[p2p-research] Amazon created the workforce online market

[Don Marti]

begin magius quotation of Wed, Aug 04, 2010 at 05:27:33PM +0200:
> Amazon created this website, where is possible to sell and to buy
> "abstract work units" (hits):
> 
> https://www.mturk.com/mturk/welcome
> 
> Imho it's the capitalist valorization of what created by the
> freesoftware communities. Individual commits of coders to shared
> collective project's code on collaborative platforms (i.e.
> Sourceforge) basicly are "abstract work units". Here comes the Capital
> that make business on collaboration..

The tasks are very different from free software
development.  Typically they're things like "identify
the type of business shown in this photo" or "select
a category for this directory listing."

(You can't split up a software project into abstract
work units.  The industry has been trying to do so
for decades.)

And so far, none of the so-called "bounty systems"
for paying rewards to fix bugs or add features in
collaborative projects seem to have caught on.

-- 
Don Marti                    
http://zgp.org/~dmarti/
dmarti at zgp.org