't think you'd need to extend contract law to limit EULAs. Instead, I'd expect that in our imaginary libertarian society, any company attempting to enforce one would get laughed out of court since the contract would be attempting to make a claim of control over somebody else's property (the computer the software is running on). It would be no more enforcable than an EULA stating "using this software gives me the right to take your firstborn child", which would immediately bang up against the (hypothetical) constitutional rights to life and liberty.

That's just my perspective. IANAL, etc. But then, I consider myself a libertarian not an anarchist.

Posted by Ian B at December 22, 2007 07:30 PM

Perhaps, but it's quanitifiable.

Which is where you become a bit unreasonable. Just because you cannot find a satisfactory way to measure it, that does not mean it is not real.

But ultimately we can reasonably expect that businesses are motivated by a desire to increase their profits, and that a business which, for instance, seeks to minimise them would have a similar level of success to a species which evolves to enjoy hurling itself off cliffs.

Except that is not really the choice on offer and a great many businesses are quite happy to occupy a limited market niche without expanding out of it... the whole 'long tail' thing is partially an expression of that truth.

The conduct of the open source people is not generally self-destructive (putting other people out of business often isn't) and as long as it satisfies the demands of the users and gives some form of value (which may not be money) to the producers, it will continue.

We can most of us sustain some degree of economic irrationality

But the motivations of the open source people are not irrational. The reason that do not compute for you is a function of the limitations of your quantifiable analysis model, not because those people are irrational.

Posted by Perry de Havilland at December 22, 2007 07:31 PM

On EULAs, I'd also add that IMV the main reason the stupid things exist at all is that ordinary users don't have the wealth and time to fight them through the courts- taking on Microsoft, Apple or anyone else would be an immense undertaking. So we put up with them.

As such, if a libertarian society is going to rely very heavily on contract law, libertarians need a good way to make a court system which is accessible to all-- but won't end up endlessly bogged down by millions of vexatious and trivial cases. Which might be quite a challenge.

Posted by Ian B at December 22, 2007 07:38 PM

Except that is not really the choice on offer and a great many businesses are quite happy to occupy a limited market niche without expending out of it

That doesn't answer my point. Ask any businessman in a limited niche if he'd like more money, what do you think the answer would be? Well, ask a group, rather, since we're talking trends rather than explaining the actions of every last individual here.

Surely you're not arguing that it's wrong to believe that businesses in general are trying to out-compete their competitors, expand their market, get more customers, make more money etc, are you? Isn't that the very basis of the free market?

...not because those people are irrational.

They're not being economically rational. That's their free choice. But a hobby is not a superior business model, as I keep saying.

Posted by Ian B at December 22, 2007 07:51 PM

On EULAs: as annoying as they are, it's not as if anyone is forcing anyone else to buy their software at gunpoint.

Posted by Alisa at December 22, 2007 08:11 PM

One of the benefits that Open Source has in the desktop space is a huge degree of standardisation of the hardware. We're not quite at Venor Vinge's SHE (Secure Hardware Environment of _Rainbow's End_) but we're pretty close. It allows developers to be nicely insulated from the hardware and gives them the freedom to write stuff.

I work in the Embedded Systems space and discussions around Embedded Linux keep coming up. The problem for the embedded space is it doesn't have the same standardisation of hardware that you get in desktop so you find yourself having to do a lot of work on different silicon to get the OS to even boot. That requires a small dedicated team working pretty much non-stop on quite expensive development boards. By the time you have got the embedded OS up and running on the silicon you've invested a pretty non-trivial chunk of time and money. It's not something that can easily done in distributed groups and optimisation for power management, graphics and so forth is a nightmare. Once you've done all that, there's not a lot of interest in sharing the results so others can use it.

If the underlying hardware standardised then this could change - but currently there's a lot of competition in the space, a good dozen silicon vendors share the embedded application market and that makes for a lot of opportunities. It might be a failure of imagination on my part but there are already a lot of failed embedded Linux platforms out there.

Posted by Daveon at December 22, 2007 08:51 PM

Where Ian B seems to be going wrong is in assuming that money is an end in itself. It's not. It's only a mechanism for greasing the wheels of exchange.

If I raise chickens and give someone half a dozen of them in exchange for a pig that they've raised then we both benefit (or at least believe we do, otherwise we would not do it) and the transaction is part of the economy even though it does not involve money and is thus not directly measurable.

Perhaps I can't find someone who wants to swap a pig for chickens. The guy with the pigs doesn't want chickens, he wants web browser software for his computer. Maybe the software guy would like some chickens? So I give the software guy chickens in exchange for writing a web browser, and then I give the pig guy the web browser in exchange for his pig. Or I tell the software guy to go see the pig guy directly. Whatever.

After a while this all gets too hard, so we invent money. I give my chickens to someone in exchange for funny bits of paper, I give those bits of paper to the pig guy in exchange for a pig, and he gives the paper to the software guy in exchange for a web browser.

The money is useful in reducing the costs of exchange, but it doesn't add anything *fundamental* to it.

If there was some way for people to match up their labour or products directly to the things they wanted without spending a huge proportion of their time on doing the matching up then an economy with no money would work just fine. But Ian B would say there was no economy there at all, because he couldn't measure it by watching bits of paper (or electronic bits representing bits of paper) moving around.

But software gets even more interesting. If I give someone a chicken then I don't have that chicken any more and can't give it to anyone else. But the guy who wrote the web browser for the pig guy still has his web browser. He can give it to me as well, in exchange for a chicken. And to someone else in exchange for something else.

This is something quite different! And it doesn't depend on whether or not there is money involved.

Posted by Bruce Hoult at December 22, 2007 09:23 PM

Perry wrote:
Except that is not really the choice on offer and a great many businesses are quite happy to occupy a limited market niche without expending out of it

Ian B replied:
They're not being economically rational. That's their free choice. But a hobby is not a superior business model, as I keep saying.

So what you're saying is that Mercedes is irrational unless they try to become Toyota?

Posted by Bruce Hoult at December 22, 2007 09:30 PM

Bruce, I don't believe I'm making that mistake, not least because I myself have a habit of explaining what money is to people by pretty much the same explanation you used, although I tend to end up with pigs and bushels of corn for some reason.

Money makes the economy easier to measure of course because it's a standardised unit, but let's remember that say GDP is defined in terms of the value of goods and services. We could equally measure the value of an economy in chickens, pigs, potatoes, bicycles and browsers. For a more meaningful figure we could define everything in terms of chickens (1 pig is worth 20 chickens, 1 bicycle is worth 50 chickens, and so on) and we could still talk meaningfully about value. There would still be an economy to measure without money. I can bore for England about how money is just another good, honest.

I don't see that your paragraph about the infinite perfect duplicability of software is what we're talking about. That's another issue. It applies to the mainstream economy as well (my cartoons are digital; I sell perfect copies of them).

What isn't infinitely duplicable is labour. If Fred spends 10 hours a week writing software, it's not free. That's 10 hours he could have spent doing paid work, or spent at leisure, or whatnot. It has an "opportunity cost". This is a calculation people make all the time. If i do this, I can't do that. If I spend 1/2 an hour a day blogging, that's 1/2 an hour I can't spend learning to ride a unicycle. And so on. There's no such thing as free time as such; everything we do has a time cost.

So maybe Fred has nothign better to do with his time than write software. It's his hobby. He'd do it anyway. Cool. But by writing free software, and then giving it somebody else, Fred isn't writing software that would have made him some money. That's the economic irrationality.

I repeat; this is not an allegation that Fred is an irrational person. It's a demonstration that the "Fred writes free software model" is less economically optimal for Fred than the "Fred writes software and swaps it for a chicken model" in economic terms. Fred could have maximised his chicken potential, but he didn't.

As such, the point remains that the use of "free" labour is reliant on a host economy in which those labourers can satisfy their chicken needs. On a small scale, if people want to give away their labour to enrich others, they're entitled to do that. But the others will only be enriched while the free labour force are supported by the greater economy. As such, any such business model can only be a sideshow. If it grows too big, the economy on which it depends will suffer. It may for instance entirely destroy the free market software industry in an extreme case; and then you end up with a kind of software welfare programme; Fred and his friends have destroyed an economically productive industry and replaced it with one that isn't. Firefox is moderately successful because it's free. Very few of its fans would pay for it- in dollars, chickens or pigs. This tells us it has little value to them in the most general sense. Its only measurable value seems to be as a loss leader for Google.

Posted by Ian B at December 22, 2007 09:54 PM

On the particular subject of Firefox, they are hiring quite a lot of good people.

I'm working for a small software company in Wellington, NZ. We're trying to hire people and expand. During 2006 we had four people (including the founder) A friend of mine was unhappy in his job and I tried to hire him. He went to work for Mozilla instead. Can't blame him ... millions of people will use his work and they were offering more money too.

One of the guys who was already working for us had to move to Auckland for personal reasons. He went to work for Mozilla as well.

Another small company in our building (Silverstripe) wrote a web site content management system for their own use in making web sites for their customers. This time last year they released the entire thing as open source software. Now business is way up and they're expanding.

Open Source is pretty clearly viable as a business model, at least in some cases, and not only in the mega ones such as Mozilla and RedHat.

It seems to me that the hard thing with Open Source is to get a new project going from scratch. It's relatively easy, and quite rational, to take an existing product that would be time consuming and expensive to duplicate, Open Source it, watch the user base grow dramatically, and live off consulting around it.

But how do you get started?

We know that one way is to have an extremely talented and energetic individual do the initial work and give it away. Linus Torvaalds with Linux, for example. Was what he did rational? I don't know, but he seems to be doing ok for himself.

Mind you, Linus could not have done what he did without the prior work of Richard Stallman.

I'm not going to try to make the case the Stallman is rational. I have after all met him.

Posted by Bruce Hoult at December 22, 2007 09:54 PM

Bruce, are you saying that Mercedes don't seek to increase their profitability?

You seem to be accusing me of saying that only cheap mass-market products are rational. I never meant to say that, and I'm sure I didn't. The point is that Mercedes would always choose a business plan that they think will make them more money rather than less. Besides all else, Mercedes attempting to break Toyota's market may well not achieve that. It would be very risky indeed.

Posted by Ian B at December 22, 2007 09:57 PM

So Mozilla hire. That's cool. Surely though we're discussing the issue of software in which a considerable component of the workforce are unpaid (or marginally paid) volunteers?

One can't blame Mozilla for making money if they can convince people to do that. Heck, if I could get an army of unpaid workers to draw comics for me, I'd probably end up hiring some workers too as my corporation expanded. I'd need some kind of schtick to keep the unpaid guys working... some kind of crusade would help. Maybe overthrowing the Marvel/DC hegemony in comics, I dunno. May work.

Anyway, that's the thing that raises eyebrows about the likes of Mozilla, isn't it?

"Keep coding, kid, and maybe we'll like buy you a new hard drive or something. We really appreciate it, really. Thanks. Heh."

Posted by Ian B at December 22, 2007 10:04 PM

A couple points:

You are making one of the same mistakes the Randians make when they discuss 'altruism'. They define that as a 'bad things' and by the way they define it, it is indeed a bad thing.

Unfortunately no one other than the Randians accepts their definition of what altruism is, so an argument with (some) Randians is utterly pointless on semantic grounds.

In much the same way, what you describe as economically irrational is not irrational at all. If you define 'economically irrational' as "doing something which does not attempt to maximise cash money profits" then sure, open source is irrational by your definition. But that is really not what irrational means the way most other people would define it. It is not even what economically irrational means to rather a lot of other people.

Secondly, this 'hobby' is going to destroy a lot of 'serious' businesses because competing with what is in effect 'free' is really really difficult unless you have a vastly superior product (and that is indeed the case with some products... which is why game mods do not displace high cost/high production value games for example (in fact they often help drive the sales of them)).

Just as the music industry is in the process of being destroyed (in 15 years tops, the only way to make significant money out of music will be to tour live), so too a lot of other 'serious' business models are going to become extinct because they will find themselves competing with hobbyists who are affluent enough to not care very much about getting paid in money for their work. They will get paid in reputation (which some will even monetise in a related field, although most will not) or just in the warm fuzzy glow of developing their craft. The evidence is all around us.

Posted by Perry de Havilland at December 22, 2007 10:14 PM

OK I think we're getting somewhere.

The last bit of the puzzle is the "army of unpaid (and exploited) volunteers". And the guy who sits in his basement for five years living on nothing and then gives all his work away.

Simply put: they don't exist.

Or at least not in significant numbers. Yes there's Richard Stallman. And yes, there are kids who haven't had a real job yet, or haven't had a job in the area they want to work in, and think that putting contributions to an open source project on their resumes will help them find paid work doing similar things. (they're correct, btw)

But. The truth is that the *vast* majority of work on open source projects is done by people who are being paid to do it.

Not being paid specifically to work on open source software (usually), but being paid to do some other useful job in your "host economy". They find some huge body of existing work on the internet that does something they need to have done. It might be the apache web server, or the Perl programming language, or Open Office. Whatever.

Your business needs word processing software You could not possibly justify the century or so it would take to write it from scratch yourself. And Microsoft Office would do 99% of the job. But there's something missing, some little feature that would make it fit perfectly into how your business is run. Can you go to Microsoft and get them to change Word? Fat chance. But Open Office does the same 99% of the job, and because you have the source code you can fix it up to do the other 1% yourself in a few days or weeks, without having to write the entire word processor yourself.

It seems to me that is an entirely rational choice.

And of course lots of other people are getting an even better deal: they're getting the same software and not putting effort into modifying it at all, just using it.

So making modifications to Open Source software for your own use is economically rational. But why not keep your modifications to yourself?

Giving your modifications back helps the freeloaders. And it helps some of the other people who are also adding their own improvements, which in turn make the product more useful for you. But that's pretty nebulous. You don't actually *have* to give your changes back and the benefits of doing so are pretty tenuous, other than the "feelgood".

Having been there, I can tell you that there is one excellent reason to give your improvements back. It is so that you don't have to merge your local changes into every new release that you get. It is so that you don't have to maintain your own local install package for that one (or a dozen) bits of software that you've changed. If you contribute your changes back then they will be on the next mass-produced install CD, and you can just install the standard package and your special feature will simply be there.

THAT is worth real money.

Posted by Bruce Hoult at December 22, 2007 10:32 PM

I don't think I'm using any Randian definition of altruism at all. That's a bit of a straw man, it seems to me. I'm not defining something as bad. Altruism is a normal part of human existence, although it normally involves some level of reciprocity (I help my neighbour, maybe some time in the future she'll help me). Indeed, pure altruism is very rare.

I'm not sure that one can see this in terms of altruism. Firefox zealots aren't being altruistic, they're more like crusaders so far as I can see, following a particular ideology. So in terms of reciprocity, they give their time in return for furthering the ideology. That's basically cultic behaviour and we're getting rather removed from business models. What they get back for their time in terms of goods is a browser. Browsers on their own aren't that interesting. How much would you pay for one if they weren't free? 20 bucks? A hundred? The time devoted by the supporters is far in excess of that, so it seems we must conclude they're devoting their time for a greater purpose which as I said is cultic behaviour effectively. That's a bit scary.

There seems to be a tidge of glee in your statement that "this 'hobby' is going to destroy a lot of 'serious' businesses" and that bothers me because it's the kind of stuff that comes out of the zealots between gobbets of spittle. I don't see any great advantage to destroying businesses. I'm glad when the market finds a better solution; in the end all businesses fade away (not much market for steam engines now) but cheering the deliberate destruction of a productive sector of the economy is something strange and ideological IMV.

I've some experience with the entertainment industry and your idea of the zealot's gleeful declaration that music will all be free etc is a bit of a canard. Currently, most touring is a marginal or loss-making business (except the very top end where the music itself is a loss leader for selling merchandise) and the primary purpose of touring is to raise awareness to sell recordings. There seems to be this manic fascination with bringing down the entertainment industry- currently a significant employer which for the past century has given us a vast flood of great music, as only the free market can. My brother in law's a drummer. he's not rolling in cash but is okay. I'd feel no glee at him being thrown on the dole.

What is this fascination with hating the music corporations? Oh yeah, "music should be, like, free". Does it ever occur to you people that if there's no way to make money at it, maybe the product won't get made at all? Have we abolished the profit motive?

I admit, I speak as a minor creative person. But I'm mystified and infuriated by this widespread slashdot socialist idea that creative people shouldn't earn money for what they do. How many other jobs should this apply to? Shop workers, call centre workers, chicken farmers? Why aren't they working for love too instead of exploiting the masses selling their services and goods?

You may wake up one day and find that "free music" translates into "not much music at all" and even less "good music".

Posted by Ian B at December 22, 2007 10:42 PM

Linus Torvalds explained one aspect of the "altruism" involved in an interview a few months back that I'll be damned if I can find: you're someone who knows how to code. You may be a professional developer, you may not. It doesn't matter. You need a program to do a particular job. None of the commercial products quite fits the bill. Neither do any of the OSS ones. But one comes close, and you can add the feature that you need. You don't get paid in cash, but you get a useful tool that you couldn't buy or (easily) have built from scratch. That's the motivation, and the reward.

In fact, in that interview, Torvalds emphatically denied therefore that altruism was involved, saying that on the contrary, Open Source is driven by enlightened self-interest. He never mentioned either Rand or Smith by name, but I do wonder what he's been reading...

I always think the misunderstanding of Open Source derives from the fact that software has, for the last thirty years or so, since the earliest PCs, been treated (very successfully) as a thing. You went in to a shop and bought a box of Windows, or Word, or whatever. Even now, with distribution over the net, that idea of a software package being a pseudo-physical object persists. But code isn't an object; it's a set of instructions. It's less like a pizza, more like the recipe.

Of course, recipe books are big business. But what's really being sold there is the author's endorsement, or if it isn't a big-name author, the convenience of the collection. And that's what the commercial Linux distributors are doing: selling authority (Novell SUSE Linux, guaranteed to work, not just any rubbish downloaded off the internet), and convenience ("we'll sell you 24 hour tech support so you don't have to rely on internet forums populated by 1337 haxx0rz").

But of course, their product is based on a freely-available recipe, just like Warburton's bread. It's just bread. Nobody owns a patent on bread. There are no secret ingredients. Anyone could make bread just as good, possibly better. But it takes time and effort. You're buying convenience, and a guarantee that today's loaf will be the same as last week's.

No liberal economist would dispute the benefit of the rise of branded commodities in the 19th century, or that money can be made from branding goods whose method of manufacture is common knowledge. Why should software be different?

Posted by Sam Duncan at December 22, 2007 11:50 PM

Bruce Holt beat me to it with a far better comment.

One point I missed out from mine: a recent audit of the Linux kernel determined that the vast majority of the code was submitted by professional coders, paid for their work. Most of OpenOffice is by Sun and Novell. The hobbyists make a valuable contribution to OSS but for the most part, it's a business, not a hobby.

Posted by Sam Duncan at December 22, 2007 11:58 PM

I don't think I'm using any Randian definition of altruism at all. That's a bit of a straw man, it seems to me.

Go back. Re-read the bit... "You are making one of the same mistakes the Randians make when they discuss 'altruism'"...

The term you are using that I am objecting to is "rational agent" because I do not accept your definition, just as I do not accept the way Randians (not you) define altruism (they need to invent a new word for what they mean by altruism). The behaviour is rational, your model of rational activity is the problem in my view.

Posted by Perry de Havilland at December 22, 2007 11:59 PM

You may wake up one day and find that "free music" translates into "not much music at all" and even less "good music".

Again I disagree but probably because I despise 98% of the signed music I hear. I find it hard to imagine any scenario where more crap music as a proportion of total music gets produced than is produced today.

People will still make music because they want to make music and people will find it via the internet. If they are good, they will tour and make money. Just like now. That works for me.

Posted by Perry de Havilland at December 23, 2007 12:06 AM

On music, I think you're naive. Firstly, I don't agree with this "most of it is rubbish" argument. Maybe you don't like it, but millions of others do. That's called popularity and popular products are produced by the market. That's what it does. I've always loved music, and my record collection is full of gems that have given real enrichment to my life- most of it not wildly mainstream, but the music companies made it available to me. Would it have existed without them? No. Some music would have existed, but the vast quantity that has enriched the 20th century is due to the music industry. Go into a record store and look at the diversity; the sheer multiplicity of genres and styles that have never existed in human history before. Would that have all existed without the profit motive? It seems hugely unlikely.

Your last paragraph is... well... it's just utopian.

Let's look at this. If there's no money to be made from a product, why make it? Yes, you can do if for kudos, but that gets old pretty quickly. You have to get on with your life, get a job, raise a family. We're back to opportunity cost.

"If they are good they will tour and make money".

As I said, touring is not a pot of gold. I've seen this thrashing around for "ways musicians will make money" a lot from the "Give Me It For Free" mob, and like their suggestions for levies on blank CDs (oooh, nationalised music!) it's just grasping at some straw without any analysis of the economics of the thing. "Just like now". Well now, youngsters form bands in the hope of hitting the big time, getting a record deal, becoming famous. If all you're offering them is relentless touring, that's a lot of incentive lost.

If you want amateur musicians to fulfill the market, you're basically saying that music should return to being a thing of the wealthy. No more kids struggling out of the ghetto and the slum, lured by the chance of the big break. No more working class moptops from Liverpool busting a gut to get a record contract and producing Sgt. Peppers. Just the middle class and wealthier ones who can afford to self finance. Well, screw that.

You're arguing for a massive withdrawal of earning potential from that industry, basically- because there won't be more money in touring to compensate for the loss of music sales revenue. You want the tours to pay for the studio time and the professionals in the recording industry, because there won't be the money from CD sales to pay for that (and professionals and professional facilities do make a difference in quality, believe it or not). So, there will be less. Less music, less quality music, less professional musicians. Less recorded music, because that product will no longer have a market except as some form of advertising for these magical tours of yours.

And that doesn't even start to get us into the question of musical forms that don't fit a band format and are effectively impractical for playing live.

That may work for you now; but I don't think it will when it happens. If you think the professionals are crap, wait until all you have are the amateurs.

Posted by Ian B at December 23, 2007 12:41 AM

1st: I like studio music. I detest going to concerts, finding myself next to a loud git commenting on the entire show. I want to sit in my house and listen to snapshots of a moment in time. I do not want to hear Simon and Garfunkel perform Sound of Silence live. I want to hear that particular recording they made first. I've heard several versions of In a Gada da Vida. I like the studio long version best. Bushy is a fantastic drummer.

To make an a priori decision that the contracts under which studio recordings are distributed are too difficult to enforce and thereby invalidate them is a dangerous solution to say the least. To fail in an effort to protect them is one thing, but to declare that in this particular market the government is going to declare certain types of consensual contracts illegal or, worse yet, legal but deliberately unrecognized is wrong for a whole lot of reasons.

If the market destroys all artists who don't make their living as live performers, that's fine. Sad as far as I am concerned, but fair. But to deliberately not protect their right of contract is plain wrong.

2nd: Alisa said what I thought about EULAs. But I do point out something for consideration. Whoever it was (Ian B?) that mentioned the terms of sale inside a box in the shrinkwrap has a valid point. A case could be made that by failing to disclose the fine print before the sale, a deliberate deception is occurring. Whether sold online or sold in shrinkwrap, it is reasonable to require the seller to disclose the terms of the sale prior to the sale. I don't believe an offer of a refund has been considered a permissible substitute for disclosing the terms of the sale prior to the sale in court. I could be wrong. In any case, it is entirely reasonable to require that terms of sale be disclosed prior to compelling the buyer to hand over the money (and yet this is how all of my recent software purchases have been conducted.)

3rd: regarding the motivations for open source software. Sony commands 100% of the consumer Betamax market. 100% of nothing. In any product line that is likely to shake down to a very few (or one) standard, giving away product free is often a very good plan. Apple relied on controlling their OS and they almost made a run at MS until they lost track of what their product was and they killed all the clones. A company that is that confused about what they are selling is a Darwin award wannabe. Their hardware obsession has been okay in hardware fields, but they screwed up their computer OS marketing (and they are not seeming to show good judgment in their IPhone rollout either).

Open source is a very good plan if you are fighting a far superior market share closed source competitor. Can you make as much as that high market share competitor does while they are at the top? No. Can you make a lot supporting and customizing what you gave away for free. Oh yeah. And if you have market dominance and are facing competition from an open source product, should you be running scared? Oh yeah.

Also, Bruce hit on a huge point when he talked about the source you wrote becoming self supporting when you contribute it back to the open source. As a programmer, every bit of code I wrote had as a background guide that I didn't want to maintain it. Maintenance can quickly overwhelm new product development. But by putting your product back on the tree, the new wood grows around it.

In short, Ian, if your business is to sell software, open source has limited profit potential. But if your business is to use software, open source is an excellent plan. You commission a paid software developer to build something, contribute it to the open source, and it then develops a life of its own.

Posted by Midwesterner at December 23, 2007 02:00 AM

What is this fascination with hating the music corporations? Oh yeah, "music should be, like, free". Does it ever occur to you people that if there's no way to make money at it, maybe the product won't get made at all? Have we abolished the profit motive?

BZZZT!

Metallica makes music. Elektra Records didn't. Metallica can continue playing and continue making money at it without the label. (Well, except for Lars pitching a bitch over Napster: "it's art when we sell a CD for fifteen bucks, but a commodity when it's free.")

More to the point: Taping in the audience and swapping and duping the tapes didn't make the Grateful Dead poor. Instead, it gave them a huge fan base and made them my band even though I hadn't even been born until ever so roughly when Blues for Allah was released.

Jerry ain't cashing any checks any more, but I don't think the internet hurt the rest of the guys.

Posted by Sunfish at December 23, 2007 02:02 AM

Here's my perspective. I've worked on, maintained and released open source software. That is, I've written software that I have published for free under a license that allows others to reuse it so long as they release their modifications (sometimes - I have also released code under the LGPL and the BSD licence which have no such requirement - you can take it and reuse it anyway you like, and do not have to return your modifications).

What reasons do I have to do this? Well, I'd say perfectly reasonable ones. Firstly, it helps promulgate my values. Just as someone may choose to work for a lower salary writing for, say, a political journal which promotes their political values rather than a trade journal which does not. The values that I am promoting in releasing open source software are actually potentially reusable commodities in the future. For instance, I work on the Semantic Web Interest Group as an interested amateur. If the work that I and others do takes off, then we will have the possibility of setting up commercial services that exploit the work.

As an individual, making source code available that's free allows me to influence development of large corporate development in a way that I couldn't just by being a user. This can create opportunities for me in the future. Open source contribution is also a good way for employers to judge skill. If you were hiring a Rails programmer, do you pick the guy with six months experience or do you pick the guy who's got six months experience *and* has contributed fifty patches to the code-base?

An example. In the XML field, there is a tool called SAXON. It's a Java/.NET XSLT processor. There are two versions of it available - the Basic 'B' version and the "Schema-Aware" 'SA' version. The B version is free and open source, but the SA version costs £150, per processor license (with volume discounts). The best advertising for the SA version is the B version. Similarly, the developer of SAXON - Michael Kay - no doubt does a good trade in consulting and has published a handful of books on the subject and worked at the W3C on the relevant Working Group. Not wanting to argue counter-factuals, but I doubt Dr. Kay would be as successful if SAXON weren't out there in the hands of users - and open source licensing is what makes that possible.

Similarly, you can use open source to promote general good will to one's company. If you have some internal tool, you release it under an OSI license which creates good will about your company, or about you as an individual - meaning people are more likely to hire you. I have had a handful of employment opportunities that only exist as a result of the work I've done on open source projects.

Open source has opened up opportunities by splitting up vendors into smaller pieces. For instance, instead of trusting your vendor to sort out security, you hire a security consultant or firm. Instead of just politely asking your vendor to implement feature X, you hire someone to insert feature X. Your software comes with only minimal, online documentation - so perhaps you want a nice manual from O'Reilly. Letting hackers play about with one's technologies is a distributed R&D department. These services which used to be value-adds for the software vendors are becoming central disciplines for people in the open source market. It's not really a big problem.

Ian B seems to give quite a bit more of a shit about existing businesses than I do. What if my open source contribution is competing with a commercial organisation and perhaps putting someone out of a job? I don't particularly give a shit. It's a free market and a free society (supposedly), so they need to adapt and find something productive to do that doesn't involve having their business plan decimated by over-educated, under-employed twenty somethings. I didn't sign anything telling me that I'm supposed to only work on things that won't put others out of work. If open source is fucking up your business model, then you need to rethink your business model. As for music? I mean, it's not like the technology used to make music is getting dramatically cheaper by the year or the means of distribution has already been setup with the Internet.

Firefox is an interesting example, but not a representative one - it deals with consumer branding (the 'Firefox' brand name, the logo etc.), consortium representation (Mozilla Foundation is on the W3C in a way that lots of folks in their bedrooms can't be) as well as software. More representative of open source business models are companies like MySQL AB, SugarCRM, Red Hat, JBoss and 'documentation' companies like O'Reilly, Pragmatic Programmers and others. Not to mention the "Linux laptop" companies who'll build and support a laptop for you running your favourite Linux distro.

Posted by Tom Morris at December 23, 2007 02:17 AM

Go into a record store and look at the diversity; the sheer multiplicity of genres and styles that have never existed in human history before.

Record store? On line. I have no use for physical media. And as the technology used to make music gets gets cheaper and cheaper, the need for big music companies gets smaller and smaller. So more people will make music because they want to make music rather than for a career. Fine. The market is global and most of the music I listen to these days are unsigned Russian or Indian bands who are never going to make any money as musicians anyway. It doesn't seem to stop them and due to the marvels of the internet and some strange and dodgy contacts, I get to listen to them in London.

Would that have all existed without the profit motive? It seems hugely unlikely.

Why not? As the cost of doing it goes down, more people will do it just for the hell of it.

You're arguing for a massive withdrawal of earning potential from that industry

You misunderstand me. I am not arguing for anything, I am saying what I think is already happening and will continue to happen until the 'industry' as currently understood no longer exists. I am not particularly sad about it and I think more than enough musicians will adapt to the new reality, but I really have no dog in that fight.

Posted by Perry de Havilland at December 23, 2007 02:27 AM

I have mentioned my luddite hippie musician friend, who lives in La Honda before.
I kept banging on to him to use the internet to increase his business. He didn't get it.
He thought he had to get the record deal and the advance to be as successful as he wanted to be.
What he didn't understand is that the record Co is just a holding company.
It doesn't create anything. It just manages it (for itself). Well the penny has finally dropped for him.
He puts his music out on the web for free, people hear it and come to see him live. That's where he makes his money.
The Dead were years ahead.
They let anyone just plug into the mixing desk and take a copy to pass round.
Their records sold in dribbles when promoted by the record company, but their gigs were always sold out.
Sunfish.
So you are a DeadHead! I love you more and more!
I saw them first at Watkins Glen. Then Bickershaw in Yorkshire. Then Alexandra Palace with the finest sound system I have ever heard sported by anybody.
Everyone has been to a gig. You cant hear yourself speak most of the time and are shouting in your friends ears to make contact. That Dead system was the dogs bollocks!
You could talk in a normal voice and be heard and understood easily by the person standing next to you.Yet the music was powerful enough to make you believe that a Sperm Whale was being dragged around the auditorium by the tail.(Ever hear Seastones? They did a bit of that)
The last time was the Pyramids in Egypt. Full Kesey Prankster light show and all.
Man what a weekend that was!

Posted by RAB at December 23, 2007 04:16 AM

Mid:

Whoever it was (Ian B?) that mentioned the terms of sale inside a box in the shrinkwrap has a valid point.

I thought about that, and yes, it is a valid point from a purely legal point of view. But in reality, by now everyone knows what the deal is. Also, I agree with you about music. I still pay money for it. The way I see it, people put time, effort and talent into it (not just the artists, but the studio technicians, producers and yes, distributors too are human beings, believe it or not), and there is no reason I see why they should not be rewarded. Of course, many people think that the price of "legal" music is inflated, and that all these middlemen should be eliminated to reach the "real" price (how do they know what that would be?). That may be true, (or it might be true in the near future), but this is still not a good enough reason to pay nothing at all, as in P2P and such.

On OS, I think Ian you are missing the point: we as humans don't exist to support an economy, it's the other way around.

If there is nobody charging, if everybody everywhere, gave their work for free, we'd all starve to death.

Not at all, unless we were all

forced

to do that. If, for some inexplicable reason, the human nature would suddenly change in a way that compelled all of us to do that, it would work just fine.

Posted by Alisa at December 23, 2007 07:59 AM

Sorry, botched the tags, should read:

"Not at all, unless we were all forced to do that. If, for some inexplicable reason, the human nature would suddenly change in a way that compelled all of us to do that, it would work just fine."

Posted by Alisa at December 23, 2007 08:02 AM

My guess is that a lot of the people who are "volunteers" to open source projects *are* being paid to contribute.

For example, take a geek who's been hired to provide a new website. The client needs the new database to import data from an old website. The geek does his research and decides that Joomla is the best system generally but will not do the import. So he writes an importing function for the new website.

Let's say the client runs a whole range of websites and he might need to use the importer on other sites in the future. If the geek keeps the code to himself, Joomla might get updated in such a way that his code stops working. His work will have gone to waste. So he releases his code so that it can become an official part of the Joomla project.

The geek is being paid to "volunteer".

Posted by Alex Singleton at December 23, 2007 09:05 AM

Anyone still reading this thread? :)

It occurred to me today that part of the divergence of opinion here between, er me and the rest of the world it seems, is down to what I think is a difference between two schools of OS boostering. On the one hand the assertion that "open source has a part to play in the software business" which we could call the Weak Open Source Principle, and the assertion (which I've often heard) that "open source can replace the (traditional model) software business" (Strong Open Source Principle).

I have no problem with the WOSP as I think I've explained already, but do fundamentally disagree with the SOSP. So if the argument is whether there can be *some* Open Source, well we're all in agreement. It's whether it can replace the traditional model entirely, or almost entirely (so that "bought" software were a very rare niche).

Some of the interesting and enlightening comments by OSers here have led me to consider it this way- it's notable that one way of looking on contributing as rational is, rightly, that if a group of people all work towards creating the product, at the end they've all got the product to use. I think one can say that that is why Linux is such a success in its own sphere. The people who use Linux are the people with the skills and desire to write Linux. It's an Operating System, used by IT professionals and amateurs, and written by them. So it fits very well as an example where OS works, for, er OSes, since the people building the barn are the people who will use the barn after it is built.

If we consider a different crowd though, OS suddenly looks much less enticing. Say graphics professionals. Most graphics professionals aren't skilled programmers. Some no doubt are, a few, but their primary skill is in using graphics software, not programming graphics software.

On the other side, most programmers are not graphics professionals. They may use graphics software sometimes, perhaps for stuff for their website or for fun, but very few are part of the graphics software professional tribe. As such, an OS project doesn't work so well here. The programmers would have to write something they don't much have a use for themselves, and probably wouldn't have much understanding of the professional use of while the graphics crowd won't be able to contribute even if they want to because they don't have the 1337 haxx0r skillz0r. It's hoping that one group will build a barn for somebody else.

Which fits with what we see; products useful to the people with the skills to write them e.g. Linux are a great OS success. The attempt to create an OS Photoshop competitor (the Gimp) far less so. Linux is a serious alternative to comercial OS software (I won't have my websites on anything but *nix :) but the Gimp, well, nice try, but it sure ain't no Photoshop and the users are generally some degree of graphics dabblers.

(The other two famous OS projects are arguable Firefox and OpenOffice. The first of those as I said before seems to be driven primarily by a slashdot socialist cult carefully driven to fervour by Mozilla, the latter is largely Sun's property, which they bought in and developed on entirely rational economic grounds that it was cheaper than a zillion MS Office licenses for their corporation, plus Larry Ellison hates Bill Gates. So I think we can excuse those two from the paradigm).

There's a lot of complex, intensive to programme software applications that, in my view demonstrate the invalidity of the SOSP. Graphics, Audio, Pro Video and so on. I'm not saying they can't be written in community stylee, but the divergence between the authoring community and the potential user community is large. Professionals in those example industries just want to buy a product that works. They've neither the time nor skills to significantlly participate in authoring one.

Posted by Ian B at December 23, 2007 05:11 PM

Ok I don't see much to disagree with in there ;-) Other than the notion that anyone believes in the "SOSP".

I think is still also still perhaps some confounding of the quite different issues of open/closed source and built by professionals/volunteers.

Ian is quite correct, I think, that a program whose users are not usually going to be themselves programmers is much less likely to spontaneously generate itself as a distributed open source volunteer effort. Not impossible, I think, but it might take much longer to become usable by non-programmers, if ever. I think the GIMP, for example, might well eventually get there.

Image editing is a very interesting case actually. The GIMP has trouble matching Photoshop, but then I doubt there are very many for-profit companies that could write Photoshop. There are a lot of very very subtle and tricky issues in the representation and mixing of colours on a computer that I think takes one genius such as Thomas Knoll to get right. A committee or "chinese army" of developers will never do it.

Photoshop is very clever in other ways too. A couple of years ago my partner was trying to use the GIMP on a Pentium4 with half a gig of RAM to make a panorama from three 4.0 megapixel photos. The poor machine was groaning and wheezing and swapping like crazy and being just generally totally unusable. I said "Try using that machine over there", pointing to an old iMac ancient pre-MacOS9 version of Photoshop to which I allocate 16 MB of RAM. She was dubious to say the least, but it proved to perform vastly better than the GIMP on the far faster Linux machine. Results here (the full version is about 1900x5600)

Anyway, we're in agreement that specialist software aimed at non-programmers is less likely to spontaneously emerge.

But a different topic is this: should Adobe release the source code to Photoshop?

Is there any benefit to a for-profit company that has developed a unique product in making the source code available to all? Would Adobe still sell any copies of Photoshop if they did that?

I don't know the answer to that, but I suspect they might. I certainly can't prove it though!

Perhaps they could adopt an intermediate position, perhaps releasing the code to the program itself but not their filters?

Note that Apple is selling a lot of copies of OSX even though the complete source code is available for everything except the user interface layer and bundled applications. That is: you can download and build for yourself an operating system that has everything that a typical Linux distribution has: kernel, device drivers, BSD userland, X windows. And you can put KDE or Gnome on top of it.

Posted by Bruce Hoult at December 23, 2007 11:29 PM

the only difference between open source and the microsofts of this world is what they charge for. ms charges for software with some free support where open source is free software and charged support. very simplistic explaination but essentially the major difference.
seems easy to see this is not only a solid business model, but it removes a lot of piracy and legal issues into the bargain!

Posted by oli at December 24, 2007 12:31 AM

Should we perhaps be more careful to distinguish between open source and free-as-in-beer software?

Software that's given away is free (as in beer). Software where you can actually see what you're getting is OS. Or so I've always understood it.

I don't mind paying for software. I spent the money on the Mandriva install I'm running now. What I mind is the closed-source model's inherent arrogance: "You will run what we sell you! You don't need to know what you're actually buying, because we say you don't."

I call bullshit. If the only people who get a look under the hood are the dealer's own mechanics, I ain't buying the car.

Posted by Sunfish at December 24, 2007 01:45 AM

Ian,

When it comes to the outrage over the bundling of the browser, it goes far more than the fact that IE is bundled. IE is integrated into chunks of the operating system. The rendering engine that displays pages is a standard component that is part of the Windows API. The framework of the browser is what Windows Explorer has been built on for quite some time now. In other words, you cannot rip out IE without demolishing a big chunk of Windows itself.

Now, I'm an advocate of the freedom to create, one of the most important liberties there is, but I do recognize the outrage that others have over this as being not entirely without merit. The way that IE is bundled makes it very difficult for other browsers to compete with it.

Another one of the perks of being integrated so deeply into Windows is that when Windows loads, a lot of IE itself is loaded, which gives an illusion that it is a better browser since it seems a bit faster in some cases.

Posted by MikeT at December 24, 2007 02:51 AM

A very interesting thread. For my part I only wish to point out that open source coding projects now exist and will not go away. Similarly, file sharing / P2P networks etc. (for the music copying part of this thread). So whether you're pro or con the fact is the market has changed and business models have to adapt.

When existing enterprises seek to protect their existing biz models via lobbying for govt regulation you know the game is up. All that remains is how long they can keep paying to protect their outdated model.

Posted by JezB at December 24, 2007 11:56 AM

I have a friend who tried for many years to make a living doing IT related stuff. Year in, year out he'd bemoan the fact that he'd recommend a free Office and Email solution running on Linus desktops to clients and they'd ask for MS Office and Exchange running on XP. He couldn't figure out why they would pay for software when they didn't have to.

The problem was the onward maintenance tended to be cheaper to maintain an MS off the shelf solution compared to his tailor made free one. I can understand why IT services professionals have a thing against MS, they've effectivelly commoditised an entire profession and effectively deskilled it. None of my friend's clients were particuarly interested in having to be tied to him or another full cost consultant when they wanted things done.

Consequently he's looking for another line of work now.

Perry: I find it hard to imagine any scenario where more crap music as a proportion of total music gets produced than is produced today. Really? I don't. Sturgeon's Law still applies 90% of everything is cr4p, increasing the amount available doesn't shift that one iota.

In the book world even with some notable exceptions like Charles Stross and Cory Doctorow most of the "free" stuff is fanfic or slash; I don't turn to YouTube for an evening's entertainment and, like some other commentators, I don't particuarly like live stuff.

Peter F Hamilton reviewed some of the consequences of this in the mediocre _Misspent Youth_ even including real life horror author Graham Joyce as an example. Jerry Pournelle also has quite a lot to say on this subject.

Posted by Daveon at December 24, 2007 10:57 PM

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