jaromil on Wed, 16 Jan 2002 00:30:13 +0100 (CET) |
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[graham@seul.org: Re: [ox-en] Threads "The Fading Altruism of Open Source" on <nettime>] |
in fact this is not the best place where to develop this discussion as long we had part of the thread kept out of the list by moderators, alltough i think this mail has a good insight and might be interesting for anybody who was following it here. Graham Seaman is from seul.org, an organization significatively supporting free software development, hosting much interesting projects. oekonux.org is definitely worth a look. ----- Forwarded message from Graham Seaman <graham@seul.org> ----- Date: Mon, 14 Jan 2002 17:28:14 -0500 (EST) From: Graham Seaman <graham@seul.org> To: <list-en@oekonux.org> Cc: Stefan Merten <smerten@oekonux.de>, <felix@openflows.org>, <cantsin@zedat.fu-berlin.de>, <HART_KEITH@compuserve.com>, <ksnelson@subjectivity.com>, <jaromil@dyne.org> Subject: Re: [ox-en] Threads "The Fading Altruism of Open Source" on <nettime> Hi, [I'm keeping the cc list Stefan put on this; hope this is ok] On Sat, 12 Jan 2002, Stefan Merten wrote: > On <nettime> there is an interesting thread at > http://amsterdam.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-0112/threads.html#00044 > and here particularly the sub-thread about altruism starting at > http://amsterdam.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-0112/threads.html#00056 > and a second part starting at > http://amsterdam.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-0112/threads.html#00087 > I wish some of these discussions would take place here. The article that started it off ( http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue6_12/lancashire/index.html ) is quite an interesting one in its own right. I think it covers many of the same areas which the oekonux group are interested in, though from a different point of view (not one which is hostile to free software - the conclusions are that free software is a 'good thing' and that it might be useful to help it indirectly by increasing educational funding). Could it be an interesting exercise for oekonux people to write a reply? One reason for doing this is that it directly criticizes some oekonux related ideas; another, that it is the first paper I have seen which looks good enough to become the standard academic 'refutation' of any 'germ-form' arguments (I'm not saying it really refutes them!). I'll have a go at a start: The paper is a little sloppy (though there have been much worse); both as Florian Cramer showed on Nettime in relation to details of free software projects, and in regard to their own data (unless my geography is badly wrong they seem to have confused Sweden with Finland!). The 'fading altruism' of the title, which is what was talked about most on Nettime, is a bit of a red herring - firstly because they're not really talking about 'altruism', secondly because their historical parts on software development are about the worst part in the paper. But the key point is their claim to have provided an empirically testable hypothesis: that free software occurs where programmers are not very highly paid, and as wages increase in the richer countries the number of writers of free software will decrease. As a consequence of this (and not strictly part of their core hypothesis) they assume they have disproved ideas that the free software culture is something that comes out of, or could succeed the most developed capitalism. I think this is the core sentence: 'As increased demand for programmers within a nation drives up the going wage rate, it should increase the opportunity cost of coding free software over [working on] commercial applications, and thereby decrease the amount of free software production'. They complain about Marx being an economic determinist but this is so extreme it's more financial than economic determinism! Wage rates decide everything.. Well, 1. This is trading Raymonds 'cultural' view for a completely determinist one. Neither is likely to be the whole truth (and there are other aspects to economics and to culture which neither covers...). But the alternative to Raymond's 'gift culture' ideas (I really don't like that analogy - the gift cultures were ones which basically went crazy or suicidal on their first contacts with capitalism) does not have to be this kind of financial determinism. 2. There are alternative explanations of their own data even on this level: they assume that because the US is the richest country, it has the richest population, and the best paid programmers, and these are the only relevant measures of wealth. Sticking at this purely empirical level and looking at their own maps, I would guess that their data is highly correlated with which countries fund education the most and where most people can afford to be students for longest. On this measure of wealth the US is certainly not going to come near the top. If this is right, they haven't shown any causal relation at all with wages. 3. They've provided a prediction as to what should happen as the recession in technology hits in America - the number of people writing free software should go through the roof. I don't think there's going to be any such event - but it should be something perfectly testable (just watch freshmeat and compare the number of entries from Stefan Merten with the number from Americans ;-). So can oekonux provide a better, equally testable hypothesis about the way things are going? I'm pretty sure that it can... Graham ----- End forwarded message ----- -- jaromil ][ http://dyne.org ][ GnuPG _key__id_ EDEE F1B9 DC92 76C0 6D46 D77A 58B0 82D6 (5B6E 6D97) # 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