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>>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 goo
by 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.