[p2p-research] Quinn Debate

[Kevin Carson]

David:  Another thing also just occurred to me.

Many of the pro-patent arguments based on R&D cost assume a particular
model of product design.  But the open-source design process is
deliberately organized to minimize outlay costs.  Modular design, with
stigmergic efforts to create modules for a common open-source
platform, greatly lowers R&D cost per product: spreading out the R&D
for a platform and for modules by making the basic designs reusable
over a wide range of different configurations.  Open-source gets one
hell of a lot more bang for the R&D buck by getting maximum use out of
discrete bundles of development work.

Eric Hunting has raised the point that, even WITH proprietary
technology, the corporate capitalist economy often resorts to modular
design for common platforms to minimize R&D costs.  If it weren't for
the use of IP to block competitive development of generic modules,
accessories, spare parts, etc., built on common platforms, it would be
far more prevalent.   Hunting:

"Industrial ecologies are precipitated by situations where traditional
industrial age product development models fail in the face of very
high technology development overheads or very high demassification in
design driven by desire for personalization/customization producing
Long Tail market phenomenon. A solution to these dilemmas is
modularization around common architectural platforms in order to
compartmentalize and distribute development cost risks, the result
being 'ecologies' of many small companies independently and
competitively developing intercompatible parts for common product
platforms -such as the IBM PC."
 http://p2pfoundation.ning.com/forum/topic/show?id=2003008%3ATopic%3A6275&page=1&commentId=2003008%3AComment%3A6377&x=1#2003008Comment6377

Another point (I got this from Samuel  Rose on the P2P Research email
list):  for efforts like the OS designs at Factor e Farm, the primary
motivation for the R&D effort is the capabilities afforded by the
technology (the utility of the small tractor, sawmill, CEB press,
etc.).

And yet another point:  for production on a JIT model by
micromanufacturers like 100kGarages, with general-purpose machinery
being used to produce short runs of a wide variety of designs on file,
small batch production would be totally uneconomical with the massive
costs of patenting each separate design.  Patents make absolutely no
sense for garage manufacturing, because they raise capital outlays and
overhead so high that the only way to amortize them is large-batch
production.

Best,
Kevin

-- 
Kevin Carson
Center for a Stateless Society http://c4ss.org
Mutualist Blog:  Free Market Anti-Capitalism
http://mutualist.blogspot.com
Studies in Mutualist Political Economy
http://www.mutualist.org/id47.html
Organization Theory:  A Libertarian Perspective
http://mutualist.blogspot.com/2005/12/studies-in-anarchist-theory-of.html