Software Kingdoms

A number of monetisation models for open-source work have been put forward in the last decade, but none of them has been able to scale and solve the problem in a fundamental way. The reason being, open-source work is a microeconomic singularity — a paradox in capitalism that can’t be corrected with donations, cryptocurrencies, or freemium models. I... See more

If you accept this premise that there is no tragedy of the commons – that open source software cannot be over-grazed by having more people use it – that freeloaders are free, and scarcity is not an applicable concept, then you’re forced to look skeptically at other assumptions we’ve been starting to make lately in the broader open source community.

Here again, Eghbal provides a framework that transcends the open-source context that inspired it. In a digital economy, goods are either excludable or not (meaning paywall-able, essentially), and rivalrous or not (meaning infinitely copyable at zero marginal cost or not). The resulting 2 × 2 matrix describes just about every way to make a buck onli... See more

It recently occurred to me that the really obvious comparison for what’s going on here is the open source software community back in the 90s. Eric S Raymond’s essay Homesteading the Noosphere, a reference text on the social norms and incentive structure of the free software movement, explains exactly what’s going on. We’re no longer dealing with a ... See more

Looking at the landscape of open source software today, I note two things. First, successful open source platforms tend to be partnered with caretaker organizations. Wikipedia has the Wikimedia Foundation, Linux has the constellation of organizations around the Linux Foundation, and Kubernetes has the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. Second, open... See more