Felix Stalder on Thu, 13 Dec 2001 02:23:49 +0100 (CET) |
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Re: <nettime> The Fading Altruism of Open Source Development |
I never understood why people think of Open Source in terms of _altruism_. Perhaps, it's due to some confusion related to the "saintly" image of Richard Stallman, but it's the completely wrong approach and shows a very limited understanding of economic relationships where things are more varied than than selling things vs giving them away. To make a long argument short, altruism is, if anything, the effect of Open Source but not its cause. For Open Source to work, people do not need to be altruistic, or at least not all of them. As far as I can see, many of the developers who contribute to Open Source do so in the context of their professional work, be it as members of academic institutions -- where publishing and visibility has nothing to do with altruism but is a necessity of survival -- or in the context of companies who use and extend Open Source software in the work they do for clients. But let's forget for a moment software and look at another great Open Source project: the law. Nobody would claim lawyers as a profession to be altruistic, even though there are certainly individuals with altruistic motives. Many of them are highly paid and some are very much motivated by money. Nevertheless, they all contribute to a great Open Source project. The law and the court proceedings (ie. the code) are public and if you want, you can use an argument made in one case by someone else in your own case. In fact, this is standard practice and crucial to the efficient working of the legal system. This is how the system learns and evolves and how it avoids to be clogged with an endless numbers of identical cases. If lawyers could copyright their arguments (i.e. restrict other lawyers from using them), the system would break down, particularly the Anglo-American system of common law. In some ways, creating the law is similar to creating software. The first copy (i.e. deciding the first case in a new area) tends to be very expensive, but subsequent copies (i.e. deciding further similar cases) are much cheaper. The problem -- and the reason why lawyers make a good living -- is that there are rarely identical cases, or, at the very least, it is very hard to tell if a case is identical to one that has already passed through system. What you pay a lawyer for is her knowlegde of the relevant cases and her work to take whatever necessary from them and then customize it for your own context and needs. Sometimes this "customization" is relatively trivial, sometime this includes a significant contribution to the evolving public knowledge base. To some degree, the same model applies to Open Source Software development. What you pay, say, IBM for when they install a new server with Linux on it, is the service they provide to you for customizing what is out there (Linux etc.) to your own ideosynractic needs. And rarely, your needs are exactly the same than other people's needs. Many people who contribute to Open Source Software work in contexts that produce software but don't sell it. Be it that they are academics/students or be it that they sell services. Taking from and contributing to free code is in both cases a strategy that makes sense for very "selfish" reasons, even though they also contribute to the free knowledge base. --------------------++----- Les faits sont faits. http://felix.openflows.org # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo@bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net