Re: Coffee and Open Source

[Jeff Licquia <jeff@licquia.org>]

On Thu, 2003-01-30 at 13:02, mike808@users.sourceforge.net wrote:
> > OK.  But in your analogy, management killed off the free coffee because
> > of unintended usage of a scarce resource.  And it was related to product
> > activation, which is fundamentally an act to restrict copying, not
> > creation.
> 
> Just as the DMCA, Jack Valenti, the MPAA, the RIAA, Sen. Hollings from Disney,
> and friends are all working hard to create a scarcity of a resource (IP),
> and justify their restricting copying to preserve their business model.
> 
> IMHO, the MPAA and RIAA are the Vanilla Ice of IP - still singing their 
> one-hit wonder 90 years after their 15 minutes of fame were over. 
> Not to worry, tour extensions are being planned now.

Well, yes, but did you read the Moglen article?  The basic jist is
something like "fairy tale worlds built by artificial laws never last". 
The key is to exploit the basic fragility in the model: kick out the
supports that hold it up, and block attempts to shore up the
contraption.  It's virtually guaranteed that they won't last, but we
want their failure to happen sooner instead of later.

> > Yeah, but we don't need a majority of users to work on something, just a
> > persistent minority.
> 
> But it's the disconnect between what the minority is willing to create (what 
> meets their interests) and the demand by the majority to meet their interests.
> We just haven't figured out a good mechanism for connecting the two, since
> the GPL and other OS licenses remove the economic incentive. If money
> can be considered a "universal translator" to exchange value, and we've
> no ability (yet) to scale this for open source development, then how does
> the majority incent the minority to create software to meet their needs?

I suppose I don't see it.  But, then again, I've been living fairly well
doing open-source development for several years now. :-)

I think that the disconnect between the techies and the unwashed masses
is way overstated.  We wouldn't have things like GNOME and KDE if
techies didn't have at least some interest in providing systems for the
many non-techies in their lives to use.  And, to my view, the ratios of
people slamming the Linux desktop for contradictory crimes are getting
very nicely balanced, which suggests that Linux on the desktop is
progressing quite well.

The main point, though, is that money is not necessary for the exchange
of value.  It's certainly a valid way to do so, but other valid ways
exist to translate work into value.  Some of these can even result in
money, although through much more indirect means than we're used to.

If Karl Marx has left any kind of legacy, it's in this persistent
fallacy that views all of reality through the eyes of economics.  For
example, it's entirely lost on most new users of Linux that the whole
thing got started in 1984 with absolutely no money, no "incentive"
except for the ravings of some MIT intern who wrote an editor once, and
that the money equation didn't become even mildly viable until about
1995, after most of Linux's core capabilities had been completed.  By
any economic model, the GNU project and Linux simply shouldn't exist at
all.  The fact that it exists and thrives suggests that, as my mom
always told me, "money isn't everything".

> Commercial software solves this problem by using money and aggregating
> (roughly) flat-fee pricing. Bill G gets $100 for each MS OS sold (er, licensed).
> That big pile of money is what he uses to incent his workers to create
> more code. In the OS world, I can offer a coder money to create code, but
> I don't have a way to aggregate my need/offer/incentive with anyone else's.
> Brian Behlendorf's Collab.net project looked promising, but hasn't taken off.

Considering that the OSS world has more coders at its disposal than
Microsoft (or anyone else, for that matter), I don't think we need to
worry about giving people incentives.  They seem to be able to find
incentives on their own.

Lots of people fear chaotic systems; they want to impose some order on
it, not realizing that the chaotic nature of the system is the very
thing that makes it so desireable.  Given the historical trends, though,
I'm inclined to think that any attempt at imposing order will be both
unsuccessful and irrelevant.

> > Unfortunately, the only examples of this that exist today are
> > proprietary: BitKeeper, Perforce, etc.  Right now, the best OSS/Free
> > version control system is Subversion;
> 
> BitKeeper can be free and open source, you just can't use it to write
> other CVSes - e.g. banning Subversion developers from coming near it.

This is absolutely, positively not true.  BitKeeper is not open source;
the restriction you just quoted disqualifies BK by itself.

You're confused, perhaps, by BK's free license for (some) open source
projects?  Several other VC systems, like Perforce, have the same thing.

> I don't get much worked up about people's choice of licenses. Its easier
> to just be disappointed that they didn't strive to choose a better one.

There are two sides to the equation.  If you look at the licenses chosen
by software developers and corporations independent of other factors,
you're absolutely right: there's no point fulminating over people's
license choice.  (Although I am proud to have been involved in licensing
issues for two prominent projects; in both cases, my involvement was
invited after I requested changes.)

Most debates, however, result from one of three problems:

 - Poor license choices by developers when licensing their code

 - Refusal to honor the license on code developers want to use

 - Arrogance on the part of developers who see licensing as "beneath"
them.

The last is really the biggest problem; without it, problems in the
former two areas are usually quickly resolved.  

Take the MPlayer debate just posted to Slashdot.  It turns out that the
license issues with MPlayer (which even the MPlayer developers
acknowledge existed) are likely all gone now, and a Debian developer is
working on the package as we speak.  The whole issue need not have ever
been raised, except that a MPlayer developer felt the need to vent to
debian-devel.

> I agree with you on your point that distributed commits and changesets are 
> important. I've got some ideas on this, and they seem obvious to me, but I 
> don't know how common they are to the folks coding. Thanks for the tip on 
> Subversion. I'll see about where they're going and if they have found the 
> same information I found. In short, I think the problem of distributed 
> commits to databases has a direct link to this problem in CVSes. But this
> stuff was worked out in the early 90's, so I didn't think it would be this
> long before somebody correlated the two, as I did a couple of years ago.

It's definitely an interesting problem.  The general consensus on the
Subversion list is that the problem seems easier than it really is. 
Given that at least one of the participants (Tom Lord) has implemented a
complete VC with changesets and distributed operation before, I tend to
think he's right.

Of course, you're certainly welcome to prove him wrong.  I get the
feeling that, if you do, he and the rest of the team (not to mention the
entire open source world) would be delighted.
-- 
Jeff Licquia <jeff@licquia.org>

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