I don't think you understand utility properly, and sounds like you have a hard sciences bent. The point of utility is that everyone is different. They will al

I don't think you understand utility properly, and sounds like you have a hard sciences bent. The point of utility is that everyone is different. They will all behave in chaotic and unpredictable ways. The only way to make sense of why people exchange is to make the assumption that each participant in the exchange gains something greater than what they give up. Since the thing they gain and the thing they give up are always going to be different, it has to be distilled down to something. That's utility. You say that I haven't solved 'the problem'. I say there is no problem to be solved. All we can do is observe the actions underway because there is nothing to fix. We can't say why the contributors utility is increased, because by very definition, each persons utility is different. You can only infer or measure the subset of those, and make observations. Utility is the abstract class of individual preference implementations. There is no more point in trying to determine the cause of each individuals utility than there is trying to work out the purpose of each class implementation form the point of view of the abstract class. What does it matter? It doesn't. Open source software doesn't suffer the tragedy of the commons precisely because the utility contributors gain can only be upwardly increased by people using it, and overconsumption of the software has very little effect on the utility of the producers. In the original case of the commons, overconsumption of grazing lands decreases the utility of each individual grazer, but if anything the opposite effect happens in OSS. Assuming one can brush off idiotic bug reports and I'll-advised pull requests, that is. But because contribution is not binding when the cost of contribution exceeds the utility gained, the person switches their time preferences to differnt things. Incidentally, the evils of central planning are precisely because people try and 'solve' the problem of marketplaces, when there is no problem to solve, only exchanges to observe.