4 ms·

I thought this was an elegant defence of open source: > This result hinges on the fact that the innovative design itself is a non-rival good: each participant

I thought this was an elegant defence of open source: > This result hinges on the fact that the innovative design itself is a non-rival good: each participant in a collaborative effort gets the value of the whole design, but incurs only a fraction of the design cost.

secretasiandan 17y ago
I wouldn't call that a defense of open source because I didn't realize that people giving things of their own will needed defense. In fact, I would refer to open source as an attack on the rationale for the patent system.
api 17y ago
Nope. Without some sort of patent, each participant in a collaborate effort gets nothing and whomever is most successful in marketing the result gets everything.
- lutorm 17y ago
  You assume they collaborate to sell whatever the result of the collaboration is.
  - api 17y ago
    Don't get me wrong... I used to totally buy the open source idealistic worldview. Then I actually got involved in business. You don't understand what a brawl business can be. People almost never collaborate to sell! You want the customers, you want the leverage! Heh... collaborate to sell... how cute... Marketing is more winner-take-all than anything else. Nice happy idealism sounds really great until you end up in the real world with people competing over money when they have kids, mortgages to pay, etc.
    - kjuhygfgbhjnm 17y ago
      You are a US car company - you find the cheapest supplier and every year cut the amount you are willing to pay - when the supplier goes broke you start again. Most of your costs and effort is put into writing contracts and NDAs and making sure that no information leaks from your engineers to the supplier. If the supplier makes faulty brakes - you sue them, spending 10x as much on lawyers as on engineers. You are a Japanese car company - you work with your suppliers and often invest in them, you lend them your engineers to make their process more efficent, every year their costs go down and you both make more profit. If they make bad parts you spend the money you would have spent on lawyers on fixing the problem and stopping it happening again. Of course this level of cooperation is the reason Japanese car companies can't pay their mortgages while US car companies dominate the world. But I suppose it works for cute little outfits like Mitsubishi or Fuji.
    - lutorm 17y ago
      You still assume they collaborate to sell. My point is that people develop things not to sell them. If you just want to develop something to solve some problem you have, and the choices are either putting in the full resources yourself or to collaborate with someone else who has complementary expertise, then you have no reason to not collaborate. You put in a fraction of the resources but still get the full benefits of having your problem solved. Only in some extremely paranoid view of the world where every piece of knowledge you have should be leveraged does what you say make general sense. If you are Apple, for example, say you compete on design and functionality of your apps. How would it not benefit you to collaborate with other companies to develop some library or parts of the OS or whatever? Your competitive position is not damaged because you help Microsoft or whoever get the same functionality, because you're not competing on that.

secretasiandan 17y ago

I wouldn't call that a defense of open source because I didn't realize that people giving things of their own will needed defense. In fact, I would refer to open source as an attack on the rationale for the patent system.

api 17y ago

Nope. Without some sort of patent, each participant in a collaborate effort gets nothing and whomever is most successful in marketing the result gets everything.

lutorm 17y ago
You assume they collaborate to sell whatever the result of the collaboration is.
- api 17y ago
  Don't get me wrong... I used to totally buy the open source idealistic worldview. Then I actually got involved in business. You don't understand what a brawl business can be. People almost never collaborate to sell! You want the customers, you want the leverage! Heh... collaborate to sell... how cute... Marketing is more winner-take-all than anything else. Nice happy idealism sounds really great until you end up in the real world with people competing over money when they have kids, mortgages to pay, etc.
  - kjuhygfgbhjnm 17y ago
    You are a US car company - you find the cheapest supplier and every year cut the amount you are willing to pay - when the supplier goes broke you start again. Most of your costs and effort is put into writing contracts and NDAs and making sure that no information leaks from your engineers to the supplier. If the supplier makes faulty brakes - you sue them, spending 10x as much on lawyers as on engineers. You are a Japanese car company - you work with your suppliers and often invest in them, you lend them your engineers to make their process more efficent, every year their costs go down and you both make more profit. If they make bad parts you spend the money you would have spent on lawyers on fixing the problem and stopping it happening again. Of course this level of cooperation is the reason Japanese car companies can't pay their mortgages while US car companies dominate the world. But I suppose it works for cute little outfits like Mitsubishi or Fuji.
  - lutorm 17y ago
    You still assume they collaborate to sell. My point is that people develop things not to sell them. If you just want to develop something to solve some problem you have, and the choices are either putting in the full resources yourself or to collaborate with someone else who has complementary expertise, then you have no reason to not collaborate. You put in a fraction of the resources but still get the full benefits of having your problem solved. Only in some extremely paranoid view of the world where every piece of knowledge you have should be leveraged does what you say make general sense. If you are Apple, for example, say you compete on design and functionality of your apps. How would it not benefit you to collaborate with other companies to develop some library or parts of the OS or whatever? Your competitive position is not damaged because you help Microsoft or whoever get the same functionality, because you're not competing on that.