Money Ruins Everything

Military theorist John Robb has presented similar arguments in the context of modern guerrilla warfare — what he calls “open source terrorism” and the global bazaar of military tech. War is increasingly being waged at the smallest scale by creative amateurs armed mainly with cellphones and web forums, working not for profit but for a “plausible promise” that can take various forms. Robb develops these ideas on his blog, Global Guerrillas.

Open source is driven to a huge degree by companies such as Intel, IBM, HP, etc. as a legal alternative to fighting Microsoft. The idea it is a bunch of people working for fun and recognition is a bit silly. Amateur productivity is certainly not the correct way to think about it. If that is the basis of your analysis then the paper isn’t worth reading.

http://whimsley.typepad.com/whimsley/2008/05/linux-again.html
Tom Slee:

“Open source, like any new phenomenon, is changing. Our understanding of it has to change too. The Linux Foundation report prompts us to re-examine some of the neat and clean dichotomies that were floated around ten years ago and see if they still hold water. A few do, but many don’t.”

As a consequence of the developments discussed above, highly capitalized intermediaries are no longer necessary for the creation,production, dissemination, and use of culturally significant content

It’s a shame to see John repeating this [new] chestnut. You really think all the makeup artists, sound & light technicians, cameramen, etc. that get paid by the current copyright system will have an equivalent in the amateur sphere?

I’m afraid this confuses me immensely.

“The most
obvious example is the weblog, where individuals produce vast amounts of
commentary, opinion, diary-notes, criticism, and observations, almost
always with no economic motivation”

And:

“Because these creators produce content for the love it and are prepared
to work for free—or even to lose money to feed their desire to create—their
existence threatens the economic assumptions of commercial providers of
content.”

That it’s playing merry buggery with the extant commercial providers of content sure. But it’s the “no economic motivation” part that confuses. Is “the love of it” not an economic motivation? The various things that you describe, the showing off of technical abolity, for example, social interaction etc?

Yes, there are huge and howling gaps in my knowledge of economics, but isn’t it a usual assumption that people try to maximise utility, rather than purely profit or other commercially measured things?

So the definition of “economic motivation” as being purely profit or similarly commercially measured matters seems a little odd. Or is this more a measure of my own lack of knowledge of the subject?

If “economic motivation” is indeed described purely in those cash/profit terms then my quibble goes away. But is that a normal assumption?

(No, I haven’t gone through all 54 pages, just the first few. Perhaps this is dealt with later?)

You really think all the makeup artists, sound & light technicians, cameramen, etc. that get paid by the current copyright system will have an equivalent in the amateur sphere?

This points up the next logical step for this argument — from arguing about *whether* the amateur modality is important, to specifying the activities in which it is more and less important.

Software, music, fashion, social science don’t require significant capital or large-scale division of labor, so the amateur mode works very well. Computer hardware, movies, health care, architecture, not so much. And then there are the hard sciences, which can be highly specialized and capital-intensive, but have a publicly supported infrastructure that allows something like the amateur mode.

As with most of these questions, it’s when you go from yes or no to where, when and how much that you start to learn something.

The distinction between amateurs vs volunteers is key. Clearly a lot of people doing unpaid activity like blogging or writing open-source software are using skills they gained from doing similar things professionally, for pay.

Software, music, fashion, social science don’t require significant capital or large-scale division of labor, so the amateur mode works very well.

It’s true that social science and humanities scholarship is done by individuals without formally organized cooperation, such as co-authoring papers–most people don’t co-author publications in history and the humanities. But the vast majority of useful work is done by professionals who are getting paid for the work, not volunteers. I don’t see people writing the kind of stuff that you would publish in a journal and putting that up on blogs or wikipedia.

But if I’m not mistaken, developing software, especially powerful software like linux or Open Office, takes a lot of people working together. I think if anything the fact that you can do a certain kind of work alone is a disincentive for doing it on a volunteer basis. This because a lot of the enjoyment of something like an open-source software project is, I think, the socialization, working on a project you love with other people who love it too. My guess would be that for a professional volunteer to do something like an open-source project, the benefit is that you have control over who you’re working with and what you’re working on and how you work together, which you wouldn’t have when you’re doing something for pay.

The volunteer activity that social scientists and other academics seem to do most is blogging, which I think is more social than writing articles. For me, that’s a lot of the attraction (at least for posting on blogs, I don’t have one of my own), I’m interacting with people more than I generally get to do when I’m working on my dissertation. So if I’m going to do publishable work, I’m going to try and get the professional recognition for it that comes from publishing it in a known journal, not just posting it on a website of my own, or wikipedia.

the vast majority of useful work is done by professionals who are getting paid for the work, not volunteers.

Sure, but that’s not the question. The questions are (1) is more useful work done on an unpaid basis than in the (recent) past, and (2) if so, does this call for changes to laws and other institutions in those areas where amateur labor is most common? John Q. says yes on both questions, and I think he’s right. Altho his argument would gain clarity & precision if he took some time to lay out the areas where the amateur mode is not relevant.

developing software, especially powerful software like linux or Open Office, takes a lot of people working together.

But not a big capital outlay — that’s important. Equally important, software development may involve a lot of people without a real division of labor as such. The various tasks involved can be carried out independently and all require more or less the same skills. This is very different from the division of labor that you find on a movie set, in an operating room, on a construction site, etc.

a lot of the enjoyment of something like an open-source software project is, I think, the socialization, working on a project you love with other people who love it too.

Here I agree completely.

Open source is driven to a huge degree by companies such as Intel, IBM, HP, etc. as a legal alternative to fighting Microsoft.

‘Huge’ is an overstatement. The scope of open source software is as broad as the needs and imagination of programmers. There are, however some very important areas of software where an odd relationship has developed between commercial and open source entities that is both symbiotic and competitive. This is where companies like Sun Microsystems, IBM, Red Hat Software among others come into the picture. It comes down to the question: How do I make money selling something other people are giving away for free?

The answer to that question lies in the basic flaw in the open source model from the end user’s prospective: open source developers tend to solve problems they have or that they find interesting. They don’t necessarily respond to criticisms like: “You have to be a programmer to understand the user interface.” or “The documentation for this software is written in Polish.” or, most importantly “This bug is costing my company $100,000/day in lost revenue!”

I developed a system for a customer on Fedora, Red Hat Software’s open source release of their commercial Linux distribution. The client decided to use a commercial product to communicate with their legacy systems. The vendor of the product didn’t support Fedora because in order to warranty their product they needed more cooperation from the Linux developers than they could get from open source projects. That’s where Red Hat came in. My client upgraded to Red Hat’s commercial product, and my software ported over without a hitch. The upside for the rest of the world is that my client is now subsidizing the software used by millions of people for free.

On another point, I’m not sure whether people outside the industry realize how important the open source movement has been to the development of the Internet as we know it. Under the traditional commercial software development model where license fees might be based on the number of people who benefit from the use of the software, the license fees for the software needed to operate this blog might be $100,000/year. Imagine how different the Internet would be if those rules still applied.

Now, how about a little love for Richard Stallman, the mad monk who started the ball rolling and his church, the ?

Throughout history most of those prizing observation have considered financial gain as secondary, tertiary or even counterproductive. Those who prized invention thought more of gain. Modernism, modernity or Sputnik put inventors in the academy, changing its focus and affecting its goals: a social scientific acknowledgment of the inevitability of self-interest became a Platonist/Panglossian faith in its truth. But now the affect has gone both ways and inventors and “innovators” [and god how I hate that word] are recognizing the relation of curiosity to communication. Maybe they were lonely? It’s good to know, but many of us, including those who write and read this blog (if they looked at their own choices) have always taken that logic as their own. How many discussions have there been on the lack of republicans in the academy?
Maybe now the neoliberals are losing their hold as well.

@24

In case it wasn’t clear, a contractual obligation for maintenance and support is the whole point of the “licensed” open source business model I described.

That’s a really beautiful comment, Zora.

John – if you want to take this further I suggest a fruitful area of research might be a comparative study of laws regarding non-profit corporations in different countries. The USA has a system that is remarkably friendly to what one might call “cultural” amateur activities, including allowing people to offset expenses incurred in such activities against taxes. In contrast the UK makes it very difficult for non-profit organizations to operate unless they are clearing “charitable”. You may also want to try to contact the UK’s Commission on Volunteering which has a brief to encourage amateur activities and has a refreshingly (for the UK) broad view of what this means.

Various pontification from me here and here.

Dr. Quiggin,

I found your section on open source more convincing than the other sections in that it struck me as a bona fide innovation that took (and is taking) place outside the paradigm for innovation and constitutes an anomaly to the paradigm. But as you said in the paper, plenty of profit-making corporations stepped in to “support” the technology, i.e. make a killing off of the work that others did.

Why those others did not seek to accrue the profit themselves might be an interesting topic to debate, but it was precisely the operationalization by traditional economic actors that made the technology widely available and caused the epic changes (if any) in human interaction. The economic model of innovation is not brought into question in its essence, nor are there obvious implications for policy. By supposedly lacking a regulatory space for amateur innovation, are we somehow suppressing promising advances?

I was not at all convinced by the historical narrative about intangible capital goods at the beginning of the paper. I detect an over-eagerness to announce changes of world-historical importance.

(See the page linked therein to see what I mean if the link’s content isn’t clear enough.)

Trackbacks seem to have gone the way of the dodo. Too bad. Is it tasteless to promote my too-long-winded for a comment response?

Roy-

If you put an extra space between your paragraphs, your comments will be *much* more readable.

Just a little bit of open-source editing for you…

“Zora’s editing-for-love. Jimmy Carter’s yeoman diplomacy in the Middle East.”
Carter’s a war criminal who’s angling for glory as a humanitarian. Google “Kwangju.” His very public pursuit of the Nobel was obscene,
And as far a priesthoods are concerned, what’s the academy? And what’s is it when it sees itself as outside the wider culture, looking in, when all study is the study of externalities?
What’s a priest who studies his flock rather than living among them? Rationalist monasticism rather than priesthood seems to be the model now.
Not a good sign.

What’s occurring is a small but significant shift away from an ideal of individualism and towards a more social, and social democratic, aesthetic. The change in sensibility comes first, the change in politics follows. All basic stuff but in reverse order of the model followed by the high priests of individualism who make up the the majority of academics these days.

Is the current version of open source where, say, the Mozilla Foundation takes in somewhere north of $60 million a year, all that different from the days when any educational institution could get a source license to Unix for the cost of media, and an entire national email and file-transfer system (uucp) was hidden in the discretionary budgets of local managers at AT&T and a few other companies? (And for that matter, is open-source really so seriously innovative rather than just a way of getting the last 30 years’ corporate and academic research results into common use?)

What you’ve got, I think, is a combination of the usual creativity and volunteerism that happens when society creates a surplus with (as noted by others) the ability to use the enormous capital invested in computers and networks by big corporations to get big visible impacts at relatively low marginal-dollar costs. With a dollop of the old patronage system coming in the form of donations by folks who won the corporate-finance lottery. But all of the people doing this wonderful work still need to have day jobs.

I also think that open-source innovation seems particularly anomalous in the face of an industrialized economy that has specialized in eliminating the surplus available for volunteer and community work in previous decades. Think of all the civil organizations and hobby groups that have withered since the 70s because fewer and fewer ordinary people had either the spare time to participate or the money to donate. Now only
something with negligible marginal cost, like blogging or (some) open-source development or distributed proofreading, can survive, it seems.

I have little doubt that OSS will obtain and maintain a substantial part of the software business (perhaps better described as “software activities”).

However, there will be ample scope for non-OSS commercial software.

Two related factors that are usually underestimated are the learning curve (for newcomers) to become familiar enough with a complex enough piece of software, and the superlinear growth in software complexity when making changes/extensions (e.g. adding new features or replacing algorithms or data structures), esp. when supporting things outside the original architecture or originally envisioned use of the product.

Both of those translate to an ever increasing barrier to entry as a software evolves and gets larger.

The level of investment, ability to organize and sustain the required workforces knowledgeable about the product, and keeping them motivated to do things that are not in their immediate interest, is usually only obtained in a commercial or semi-commercial (e.g. academia with industry-backed funding, or R&D institutions) context.

And it can be plausibly expected that even OSS products will fall prey to the same problems as all things that are getting too big, opening up opportunities for nimbler replacements that won’t necessarily start out as open source.

That an organization would choose to develop their proprietary product instead of the OSS product would then be a matter of barrier to entry into the OSS product, and possibly fact or perception that the proprietary technology is superior or more easily managed.

#41
The Clovis point. There are no citations available.
No doubt there were contemporary scammy opportunists who tried to proprietize that kind of knowledge. Logic says they were not in the majority.
None either for the additional assertion I’m making that the Neanderthals laughed and sang, extrapolated from their grave sites. Anybody who took that much care for their dead also sang. People who sing, laugh. Are laughing and singing Neanderthals in your conception of pre-history?
Possibly you believe that currently we are not so overrun with humanoid parasites and parasitic organisations that we can barely move. If so, hang on, watch closely.
#42:
Carter’s role in Kwangju looks from here to have been more like he was in over his head and relying on bad advice. I doubt, with no citations to back it up, that Carter’s decision leave the Korean resistance dangling in the wind was as cold-blooded as you seem to see it. And it seems way too cynical to view his current activities as nothing but megalomania.
Altruism takes a lot of forms, not all of them heroic action or sacrifice. My unsupported assertion is that before we began to dominate the natural world, most of our history, altruism was so integral to survival it was essentially what we were.
The Medici may have given us a nice big statue and some buildings and paintings, but those unknown ancestors gave us everything – language, music, tools – for free. It is a symptom of this profane time that those gifts, and the spirit in which they were given, are trivialized.

“The first man who, having fenced in a piece of land, said, “This is mine,” and found people naïve enough to believe him, that man was the true founder of civil society.”
— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

“…there was a time… when people learned rapidly from each other….”

Besides the possibility that Clovis point knappers could in fact have been part of a closed group, guilds, priesthoods, and trade secrets aren’t the only mechanisms that slow innovation. Anthropologist George Foster, the developer of the theory of Limited Good, found that a potter’s innovation in the small Mexican town where he did much of his research was not taken up by others of the trade nearly as quickly as Foster expected. When a few eventually began to use it, his questioning seemed to reveal that such “early adopters” had spent decades convincing themselves that they had come up with the idea independently — only in that way did they feel comfortable using it.

As a matter of fact, it could be argued that the community had developed the equivalent of a patent system, in which an innovater would have a reasonable time in which to benefit from their invention free from competition, before it was taken up by the larger society. You could even argue that it is an open-source, socially-based, patent system.

Worse is the phenomenon that many of us who have spent much time in third-world societies have witnessed — an automatic suspicion of innovation, and uneasiness or outright fright in the face of change.

Abb1,

You need to get out of whatever pigeon hole you’re stuck in. There’s as much if not more custom system and application software being developed today as ever.

In fact, the availability of free systems software like Linux, Apache, Java and PHP means that a greater percentage of a company’s software budget is available for custom development. Free software is actually creating more opportunities for professional software developers, not fewer.

quo vadis: You are assuming that software budgets stay the same, per user capita or whatever base metric. Arguably one thing that Linux etc. have enabled is the server farm. I don’t see how that would free up money for internal software. Server farms have to be operated, and the maintenance contract cost (if applicable) probably scales with your server farms. I wouldn’t think Redhat charges the same whether you run 10 servers or 1000 (but I don’t know).

As far as I can see at least in “supporting” departments, internal (or contracted out custom) development budgets are matched to staff cuts in the job descriptions that are automated away.

Website/database development/operation vs. phone reps, automated resume mills vs. human recruiters, “employee/manager self service” vs. clerical staff, etc. Where I work (mid-size corporation) the secretarial and recruiting staff has been cut down to the bone, to the point where only VPs and up have a secretary.

Cm, sure, of course software companies develop proprietary software, that’s their business, this is how they make money. If you’re talking about software companies, then I’m not sure I understand what you’re saying in #50.

QV 53, what kind of custom software? Give me an example. I was thinking about applications like firewalls, monitoring systems, web servers, office/document management systems, proxies, load-balancers, VOIP, instant messaging, etc. – that kind of stuff. This is (as I understand) where you typically face a choice between commercial and open source. Is there really any in-house development (beyond trivial customizations) of this kind of stuff anymore?

abb1: Let me try again. And first of all, I don’t mean to argue against anybody’s position, but rather provide an additional perspective.

Whenever any software product (including OSS) becomes “too big”, its development stagnates, as it becomes ever more challenging to make changes, add new features in a coherent manner, and indeed maintain or obtain an oversight and understanding of the whole system. Even when it’s not about features, the same goes for implementing more efficient or otherwise better algorithms.

Of course, I’m not talking about stable base utilities that have a well-understood and limited feature set.

Eventually this will express itself in an untenable learning curve and punitive overhead when doing any work on the product, as well as likely the product becoming sluggish and lagging in new features.

This opens up opportunities for competing products that start from a clean slate.

In any area, when somebody thinks they have invented a better mousetrap, they usually don’t hack an existing product that is centered around the old mousetrap technology, and where perhaps the non-core (non-mousetrap) parts, e.g. the user interface, are not particularly great.

Even in OSS you have many competing implementations in various areas, each with distinct advantages, and differing feature sets, targeting different interests. And even in OSS, new products share little code from those they replace, so I don’t see code reuse as a major tradeoff component.

Now combine this with the fact that a new product development need not be OSS.

cm @55

I don’t want to sound rude, but it’s obvious from your first paragraph that you don’t have a lot of experience with open-source based software systems. FYI, I make the better part of my living building and selling custom software systems and services to small to medium sized companies, and I’ve been doing this for almost 20 years now.

abb1 @57

I’m currently re-engineering a legacy accounting system system for a company that provides customized accounting services for hedge fund managers. Previously, I worked on a web system for a realty company, an email monitoring product for a startup, a transaction processing system for an e-commerce value-added network …

For many companies, computer systems are not just for generic HR, CMS and accounting functions, they also implement the core business the way an assembly line does for an auto manufacturer. These systems are highly specialized and typically represent a significant part of the company’s capital investment.

#56:
I’m sorry, but that’s mostly all hyper-rational gibberish. There is no evidence. There never will be.
And so ends that part of our discussion.
This strident demand that you be provided documentation for things that otherwise will have no validity is a rhetorical trap rationalists use to discount anything they can’t own and manage.
My paranoid side sees a deeper agenda behind the stridency. My poetic side wonders what it might be.

#58:
Samizdat was a remnant artifact, a relic of what was once common enough it was just how things were. Like weeds in a vacant lot. Bears in the zoo.
It stands out as minor and exceptional because we’ve been so thoroughly nobbled by wanna-be hivelings and their drones. We all get born under these giant insectile pseudo-human aggregates which have almost immortal physical lifespans and powers way beyond individual human capacities. Our Distributed Masters and their support teams. But they aren’t human, which will be their eventual undoing.
For aesthetic reasons, Tracy W – because aesthetics are the ultimate morality. Reason falls away, beauty remains.
Stallman’s quixote-opposition to that hive-predation is what in my book recommends him for canonization.