The Economist On The Economics of Sharing 345
RCulpepper writes "The Economist, reliably the most insightful English-language news publication, discusses the economics of sharing, from OSS programmers' sharing time, to P2P users' sharing disk space and bandwidth. " True indeed (about The Economist, I have to remember to renew my subscription); one of the main supports for the article comes from Yochai Benkler latest piece, which is excellent.
Sure... (Score:3, Insightful)
and
Thoughts on sharing (Score:5, Insightful)
Most open source projects revolve around a core of developers with the odd donation of time and code from users who extend the code to suit their needs. Ditto with most P2P networks, most casual users are happy to leach whilst most of the bandwidth is provided by hardcore users. Perhaps the exception to this is Bittorrent where users are more inclinded to share fairly.
Nice Advertisement (Score:5, Insightful)
Sharing of information has proven very beneficial in science and there is no mention of this in the article. You'd think that this would be one of the first things that would come to mind when one thinks about innovation in ideas.
I'm just waiting ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Pre-emptive strike: when The Economist, which is the leading voice of center-right journalism, speaks favorably of F/OSS, it's time to drop the "communism" line and come up with something else, folks.
They are different kinds of sharing! (Score:5, Insightful)
Economist is better than the rest... (Score:4, Insightful)
If the only language is English, and you have any ability at all to filter editorial statements out of news stories, you should subscribe to the economist -- and I say this even though I am a registered pinko commie bastard.
Re:Sure... (Score:5, Insightful)
Why?
Folks,
Stop editorializing article summaries, please. (Score:2, Insightful)
Gee, what an unbiased way to present an article for discussion.
True indeed
Coming to a conclusion in an article summary stifles discussion. Stop doing that.
Re:in-crowd (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Nice Advertisement (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Imagine a different kind of sharing... (Score:2, Insightful)
Different motivations for sharing (Score:5, Insightful)
It should also be noted that not all sharing is good. [go.com]
Have to agree (Score:2, Insightful)
Article about nothing (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, here are my 0.02:
Why is sharing important:
It breaks down traditional corporate moloch, it teaches that anarchy-like goal-driven structures are perfectly viable and can outperform hierarchical companies.
It teaches that inforamation must be free (both as beer and as freedom), if it isnt, there will always be ways to free it.
It practicaly demonstrates that acting selfish is not way to go (try throttling bt upload to 1kb/s, see results
All in all, its kind of hippie like philosophy crossed with viable economy (thats not based around money, but around ideas).
Liberal, actually (Score:5, Insightful)
After many years of reading the Economist, I agree with their self-assessment.
Having said that, I've never been comfortable with the 1-dimensional right/left political categorizations. People and politics are far more complicated than that.
Re:Imagine a different kind of sharing... (Score:5, Insightful)
As for security, unless every single thing is bolted down, your office will suddenly need a much larger budget to replace disappearing paper, pens, coffee, computer parts and the like. And considering that a typical PC is completely vulnerable to physical access attacks - would you feel comfortable typing anything secure on a keyboard in an office that is lived in by unknown non-company-employees?
I am not saying that your idea is impossible - however, it will not be easy to implement, especially in a way that office occupants find agreeable.
Re:in-crowd (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, they're pretty moderate and reasonable with their analyses, they advocate market solutions for problems that a market can solve i.e. most things.
They go with the least-worst economic system (free-market with a small dash of government regulation to stop the worse excesses of capitalism) since that appears to have won the argument so far. So they obsess about what Greenspan says, but isn't that their job? That's the "Economist" bit in "The Economist".
And hindsight is a wonderful thing. Nobody else was worrying about the Taliban at the time, either.
Re:in-crowd (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:in-crowd (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Imagine a different kind of sharing... (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes there is extra space, but the cost to get homeless people there, maintain the building, ensure those people do not do things that would disrupt during business hours, is quite high. The same reason there is excess food, yet people starve. The cost to get the food to the starving people becomes prohibitive in some areas.
Re:I'm just waiting ... (Score:5, Insightful)
While, I agree that The Economist is generally 'pro-capitalist', I would not call them pro-business, but rather pro-competition; a distinction most people miss. Most businesses, ironically enough, dislike competition and are therefore anti-capitalists.
PCB
Re:The True Economics of OSS (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:in-crowd (Score:3, Insightful)
[In response to an anonymous reporter's question [banking.com] "Why do you rob banks?"]:
"Because that's where the money is." - Willie Sutton
[from the bottom of the current Slashdot page in which I'm submitting this post]:
"I don't have any solution but I certainly admire the problem. -- Ashleigh Brilliant"
Not to bash science, but... (Score:3, Insightful)
Uh, there's always the potential "loss" of the credit for other discoveries based on that knowledge. Think Rosalind Franklin and the discovery of DNA; "competitors" saw her crucial photograph and some unpublished work, and she's never really gotten some credit she deserved. Even when you're formally releasing whatever information you have, by publishing it, there's a certain loss in that sense -- of control, or something close to it.
The scientific method transcends those petty human "losses" in a larger sense, but they sure do affect how people within the scientific world behave. People are very conscious of the tradeoffs between sharing information and withholding it.
How to do it (tm) (Score:4, Insightful)
Insubstantial (Score:2, Insightful)
The author barely even mentions what Open Source is, does not analyse the reasons for Open Source, and gives two-three obvious explanations. Then he attempts to compare Open Source programming with file sharing and SETI@Home. It is wrong to compare these two examples since they're based on unused resources. Spare time is not an unused resource.
Re:in-crowd (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, gee, with the collusion of apathy and cheerleading amongst news sources, it becomes difficult for the common man to become educated enough about things like future Talibans in order to become concerned.
The American CIA is similarly insulated from public worry. People commonly go about their lives utterly unconcerned about the documented offenses of this agency. In part, that's because of the press blackout.
The old sentiments are quite correct on this matter: Without a free (or diverse) press, our democracies simply cannot function.
Re:The rest are just worse. (Score:4, Insightful)
For most of the people doing reviewing, the Economist is really very fair and reasonable in its reporting.
Is it possible you are just politically marginalized, and that your views differ significantly from the rest of ours?
Is there a publication you recommend? That isn't filled with lunatic fringe ravings? Seriously, I would like to try it.
OSS often passes as kind "communist" (Score:2, Insightful)
But I don't agree with that point in the least.
Communism is all about the "common good" and giving to the collectivity. OSS and free-sharing knowledge is just what Science has been for a very, very long time. It's sharing knowledge freely with one another, so that knowledge can grow. It's not giving blindly to the collectivity. Big difference. I surely would hope nobody (nobody decent, at least) would claim that Science is communism.
Actually, most harsh defenders of industrial IP rights "against" OSS and patent-free stuff are the ones who act more for the "collective good" in mind, even if that's not their primary intend. They are defending the rights of their company, or sometimes a whole industry, sometimes in a forceful mamner: to me, that closely looks a lot more soviet-like than the spirit behind OSS. They also are often the ones who stole stuff from others: but in a legal way. All you have to do is patent it first - even if you didn't invent it.
Re:Sure... (Score:5, Insightful)
If you have read the Economist and don't realize how important free markets and trade are to them, then there is no hammer big enough to hit you over the head with.
I always think it is a shame that this county (US) doesn't have a party that thinks like the Economist. Bush might like to claim this philosphy, but his strain of Republicanism is to concerned about what you do in the bedroom to fit this model.
Re:Different motivations for sharing (Score:3, Insightful)
The idea behind that story was that everyone had enough to survive, but nobody had enough variety to make anything good. When they all threw it into the same pot, they still had plenty of food, but now it tasted better. No more food, no less food, just better food.
Fortunately for Linux, there's plenty of "soup" to go around. Our bowl can be indefinitely replenished.
You got the point! Information is different.
Information can be shared without diminishing your own share. With information, ``sharing makes it better'' is equivalent to ``sharing makes more of it''.
Re:Sure... (Score:4, Insightful)
The fiscal conservitives are sticking with the Republican party out of inertia. They should either kick the bible-thumpers out, or jump ship themselves and start a new party under the banner of fiscal responsibility. Shrub and his borrow-and-spend killed whatever lingering illusion that the Republican party represents fiscal conservitives and smaller government.
Liberals and freedom (Score:5, Insightful)
Later, that became associated with fighting for other sorts of freedom, such as civil rights for minority groups.
The association of "liberal" with "poor and minority groups" has led the term somewhat away from its original meaning. Over time, it's become associated with improving the lot of poor people even where they're not activily being oppressed but merely poor: welfare, medical care, affirmative action, etc.
Liberals argue that the causes of poverty are side-effects of less obvious rights violations by rich people and companies. They'd argue that a company which employs many people in a town has an obligation to those people to continue to employ them, even when that factory is no longer profitable. That obligation by the company is the right of the people.
I wouldn't say that the Economist is "all for" corporate tyranny. They'd say that a factory which isn't profitable cannot employ those workers because there simply is no money to pay them. That strikes them as simple level-headedness: you cannot pay workers from nonexistent money.
But they do hold the company responsible for its non-economic externalities. If the company is dumping cadmium into the water and poisoning those workers, even if it's proftable for the company it is wrong to do so. Simple economics will not prevent that, so they recommend well-chosen and well-enforced government regulation.
I often find myself disagreeing with them. Their notion of free-market capitalism often assumes frictionless changes that are untrue. If a company moves a factory from Flint, Michigan to Bangladesh, yes, I suppose it does improve the US economy by allowing Americans to purchase the goods more cheaply, thus freeing up their capital for investment in other things.
But the people of Flint, Michigan don't realize those improvements directly; they don't immediately acquire programming skills and move to San Francisco to get better jobs. Nor do they disappear. Even if the simple "invisble hand" argument works for the good of the country as a whole, it can cause vicious harm in microeconomic terms, and those are externalities which shouldn't be ignored.
Re:Liberals and freedom (Score:4, Insightful)
"[Liberals would] argue that a company which employs many people in a town has an obligation to those people to continue to employ them, even when that factory is no longer profitable."
Some "liberals" might, especially communistic/collectivists at the far end of the "liberal" spectrum, who have wrapped around to some kind of "national socialism" or something. But most "liberals" base the requirements of a corporation's obligation to its community on the exchange of value between them, and explicit agreements. Places like Flint, Michigan were built on government subsidies to create factories, from police security to education to tax breaks to actual handouts. In fact, the people who usually complain most about a company "taking their jobs away" are usually found voting for Republicans, calling themselves "conservatives" because of issues like abortion, homosexuality and evolution (AKA minding someone else's business). That kind of "right to work" at the expense of actual business is rarely heard from liberals, though lawyers, doctors, and other rich people still think of it as their right.
There is a word for this (Score:5, Insightful)
For a lot of open source project's and P2P networks it's not the case that developers and users are really sharing fairly.
Most open source projects revolve around a core of developers with the odd donation of time and code from users who extend the code to suit their needs. Ditto with most P2P networks, most casual users are happy to leach whilst most of the bandwidth is provided by hardcore users. Perhaps the exception to this is Bittorrent where users are more inclinded to share fairly.
It's not greed, since it's about sharing.
I don't know what to call it, fear of leeching or something?
To sum it up: When you share, if you constantly think about if everybody else is sharing as much as you, you'll end up not sharing.
Period.
When you share, you share.
If people leech, don't bother.
If they spam or hog resources, limit the resources with technical solutions, but you still don't bother.
This is the truth of sharing. The more you give, the more you get. Karma is absolute truth, but you don't give a damn about it. If you do, you get in trouble. If you analyse it all, you will stop the process itself.
So what if you share more than the next guy for some times? If you think about it, worrying about who is on top is really capitalism.
Strange thought, huh?
If you happen to have more / willing to share more, for some time, then just think what an opportunity!
In Reference to Slashdot (Score:3, Insightful)
In this case, the "shareable good" involved is
the time, education, and effort of the users who participate. It is combined
with a public good--existing information--to form what is also itself a
public good--a topical news and commentary source.
The question tho' is whether the employers of many
I am not opposed to the OSS model but I would like to see more analysis of its true economic cost as I was always taught "there is no such thing as a free lunch." The fact that it does seem to produce a superior product is all the more reason to better understand its true costs.
Professor Benkler's 10/22/2004 article is a good read. Thanks for posting a reference to it.
Hopefully this was worth more than $.02
Free Open Source is Programmers "best interest" (Score:5, Insightful)
In the case of programmers and open source, it is easy to explain. By taking control of the programming environment (i.e. by developing open source operating systems), the software community is organizing to expand their productivity in a way that the corporate environment has always refused to do.
Companies have always routinely forced programmers to adopt the tools and software language that the companies aquire at the least cost. The efficency of the programmer's skills has always been a secondary consideration.
For example, a programmer spends five years mastering C++. Then the company they work for goes bankrupt. In the next job, that company uses Z-- as the development language. The new company judges the programmer to be second rate until they have mastered this new language.
After forty years of having to learn arbitrary new software development systems and tools, the software development community has said, "Enough!". "Now, we will develop the software envirnment, languages, and OS. And you will use it. And it will be free so you can't use the argument that it would cost too much to implement".
They have had to do this in their own best self interest because companies will always be changing the software development environment when this environment is bought and sold as a product.
Everyone originally went to Microsoft because they promised standardization at an acceptable cost. But that is no longer the case in a global network.
For The Economist to claim that the software developers of open source are not acting in their best lnng-run interest is naive of them.
Re:Sure... (Score:4, Insightful)
It's true, the editors are not obligated to remove anything. Or for that matter, check for non-dupes, etc.
BUT... One primary reason of slashdot's success is the high signal to noise ratio. Articles are posted that consistently reach a cohesive demographic. Moderation and Meta-Moderation provide methods of locating user comments which have the highest likelyhood of consisting of signal, and not noise.
That being said, I believe the point of the parent post is that we don't care if the editor needs to renew his subscription. We want signal, not noise, and are merely providing feedback to help promote that practice.
Re:I'm just waiting ... (Score:3, Insightful)
I think business (aka capitalist) are pro-competition about the things they have to pay (raw materials, services they use) but dislike competition in the product or service the business provides.
re: I'm just waiting... (Score:3, Insightful)