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.
Imagine a different kind of sharing... (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm not saying it would be easy, but imagine if...
The Economist is more time-draining than Slashdot (Score:5, Interesting)
It's a very interesting magazine though if you can find the time to commit to it.
The True Economics of OSS (Score:5, Interesting)
The analogy runs as follows. Suppose that a street has a bunch of bun vendors and a bunch of people who sell sausages to put in the buns (wow, talk about decoupled designs). People might be willing to spend $1.50 for a bun plus a sausage - nominally $1 for the sausage and $0.50 for the bun.
Now, suppose that someone in the sausage industry comes up with a way of "open-sourcing" buns - now buns are free! This happening, you've got a bunch of customers wandering around buying sausages with an extra $0.50 in their pockets. They were clearly willing to spend more on the sausage+bun combination, so maybe you can jack up your price to $1.10 or $1.20 (very unlikely you'll be able to go to $1.50).
Of course, like all simplistic analogies, this depends on a lot of assumptions. For instance, we
expect that the customer won't go off and buy something new (a 50 cent Coke, maybe).
Now, think about companies that have major OSS support. The best example is IBM - which makes its money of hardware and services. Are they the sausage vendors in this case?
I don't know if this is nonsense, but it's an interesting theory. If anyone has a good counter-argument, let's hear it. If anyone has a silly pun about "open-saucing" hot dogs, well, remember that I'm a computer scientist and can generate an enormous static charge from your keyboard to Get You.
Problem of cost/return (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:in-crowd (Score:5, Interesting)
I think that you probably haven't really read too much of it.
Independant (Score:5, Interesting)
As to the "right wing propagandistic tool of international corporatism". Wow, good line if it's some sort of attempt at ironic hip retro-sixties radical leftism, but it doesn't have much to do with...well, reality.
The Economist supported Kerry, after all, in the US elections. They have been quite positive about Linux for a long time. They are being sued by Silvio Berlusconi, Italy's right wing leader, because of their scathing attacks on his corruptness. This is hardly the sort of independant thoughts and writing that one would expect from a "propogandistic tool".
Re:Economist is better than the rest... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:The True Economics of OSS (Score:3, Interesting)
OSS can artificially manufacture more wealth in the long-term, much like the stock-market does.
Think of using (and in turn contributing back to) OSS tools like getting free hammers and nails so long as you help improve the design of hammers, nails, and other industry standard tools you use for free. Within the context of using those tools to build things, general practitioners are going to come up with gripes and improvements. I think the same holds true of using OSS tools for building proprietary software.
My group in a company I used to work for submitted patches back to Jakarta Digester to handle some functionality we needed. It was much more valuable to us to have that get accepted and made part of the product than it did to maintain an internal patchset against the product.
Re:I'm just waiting ... (Score:3, Interesting)
Journalism started to die off in great masses of professionals in the early 1990s. Today, I can hardly use the term "journalism" since that thing is essentially dead. Many important stories are simply ignored for purely political reasons by men who should know better. And another fat slice of the population finds itself being spoon-fed intellectual pap that leads to a greater fantasy view of the world
American journalism is now not liberal or conservative. It's corporate. More precisely, it's 90% corporate, 5% liberal, and 5% conservative. It's a triumph of American Imperialism. Each news outlet is a retail store that sells the viewpoint of the Empire constantly.
I can only refer to you to the book "Into the Buzzsaw" about the death of objective, investigative and diverse journalism. Combine that book with the economic and corporate criticisms in the books "When Corporations Rule the World" and "Perfectly Legal", and there's no way you'll exist afterward saying the word journalism without getting choked up and having tears spring up in your eyes.
It's not liberal, it's not conservative. It's just dead. Thank god for the Internet, or I'd be a completely ignorant person from what TV, radio and newspapers would deliver to me.
What's wrong with the Economist.... (Score:3, Interesting)
It's a pity, but at least it means that in an Economist article you can usually identify the compulsory editorial slant bit and discount it. And the Economist has a chance of perceiving how FOSS and the prevention of governments from allowing software parents have beneficial free-market implications. But just one day I would like an Economist article which, say, admits how limited protectionism can have benefits for the environment or the protection of the rights of the poor in some countries.
meatspace sharing (Score:2, Interesting)
Food banks, share surplus food around, everything from surplus garden produce to hunters harvested game meat to "normal" food so it gets used and not wasted
Seed banks, many gardeners share seeds with each other, helps to maintain long term biodiversity and a hedge against catstrophic failures with bioengineered seeds possibly in the future
Volunteer fire departments, obvious good advantages there
Not for profit "thrift" stores, allow folks to donate useful but surplus items so they can be reused by other people cheaply instead of contributing to landfill mess
Orgs that do work like Habitat for Humanity, besides sharing labor to help folks out immediately by providing affordable to them shelter, down the road it's psychologically good to have children raised in decent homes and not in slumlord run cheap no win rental housing. hard to put an exact economic price on that, but I would bet it's pretty useful for society as a whole
Normal neighborly collaborative work, the concept of the "barn raising" is still there all over. Everything from Joe down the block is a good mechanic and helps his neighbors out to neighbors helping neighbors with community watch or shared child care, etc. Still alive and well all over.
Community free concerts, still a phenomenon practiced all over, most any weekend across the US you can go find free music and art that is "shared"
and etc etc
I would imagine there are way more examples of "sharing" that go on voluntarily that don't make it into the raw economic figures but contribute to the basic over all health of the economy and society.
Re:The rest are just worse. (Score:3, Interesting)
OK, you start off solicitous, then devolve into calling me a liar. Let's be frank: you've decided you disagree with me. Your approach is pretty typical of rightwing gamesters, who are totally committed to your foregone, selfserving conclusions, and engage in "discussion" with the strategy of discrediting their chosen opponent, regardless of the merit of the facts. Drop the pretense. Your corporate comrades have succeeded in coopting the mediasphere, even the language, flinging words like "elite" and "hate" at opponents like masters of newspeak. But it doesn't work on me. BTW, I note that I've had my fair share of capitalist success by harnessing the global banking/media industries. I'm no martyr to the truth, but I'm no liar. You should examine your own baseless position before you come out swinging at me.
Re:Sure... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:The True Economics of OSS (Score:1, Interesting)
The thinking goes like this: (hopefully) we don't make or acquire a product unless we believe it will become an asset. On the books, we depreciate that asset over time, all the way to 0. This is the point at which people usually say 'package it up nice and open source it'. But the time spent by the corporation's programmers to do this, even if it is just an hour to zip and dump it somewhere, is considered an expense. Between the strictures of the new law and the reason for the corporation to exist as such (profit), according to the books, it is bad for the corporation to open source the former asset.
Robert went on to argue that the real Source in Open Source is neither the source code nor the programmers that wrote it, but in fact it is the software requirements that guided (or failed to guide) the development. I don't know if you'd consider that a counter-argument. But if you extend that a little bit you'll realize that if anyone uses my post to help them come up with project development methodology, whether OSS or not, then I (the expense) just cost my company some money by opening our 'source' (the asset) to anyone on the Internet. So you see, the fact that no one listens to either you or me at work is actually a good thing!
Re:Liberal, actually (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:The rest are just worse. (Score:2, Interesting)
OSS is in our best interest (Score:3, Interesting)
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 acquire at the least cost. The efficiency 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 environment, 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 long-run interest is naive of them.
Re:Nice Advertisement (Score:4, Interesting)
Only when Science interfaces with Technology, patent laws turn it into a rivalous good...and the sharing stops. I'm not sure, e.g., that the current efforts to coerce the pharmacuetical companies to report all their trials and results will be successful. If it is, it will continuously require force and oversight, and bribery scadals, because that information has been turned into a rivalous good by the legal system.
Historical note (Score:3, Interesting)
In the days before canning armies would starve when on the move, unless they could steal food from villages that they passed. If they did, the villagers would starve.
So, three soldiers show up in a village... of course the villagers don't know that there are only three, and they don't know that they CAN'T just steal all their food. So they pretend that they've already been robbed, and don't have any left. The stone soup is a con game to allow people to safely contribute without being robbed blind.
One reason that potatoes were so valuable is that they could be left in the ground until you were ready to dig them up. This made it quite difficult for an army to just march through and steal your entire food supply, leaving you to starve to death. And to death is NOT a figure of speech, but rather a frequent fate of the villages that were robbed.
In this context the story makes perfect sense. The villagers had time to make sure that they were safe. The soldiers didn't have to split up into small(er) ambushable groups. The locations of the villagers food remained secret. Nobody was forced to contribute more than he could spare. Etc.
Re:Communism != Socialism (Score:3, Interesting)
First, Communism is a form of Capitalism. The reason this probably sounds strange to the average person is because they have stopped thinking of Free Market Capitalism as a form of Capitalism, and think of it as the ONLY form.
Communism is State Capitalism. An economy of administrators and workers, hierarchical, with central control of economic planning, distribution, and consumption. In the "free world" these functions are less centralized, and we elect semi-democratic governments to oversee administration of the economy.
But really, at the heart of things, "Free Markets" and "Communism" are not incompatible. If you don't believe me, consider a factory worker or teacher in one economy being moved to the other. What adjustments must be made for them to be productive in their new environment? Hardly any (aside from cultural, that is). Their job complexes (their tasks, duties, and relationships to co-workers and bosses) are structured in very similar ways.
In a Socialist society, however, they would have to involve themselves in all sorts of domains that workers are not expected to participate in within a Capitalist framework. They would have to contribute to the management of their workplace, share work in a fair way with their peers, become politically active in order to help set strategic goals, and contribute to economic planning somehow.
A Capitalist society sees society as a resource to be sued to maximize economic processes. A Socialist society would see economic activity as a means to achieve social end.