Algamics: The Dynamics of Gift Society 79
Robert Levin wrote a piece about what he calls Algamics,
i.e. the dynamics of gift society. He points out that it is
neither new, nor a zero-sum game such as the "market" as described by
conventional economics.
In related news, Jakob Kaivo has written a Freshmeat Editorial
for newbies about chipping in, and giving back to the Free Software Community.
Free Software? (Score:1)
I guess this is another one of those April Fools jokes...
Non-Programmers: Other ways to help (Score:1)
I only read the second article (ie. Freshmeat Editorial). The author forgot to mention another way that non-programmers can help: participation in Linux newsgroups and IRC channels. Newbies can be won over by quick and correct responses from these sources. Just make sure you don't flame them for asking stupid questions (unless they are in the category of "Teach me how to get root!"). Maxim: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.
There is also the Linux Advocacy mini-HOWTO [unc.edu] - a must-read for all Linux enthusiasts.
And another thing... (Score:1)
This guy is out to lunch. HE has COMPLETELY misrepresented his case, and shown his complete lack of understanding of economic theory.
I didnt realize that "Trade" meant that I give things away for free.
Starting new website... (Score:1)
I had the same idea a month ago. In the end, I never set it up. One reason is my school work. The other is simply this: there are already so many Linux websites for newbies, eg. those by Howard Mann, Josh, etc. and of course the LDP itself. Should I contribute another one? I felt that unless I can fully commit myself to the task, my work may be a disservice to the community. A poorly maintained help-site is worst than a Windows-advocacy site.
I am not here to throw wet blankets. If you have the time and commitment, go ahead and do it! Otherwise, help out in existing projects. I am sure the project's owner will be more than happy.
Hint: The LDP has some really old HOWTOs that may benefit from a rejuvenation and inclusion of distribution-specific information.
I include below a listing of (newbies) websites which I know of and like. You might want to email their maintainers.
http://metalab.unc.edu/LDP/
http://www.control-escape.com/
http://dotfiles.com/
http://howto.linuxberg.com/LinuxGuide/index.htm
http://www.magma.ca/~bklimas/
http://www.linux.ie/beginners-linux-guide/
http://www.xmission.com/~howardm/
Of course, I am somewhat of a newbie myself and my views may be wrong and lacking in wisdom.
Answer this. (Score:1)
What I think should be freed are things like common instructive manuals (i.e. full-blown calculus, electronics, etc. books). Having these freely available ("free beer" and "free speech") would allow both the book itself and the people who use it to improve. If books like these were free, you have a much larger audience than previously available.
True: Free markets aren't zero-sum. (Score:1)
I'm not sure what you mean by 'in each direction.' In fact, the only way in which they are zero-sum is with respect to a single commodity. If you consider anything more, they're highly positive sum, because both parties are more efficient than before (or at least believe that they are, and we can't contradict them).
I'm quoting myself here because I made a huge mistake -- I said that his essay "stopped far short of being useful." I meant to say "was far too short to be useful."
And that only underscores the importance I believe this subject has, and the competence I feel the author posesses to discuss it.
I look forward to seeing more depth in later postings, together with commentary on examples -- hopefully with the theory published before the examples happen (anyone can backdate a thesis ;-).
-Billy
True: Free markets aren't zero-sum. (Score:1)
This description is, as you say, false. But the author's point is nonetheless true, because the description nonetheless drives the behavior of some large companies (to be specific, Microsoft), who have come to believe that unless someone else loses something, they can't win anything.
It's fairly trivial to see, both theoretically and practically, that acting as though the market were a zero-sum game doesn't make it one, but does reduce the total growth of the market by hurting consumers as well as competitors.
This essay is very good, as far as it goes. Its tone reminds me very much of Mises' landmark work in economics. Unfortunately, this essay, unlike Mises' "Human Action", stops far short of being in any way useful. Hopefully the author will publish a more complete treatment. And this time, perhaps explain his perspective of the free market a little more clearly.
-Billy
Free markets aren zero-sum. (Score:1)
If next generation of Voodoo 3d accelrator is 10 times as fast, 3Dfx gain, but if next generation of TNT 3d is also 10 times as fast, 3Dfx gain nothing.
If next release of svgalib has a lot more hardware support, I gain, if next release kgi also has a lot of hardware support, I gain more.
This is why 3Dfx and nVidia, try to keep as much as they can secret, resulting in a lot of redundant work, while svgalib and kgi share, and gain from each other.
Econometrics and Social Cost Pricing (Score:1)
:)
sorry couldn't resist myself
ideas are more important than code (Score:1)
The mentoring environment, I think, is a good idea. Not only for newbies to learn stuff, but also for experts with to little time to submit ideas for other people to implement. I have plenty of ideas but just not the time to implement them all. (I'm not saying I'm an expert, that's all pretty relative)
Non-Programmers: Other ways to help (Score:1)
Freshmeat editorial was on the money (Score:1)
On NO scale are free markets zero-sum. (Score:1)
The "zero-sum" game says that if I give you a dollar for a comic book, I'm out a dollar (-1) and you're up a dollar (+1): (-1) + (+1) = 0. Left out of the whole equation is the value of the comic book we exchanged. I no longer have that dollar, but I have something else that I wanted more than that dollar. In other words, I valued the comic book more than the cash I gave you.
In the same way, you want my money more than you want that comic book: you value that dollar more than that particular issue of Detective Comics.
It is for this reason that it is impossible to overcharge for goods. People will never (short of being very very foolish) attempt to get a product that they value less than their money. Shysters may attempt to deceive people into thinking that their products are more valuable than the money they want, but that doesn't change the fact that the buyer and seller must both believe they are coming out ahead, or the sale doesn't take place.
I should add here that this is why price controls never work. Why? Because they force sellers to sell at prices below what they're willing to accept. This leads to shortages, because producers of goods become unwilling to produce at the legislated price levels.
On the other hand, if we have price floors, then there will be surpluses of goods. Why? Because consumers become unwilling to part with their money at the legislated prices. They don't think the milk or software or whatever is worth the minimum price that government has mandated, so it sits on the shelves.
Capitalism, far from being intrinsically immoral somehow as communists and some others suggest, is actually therefore very moral: both sides in a transaction believe they are coming out ahead. Everybody wins.
With respect to software, Open Source stuff is slowly but surely going to open people's eyes to the fact that they may have been valuing commercial software too highly. This will lead them to reduce the amount of money they will be willing to pay for those products. This is what will put Microsoft's back to the wall.
On NO scale are free markets zero-sum. (Score:1)
More than that you are missing the point that the opposite of "less than" is "greater than or _equal_". Market efficiencies tend to make equal the natural result and this means that locally the transaction economy tends to be a zero sum game as well.
Finally, who said anything about price controls? Or Rand's sophistry about the "morality" of capitalism? Or communist ideology for that matter? I am generally not in favor of price controls, I think Ayn Rand is a psychotic hag who couldn't think her way out of a wet paper bag and I think that communists are deluding themselves on several fronts.
I also think that markets are tools that we as a society need to understand and use, not be used by. This is why the gift economy is so interesting - it is another tool we can all use to make our lives more enjoyable.
On NO scale are free markets zero-sum. (Score:1)
Thanks to all, and state of play (Score:1)
It was rather disconcerting to discover, coming in around midnight US/Pacific, that sengan had posted my essay together with a somewhat, um, difficult to recognize summary of the thoughts expressed.
Thanks to all who provided comments on the essay; they were greatly appreciated and should prove helpful. Thanks especially to the CMU writer who reminded me of the term "externalities of possession" in his correspondence. Once I get a bit more sleep and the chance to do a bit more thinking and writing, I'll begin working through the implications of agalmics in more detail. Expect to see additional postings on the agalmics site [agalmics.nu].
As to the usual flurry of "this guy is an idiot", "this guy is trying to be ESR" and "this guy can't think his way out of a paper bag" postings, well, this is Slashdot, a medium which seems to mix genuine enthusiasm, thoughtful engagement and a tendency to skip paper training. All things considered, I'm glad to have the opportunity to post here, and perfectly willing to ignore the occasional flame. ;)
Free markets aren't zero-sum. (Score:1)
Nelsonrn wrote: Economics has been defined pretty consistently as the study of the allocation of scarce goods. The common medium of exchange is money, which is, in itself, a scarce good. As such, it is a zero-sum commodity in any given transaction. Either I have that dollar, or I've given it to you. It's certainly true that economic transactions can be positive sum, But each side of an economic transaction is typically zero-sum: I give you a toaster and no longer have it. You give me $20 and no longer have it.
On the other hand, each side of an agalmic transaction is typically positive-sum. The software I give you stays in my possession, too. The fixes you give me stay in yours. So if you're attempting to implement positive-sum games, the agalmic context is a much more effective one.
True: Free markets aren't zero-sum. (Score:1)
William Tanksley wrote: Thanks for your comments. I think several people have gotten the impression that I consider economic behavior, as a whole, to automatically be zero-sum or even negative-sum. That was not an impression I intended to create. But one of the weaknesses of economic transactions is that they are typically zero-sum in each direction. This is appropriate, since economics deals with the allocation of scarce goods. I can't continue to own my toaster if I sell it to you.
Nonetheless, economic transactions have produced quite a bit of value; they provide a mechanism whereby individuals can 'trade up' from a commodity with less utility to one with greater utility. They also provide opportunities for cooperative behavior in which groups of individuals can produce value by division of labor or creative effort.
Thanks for your positive comments. I intended this essay as a mini-introduction a concept of "non-scarcity economics", and as such it's inherently very limited and incomplete. I expect to spend a good deal of time examining how successful agalmic transactions work, how agalmias can come into existence and grow, how agalmic and economic behaviors can interact, and how the future of agalmic activity might play itself out. I also want to talk about the role of nascent technology in expanding the agalmic sphere, about how decentralized logistics can help agalmias prosper, and how this all relates to free software.I agree with your comments on von Mises; he had a lot of things to say, and indeed a lot of Human Action has practical applications, but his work would probably have profited more from more direct real-world examples. As something of a philosopher, I find it extremely helpful to be able to use the Internet to comment about real world situations in something approaching realtime. I do plan to exercise that advantage.
Rob Levin
Agalmics??? It makes a "GOOD" point!? (Score:1)
LittleStone wrote: Thanks for your comments. I see some confusion here---you appear to assume that open source software works via a "volunteering" process, and I'm not sure that's a useful model. It implies a single-direction transaction, rather than an exchange. It's clear there are direct benefits from the exchange of software source for bug reports, fixes and enhancements, and these are only peripherally based on notions of charity and public good.
I will be glad to entertain the possibility that my comments evince "flaws and misunderstanding of economic concepts," though I will obviously have to wait until you enumerate at least one of them before I can agree that they exist. As to the dropping of hardware cost being nothing new to economics, I can certainly agree. But the concept of exchanges based on other than scarcity is hardly anything like an economic concept.
I'd be interested in seeing the results of such studies.Agalmic is a poorly defined subset of economics (Score:1)
PhunkyP wrote: Thanks for your comments. Actually, sengan referred to gift cultures in the introduction, but my essay mentions them only in a non-rigorous way. I'm not convinced that non-scarcity "economics" really has much to do with the conventional gift culture, which is a pre-technological culture in which scarcity is a basic fact of daily existence. Actually, most economics texts I've seen in recent times do refer to economics as the study of the allocation of scarce goods. The Adam Smith definition would seem to be pretty dated. Zeno's paradox is not all that useful for reasoning real-world situations. If you reduce something by half over and over, what you eventually get in the real world is a state change, when the actual value drops below some level such that behavior changes. Continually diminishing scarcity is only of academic interest when a particular good becomes plentiful enough that it is no longer traded. Specifically, if supply always equals or exceeds demand, you don't have a scarce good in the real world. Here we will have to disagree. Intellectual property law is an attempt to turn fundamentally non-scarce goods (ideas) into scarce goods by limiting their use through legal sanction. If ideas could not be invented independently by more than one person, or if IP didn't tend to be collected by well-capitalized organizations with large legal staffs, or for that matter if ideas were not as fundamentally easy to transmit without loss of the original copy, intellectual property law might be a good idea. In the world as it really exists, IP law tends to slow technological progress, and IP economics provides a distorted view of goods which are essentially agalmic, not economic, in character. I can only agree wholeheartedly. But it would be a mistake to regard agalmic behavior as synonymous with charity. People engage in agalmic transactions based on personal motives which are as diverse as those of economic actors, and often quite thoroughly self-interested. Like a well-functioning free market, an agalmia does not require charitable intent to function efficiently.
Rob Levin
Giving Back (Score:1)
Siberian wrote: I do understand your viewpoint. But what you need to remember is that people who flame you for contributing to the free software community are not functioning as members in good standing of that community.
Give your software because there will be people who will let you know they appreciate it. Give it because people can at least potentially contribute back with bug reports, patches and enhancements. Don't let flames, which are essentially noise, ruin your view of a process which can produce enjoyment, utility and clear, demonstrable value for all of the parties involved.
Rob Levin
Dumbkopf (Score:1)
Rocketeer wrote: Thanks for your comments. AT&T and the electronic switching system. (1950's technology, implemented in the 1970's). IBM at the beginning of the PC revolution, when Compaq was a small organization whose name was synonymous with high-end, and regularly came out with faster machines than IBM.
When a corporate entity owns two pieces of technology, and sales of the newer one will impact sales of the older one, it has no incentive to immediately gear up to produce new product. Except when such a product can be used to compete with a rival which, as I say in the essay, does happen with some regularity.
Rob Levin
True: Free markets aren't zero-sum. (Score:1)
William Tanksley wrote: Well, ultimately theories do have to be written based on observed fact, not the other way around. But I agree that the test of a theory is the reproducibility of its results.
Algamic in the noosphere... (Score:1)
An anonymous user wrote:
Actually, it would be incorrect to say that I view the hacker culture as a gift culture, per se. All of the gift cultures I'm aware of existed prior to significant modern technology, and hence were based as much on scarcity as modern economies.Further, I would have to say that I consider ESR's reasoning in much of Noosphere to be seriously flawed. He seems to be invoking "hacker tradition" to assert that people "own" the projects they run. I don't believe it is possible to homestead the "Noosphere."
As to the originality of my comments, I make no claim to be the first person thinking about these issues. Indeed, in the mid-80's, a science fiction writer named James Hogan wrote an excellent novel called Voyage to Yesteryear which touched on a number of these topics. And the Extropians have been talking about them for some time. Eric has come up with some interesting spins and useful comments, but I'd argue that neither the topics nor the issues are new.
Rob Levin
more for non-programmers giving back (Score:1)
I certainly appreciate the efforts in free software, in coding, technical writing, advocacy, feedback, and so forth.
For those of us with inadequate technical skills for even these, however, I would remind you that the information age does not refer only to computer information, but to computerized information. If you are qualified to put any sort of useful information online, do so! It can benefit all of us.
My personal preference is in putting public domain literature online. See The On-Line Book Page [cmu.edu] for information on how to get involved in this.
Alan R. Light
Monroe, North Carolina
*too much* IP harmful. (Score:1)
The problem with Intellectual Property is not that it exists, if only as a legal fiction, but that it is too restrictive and becoming more restricted. Copyright is now "Life of the Author plus 70 years", though it is difficult to conceive how copyright protection for such a long time is likely to increase an author's willingness to create, while it does profoundly restrict new works, and is even sometimes used for censorship. In that sense, the author is right.
There are also some fairly good arguments that Intellectual Property ought to be done away with entirely. In either case, it would behoove our society and culture to reduce IP terms instead of extending them towards infinity.
See this page of mine [vnet.net] for a fair amount of information on this topic.
Alan R. Light
Monroe, North Carolina
Zero sum- YES, and so is Free Software (Score:1)
His counter-example in the gift economy isn't quite right, though. He compares a buyer & seller and describes how they both gain (user gets free software, seller gets free debugger). That's true, but no different than the fact that a buyer in the market gets a product and the seller gets money.
It would be more apt to compare two software products. And here it may *still* be a zero sum game. If Program A and Program B (emacs and vim, for example) each benefit from more debuggers, then the competition to get the user to use A or B is identical to the market economy. Only one program will get the user.
You are free to think this (Score:1)
Sengan has no problem attacking others and capitalism -- blindly.
I agree -- Sengan is a jack ass. (Score:1)
Sengan is clueless - he subscribes to anything pro-'free', regardless of how contrived or poorly written. I was writing a good in depth reply for this thread but X actually crashed on me while writing it, so scratch that.
Classic economic texts don't assume a zero sum economy either. Zero sum would imply that nothing new is being created, and that all transactions are merely trading previous existing things of equal value. This is simply not the case, empirically or by classic theory. The author seems to complete skip the theory of value added. And he fails to draw any meaningfull conclusions about what he admits is a growing free market economy. This 'growing economy' is essentially a measure of what has been added -- a hell of alot. Thousands of new goods, services, and ideas are produced every day.
How exactly is it that Linus giving his code away for free 'adds' something to this world, yet AT&T creating Unix isn't. In one case, nothing is paid. In the other, some nominal fee is applied. I can see him arguing possibly, in his own screwed up logic, that 'more' value is created by Linus. But how is it that AT&T adds nothing. They charge you a few bucks, and in return you get a kick ass OS. If the money you pay and the OS are worth the exact same amount of money, then the transaction would probably not occur. The other possibility is that the item in the other party's hand is simply worth more to you, than your money is. While you may sacrifice a little of your money to obtain it, it doesn't cancel out the softwares existence. The author is playing with semantics, but he's not following any logic.
Giving Back (Score:1)
So, until the kiddies grow up and people realize that the community needs to regain a certain level of acceptance and mellowness I think it will continue to be difficult to bring new people into the fold. Most likely I will contribute in the near future as I feel that my coding skills can pass most of the tests all of the el88t hax0Rs can put it through but its still an issue.
If we can somehow provide an environment of mentoring rather then community flaming I think we would see great advances. I have no idea what form this would take, mailing lists, web sites or whatnot. But some sort of mentoring to ease newbies from users to contributors would really make a huge contribution to advancing the movement.
Just one coders opinion and experience.
Economics IS about scarcity (Score:1)
Economics: The science of scarcity: the science of how individuals and societies deal with the fact that wants are greater than the limited resources available to satisfy those wants.
Page 2, Macroeconomics: Fourth Edition, by Roger A. Arnold, South-Western College Publishing, San Marcos, CA.
True: Free markets aren't zero-sum. (Score:1)
Agalmics??? It makes a "GOOD" point!? (Score:1)
I would suggest to drop the emphasis on scarcity. True, without scarcity, we can satisfied our wants as much as we can based on the economic theories we have nowadays. But is scarcity the starting point of every economic analysis? No. Every economic theory ought to specify how we have scarcity. The way that scarcity arised will affect the "rule of the game", and thus the equilibrium.
Moreover, I do want to know, as time is limited for everybody, how come contribution of codes or update or as simple as bug report is not using up resouces? If it takes up resources, any kind of exchange in Open Source model is not exchange based on something other than scarcity. I would bet, if there were equilvalently effective mechanism to obtain the advantage of Open Source development model, while the source could be kept closed without high transaction cost, our evil M$ would have adopted it already.
The basic flaw that I would say from Mr Levin's original article is: assume that what economics has are those models from undergraduate textbooks. Therefore, so as long as those models doesn't match the observations in Open Source development, it must be the trouble from the assumption: Scarcity. However, Mr Levin hasn't considered that each model must have more than one assumed restriction, and these all restrictions could be also wrong while the basic assumption of scarcity is okay.
In economics, in most of the time we assumed that: agents are self-interested and know what we are doing, period. (technically, rationality, although there's such thing as bounded rationality in economics too) Nothing else must appear in every model, although we always say that resources are limited to some extent. (Even more creative idea is to applied evoluntionary game theory to explain why are we self-interested.) An economist's job to such "new" kind of Open Source development model is to first applied the knowledge we have today to explain. As we have seen in many other areas, we still can explain the so call un-selfish behaviour and organisation based on the self-interested assumed economics. If we have tried all the existing modelling techniques in the mainstream economics and still can't find the proper explanation, then check assumptions. The suggestions of something like "Algamics" based on the inability of perfectly explaination of the observations by some subset of economic theories is not new to social sciences. That appeared even before Adam Smith (from many psychologists at that time). What we see is more and more social scientists found that the idea from economics are so powerful in their own area and adopt it, while economists, especially those from U of Chicago, are trying to use economic theories to explain more and more area that used to be in other social sciences. Even psychologists and sociologists nowadays would hesitate to attack the insufficiency of rationality and scarcity. (Related to the methodology of economics, interested could check the Positive Economics by Milton Friedman.)
If Mr Levin's idea appeares before Ronald Coase, it's revoluntionary in economics. However, the rise of Industrial Organisation theories in the last 30 years have laid down the framework to explain many industrial structures, which would include the open source development model. (Ronald Coase published not many articles, but each one is very very important. His theories are the foundation of works on organisations, firms or even society.)
Sum it up. Economics is not just for market behaviour.
Agalmics??? It makes a "GOOD" point!? (Score:1)
Basically, we can model the situation by the similar models of volunteering (we do have models about volunteering!). I bet it's because the dropping of hardware cost enable us to have Open Source Softwares. And the dropping of hardware cost is nothing new to economics.
Theoretically, it seems that there's nothing new. We do need some empirical studies.
Long term rewards of contribution to free projects (Score:1)
If you manage to make a name for yourself when you're relatively young, you can leverage the contacts you make and an extended social network in the years to come. The wider your circle of acquaintances and friends, the more likely it is that someone at random ten years later will be in a position to hire or to fund your next project.
thanks
Ed
Edward Vielmetti emv@umich.edu Vacuum project: http://egroups.com/list/vacuum [egroups.com]
I would have read the article but... (Score:1)
Oh well.
gift society: China, 12th-17th century (Score:1)
When the prime desirable commodity for hackers and workers in Open Source community is the respect and admiration of the rest of the community, what will happen when the community gets a) much larger or b) even harder to impress? With more and more "illiterate barbarians" getting involved (or at least hanging around), people who wouldn't recognize clever and beautiful code if you showed it to them and wouldn't be impressed anyway, how does one get the prestige needed to make writing Open Source worthwhile?
One way is just to reduce the effective size of the community again. So, will the Open Source community continue to fracture along lines of skill level? Wizards who only write for, and value the opinion of, other Wizards, followed by Apprentice Wizards, who will explain stuff to the Wizard wanna-be's, who will, in turn explain stuff to Anonymous Cowards who will lord their wisdom over newbies like me?
Please stop the name calling! (Score:1)
We do agree on some things (Score:1)
I chose the Adam Smith quote because it would likely be the most familiar, same with the Zeno illustrations. I still believe that Economics is more the study of rational decision making and that scarcity is a condition of the environment in which those decisions are made. But you are correct that nearly all Economics texts see econimics as the study of the allocation of scarce goods. I'll continue my jihad on this in another forum.
My point about intellectual capital was intended to focus only on the econimics of information 'goods' and I hope to avoid a discussion of IP Law. I agree with you that the goal of IP law is to restrict access to ideas which, once generally available, are fundamentally non-scarce. I also agree that there are a number of negative results of IP law. (I'm a huge collaboration proponent, it is the industry that I work in.)
I see these intellectual 'goods' as still being economic goods. There is a demand for information. There is a supply of information. The nature of information skews their schedules, but they still exist. With both supply and demand accounted for, we have a market and the beginings of an analysis of what decisions are made and how they are made for the exchange of information.
I'm a little confused by the caution at the end of your reply. I never intended to compare agalmic behavior and charity. Perhaps an illustration of my final point would help. In one of my economics classes in college the professor was talking about how we all are rational decision makers. After the lecture, several of us were discussing the assertion and came to the conclustion that the roommate of one of my classmate is not a rational decision maker and therefore an economic analysis of his actions is impossible. I've reflected on that conversation and I have come to the conclustion that we just were not able to 'think outside the box' enough to account for the decisions of the roommate because if you look at his decisions over time they do fit a pattern, and from that pattern you can predict future decisions quite accurately.
The point of that, as applied to free software is that the software is freely available for a reason. The motives of the individuals responsible may not be immediatly apparent, especially from our perspective, but their decisions will fit a pattern and that pattern will point to their motives for producing the software. Those motives likely won't make a lick of sence to a sucessful business man or a your run of the mill industry analyst, but they are obiouse to others with similar motives (i.e. slashdot readers) who are likely pursuing the same goals.
I'm facinated by this whole discussion and I would be interested in other resource that attempt an economic analysis of any of these topics. If you have any, I would appreciate it if you would pass some along. I'm still working on my own economic model of the Internet and its relevant markets. I'll of course create a web site for this so that my observations will be freely available to all who would be interested (a select group of individuals likely including only my mother, and that just for the pictures of me)
-Josh
Agalmia - Impossible (Score:1)
Listen, he says that you can "marginalize" scarcity. Okay, so if we buy his statement, then in the end, everything in the tech world runs until nothing is scarce, and then there is no need to allocate, right? If economics is about allocation of scarce goods, then when we remove the scarcity of goods, there is no need to allocate, and we have eliminated markets and economics entirely. Agalmia - here we come!
Except this just cannot ever be true. Because one good must remain forever scarce and forever necessary to be allocated. Time. Even if we reduce everything else (all goods and services) to the point where everything is equivalent, we must allocate time among them, and thus an economy of time exists. Since (and let's not get into rewriting physics) time is always fleeting, there will always be an economy of that sort.
Agalmia is just some more pseudo-semi-post-modern-over-hyped-under-research
Figure it out, bud - everything is scarce and always will be. While software doesn't obey all the traditional rules, we don't need to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
my $.02
Obvious starting points (Score:1)
- The Linux Documentation Project [unc.edu] has everything from mini-HOWTOs on single specific issues to books.
- The GNU website has pointers to documentation guidelines and a list of projects. [gnu.org]
- I saw announcement of a kernel documentation mailing list on (urrr..) Linux Weekly News [lwn.net] some time ago. kernel-doc? Hosted in Europe somewhere. (Helpful, no?)
- GNU also has a proof-readers' mailing list, where potential proof-readers lurk and people with documentation needing checking send calls for 'I've got this, can people get back to me on it?' or 'I write in this language, can someone check my English?'
- Loads of websites for projects seem to have contacts for feedback. Even if nothing's said about documenting, those are a good start. A lot of them have documentation - but of course each new release means someone has to update the lot - or at least check it!
Or, as you say, you could offer your services at large. Or wait til someone posts 'new release... documentation isn't complete yet' to Usenet and dive in to that. Or email the author. Or the maintainer, if that's someone different.As someone who relies heavily on HOWTOs and man pages and so on, I have to say: pick one! And good luck and thanks in advance :)
Free markets aren't zero-sum. (Score:1)
We both win (and George Lucas, of course.) I think only accountants and social activists can even imagine free enterprise and zero sum in the same thought.
The article is interesting, but such an egregious error undermines its credibility.
A subset of the future? I agree. (Score:1)
http://www.zoomnet.net/~alice
http://members.xoom.com/sitrep
If you care
Take it easy
Only sometimes. (Score:1)
This article in question only made it to Slashdot because it had the words "open source" somewhere in it. It was poorly written (worse than Jon Katz, even), poorly researched, and didn't know whether it was a persuasive essay or not. I recommend against.
As an aside, it's also interesting that whenever a paradigm is on the verge of collapse, or a technology on the edge of obsolescence, the people who benefit most from that technology will violently defend their turf, to the point of killing. "Communism" (read: social democracy) threatened the top .1% for years, and several democratically elected governments (particularly in South America) have been overthrown and/or their candidates and officials killed to keep wealth where it is. Hemp threatened the Hearst paper and Du Pont chemical monopolies, so they lied in Congress and whipped up a media frenzy to have it banned. (Hemp more directly threatened the existing social order in the early '70s; the Controlled Substances Act of 1972 was passed shortly thereafter, and civil liberties have been in decline ever since.) Chevron keeps labor cheap in Nigeria by renting the Nigerian police forces (and, after this information was presented in an award-winning program "Drilling and Killing" by Pacifica Radio's Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzales, Chevron barred a credentialed Pacifica reporter [pacifica.org] from a press conference because "Pacifica does not report news"). And do I need to mention Steve Kangas turning up dead in a restroom near the office of a CIA operative he fingered, with bullet holes in the wrong places and facts that don't match up?
Not only does this explain Microsoft, it explains society. C'mon, kiddies, they're playing for keeps. They need us more than we need them.
-jhp
Non-Programmers: Other ways to help (Score:1)
Non-programers could help by trying to offer constructive criticism and suggestions to free software projects.
I don't know if GUI Linux apps are like this, but a lot of NeXTSTEP applications included an easy way to mail feedback and suggestions to the author. You'd just click a menu, and the program would bring up Mail.app with a pre-addressed compose window.
That would probably help a great deal.
For free-software projects, the mail could be sent to a suggestions mailing list, instead of to a single author.
Agalmics??? It makes a "GOOD" point!? (Score:1)
No it doesn't.
A volunteer benefits from their volunteering. First, they get the intangible feeling of having done a good thing. Second, they get the benefit of living in the society which they have helped improve.
If I volunteer to clean up litter on the street I live on, I benefit by living on a cleaner street.
If I volunteer to participate in a neighborhood crime watch, I benefit by living in a safer neighborhood.
At an indirect level, if I volunteer to teach computer-illiterate adults how to use a computer, then they can participate more fully in today's economy, possibly earning more money. This in turn may help them put their kids through college.
This boosts the local, regional, and national economies over several generations, which benefits me quite a bit. Somebody's got to buy those mutual funds.
Agalmic is a poorly defined subset of economics (Score:1)
Ah, but Shakespeare's quality is exactly what makes it scarce.
If everyone wrote like Shakespeare, would we value his works as highly? Probably not. Hell, there'd probably be a backlash against quality playwrights, in favor of crap like 'Cats'.
Intellectual Property considered harmful? (Score:1)
In the first place, intellectual property rights are not "inherent" or "natural" rights they were invented with a purpose. That purpose was to promote sharing by allowing the inventor to benefit from his/her invention in some other way than keeping that invention secret. Patents can protect the small and weak from the large and powerful.
For example, I can invent a better carrot-slicer. What prevents Megtronics Corp. from simply stealing my invention and selling millions of them with no compensation to me? Patent law. By allowing me to retain ownership of my invention, innovation is encouraged.
Rewarding the creator is only a means to an end, not the end itself.
Second, without intellectual property of a different kind (copyrights) we would never have had a GPL. My life personally would be much poorer, since I've been an Emacs user for nearly 20 years. This use of copyright law to perpetuate the sharing of his work is something I deeply respect RMS for, it's a really clever hack.
My approach with my children vis-a-vis sharing is that they aren't forced to share their own personal stuff -- forced sharing is no sharing at all. But when they are using my stuff they have to share and take turns. This has proved very effective -- they value sharing as I do and quite often share without prompting.
I believe that forcing people to share at best builds resentment and often leads to very cloudy boundaries, which in turn, leads to domination, codependence and abuse. I find I have little patience for voices which cry "All software must be free!" or "All music must be free!".
Star Wars was definitely worth paying to see. It wouldn't exist if there were no intellectual property laws.
Dumbkopf (Score:1)
"The nature of such organizations is to hold onto these assets tightly and release them slowly, so that the most efficient return on investment can be achieved."
Duh no. They deploy them as quickly as possible to realize the fastest return on investment.
Is there an economist in the house?
A subset of the future? (Score:2)
You may think I'm crazy, but look at some of the free software projects out there today -- look at the KDE or GNOME projects!! They're creating a *large* collection of software to make a good interface, that takes a LOT of effort and teamwork. Why couldn't the same thing be done for information in general?
That's what I'm curious about. I'm hoping that in the future, people who are interested in topics will pool their thoughts and abilities together to create free information for all. Think about it: if you had one good, free Calculus book out there, wouldn't many people use it? Why would students pay over $100 for a decent Calc book when you could get the best one for free?
Of course, you have a problem of document portability, but that's simply a minor technological inconvenience for the time being. With further advents of technology, such as portable document viewers (slimmed down laptops, perhaps the shape of a clipboard), that problem goes away. The technology is there, we just need to harness it.
Additionally, this free information would be worked on globally, making international cooperation more widespread and successful. I don't know about you, but I find that exciting. The more the world works together on things, the more we will advance as a global society.
Here's a quote that comes to mind:
"You may say I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one.. I hope some day you join us, and the world will live as one."
Free markets aren't zero-sum. (Score:2)
-russ
Zero sum??? (Score:2)
Econometrics and Social Cost Pricing (Score:2)
{
printf("
I think a lot of confusion vis-a-vis viewing the economy as "Zero-Sum" comes into play if you only view money as the tried and true measure of all things economical. I get $X via my labor, and I pay $X for some widgets, and from the perspective of the market, there's been a zero sum. Or so Sengan would have you believe.
Even this is wrong, taking into account inflation, money demand, and the interest rate. Even if money is our only benchmark, the value of money changes. It's so wrong that there's an entire branch of macroeconomics studying money market fluctuations..
Knowing that economics is not* a zero-sum game if we just considered money the benchmark, let's move on to consider social cost pricing**. The intrinsic worth of a transaction is based on:
1.how much one values the object
2. the social impact of having it produced, consumed, and changing hands
3. and various X-factors which I don't feel like listing
In short -- Comparative Advantage is what matters in any given transaction, not Absolute Advantage. A common analogue would be: If I had all the gold and you had all the hamburgers, sure, the gold is more valuable than the hamburgers normally but King Midas has got to eat sometime!
This isn't even taking into account that technology, capital goods procurement, and an expanding labor market increase production as well. Open source fits here quite well, i posit. Nowhere do I have to pay you for your labor in creating Open Source Software. Presumably, the social impact of using this software pays for itself. (No Microsoft Tax on OEM hardware if Linux becomes mainstream, that sort of thing.) On the flip side of things, if the social impact of totally free software becomes cumbersome (net traffic goes to a standstill every time a kernel is released) then the market will attempt to seek a solution (people will fork out $5 for CD-ROM of Linux).***
It is true that no one can truly know everyone's preferences, or measure how much impact social impact is.**** That's why people are tempted to view economics solely in terms of money. Do not be lulled into this trap, however! Armed with basic axioms of consumer preference and an entire branch of statistical economics -- Econometrics -- we can massage cross-sectional and time-series data to infer preferences. Such preferences deny a zero-sum game.
Besides letting us use phrases like "running a white test on a heteroskedasticity-consistent variance-covariance matrix in order to run a robust first-order regression,"***** econometrical analysis allows us to measure the cost of objects in terms of their correlative effects on human behavior. Here's where the zero-sum idea breaks down...
A zero-sum game wouldn't even need a regression line. Because there is no net gain, the correlative impact of X on Y or Z is nil -- do whatever you want, you're going to end up screwed anyway. Given the fact that there is enough variation in human economic behavior to require probability and autocorrelation tests, it's fairly self evident that X has an effect on Y and Z and vice versa.
If X and Y and Z have correlative effects on each other, it means the following:
1. Said economic transaction is not a zero-sum game, because the elements are not independent.
2. Non-Independence means that the variables are covariant.
3. Covariant variables tend to follow one or more of the Gauss-Markov assumptions about spherical disturbances ******. This means that the changes are stimulated in part by "outside forces," known as "Error terms," "disturbances," etc.
4. A zero sum game has no disturbances because there is nothing to disturb.
5. Technology, capital gains, political climate, social change, etc. count as "Disturbances" if they are infrequent or weak enough, else they count as variables of their own. (in which case they are covariant as above)
6. I enjoy saying the phrase "heteroskedasticity-consistent variance-covariance matrix." =P
7. Q.E.D. (sorta)
Discuss amongst yourselves.
Whew. That was quite rant.
\n");
}
/* sorry folks, I needed to let out some steam =) */
*(and probably never will be, except in peer-to-peer oligopoly transactions)
**(Campbell and Pereira, 1998)
*** Will the software still be free? Yes. But general procurement will not be. Of course, I have yet to find a person with free Internet access for those downloads...
**** Not 100% true. There is such a thing as experimental economics. Most people's preferences fit within Additive, Leontiff, or Cobb-Douglas utility functions (for substitutes, compliments, and not-quite-either goods respectively)
***** (Pindyck and Rubenfeld, 1997)
****** Even if they don't, they follow the assumptions if you do a robust regression. A robust regression replaces the linear approximation of trends with a taylor series expansion of an nth-degree polynomial fitting the data.
On NO scale are free markets zero-sum. (Score:2)
If this doesn't happen, there's no sale.
This is still the case on any scale. The only time this appears to be false is when governments intervene in the markets, thereby distorting prices and making it more difficult for buyers and sellers to arrive at mutually acceptable prices. But even then you have to keep in mind that regulations of various sorts -- and complying with them (or not doing so) -- constitute additional costs in any transaction.
Even so, it is just not true that free markets are ever zero-sum. It won't happen. It can't.
Current Patent Court and profitability (Score:2)
In the '60s and '70s, more than 70% of litigated patents were declared invalid. But since the 1980's when Reagan established the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC, the first circuit court with national jurisdiction) the court has been handing out HUGE rewards to patent holders (eg Polariod won an $873 mil. from Kodak). In the current IP climate, owning a patent can be extremely profitable without even developing a product (Honeywell won $93 mil. from Minolta over a patent Honeywell had licensed to Minolta; Honeywell claimed Minolta used a version of the patent in the Maxxum 35mm).
Many firms who hold patents just don't have the vision to see the products that can be created or the ability to market them. Xerox PARC jumps to mind. Many attribute the failure of PARC to the fact that Xerox was a copier company and had no interest in marketing computers.
Because of the potential profitability of patents, firms will patent everything in site, even if they don't have the resources or motivation to develop these inventions. A single entity just doesn't have the time to produce hundreds (or even dozens) of new products every year. They may not "set out" to limit innovation, but that is the end result.
The success of post-it notes was a fluke. Marketing didn't know what they had (the central premise of Dilbert). The engineers discovered it by accident, and realized what they had. They created a bunch of pads and gave them to the executives-- an instant success. When they ran out, the top dogs wanted (NEEDED) more and were told by the engineers that it wasn't really a product. That's what got the ball rolling...
Even the most ardent supporters of patents admit that there is a tradeoff here. Allowing patents, they feel, gives incentive to motivate. But they also realize that they are creating monopolies and that monopolies are, in general, bad for the economy. They don't have competition, and therefore have lost some incentive to improve their products (that does NOT mean that they've lost ALL incentive).
Hold up a second here... (Score:2)
While it may be true that a company will 'hold back' certain technologies on occassion, there are normally reasons for it beyond just the desire to maximize short term profits. Additionally, it is not as if their patent on it really holds advancement back for any extended period. IBM owned the PC industry, Compaq sliced and diced them and came up with compatible machines.
Earlier in this thread, someone pointed out that GM has had efficient internal combustion engines for some time, but didn't bother introducing them until the 1970's. The fact of the matter is that demand for efficient machines before that 1970's didnt really exist. Only when the oil crisis hit did people really begin to think about it. My point is basically, that even if this technology was 'open and free' it wouldn't have been implimented anyways. You simply can't force people to use it. If it were 'open and free', there wouldn't have been any incentive for the auto industry to invest the millions that they have in new and better ways.
Furthermore, many times the latest advancement or tweak isn't really in the interest of the greater population. There is a thing known as standards. While IBM did not get everything 'right' or 'fastest' when they created their PCs, they did set a standard. Eventually, Compaq reverse engineering their bios and was able to replicate the entire platform. It essentially became an 'open' standard. This has led to tremendous advances in personal computing. Even today, there are faster platforms and machines nipping at the PC industries heels. Yet the world sticks with this standard. While I agree that there are many things wrong with it, I do not think we would be aided in any way by an industry which only follows the latest and fastest. Anyways, these alternative platforms keep the PC industry on its heels.
The fact of the matter is that this withholding of technology doesn't just happen in commercial industry. Witness IPv4 vs IPv6. IPv4 has served us fairly well, but IPv6 is really the better protocol. Yet IPv6 has not been implimented. Linus has frequently rejected the latest and 'best' techniques in favor of the tried and true standard. You can only reinvent the wheel so many times before you begin to break the greater machine.
I would also go on to point out the fact that "Open Source" is not an "Open Standard", many people seem to think it is. This is simply not the case. Except for the internet RFCs, there are very few 'standards' in the open source world that seem to be fully met. The Linux world has yet to agree on a single widget set or desktop for X -- all of these are open source. There are more examples -- but I haven't thought of all of them. One thing I'm sure of, is that if Linux does really take off, we will see problems like these grow(amongst the open source community). I would say it is Linus' common sense and his control over the Linux kernel that has made it a success.
We need documentation. (Score:2)
Case in point: I'm trying to use the mailman [list.org] mailing list software with Exim. It's been just no fun. I'll be able to figure it out, but it's going to take some effort.
You can be sure that once I do, I'm going to write up a README.exim and submit it to the manmail maintainers/developers, and perhaps add an FAQ entry.
Writing is not hard, and it really helps.
Agalmic is a poorly defined subset of economics (Score:2)
The author's premise is that economics is the study of the allocation of scarce goods. Adam Smith defined economics (or polictical economy) as the study of "the nature and causes of the wealth of nations." Since then, the focus of the dismal science has not changed. Economics is concerned with how nations, or other arbitrary divisions, produce and increase wealth. In its basest terms, it is the study of rational decision making given certain conditions. It is always assumed that the decision makers are rational, and scarcity is nearly always included as a condition of the environment.
So scarictiy is a common condition (much too common for our tastes), but it is by no means the focus of economics. Economics usually deals with goods and services, because for most cultures that is what the culture consumes and that is how wealth is made. Good, by their nature, are always scarce to some extent. Services are limited first by the time of the individuals that provide the service (there are only so many hours in a day) and by the number of people available to perform the service (not everyone wants to code in assembly).
In the US we are seeing the developement of new kind of economy. We have moved from the manufacturing oriented Industrial age to the technology driven Information Age. However, the same economic principles will still apply. Reguardless of how much you 'marginalize scarcity' (a rather dubious concept) it will still exist. If you keep taking a small portion away from something, you still have most of it left (see Zeno's paradox's for more on that).
We are left a poor attempt at an economic analysis of a gift culture. The author is correct that with the case of free software, you can give away as much as you want, and still have the same amount of free software. This is because what is being distributed is neither a good or a service, it is intellectual capital. Its only depreciation occurs as the the intellectual capital becomes more widely used/known. Even then, the inheirent value of the intellectual capital is not changed.
Think about it this way, do the works of Shakespear gain their worth from their scarcity? Of course not! Their worth is determined by their quality. Their lack of scarity is a result of their quality, not other other way around.
Such is the case of any idea. Its worth is determined by its merite. The primary reason that Linux has gained any ground on proprietary Operating Systems is not because it is free, but because it has greater merit. The free price has allowed it to overcome the FUD propigated by those with a vested interest in the the longer established Operating Systems.
There are costs to Linux, and other free software for that matter. If you chose to use linux, you are chosing not to use another Operating System, and that is an opportunity cost.
I believe that intellectual property economics is a good model to start with when dealing with the economics of the free software (or open source, or copyleft...) market. What must be kept in mind are the fundamental laws of economics. They are tried and tested rules that have shown to explain human behavior in many circumstances.
We are all acting in our own rational self interest, reguardless of how irrational that may appear to everyone else. Begin here and you start on a strong foundation.
-Josh
"In all things, moderation"
Misrepresenting Agalmimcs? (Score:2)
7. It is positive-sum. In games theory, a 'zero-sum game' is one in which one player's gain is another player's loss. Conventional economics often describes zero-sum games. When two suppliers compete for the dollars of a single customer, or when two government agencies compete with each other for fixed budget dollars, a zero sum game is played. A 'positive-sum game' is one in which players can gain by behavior which enhances the gains of others. Efficient agalmics is a positive-sum game. For example, when a free software programmer gives his source code away, he gains a large population of users to report bugs; the users gain the use of his programs. By awarding the other players points, the player gains points.
In addition, the "real economist" who posted earlier is right: this is nothing new. But then...
8. It is not new. Gift cultures have existed during much of human history, and other, non-gift cultures have clear agalmic influences. Religious communities have engaged in agalmic behavior, as have governments, businesses and individuals. Charities, standards organizations and trade associations often act agalmicly. It may be argued convincingly that civilization itself is an agalmic activity.
I think it's clear that several posters (I'm not naming names) neglected to read any further than sengan's incorrect summary and the title.
-Dan
Leveraging non-scarce resources to preserve scarce (Score:2)
We only got one Einstein, one Newton, one Leibniz (list ended arbitrarily here). We can't make them any faster than a few per century. If somebody locks that information up in a vault and uses it for private purposes only, it is a huge loss for humanity.
If UNIX is a proprietary operating system with a huge license fee, none of the hackers can use it at home, and none of them can distribute the UNIX specific programs they make. This is a brutal blow to the technological development of humanity, perhaps as much as physics textbooks being similarly restricted to a few thousand copies hidden away on the shelves of engineers.
Writing and supporting one Linux is much cheaper in terms of sparce developer time than supporting two dozen proprietary OS's, and giving it to everyone who wants it provides far more value to humanity and ends the whole mess of writing new ones.
Imagine a tractor developed around the turn of the century, like a modern tractor but with a button you can push that instantly creates an identical tractor out of thin air at zero cost. Naturally, you'd expect every farmer to have a tractor. But what if the creator of the first tractor (or his employer) built a factory in which the tractors are created in the same costless manner, but then workers pry out the replicator button before shipping them off and charged the price of 10% of the land it could work? Or worse yet, the tractors are sold under a no-replication licence, and anyone caught replicating a tractor is dragged off to jail, regardless of how many mouths it would feed or hands it would free. Well, you might expect war, but the tractor company would become very wealthy and powerful very quickly, and all the tractor owners would leap to protect their competitive advantage. You would certainly expect other people to expend the huge effort to make their own tractors from scratch, but most of them would also want lots of money and would follow the example of the original. Inevitably, though, those farmers who could not afford to buy tractors would pool their resources and remake the tractor themselves, and would not, of course, place restrictions on themselves or the friends they replicated it for, because they want maximum value and they want to give maximum value. Humanity would then forever have tractors, and would enter the post-agrarian age where only 5% of the population can provide all the food, the survival need for the scarce resource of human labor being greatly reduced.
This analogy applies to arithmetic, trigonometry, Newtonian physics, and UNIX equally well. If it's valuable and cheap to reproduce, eventually it will be free, even if empires are built between the time when one group of people gets it and the time it becomes common property, and even if one group of people has to seemingly act against their own interest in releasing it. It is the lower energy state into which all things are doomed to fall and from which they cannot return.
Free Software isn't a paradigm (Score:2)
He forgot that, even if you code 12 hours/day, the other 12 hours you live in a real world, and all things around you, buildings, TV, food, etc are controlled by good old money.
You can help your community and yourself programming, and it's a VERY GOOD THING (TM), but it's overall only 0.0001% of the world needs and does every day, and that won't change.
Jesus said "love your fellow man like you love yourself". Why? because he knew that we love ourselves more than (almost) anything, it's part of the human behavior, that's what created capitalism "I worked a lot to produce this, if you wanna it you must pay something to me". That "something" is the only part that changes with Free Software. You're no more talking about money, but about earning public respect from your community and users, of feeling good inside for sontributing for a movement, or like being in a war against greedy buggy companies like MS, it's just that, when you gave up our rights of receiving money for our code, that was only because you was convinced that you could earn something that could have the same or more value than money, a totally selfish/capitalist vision, and that's ok!
Sorry my poor english,