11 ms·
> non-excludable I think the term you're looking for is "public goods", which combines non-rivalrous and the author chooses not to exclude people through legal
by smichel17 6y ago
> non-excludable
I think the term you're looking for is "public goods", which combines non-rivalrous and the author chooses not to exclude people through legal means.
Running out of time to comment before I need to get to work so I'll just link our economics page here: https://wiki.snowdrift.coop/about/economics https://wiki.snowdrift.coop/about/economics
- jacques_chester 6y agoYes, but with a twist. OSS in itself behaves like a public good, but most business models for OSS and closed-source software revolve around bundling to create excludability (since software is de facto non-rivalrous). That makes them club goods. The most effective excludability is SaaS offerings, because total exclusion can be enforced easily. That's why hyperscalers make far more from OSS than companies devoted to it. (btw: the snowdrift docs are really impressive, kudos)
- quadrangle 6y agoPublic-goods are non-rivalrous and non-exclusive. It doesn't matter why they might be exclusive. If it's through technical means like DRM (even absent legal support for it) or (blurry, admittedly) needing an exclusive tool such an Open Source plugin for Photoshop, then it's not really a public good. The latter case is arguably a public-good within the "public" of Photoshop-users.