2 ms·
The point the author was making was that computer files are fundamentally different than physical goods. But software engineers don't produce "computer files" f
by seibelj 11y ago
The point the author was making was that computer files are fundamentally different than physical goods. But software engineers don't produce "computer files" for sale. They make products and services. Whether it's a file or not is meaningless, and the abstract idea of a "computer file" being a public good is inaccurate.
- toomuchtodo 11y agoWell, it does get a bit murky. A book is a physical good. An ebook is not. But if I print an ebook out, it is now a physical good. TL;DR Things are complicated. We keep trying to find physical world analogies for the digital space, and that just isn't going to work well.
- brbsix 11y agoAn ebook is still a physical good in a sense. The data (or some portion of it) rests on a medium in your possesion (even if only temporarily). As we all know, there are significant costs involved in creating, advertising, distributing, maintaining said digital good. The costs and subsidies (e.g. open source software, government research, corsortiums) are just distributed in a vastly different way, so much so that to some it may seem to be a free lunch (despite being far from it).
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- tamana 11y agoThe cost to create and maintain a public good are not relevantly to its "publicness". Only the cost to access it is. Clean air and national securty also cost money to maintain, but have no user fees.
- fleitz 11y agoBooks aren't really physical goods, economically for all intents and purposes they are very similar to digital goods as the cost of reproduction is near zero which is why books like digital goods fall under copyright law.
- toomuchtodo 11y agoAnd what happens when physical goods become similar to digital goods and can be replicated at zero marginal cost? It won't happen tomorrow, or a year from now, but it'll happen in our lifetime.
- fleitz 11y agoI'm betting on UBI / Star Trek, others see violent revolution / Fallout 4. Essentially, humanity is freed from 'work'
- tamana 11y agoDigital objects that are torrentable are public goods. This includes media files and local machine software but not web services.
- toomuchtodo 11y agoYou could torrent a web service if the app was dockerized, the docker containers were part of the torrent file, and the underlying datastore (files or a DB) were also included.