5 ms·
I work at Pivotal and disagree with a fair amount of the characterisation thereof, but my bias is mostly informed by actually working there for the last 6 years
by jacques_chester 7y ago
I work at Pivotal and disagree with a fair amount of the characterisation thereof, but my bias is mostly informed by actually working there for the last 6 years. Let's look at the heart of the argument instead.
> If you squint, open source could be seen as a very generous charitable donation to some of the largest and wealthiest corporations on the planet.
Broadly: yes. Except backwards.
FLOSS can be seen as a public good -- it is non-excludable and non-rivalrous. Excludability is the property that someone can be prevented from using the good (eg, requiring payment to consume a can of soft-drink). Rivalrousness is the property that utility from consumption of a good by one person diminishes utility for another person (if I drink the soft-drink, you get less of it).
Economics predicts that public goods will be underprovided by a pure market. This is because of the free rider problem. Since I can't be excluded from the good, I can consume it without giving something up for it. Since it's non-rivalrous, there's no meaningful back pressure that eventually raises the cost of consumption to an unacceptable level.
A strictly rational agent will always free ride on a public good. And most of the time, most rational agents will not provide a public good, because the cost of paying for everyone else's consumption exceeds the benefits of their own consumption.
This hints at one of the ways that public goods get provided: through subsidy by benefactors, who will capture some but not all of the value created by their benefaction. A wealthy person may so enjoy seeing the opera that they will donate heavily to the local opera house. They don't capture the full benefit -- other folks can watch the same shows -- but they capture enough value that they are satisfied with the arrangement. They might also get value from other factors, such as social approval.
The cloud providers do not sell public goods. Their services are fully excludable. If you refuse to pay, service will end. They are rivalrous at the limit, though, putting them into the category of club goods. These are much more likely to be provisioned in a pure market, since the benefits and costs fall more "correctly" on those who obtain or bear them.
- syshum 7y ago>>Economics predicts that public goods will be underprovided by a pure market. This is because of the free rider problem. Since I can't be excluded from the good, I can consume it without giving something up for it. Since it's non-rivalrous, there's no meaningful back pressure that eventually raises the cost of consumption to an unacceptable level. >>A strictly rational agent will always free ride on a public good. And most of the time, most rational agents will not provide a public good, because the cost of paying for everyone else's consumption exceeds the benefits of their own consumption. Thus the reason Free (As in Freedom) software advocates promote the use of Copy-Left Licensing, and why non-copyleft (like MIT, BSD, and others) are slowly eroding "open source" to less fully formed software and more just the tooling, libraries and dev environments used to create software
- pjmlp 7y agoBeing an old dog at tech, given how the community has been anti-GPL licensing, pushing for non-copyleft licenses, I predict that in a couple of years we will be back to the PD, Shareware, Demoware, Beerware, PostcardWare, whatever were all the way to share code during the 80 and 90's on home computers. And it is already too late to change course back to GPL being widespread. Every year there is a new project replacing GCC with LLVM, on Android the kernel is the only major GPL piece still standing (with Fuchsia on the horizon), on embedded there is a rise of non-copyleft OSes (including Zephyr, a Linux Foundation project), and so on.
- jacques_chester 7y agoCopyleft doesn't guarantee payment and developers are not paid in patches. What you're arguing for is like-for-like bartering, which is a subset of all possible market exchanges. The GPL creates neither excludability nor rivalrousness in the sense I am describing.
- zozbot234 7y ago> A strictly rational agent will always free ride on a public good. True in the general case of course, but there are arrangements that can be used to mitigate this. Crowdfunding with a threshold mechanism, ala Kickstarter, is one of these - reaching the crowdfunding threshold is a stable equilibrium. The intuition is that if every funder's contribution is critical to the threshold being reached, the funders are essentially "matching" each other's contribution, and thus providing a successful incentive even in a strictly rational sense.
- jacques_chester 7y agoI don't think crowdfunding will work with enterprise budgeting processes. That's where the sustaining money comes from for most OSS development.
- zozbot234 7y agoA 'crowd' of enterprises is called a consortium, joint venture, foundation etc. While the funding arrangement for those is less formal than in actual crowdfunding, plenty of those do get funded out of enterprise budgets.
- jacques_chester 7y agoI took your meaning to be buyers of enterprise software, rather than producers.