The economics of open source (Score 1)

I don't really understand what all the fuss is about. From what I remember of economic analysis - to my mind at least - the whole idea of open/free software makes good sense economically. It is generally accepted that in some situations trying to charge people to use some good/service is quite wasteful. For example a park. The park itself is worth quite a bit of money and it's not all that cheap to run either. However trying to charge everyone who uses the park (with all it's entrances etc) would be quite expensive - far far more than the additional maintenance cost due to having just one more visitor. By drawing a few funky little micro economic graphs you can actually prove that this is a very waste full solution. A better solution it to make the park what economists call a "public good". Bascially, it's much more efficient to pay for the thing with a little extra tax (simply add 0.5% to the tax rate) and then let everyone enjoy the thing! The very expensive task of collecting thousands of tiny payments for each person walking into the park is now no longer required. I see open source software as being in the same category - in fact I think it's an even more extreme example of something that should be a public good as in this case the additional cost of one more consumer of the product is extremely close to zero. click click down load .. all done! In the long run, charging for something like a browser simply doesn't make economic sense. Products which are very niche however are a completely different story. Then it's much more efficient to charge the 20 or so people who actually want to use the thing. So how's this for a proposal - perhaps taxes should help fund (in a small way) the development of open source software as it's really for the good of *all society* that we have it freely available. For a small cost we are all much richer.