The strange economics of open-source software

It doesn't annoy me, but I have to say that I think you are wrong ;-). My google-fu gave me the following definition for communism:

"a theory or system of social organization in which all property is owned by the community and each person contributes and receives according to their ability and needs."

I suppose there is some superficial resemblance, but I consider communism a means of doling out limited resources in an equitable fashion. So instead of having individual ownership, the community owns it and manages it based on need. Instead of being free to act in your own best interest, you are obliged to contribute to the level of your ability.

With FLOSS, we are simply removing the concept that a piece of software is a limited resource. There is no group ownership -- individuals still own their copyright. It's just that under the rules of the licensing, ownership is irrelevant.

For example, I no longer sign inventions agreements at work. Instead, I tell my employers that all outside work I do will be under the GPL (or AGPL). I will even assign copyright over to them as long as the code is licensed as GPL. They can own it. I don't care because it makes no difference who owns it.

In a communist society, ownership is still quite important. It dictates who will decide what I need. If I owned the resource, I could take as much as I wanted (or give away or sell it if I wanted). With community ownership, the community decides. With FLOSS, if I have a copy of the software, it just doesn't matter who owns the copyright. I have the same rights and obligations either way.

Another big difference is the reception of the item. In a communist society, I have a right to the things I need and an obligation to contribute to my ability. With FLOSS, nobody must give me anything. If they do happen to give something to me, then I can do what I want with it (up to the limit of impinging other people's freedoms in some cases). But I don't have to do anything.

This is often a big misunderstanding the neophytes to free software have. They often demand bug fixes, or they demand to be given software for free. You just don't have that right, even if it is something you need. Similarly, if I make a change to any software, I needn't give that change to anyone. I am free to do so, but I have no obligation.

In summation, I don't think this is communism at all. It is simply leveraging the fact that existing software is not a limited resource. It establishes a set of community rules that optimises the freedom of the members of the community, not the satisfaction of their needs. Importantly, it does not establish any rights or obligations.

The last bit is tricky as you have obligations to offer source code if you choose to distribute, but the "if" part is important. Similarly, advocates feel that there is a moral imperative to act in a way that preserves software freedom for downstream users, but nobody says that those users have a "right" to the software (in the way that a person has a right to a food in communist society).

I don't think you understand utility properly, and sounds like you have a hard sciences bent.

The point of utility is that everyone is different. They will all behave in chaotic and unpredictable ways. The only way to make sense of why people exchange is to make the assumption that each participant in the exchange gains something greater than what they give up. Since the thing they gain and the thing they give up are always going to be different, it has to be distilled down to something. That's utility.

You say that I haven't solved 'the problem'. I say there is no problem to be solved. All we can do is observe the actions underway because there is nothing to fix.

We can't say why the contributors utility is increased, because by very definition, each persons utility is different. You can only infer or measure the subset of those, and make observations. Utility is the abstract class of individual preference implementations. There is no more point in trying to determine the cause of each individuals utility than there is trying to work out the purpose of each class implementation form the point of view of the abstract class. What does it matter? It doesn't.

Open source software doesn't suffer the tragedy of the commons precisely because the utility contributors gain can only be upwardly increased by people using it, and overconsumption of the software has very little effect on the utility of the producers. In the original case of the commons, overconsumption of grazing lands decreases the utility of each individual grazer, but if anything the opposite effect happens in OSS. Assuming one can brush off idiotic bug reports and I'll-advised pull requests, that is. But because contribution is not binding when the cost of contribution exceeds the utility gained, the person switches their time preferences to differnt things.

Incidentally, the evils of central planning are precisely because people try and 'solve' the problem of marketplaces, when there is no problem to solve, only exchanges to observe.

It's not meant to be scientific. It's a tool for abstracting a situation down to understand the intent rather than the details.

Your first mistake here is to try and assign a '$X worth of utility' - utility is not a unit which can be expressed in another unit. Someone can spend $x on something which gives them utility, but equally they can go for a hike in the mountains which provides greater utility to that individual than the object bought for $x, yet the hike costs has no $ value and cannot be bought nor sold.

So the circular argument criticism is only circular because you're forcing it to be circular.

I implied that. Most programmers today use Google. A paywall prevents them from getting these answers. So, most are blocked out.

Far as your example, I agree that algorithm support can't help without good software going along with it. That's probably true for many use cases with examples you cited being areas where proprietary tools and ecosystem dominate. Leads to some potential counters:

1. It might help in the many things that OSS is doing. That's a huge list that includes desktops, phones, servers, and a few major apps.

2. It might help in commercial sector if their developers see the cutting edge approaches. It might be obvious where rendering advances are but most stuff is scattered: finding it took lots of searching with my keyword, kung-fu. Might be affecting discovery in proprietary side, too. I know many of them keep inventing solutions weaker than even well-cited academic stuff. Aside from patents, gotta wonder why they didn't go with better approach if it seemed like a good fit. Likely explanation: didn't know it existed.

For instance, it's commonly believed that signal processing can only use a commercial DSP or graphics card with nothing delivered aside from that. People wanting an open alternative don't even know where to start that's worth anything. I heard and believed that too till I landed on this bad boy:

https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Asynchronous_array_of_simple_pro...

The architecture is described in enough detail to be clonable. It might even be licensable with open-source allowed. It should handle plenty of workloads and supports custom accelerators for common things. After the mask costs, it would have great price vs performance vs energy usage. Yet, with 8 years of research, I just now came across this despite the first deliverable being in 2005. Might be a dead end and might turn into something if pursued. Yet, I'm sure it had potential to benefit commercial and OSS projects whose design approach accomplished far less had they known about this.

So, more full and legacy systems certainly have lots of momentum. You can't just have a piece of a system. I think even they might be affected by the problem I describe, though, given they're as sub-optimal vs cutting edge as OSS often are. So, easier movement of these ideas might benefit both.

I think the trend is that closed source software is increasingly becoming the highly customized last-mile code that runs a specific business which sells services, curated information, or physical products.

I also think this is why jobs involving OSS development are increasingly attractive to candidates. Do you want to spend your time building what amounts to a one-off solution to duck tape some wonky IT-department components, or do you want to work on well-engineered projects that are generalized solutions?

So I think closed source software is basically the last layer that integrates open source software. Which ever side you view as bringing in the sales and money is really just a matter of perspective.