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Is Open Source the counterpoint to Adam Smith’s “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own self-interest”?
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In particular, a discussion of the incentives at work would be fascinating. Russ, have you thought of interviewing Yochai Benkler, Yale Law Professor and author of the influential paper on this topic, Coase’s Penguin? He coined the term Commons Based Peer Production to describe the open source production process. I would love to hear more discussion on this topic. My blog is powered by WordPress, an open source application. On my most recently purchased computer, I installed OpenOffice rather than MS Office.
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#Chambers dictionary amazon software#
But the success of open source software is indisputable. I have worked for a software company for 13 years so I have a vested interest in the success of copyrighted software produced by a firm. But this topic is one that has intrigued me for some time. I am only half way through this podcast so I have not gotten to the part about open source. and others that crowds will undoubtedly suck at, such as when focus and uniformity are desired traits. In other words, there are some things that crowds are very good at when information is dispersed. I wonder how Sunstein would feel about music or plays or scripts composed via wiki. Many people (and companies) see software as art. Yet Firefox has all the volunteers while Microsoft just occasionally staffs up to bring IE up to date. Many would say that Firefox is better, but nobody could reasonably argue that it’s twice as good as IE7. Concrete example… Compare progress on Internet Explorer to Firefox. Millions of eyes or millions of coders will tend to muck things up. The whole concept of open source seems to just turn this reality on its head. Hire more people and expect it to take even longer. It is well known in software development circles that if you have a staff of say, 100, and your project is moving too slowly, the best way to make it go faster is to fire half your staff. That would be solving the coordination problem. In the long run though, to say that commercial software or open source is “better” is folly on an axis of better, except one. This keeps the “too many cooks” problem from getting into the DNA of the project. Additionally, self-annointed open source pioneer Eric Raymond argued a decade ago that the best open source projects were mainly individual efforts until they reach a certain critical mass of users or importance. Great for 4th graders, but horrible in the adult world. Some (read “the guy posting this”) would argue that viral licenses like GPL are socially retarded akin to the understanding of Christmas gift giving that a 4th grader might have. There is still a tremendous amount of open source software available under so-called BSD licenses, which don’t require giving back. The definition he gives in the interview is of a particular strain of open source software. Not that I don’t have enough EconTalk inspired reading (two Taleb books came from Amazon today, and Moneyball and The Blind Side were recent excellent reads), but I’m going to have to see how he connects open source with wikis in his book. He had me up until the open source software discussion.