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The strange economics of open-source software

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Re: The strange economics of open-source software

#21

Post by jlarocco »

nickpsecurity wrote: post #3

I'm not sure I agree with the notion that OSS is where all the innovation is happening. There's certainly plenty of innovation there. But most innovation still seems to be privately funded developments (esp startups) which get open sourced. Or not. Has there been any empirical work on assessing it in recent times? Maybe post 2010?

I agree. Innovation in open source is all on commodity computer stuff that developers understand, like operating systems, compilers, web browsers, and databases.

For almost everything that requires other expertise the innovation is still done in closed source software.

Stuff like photo editing (LightRoom, Photoshop, Capture One), video editing (Premiere, Flame, DS), high end rendering (Renderman, 3Delight), CAD (Catia, Solidworks, NX), embedded systems (almost anything in cars, airplanes, appliances), and a million other areas are all still as closed as can be, and open source isn't even competing, much less innovating.

Re: The strange economics of open-source software

#22

Post by brc »

danharaj wrote: post #20
brc wrote: post #5

I don't find it strange at all, and looking at a proper classical economist - they would have no trouble explaining it. Most people, when understanding economics tend to make the jump directly to money/cash when explaining prices and market action. But to be correct you have to look at utility. There's little question as to why companies install open source software - the TCO can be lower. But why do people contribut…

Calling it utility doesn't seem to actually explain what it is.

Utility is a well-known concept in economics. It's strange at first to the outsider, but it's easy to understand with a little reading.

Re: The strange economics of open-source software

#23

Post by nickpsecurity »

jlarocco wrote: post #21
nickpsecurity wrote: post #3

I'm not sure I agree with the notion that OSS is where all the innovation is happening. There's certainly plenty of innovation there. But most innovation still seems to be privately funded developments (esp startups) which get open sourced. Or not. Has there been any empirical work on assessing it in recent times? Maybe post 2010?

I agree. Innovation in open source is all on commodity computer stuff that developers understand, like operating systems, compilers, web browsers, and databases. For almost everything that requires other expertise the innovation is still done in closed source software. Stuff like photo editing (LightRoom, Photoshop, Capture One), video editing (Premiere, Flame, DS), high end rendering (Renderman, 3Delight), CAD (Cati…

Those are good examples. I'm not sure what the actual split is. Don't forget, though, where the real majority of innovation is: academic (mainly) and corporate labs. I went into detail a little while ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10269245

Re: The strange economics of open-source software

#24

Post by sanxiyn »

elektromekatron wrote: post #14

I know that this will annoy some people, and believe me, I mean this with a very small 'c', however I think that the open source movement is far and away the most successful communist experiment in history.

Means of production, right? I agree the resemblance is more than skin deep.

Re: The strange economics of open-source software

#25

Post by erikpukinskis »

bad_user wrote: post #17
erikpukinskis wrote: post #11

I think it's important to note the strange duality of this moment: 1. This is a cambrian explosion of open-source infrastructure tools 2. This is the dark ages of open-source UI I think it's important to be aware that on this front the Open Source movement has completely stalled. When I was in College, I used Abiword, Evolution, and Rhythmbox. Now those things have been replaced for me with Google Docs, Gmail, and Am…

My desktop is Linux and I still use LibreOffice, VLC and Thunderbird. And I also used Google's Docs, Calendar, Gmail and Music, but I've cut off my Gmail / Calendar usage due to their poor implementation for standards, having migrated from Google Apps to FastMail. I'm also paying for a Dropbox subscription because they are the only major cloud storage provider with native support for Linux and even though some client…

It's true, you can do a lot without a server! And I think where we're headed there's a lot happening in-browser. But there are still parts of most workflows where a little server work makes sense, and that's the bottleneck.

We can't have an open source web app workflow until the entire develop/deploy workflow can be forked with a couple button presses. As long as there's one single part of that chain that needs to be done by hand, we won't have a rich pool of open source web software users.

You're right though that if you're willing to use Desktop software there's still a bunch of good software out there. I'm just not interested in desktop software anymore.

Re: The strange economics of open-source software

#26

Post by danharaj »

brc wrote: post #22
danharaj wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Calling it utility doesn't seem to actually explain what it is.

Utility is a well-known concept in economics. It's strange at first to the outsider, but it's easy to understand with a little reading.

I know what utility is in economics, my problem is that you can always just say that the reason why people do X is because they are rational and X maximizes their utility. It doesn't tell you why that is their preference and why X satisfies their preference. It is not like the action or hamiltonian in physics which come with equations of motions that can be checked against experiment.

Why is open source good for everyone? You didn't explain it, you just cast it in certain terms, which is useful for distilling the problem, but certainly not for solving it. You gave your guess why it improves the contributors' utility, but you haven't really proved it. It's just a guess. I can guess, too.

My guess is that open source software reduces the transaction costs of acquiring and fixing software for corporations, but I could not explain to you with neoclassical economics why developers work on it without being compensated. It should be a tragedy of the commons, but it isn't. Open source software is developed at the fraction of the cost of closed source software and either competes or completely dominates it.

I don't believe in Liberal organizations of economy though, so it's not a big deal for me.

Re: The strange economics of open-source software

#27

Post by nickpsecurity »

bduerst wrote: post #13
dfc wrote: post #6

Wow, I was expecting a little more economics in a post titled "the strange economics of OSS." It is too bad the post makes such grand claims without any modicum of effort to back them up with data; these are very interesting research questions. The two most hand wavy claims have to be "it is almost taken for granted that the source code for most software is freely available" and " it is at larger, older firms, that t…

Right? They could have at least gone into detail about how businesses now follow the model of open-sourcing the software and then making revenue on the implementation fees. Or they could have talked about how open sourcing is part of a race to the bottom. They mention some SQL-like databases, which is a tech that started out as proprietary. How much tech starts immediately as open source?

Or selling out their users to advertisers for hefty profits while open-sourcing software they use to do it efficiently. ;)

Re: The strange economics of open-source software

#28

Post by pki »

amatic wrote: post #19
elektromekatron wrote: post #14

I know that this will annoy some people, and believe me, I mean this with a very small 'c', however I think that the open source movement is far and away the most successful communist experiment in history.

IP communism is not in conflict with belief in private property rights. The trick is in denying IP the status of property, because you cannot own ideas in the same sense you can own a car. Cars are fundamentaly scarce, two people can't use the same car at the same time. Ideas can be copied and improved upon, they don't go away when somebody steals them. Anyway, there would certainly be successfull business models in…

I thought in some places (France?) software patents were unenforceable/not legal/not a thing

Re: The strange economics of open-source software

#29

Post by jlarocco »

nickpsecurity wrote: post #23
jlarocco wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. Innovation in open source is all on commodity computer stuff that developers understand, like operating systems, compilers, web browsers, and databases. For almost everything that requires other expertise the innovation is still done in closed source software. Stuff like photo editing (LightRoom, Photoshop, Capture One), video editing (Premiere, Flame, DS), high end rendering (Renderman, 3Delight), CAD (Cati…

Those are good examples. I'm not sure what the actual split is. Don't forget, though, where the real majority of innovation is: academic (mainly) and corporate labs. I went into detail a little while ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10269245

I think you're right for computer related stuff, like networking, databases, operating systems, etc.

And it may even be technically true for the examples I mentioned. But in those areas, for all practical purposes, research from academic and corporate research doesn't actually get used until it's implemented in closed source software. At the annual Siggraph conference a good portion of the papers come from companies like Pixar and Autodesk, and get implemented in their products. Outside of that, it's pretty rare for the academic stuff to go much beyond a cool demo, unless one of the big graphics companies thinks they can use it, at which time they buy up the rights to it.

Re: The strange economics of open-source software

#30

Post by nickpsecurity »

elektromekatron wrote: post #14

I know that this will annoy some people, and believe me, I mean this with a very small 'c', however I think that the open source movement is far and away the most successful communist experiment in history.

I considered it briefly in the past but decided against that paper. The reason is that most projects have a few core contributors that maintain control of it and use copyright law to underpin their efforts. Many also have corporate sponsors, which is a different dynamic. Others were built with proprietary process and open-sourced later. Not the emergence of software from voluntary actions of many that I pictured back then.

There could be a comparison to communism with the few that have a foundation, community-driven development, and maybe community voting on what happens with it. Closest to how people would picture it. So, which major FOSS projects are done like that?

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