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I notice that there's an inherent conflict between the democratic approach found at Debian, Mozilla, W3C, etc versus the dictatorial approach of Apple and so on

by nwah1 11y ago

I notice that there's an inherent conflict between the democratic approach found at Debian, Mozilla, W3C, etc versus the dictatorial approach of Apple and so on. In a way, it mirrors the difference between free markets and command economies. Free markets tend to be resilient, offer individuals the most power, and tend to favor those with skill at the expense of lots of market fragmentation and inefficiency. Command economies, by contrast, can have everything working together towards one common goal, and allow for every individual to have some measure of equality and security. They can operate with either far more efficiency than a free market, or far less... and the fortunes can rapidly change. Democracies respond by then copying the innovation of the risky dictatorial/command experiments. Ubuntu is trying to do a little of both. It tries to be like Apple, and thus doesn't try to conform to the general FOSS community initiatives if it thinks they aren't innovating correctly or quickly enough. That is why they created Unity, Mir, and many other in-house projects. Tightly integrating branding into the products is just par for the course. By not trying to go along with the program, they annoy everyone else. But since the Debian Technical Committee, X Foundation, Linux Foundation, and W3C committees are not like the Comintern or the Apple board of directors, they have no power to enforce that program. Hence the fragmentation.

sbuttgereit 11y ago
An aside regarding the details of your analogy. I have to contest that command economies can be more efficient than free markets. Please note that this does not mean that free markets are perfectly efficient: they aren't. But even if we dismiss the outsized impacts that leadership personality can play in determining the functioning of a command economy, they cannot be as relatively efficient as a free market. We need to define what it means to be efficient: I use efficiency to mean the measure of how market producers meet the demands of market consumers. In these cases a central planning authority cannot obtain enough actionable data from the market nor can it act on it in a timely enough way as to actually meet that definition of efficiency. Individual consumers have differing wants and needs: differing to the point that you would be hard pressed to define the difference between what constitutes a want vs a need in all cases. Even the best central planners would be hard pressed to deal with such complexity. You may be able to use prior consumption numbers to plan the next cycle, but things change. Also adoption of new technology (not just computer technology) is difficult to understand. When the car is invented does the command economy order a bunch to see how it plays out? Does it order none because there were no prior demands expressed? Can it even be invented or manufactured because the likelihood of seeing it even get considered so small as to make it not worth it... or needed enabling technologies like, say, better lathes (or some such thing) not developed for a car that may exist because there is no purpose for it now, or because there is no reward for pursuing such a path to the inventor? How does one set prices or does one dictate consumption as well? Fail in pricing and you have shortages for one thing and over-abundances for another. This goes on and on. And again, these are the questions outside graft and ill-will from the central authorities. Free markets on the other hand distribute the penalties and rewards based purely on how well a producer meets a consumers requirements (note that this is different from producing a perfect world for the consumer... consumers have a limit of what is acceptable, so you may buy something you wish was much better/cheaper/etc than it was, but you still concluded that you'd be worse off having the money rather than the product so you traded... a need was met). An individual producer can focus on a an individual area of need for specific consumers much better than a central authority can; and if the existing producers fail some consumers, an opportunity for other producers to enter the marketplace exists. If a producer meets consumer demand in a way that maximizes the resources that production itself consumes, they have the resources to continue to serve the market; if they fail to meet consumer demand in a resource efficient manner, they cease to be in the market. Profit is the measure of efficiency of meeting a consumer demand: you have bad profits, you're not efficient in some way, good profits and you are. Rewards and "punishments" from the market itself coordinate resources and do so quickly and without needing to wait for the next 5 year plan. In command economies, if consumer needs aren't met, rarely are there any bad outcomes for the producers (the state). You can't choose to buy from the other guy because there is no other guy. And to reward good outcomes? Why bother when you control the rewards and the penalties either way? Anyway, to bring it all home, fragmentation in the Linux world is really about this random walk of producers trying to meet needs: the interesting question is, "who's needs"? Ubuntu is shooting for customers: those not interested in building the operating systems/tools and those that just want to use it. Red Hat is similar except for a narrower set of consumers. But, say, Debian (to some degree), or even better Slackware (a personal old favorite)... who is the consumer? I would argue that often times it is the developer/maintainer that is actually the consumer: they consume their leisure time and make other consumer expenses because of their desire to engage in the activity of developing or maintaining a distribution; OK, maybe less so Debian than Slackware, but I think the point still applies. Many of these distributions don't exist because an entrepreneur was trying to reach an underserved market... they exist because the developer/maintainer set out to achieve personal goals. As such a distribution cannot fail on adoption rates or by using monetary success measures since the reward/punishment is really a matter of developer satisfaction in the pursuit. That's also not to say that these personal pursuits cannot also be commercial pursuits or that developers don't want to see their work adopted by others, but the primary motivation will not weed out less successful distributions because they are actually successful for what the makers tried to accomplish. And in that sense, they are meeting a need and that is actually efficient... just not in the way you may desire or expect.
- nwah1 11y ago
  Command economies can make risky bets on particular technologies or strategies, and just reorganize everyone's life around this goal. It is very authoritarian, often tyrannical, but the notion that it is necessarily inefficient is just stupid. Planning occurs in markets too. A Boeing jet takes decades to bring it to market, and the organization must make risky long term plans and bets. They may pan out, or may not. But every entrepreneur and startup at YC is doing the same sort of thing. Taking losses for years, even, because of a belief in their plan. Sometimes, risky bets pay out. Sometimes spectacularly. And sometimes they crash and burn. The resilience of a market economy means that not everyone has to be on board for such a venture. Indeed, the market is a collection of organizations that are all either slowly or quickly in the process of failing. None of them will last forever, but they generally won't all fail at the same time. A command economy can, and often does.
- nwah1 11y ago
  I suppose I would tend to agree with you that a fully planned economy will be destined to fail, just like a fully unplanned economy would, but no economic system is ever pure. Certain Asian Tiger economies, like South Korea and Japan, had large scale economic plans to begin manufacturing electronics for export. This was an intentional, top-down strategy. A successful one, at that. Other types of economic planning that we see have included nuclear energy, damns, highways, railways, satellites, and so on. The US only began funding space exploration after they realized that the USSR was ahead. The US was able to be more resilient over time, and still incorporate a lot of the top-down innovations.

by nwah1 11y ago

sbuttgereit 11y ago

An aside regarding the details of your analogy. I have to contest that command economies can be more efficient than free markets. Please note that this does not mean that free markets are perfectly efficient: they aren't. But even if we dismiss the outsized impacts that leadership personality can play in determining the functioning of a command economy, they cannot be as relatively efficient as a free market. We need to define what it means to be efficient: I use efficiency to mean the measure of how market producers meet the demands of market consumers. In these cases a central planning authority cannot obtain enough actionable data from the market nor can it act on it in a timely enough way as to actually meet that definition of efficiency. Individual consumers have differing wants and needs: differing to the point that you would be hard pressed to define the difference between what constitutes a want vs a need in all cases. Even the best central planners would be hard pressed to deal with such complexity. You may be able to use prior consumption numbers to plan the next cycle, but things change. Also adoption of new technology (not just computer technology) is difficult to understand. When the car is invented does the command economy order a bunch to see how it plays out? Does it order none because there were no prior demands expressed? Can it even be invented or manufactured because the likelihood of seeing it even get considered so small as to make it not worth it... or needed enabling technologies like, say, better lathes (or some such thing) not developed for a car that may exist because there is no purpose for it now, or because there is no reward for pursuing such a path to the inventor? How does one set prices or does one dictate consumption as well? Fail in pricing and you have shortages for one thing and over-abundances for another. This goes on and on. And again, these are the questions outside graft and ill-will from the central authorities. Free markets on the other hand distribute the penalties and rewards based purely on how well a producer meets a consumers requirements (note that this is different from producing a perfect world for the consumer... consumers have a limit of what is acceptable, so you may buy something you wish was much better/cheaper/etc than it was, but you still concluded that you'd be worse off having the money rather than the product so you traded... a need was met). An individual producer can focus on a an individual area of need for specific consumers much better than a central authority can; and if the existing producers fail some consumers, an opportunity for other producers to enter the marketplace exists. If a producer meets consumer demand in a way that maximizes the resources that production itself consumes, they have the resources to continue to serve the market; if they fail to meet consumer demand in a resource efficient manner, they cease to be in the market. Profit is the measure of efficiency of meeting a consumer demand: you have bad profits, you're not efficient in some way, good profits and you are. Rewards and "punishments" from the market itself coordinate resources and do so quickly and without needing to wait for the next 5 year plan. In command economies, if consumer needs aren't met, rarely are there any bad outcomes for the producers (the state). You can't choose to buy from the other guy because there is no other guy. And to reward good outcomes? Why bother when you control the rewards and the penalties either way? Anyway, to bring it all home, fragmentation in the Linux world is really about this random walk of producers trying to meet needs: the interesting question is, "who's needs"? Ubuntu is shooting for customers: those not interested in building the operating systems/tools and those that just want to use it. Red Hat is similar except for a narrower set of consumers. But, say, Debian (to some degree), or even better Slackware (a personal old favorite)... who is the consumer? I would argue that often times it is the developer/maintainer that is actually the consumer: they consume their leisure time and make other consumer expenses because of their desire to engage in the activity of developing or maintaining a distribution; OK, maybe less so Debian than Slackware, but I think the point still applies. Many of these distributions don't exist because an entrepreneur was trying to reach an underserved market... they exist because the developer/maintainer set out to achieve personal goals. As such a distribution cannot fail on adoption rates or by using monetary success measures since the reward/punishment is really a matter of developer satisfaction in the pursuit. That's also not to say that these personal pursuits cannot also be commercial pursuits or that developers don't want to see their work adopted by others, but the primary motivation will not weed out less successful distributions because they are actually successful for what the makers tried to accomplish. And in that sense, they are meeting a need and that is actually efficient... just not in the way you may desire or expect.

nwah1 11y ago
Command economies can make risky bets on particular technologies or strategies, and just reorganize everyone's life around this goal. It is very authoritarian, often tyrannical, but the notion that it is necessarily inefficient is just stupid. Planning occurs in markets too. A Boeing jet takes decades to bring it to market, and the organization must make risky long term plans and bets. They may pan out, or may not. But every entrepreneur and startup at YC is doing the same sort of thing. Taking losses for years, even, because of a belief in their plan. Sometimes, risky bets pay out. Sometimes spectacularly. And sometimes they crash and burn. The resilience of a market economy means that not everyone has to be on board for such a venture. Indeed, the market is a collection of organizations that are all either slowly or quickly in the process of failing. None of them will last forever, but they generally won't all fail at the same time. A command economy can, and often does.
nwah1 11y ago
I suppose I would tend to agree with you that a fully planned economy will be destined to fail, just like a fully unplanned economy would, but no economic system is ever pure. Certain Asian Tiger economies, like South Korea and Japan, had large scale economic plans to begin manufacturing electronics for export. This was an intentional, top-down strategy. A successful one, at that. Other types of economic planning that we see have included nuclear energy, damns, highways, railways, satellites, and so on. The US only began funding space exploration after they realized that the USSR was ahead. The US was able to be more resilient over time, and still incorporate a lot of the top-down innovations.