From: Eugen Leitl (eugen@leitl.org)
Date: Sun Nov 17 2002 - 03:55:55 MST
On Sat, 16 Nov 2002, Lee Corbin wrote:
> Historically, we tend to find that the only *long-term* care people
> have for others is when it is in their self-interest (excluding the
> ties in families or very small communities).
Yes. However, in case of bits (and maybe soon atoms) where replication
cost is negligible, and carried by individual contributor you can
establish a more benign form of cooperation, a form of digital communism.
The reasons why open source works so well are many. The negligible cost of
reproduction, non-zero-sum interaction (the whole is greater than the sum
of parts), nonmonetary prestige building in the community, demonstration
of skills to potential employers, etc.
Customers who do not contribute (except as transparent bug-finders, as app
phones home the circumstances where it croaked as it crashes to aid in its
debugging) profit from the noncommercial nature of the venture. There is
no drive to break standards (what Redmond usually tries with its 'Embrace,
extend and extinguish' strategy), the system is full disclosure at all
levels, since coming as inspectable source, stability is preferred to
bleeding edge featuritis (though you can live at the bleeding edge, if one
so wishes), there is no EULA with your firstborn and ceremonial obsidian
knife mentioned in fine print on the 12th page, no idiotic product codes
to enter, no costs for the license, etc.
No wonder software industry is scared. You can't really undersell a zero
price product, you can't sue a software author for patent violation if you
don't know who and where she is, and the market share shows no signs of
slowing, though currently mostly at expense of proprietary Unix boxes.
Once the open source skills in the workforce have arrived at a certain
critical density (right now cluey people are very scarce) we're going to
see an avalanche effect.
Of course it won't kill the software industry, there are always niches.
But the times of high profit margins are rapidly coming to a close, and
not only due to sudden influx of low-price developers from threshold
countries.
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