7 ms·

I've been thinking about this a lot lately. In economics, the value of competition is well understood and widely lauded, but the power of cooperation seems to b

by m12k 6y ago

I've been thinking about this a lot lately. In economics, the value of competition is well understood and widely lauded, but the power of cooperation seems to be valued much less - cooperation simply doesn't seem as fashionable. But the FOSS world gives me hope - it shows me a world where cooperation is encouraged, and works really, really well. Where the best available solution isn't just the one that was made by a single team in a successful company that managed to beat everyone else (and which may or may not have just gotten into a dominant position via e.g. bigger marketing spend). It's a true meritocracy, and the best ideas and tools don't just succeed and beat out everything else, they are also copied, so their innovation makes their competitors better too - and unlike the business world, this is seen as a plus. The best solutions end up combining the innovation and brilliance of a much larger group of people than any one team in the cutthroat world of traditional business. Just think about how much effort is wasted around the world every day by hundreds of thousands of companies reinventing the wheel because the thousands of other existing solutions to that exact problem were also created behind closed doors. Think about how much of this pointless duplication FOSS has already saved us from! I really hope the value of cooperation and the example set by FOSS can spread to more parts of society.

naringas 6y ago
but let's not forget the non-material nature of software allows this, hardware will always be a physical (material) artifact. however the line does blur when talking about blueprints and designs. in any case, I think that free software movements are a sociological anomaly, I wonder if there is any academic research into this from an antropological or an historical economics viewpoint. also, it seems to me that in some sense the entire market works in cooperation, just not very efficiently (it optimizes for other things than efficiency and is heavily distorted by subsidies and tariffs)
- m12k 6y ago
  I'm curious to hear what you mean when you say the entire market works in cooperation? I mean, strategic partnerships happen, and companies work as suppliers for other companies. But that's not the market - the market is where someone wanting to buy something goes and evaluates competing products and picks the one they want to buy. It's pretty comparable to natural selection, where the fittest animals survive and the fittest companies get bigger marketshare while the least fit companies go bankrupt, and the least fit species go extinct. So I guess you could say that the market functions as an ecosystem - maybe the word you were looking for was 'symbiosis' rather than cooperation? Cheetah's aren't cooperating with lions, they are competing - but relative to the rest of the ecosystem, they exist in a form of symbiosis.
  - CabSauce 6y ago
    Trade and money are just tools to facilitate cooperation. They incentivize agents to cooperate by sharing the value of that cooperation.
  - crdrost 6y ago
    There are various forms of cooperation too. Lions merge with cheetahs to hopefully starve the leopards out, then they domesticate emus and antelopes so that they can survive scorching the rest of the savannah so they don't have to deal with those pesky wild dogs. Then they see tigers doing the same in India and say “hey let's agree that you can run rampant through Africa if we can run rampant through India, but we agree on these shared limits so that we are not in conflict.” A favorite example is that us legislation to ban advertisements for smoking was sponsored by the tobacco industry. They were spending a lot on ads just to keep up with the Joneses; if Camel voluntarily stopped and Marlboro continued, then Camel would go the way of Lucky Strike. They would rather agree to cut their expenditures! But they needed to make sure no other young tobacco whippersnappers came in and started showing a couple ads which they would have to both best, reigniting the war. Open source is interesting because it seems to be a marvelous unexpected outcome from the existence of the corporation. Individual people start to work at corporations and are aware that whatever they produce at that corporation is mortal, it will die with that corporation if that corporation decides to stop maintaining it or if that corporation itself folds. The individual wants his or her labor to survive longer, to become immortal. This company could go out of business and I will still have these tools at my next job. So in some sense layered self-interests create a push towards corporate cooperation.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - visarga 6y ago
    'Survival of the fittest' when applied to groups implies cooperation as an essential skill between individuals. It's not all competition. The fittest group is not the one made of the most individually fit members, they also need to function well together.
    - 6y ago
- mannykoum 6y ago
  To me, it seems as less of a sociological anomaly and more of an example of the quality of production outside the established competitive norms of capitalism. There are multiple such examples throughout history. The gift economy wasn't born with FOSS development. There is a lot of literature on the subject of cooperation, especially from anarchist philosophers (i.e. Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution, Kropotkin).
- _zamorano_ 6y ago
  Well, I'm yet to see a free (as in beer) lawyer, helping people for free after his regular workday.
  - fgonzag 6y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pro_bono https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pro_bono
- nwallin 6y ago
  > but let's not forget the non-material nature of software allows this, hardware will always be a physical (material) artifact. Sort of? I tried to get into FPGA programming a while ago, and it turns out the entire software stack to get from an idea in my brain to a blinking LED on a dev board is hot garbage. First of all, it's insanely expensive, and second of all, it really, really sucks. Like how is it <current year> (I forgot what year it was, but it was 2016-2018 timeframe) and you've tried to reinvent the IDE and failed? I think projects like RISC-V and J Core are super cool, but I couldn't possibly even attempt to contribute to them based on how awful the process is.
  - aswanson 6y ago
    Same. Started off in love w FPGA design in college. Software design is light-years ahead of that area in terms of tool maturity, functionality and freedom.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - HansHamster 6y ago
    Check out IceStorm (+Yosys, nextpnr...) for a pretty complete open source toolchain for ice40 FPGAs. It's really amazing to go from the infuriating to use vendor tools with all their quirks and bugs to a single 'make' that just generates the bitfile without using the broken IDE or complaining about licenses... The FPGAs are also relatively inexpensive (<5-10€ in single quantities depending on the model) but are on the lower end in terms of features and performance. The tools should also support the more powerful ECP5 FPGAs, but I haven't tried them yet.
    - jacquesm 6y ago
      Interesting, thank you for the pointer. I've been playing around with FPGAs a bit and this sounds like it might just be what I was looking for. Is there any starter board that you'd recommend for this workflow?
      - 6y ago
- lopsidedBrain 6y ago
  The material nature of hardware is barely any higher than that of software. Yes, you cannot just copy bits around, but you can take the same design and fabricate millions of chips for pennies. The cost of production for any given chip of Silicon has almost nothing to do with its material cost. It has everything to do with the amount of design work that went into it, just like software. None of that appreciably changes the benefits of cooperation vs competition.
- kilburn 6y ago
  > in any case, I think that free software movements are a sociological anomaly, I wonder if there is any academic research into this from an antropological or an historical economics viewpoint. I don't have the proper background to make a strong case about this, but I feel like middle ages guilds would be closer to the open-source model than to the current "trades secrets" one, wouldn't it? Likewise, I don't see farmers of ye olde times keeping their crop-growing tricks to themselves as secrets and so on. Furthermore, we've known about many indigenous cultures where "the tribe" is regarded as more important than the individual, meaning that sociologically they should be more aligned with the open-source model than the capitalistic one, shouldn't it? Again, I'm not an expert in the area, but it seems to me that our current society is more "historically anomalous" at the commoner level than any more socially-conscious one would be (i.e.: common people has leaned to greed/individuality these days than almost always in the past).
- jacquesm 6y ago
  There is no historical precedent other than the media industry, which uses the copyright system for an entirely different purpose: to milk as much as possible out of a single investment in time and effort, usually by someone else than the original creator. The whole thing revolves around the marginal cost of an extra copy of a piece of software being close to zero, no other critical industry gets such economies of scale. Making more chips still requires huge capex and opex.
mercer 6y ago
Whatever one might think of socialism, and I really don't mean to start a political discussion here, FOSS is an example for me that shows that at the very least we're not purely driven by competition.
- shard 6y ago
  Haven't thought very deeply about this, but FOSS doesn't seem like socialism, as the capital being competed for is user attention. FOSS projects without enough capital does not gain enough developers, and falls into disrepair and obscurity. Not sure what a socialist FOSS movement might look like, but maybe developers would be assigned to projects as opposed to them freely choosing the projects to work on?
  - mercer 6y ago
    > Haven't thought very deeply about this, but FOSS doesn't seem like socialism, as the capital being competed for is user attention. I think that's stretching the definition of 'competition' a bit too much. First off, many people work on FOSS just because they want to, or because they believe that it's a good thing. Not because they want 'user attention'. Furthermore, I'm pretty sure that even the people that are motivated by user attention don't see it as a competition. > FOSS projects without enough capital does not gain enough developers, and falls into disrepair and obscurity. There are plenty of FOSS projects that do fine with just a handful of developers, or even just a single one. with perhaps the occasional pull request from others. > Not sure what a socialist FOSS movement might look like, but maybe developers would be assigned to projects as opposed to them freely choosing the projects to work on? Maybe I misunderstand, but I get the impression that you're thinking of 'state' socialism. I wouldn't say being assigned stuff is a core aspect of socialism. All that said, it's not so much that I think FOSS is like socialism, but rather that FOSS is a counter-example to a common argument I hear from especially the more hardcore 'everything should be market forces' capitalists, which is that we're primarily driven by competition.
    - shard 6y ago
      Hi Mercer, interesting points. But I think in general, the FOSS projects that thrive, that gather users which report bugs, that has an active community, are going to be the ones which attract developers, not necessarily because they seek fame and fortune, but just by the simple aspect that they are more likely to run into those projects, and be able to contribute to those projects more easily due to better documentation and active devs who can answer questions. It is the projects which compete for attention for their livelihood, like an emergent behavior, even if the developers don't explicitly target it. Besides, developers are humans too, and they can feel pride when their contributions are recognized, and they can consider the work to be helping to pave the way to future employment. Contributing to large active projects give higher chances for both prospects. Regarding whether it's state socialism that I'm thinking of, you're probably right. I've never been very clear on the definition of socialism. On the most superficial level, I understand socialism to be that the community controlled the means of production. So when applied to FOSS, that seems to mean that the whole community decides what projects to work on, and in the case where the community decided that something needs to be worked on, but not enough devs volunteer, then it seems like the work will need to be assigned. Finally, as you said, it's not about FOSS being like socialism, but that they devs are not directly competing for big cash prizes that's the interesting aspect. I agree. There are not that many industries that are so fundamental to our society which has a large contingent of people doing critical work for free. Perhaps education comes close. Politics, with political power taking a similar role as attention for FOSS projects, but that's straying pretty far.
CabSauce 6y ago
In economics, ... but the power of cooperation seems to be valued much less I'm not sure that I agree with this. The creation of firms and trade are both cooperative. They aren't altruistic though. (I'm not disagreeing with your overall point, just that cooperation isn't valued in economics.)
- koheripbal 6y ago
  Agreed - partnerships abound in the real business world. It might be under-modeled in economic theory and not well taught in business school, but the value of networking is and having high-level industry relationships is the life-blood of a good business leader - specifically because of partnering and information sharing.
  - 38e7ruhrhdh 6y ago
    If anything economics seems like the smarter field when compared to the open source community because the focus is on resource evaluation, allocation, and returns. Open source could probably use more talent but the missing lynchpin is obviously a reward structure. The techno-optimism of the 80s and 90s doesn't scale, we need licensing structures that entitle the parties doing the unprofitable stuff to a share of the profits their work produces. Resisting commercialization has weakened the community not made it stronger, open source can still be free without being free labor.
    - zhengyi13 6y ago
      If you think there's no reward structure, perhaps it's because you can't see it? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gift_economy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gift_economy
  - Spooky23 6y ago
    It’s the lifeblood of the leader, but not the firm. A good percentage of being a good leader is being able to pick up the phone and get stuff done, which is often contrary to what the firm wants.
- 6y ago
dimva 6y ago
FOSS is super competitive, too. Teams splinter off and fork projects, new projects start up that try to dethrone the industry leaders, people compete for status/usage, etc. The main difference is that the work product/process is public and so ideas spread much more rapidly.
- JDEW 6y ago
  Yes but competing in a cooperation is different than cooperating in a competition.
pradn 6y ago
Classical economics thinks of people as "rational utility-maximizing actors", which doesn't approximate reality in quite a lot of ways. There's been a move toward more sophisticated models - like that people minimize regret more than they seek the optimal reward ("rational actors with regret minimization.") This switch to more complex underlying models is similar to computational models used in computer science. Algorithms used to only be designed for the RAM computation model, which doesn't model real-life CPUs, which have caches and where not all operations take unit time. Now, there's a wide variety of models to choose from, including cache-aware, parallel, and quantum models. You often get better predictors of the real world this way. There has been quite a lot of study in economics about cooperation. My favorite is Eleanor Ostrom's work on "the commons". She observes that with a certain set of rules, discovered across the world and across varying geographies, people do seem to be able to cooperate to maintain a natural resource like a fishery or a forest or irrigation canals for hundreds of years. Her rules are here (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elinor_Ostrom#Design_principles_for_Common_Pool_Resource_(CPR)_institution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elinor_Ostrom#Design_principle...).
- webmaven 6y ago
  > Classical economics thinks of people as "rational utility-maximizing actors", which doesn't approximate reality in quite a lot of ways. There's been a move toward more sophisticated models - like that people minimize regret more than they seek the optimal reward ("rational actors with regret minimization") Even when entities (corporations, for example) are trying to maximize utility, and an optimal decision is desired, there are issues with how much time and resources can be spent making decisions, so optimality has to be bounded in various ways (do you wait for more information? Do you spend more time and compute on calculating what would be optimal? etc.).
- pas 6y ago
  The problem with the "rational agent" model is that it's a tautology. Yes sure everyone wants more utility, great, but everyone's utility function is slightly different. As you say some are risk takers pursuing insane rewards/yields/profits with low probability, while others are super risk-averse conservative in their choices, etc. That said, economics doesn't rest on this. Macroeconomics doesn't care, nor micro/labor/health/sports/developmental econ either. Sure trying to predict how someone (and more interestingly how groups) will behave based on their psych profile is an important area of research, but the aforementioned subfields of econ already have well working assumptions about how people will behave in the aggregate, even if they can't derive it from some exact utility function.
unishark 6y ago
Perhaps because competition relates to monopolies which is where governments intercede, and hence there is a demand for economic analysis. The libertarians economists talk about cooperation in terms of spontaneous order. Milton Friedman had his story of the process to manufacture a pencil as "cooperation without coercion". Basically it's the "invisible hand" driving people to cooperate via price signals and self-interest. I don't know if there's much that can be done with the concept beyond that.
lucbocahut 6y ago
Great point. It seems to me the mechanics of competition are at play to some extent in open source: ideas compete against each other, the better ones prevail, and contribute to a better whole.
Ericson2314 6y ago
The negligible unit economics of software mean that the successfulness of Free Software should be derivable from those old theories. The monopolistic and rent-seeking alternative that is the proprietary computer industry is also really far from some Ricardo utopia. I don't mean to engage in some "no true capitalism" libertarian defense, but rather point out that a lot of fine (if simplistic) economic models/theory have been corrupted by various ideologies. A lot of radical-seeming stuff is not radical at all according to the math, just according to your rightist econ 101 teacher.
mr_toad 6y ago
Software can be duplicated for near zero marginal cost. It’s a well studied phenomenon in economics. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_good_(economics) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_good_(economics)
- novaRom 6y ago
  And corporate consumers can take advantage of public goods without contributing sufficiently to their creation.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
yolomcsuperswag 6y ago
The economy _is_ cooperation. I.e. a trade is when two parties engage in a mutually beneficial exchange.

by m12k 6y ago

naringas 6y ago

but let's not forget the non-material nature of software allows this, hardware will always be a physical (material) artifact. however the line does blur when talking about blueprints and designs. in any case, I think that free software movements are a sociological anomaly, I wonder if there is any academic research into this from an antropological or an historical economics viewpoint. also, it seems to me that in some sense the entire market works in cooperation, just not very efficiently (it optimizes for other things than efficiency and is heavily distorted by subsidies and tariffs)

m12k 6y ago
I'm curious to hear what you mean when you say the entire market works in cooperation? I mean, strategic partnerships happen, and companies work as suppliers for other companies. But that's not the market - the market is where someone wanting to buy something goes and evaluates competing products and picks the one they want to buy. It's pretty comparable to natural selection, where the fittest animals survive and the fittest companies get bigger marketshare while the least fit companies go bankrupt, and the least fit species go extinct. So I guess you could say that the market functions as an ecosystem - maybe the word you were looking for was 'symbiosis' rather than cooperation? Cheetah's aren't cooperating with lions, they are competing - but relative to the rest of the ecosystem, they exist in a form of symbiosis.
- CabSauce 6y ago
  Trade and money are just tools to facilitate cooperation. They incentivize agents to cooperate by sharing the value of that cooperation.
- crdrost 6y ago
  There are various forms of cooperation too. Lions merge with cheetahs to hopefully starve the leopards out, then they domesticate emus and antelopes so that they can survive scorching the rest of the savannah so they don't have to deal with those pesky wild dogs. Then they see tigers doing the same in India and say “hey let's agree that you can run rampant through Africa if we can run rampant through India, but we agree on these shared limits so that we are not in conflict.” A favorite example is that us legislation to ban advertisements for smoking was sponsored by the tobacco industry. They were spending a lot on ads just to keep up with the Joneses; if Camel voluntarily stopped and Marlboro continued, then Camel would go the way of Lucky Strike. They would rather agree to cut their expenditures! But they needed to make sure no other young tobacco whippersnappers came in and started showing a couple ads which they would have to both best, reigniting the war. Open source is interesting because it seems to be a marvelous unexpected outcome from the existence of the corporation. Individual people start to work at corporations and are aware that whatever they produce at that corporation is mortal, it will die with that corporation if that corporation decides to stop maintaining it or if that corporation itself folds. The individual wants his or her labor to survive longer, to become immortal. This company could go out of business and I will still have these tools at my next job. So in some sense layered self-interests create a push towards corporate cooperation.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- visarga 6y ago
  'Survival of the fittest' when applied to groups implies cooperation as an essential skill between individuals. It's not all competition. The fittest group is not the one made of the most individually fit members, they also need to function well together.
  - 6y ago
mannykoum 6y ago
To me, it seems as less of a sociological anomaly and more of an example of the quality of production outside the established competitive norms of capitalism. There are multiple such examples throughout history. The gift economy wasn't born with FOSS development. There is a lot of literature on the subject of cooperation, especially from anarchist philosophers (i.e. Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution, Kropotkin).
_zamorano_ 6y ago
Well, I'm yet to see a free (as in beer) lawyer, helping people for free after his regular workday.
- fgonzag 6y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pro_bono https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pro_bono
nwallin 6y ago
> but let's not forget the non-material nature of software allows this, hardware will always be a physical (material) artifact. Sort of? I tried to get into FPGA programming a while ago, and it turns out the entire software stack to get from an idea in my brain to a blinking LED on a dev board is hot garbage. First of all, it's insanely expensive, and second of all, it really, really sucks. Like how is it <current year> (I forgot what year it was, but it was 2016-2018 timeframe) and you've tried to reinvent the IDE and failed? I think projects like RISC-V and J Core are super cool, but I couldn't possibly even attempt to contribute to them based on how awful the process is.
- aswanson 6y ago
  Same. Started off in love w FPGA design in college. Software design is light-years ahead of that area in terms of tool maturity, functionality and freedom.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- HansHamster 6y ago
  Check out IceStorm (+Yosys, nextpnr...) for a pretty complete open source toolchain for ice40 FPGAs. It's really amazing to go from the infuriating to use vendor tools with all their quirks and bugs to a single 'make' that just generates the bitfile without using the broken IDE or complaining about licenses... The FPGAs are also relatively inexpensive (<5-10€ in single quantities depending on the model) but are on the lower end in terms of features and performance. The tools should also support the more powerful ECP5 FPGAs, but I haven't tried them yet.
  - jacquesm 6y ago
    Interesting, thank you for the pointer. I've been playing around with FPGAs a bit and this sounds like it might just be what I was looking for. Is there any starter board that you'd recommend for this workflow?
    - 6y ago
lopsidedBrain 6y ago
The material nature of hardware is barely any higher than that of software. Yes, you cannot just copy bits around, but you can take the same design and fabricate millions of chips for pennies. The cost of production for any given chip of Silicon has almost nothing to do with its material cost. It has everything to do with the amount of design work that went into it, just like software. None of that appreciably changes the benefits of cooperation vs competition.
kilburn 6y ago
> in any case, I think that free software movements are a sociological anomaly, I wonder if there is any academic research into this from an antropological or an historical economics viewpoint. I don't have the proper background to make a strong case about this, but I feel like middle ages guilds would be closer to the open-source model than to the current "trades secrets" one, wouldn't it? Likewise, I don't see farmers of ye olde times keeping their crop-growing tricks to themselves as secrets and so on. Furthermore, we've known about many indigenous cultures where "the tribe" is regarded as more important than the individual, meaning that sociologically they should be more aligned with the open-source model than the capitalistic one, shouldn't it? Again, I'm not an expert in the area, but it seems to me that our current society is more "historically anomalous" at the commoner level than any more socially-conscious one would be (i.e.: common people has leaned to greed/individuality these days than almost always in the past).
jacquesm 6y ago
There is no historical precedent other than the media industry, which uses the copyright system for an entirely different purpose: to milk as much as possible out of a single investment in time and effort, usually by someone else than the original creator. The whole thing revolves around the marginal cost of an extra copy of a piece of software being close to zero, no other critical industry gets such economies of scale. Making more chips still requires huge capex and opex.

mercer 6y ago

Whatever one might think of socialism, and I really don't mean to start a political discussion here, FOSS is an example for me that shows that at the very least we're not purely driven by competition.

shard 6y ago
Haven't thought very deeply about this, but FOSS doesn't seem like socialism, as the capital being competed for is user attention. FOSS projects without enough capital does not gain enough developers, and falls into disrepair and obscurity. Not sure what a socialist FOSS movement might look like, but maybe developers would be assigned to projects as opposed to them freely choosing the projects to work on?
- mercer 6y ago
  > Haven't thought very deeply about this, but FOSS doesn't seem like socialism, as the capital being competed for is user attention. I think that's stretching the definition of 'competition' a bit too much. First off, many people work on FOSS just because they want to, or because they believe that it's a good thing. Not because they want 'user attention'. Furthermore, I'm pretty sure that even the people that are motivated by user attention don't see it as a competition. > FOSS projects without enough capital does not gain enough developers, and falls into disrepair and obscurity. There are plenty of FOSS projects that do fine with just a handful of developers, or even just a single one. with perhaps the occasional pull request from others. > Not sure what a socialist FOSS movement might look like, but maybe developers would be assigned to projects as opposed to them freely choosing the projects to work on? Maybe I misunderstand, but I get the impression that you're thinking of 'state' socialism. I wouldn't say being assigned stuff is a core aspect of socialism. All that said, it's not so much that I think FOSS is like socialism, but rather that FOSS is a counter-example to a common argument I hear from especially the more hardcore 'everything should be market forces' capitalists, which is that we're primarily driven by competition.
  - shard 6y ago
    Hi Mercer, interesting points. But I think in general, the FOSS projects that thrive, that gather users which report bugs, that has an active community, are going to be the ones which attract developers, not necessarily because they seek fame and fortune, but just by the simple aspect that they are more likely to run into those projects, and be able to contribute to those projects more easily due to better documentation and active devs who can answer questions. It is the projects which compete for attention for their livelihood, like an emergent behavior, even if the developers don't explicitly target it. Besides, developers are humans too, and they can feel pride when their contributions are recognized, and they can consider the work to be helping to pave the way to future employment. Contributing to large active projects give higher chances for both prospects. Regarding whether it's state socialism that I'm thinking of, you're probably right. I've never been very clear on the definition of socialism. On the most superficial level, I understand socialism to be that the community controlled the means of production. So when applied to FOSS, that seems to mean that the whole community decides what projects to work on, and in the case where the community decided that something needs to be worked on, but not enough devs volunteer, then it seems like the work will need to be assigned. Finally, as you said, it's not about FOSS being like socialism, but that they devs are not directly competing for big cash prizes that's the interesting aspect. I agree. There are not that many industries that are so fundamental to our society which has a large contingent of people doing critical work for free. Perhaps education comes close. Politics, with political power taking a similar role as attention for FOSS projects, but that's straying pretty far.

CabSauce 6y ago

In economics, ... but the power of cooperation seems to be valued much less I'm not sure that I agree with this. The creation of firms and trade are both cooperative. They aren't altruistic though. (I'm not disagreeing with your overall point, just that cooperation isn't valued in economics.)

koheripbal 6y ago
Agreed - partnerships abound in the real business world. It might be under-modeled in economic theory and not well taught in business school, but the value of networking is and having high-level industry relationships is the life-blood of a good business leader - specifically because of partnering and information sharing.
- 38e7ruhrhdh 6y ago
  If anything economics seems like the smarter field when compared to the open source community because the focus is on resource evaluation, allocation, and returns. Open source could probably use more talent but the missing lynchpin is obviously a reward structure. The techno-optimism of the 80s and 90s doesn't scale, we need licensing structures that entitle the parties doing the unprofitable stuff to a share of the profits their work produces. Resisting commercialization has weakened the community not made it stronger, open source can still be free without being free labor.
  - zhengyi13 6y ago
    If you think there's no reward structure, perhaps it's because you can't see it? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gift_economy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gift_economy
- Spooky23 6y ago
  It’s the lifeblood of the leader, but not the firm. A good percentage of being a good leader is being able to pick up the phone and get stuff done, which is often contrary to what the firm wants.
6y ago

dimva 6y ago

FOSS is super competitive, too. Teams splinter off and fork projects, new projects start up that try to dethrone the industry leaders, people compete for status/usage, etc. The main difference is that the work product/process is public and so ideas spread much more rapidly.

JDEW 6y ago
Yes but competing in a cooperation is different than cooperating in a competition.

pradn 6y ago

Classical economics thinks of people as "rational utility-maximizing actors", which doesn't approximate reality in quite a lot of ways. There's been a move toward more sophisticated models - like that people minimize regret more than they seek the optimal reward ("rational actors with regret minimization.") This switch to more complex underlying models is similar to computational models used in computer science. Algorithms used to only be designed for the RAM computation model, which doesn't model real-life CPUs, which have caches and where not all operations take unit time. Now, there's a wide variety of models to choose from, including cache-aware, parallel, and quantum models. You often get better predictors of the real world this way. There has been quite a lot of study in economics about cooperation. My favorite is Eleanor Ostrom's work on "the commons". She observes that with a certain set of rules, discovered across the world and across varying geographies, people do seem to be able to cooperate to maintain a natural resource like a fishery or a forest or irrigation canals for hundreds of years. Her rules are here (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elinor_Ostrom#Design_principles_for_Common_Pool_Resource_(CPR)_institution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elinor_Ostrom#Design_principle...).

webmaven 6y ago
> Classical economics thinks of people as "rational utility-maximizing actors", which doesn't approximate reality in quite a lot of ways. There's been a move toward more sophisticated models - like that people minimize regret more than they seek the optimal reward ("rational actors with regret minimization") Even when entities (corporations, for example) are trying to maximize utility, and an optimal decision is desired, there are issues with how much time and resources can be spent making decisions, so optimality has to be bounded in various ways (do you wait for more information? Do you spend more time and compute on calculating what would be optimal? etc.).
pas 6y ago
The problem with the "rational agent" model is that it's a tautology. Yes sure everyone wants more utility, great, but everyone's utility function is slightly different. As you say some are risk takers pursuing insane rewards/yields/profits with low probability, while others are super risk-averse conservative in their choices, etc. That said, economics doesn't rest on this. Macroeconomics doesn't care, nor micro/labor/health/sports/developmental econ either. Sure trying to predict how someone (and more interestingly how groups) will behave based on their psych profile is an important area of research, but the aforementioned subfields of econ already have well working assumptions about how people will behave in the aggregate, even if they can't derive it from some exact utility function.

unishark 6y ago

Perhaps because competition relates to monopolies which is where governments intercede, and hence there is a demand for economic analysis. The libertarians economists talk about cooperation in terms of spontaneous order. Milton Friedman had his story of the process to manufacture a pencil as "cooperation without coercion". Basically it's the "invisible hand" driving people to cooperate via price signals and self-interest. I don't know if there's much that can be done with the concept beyond that.

lucbocahut 6y ago

Great point. It seems to me the mechanics of competition are at play to some extent in open source: ideas compete against each other, the better ones prevail, and contribute to a better whole.

Ericson2314 6y ago

The negligible unit economics of software mean that the successfulness of Free Software should be derivable from those old theories. The monopolistic and rent-seeking alternative that is the proprietary computer industry is also really far from some Ricardo utopia. I don't mean to engage in some "no true capitalism" libertarian defense, but rather point out that a lot of fine (if simplistic) economic models/theory have been corrupted by various ideologies. A lot of radical-seeming stuff is not radical at all according to the math, just according to your rightist econ 101 teacher.

mr_toad 6y ago

Software can be duplicated for near zero marginal cost. It’s a well studied phenomenon in economics. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_good_(economics) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_good_(economics)

novaRom 6y ago
And corporate consumers can take advantage of public goods without contributing sufficiently to their creation.

deleted 6y ago

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yolomcsuperswag 6y ago

The economy _is_ cooperation. I.e. a trade is when two parties engage in a mutually beneficial exchange.