Good job on the DMCA exemptions by the way.

Anyway, as someone deeply embedded in the debate, again, I use Open Source to denote the people who have no particular moral opposition to proprietary software, but believe source code access is simply a better business policy (which includes the above-mentioned software engineering issues), while Free Software denotes those who believe proprietary software is akin to censorship.

What I think you’re describing is the Open Source rebuttal of the closed-source argument. The closed-source viewpoint is that restricted access is the only workable business model. The Open Source rebuttal is as you say, that other workable business models can be built by using different sources of economic returns to the participants.

But, critically, Open Source is NOT DENYING CLASSIC ECONOMICS! It’s simply saying that closed-source is blinkered and limited in its framework. It’s a “10% of a lot rather than 100% of a little” type economic argument.

Too many evangelists then make the mistake of saying that since the Open Source argument is about using different, more indirect, economic incentives, that’s somehow not economic at all, and WOW, IT’S A REVOLUTION WHERE PEOPLE WORK FOR FREE!!! This is very stupid, and confusing, but it sells, for a lot reasons.

Thanks for the url. It looks like an interesting book.

[...] I’m trying to grasp what everyone one here, as Libertarians, refers to [...]

Fwiw, I don’t mind being called a Libertarian—might even vote that way, on occasion, depending on the candidate. But I don’t usually idenify myself as a Libertarian. And I’m not sure that most others would identify me that way either.

Instead, if I sound like I have libertarian attitudes, it’s more that I spent a good number of my formative years growing up in Alaska. That probably might have left me with some ingrained politico-cultural biases, so to speak. You can take the boy out of the last frontier….

Thanks for the url. It looks like an interesting book.

[...] I’m trying to grasp what everyone one here, as Libertarians, refers to [...]

Fwiw, I don’t mind being called a Libertarian—might even vote that way, on occasion, depending on the candidate. But I don’t usually idenify myself as a Libertarian. And I’m not sure that most others would identify me that way either.

Instead, if I sound like I have libertarian attitudes, it’s more that I spent a good number of my formative years growing up in Alaska. That probably might have left me with some ingrained politico-cultural biases, so to speak. You can take the boy out of the last frontier….

Seth,

I’d agree that most of the core open source promoters are concerned with a business model. But I’d say that the majority of open source developers are more concerned with a software engineering model.

Jim Harper said in another post that he views open source as a production model. He didn’t explain too much, and I wish he would have gone further with his citation to AOL in a discussion on open source. However, he did give me the idea that perhaps open source developers work like free lance journalists. These journalists don’t sell everything they write. Sometimes they write to build a personal portfolio, sometimes for fun, perhaps even to write about things that 9-5 journalists never write about. Free lance journalists can post their work on the web for free and accumulate readerships or cited/linked to by other sites. Perhaps they do this in their spare time or full time as part of a larger plan of building foundations for a career. There are many business models I can imagine arising from this scenario, yet it can exist without or peripherally related to a revenue stream.

How does this scenario sound as an analogy for open source production? There are some limitations to the analogy, but I’m trying to grasp what everyone one here, as Libertarians, refers to as open source. Of course terms like “patent troll” are probably equally undefined, but everyone agrees that they don’t like trolls. With “open source” there’s a lot of disagreement, which makes less ambiguity valuable for discourse. Jim, Tim, Mike, Ned, Seth?

Seth,

I’d agree that most of the core open source promoters are concerned with a business model. But I’d say that the majority of open source developers are more concerned with a software engineering model.

Good to see RMS isn’t considered the icon among all open source fans. Whewwww…

Seth, you make a good point.

Tim, although a bit different that what I tried to explain, Seth calls out a distinction between commercial and non-commercial open source. Do you agree that she does this along the lines of open source software (commercial) v free software (“moral”).

We have a spam filter that tends to hold comments that have links in them. They get released when we have time to approve them.

And I don’t think I agree that open source only works for platform products. GAIM is one of the best IM clients around. Firefox is arguably the best web browser on Windows and Linux.

Obviously, open source programs often become platforms unto themselves, as with the various plugins and XUL extensions for Firefox. But I don’t think Firefox’s platform-ness is essential to its success.

It’s really very simple. The Open Source people are concerned with a business model. The Free Software people are concerned with a moral stance. This is meant to be descriptive, not judgmental.

Grasp this distinction, and they should be easy to tell apart.

Where open source does not make much sense as a business model is in non-platform software. It cannot be supported on its own because people don’t need commercial support for CD burner software, IM clients, etc. Platform software is by its nature, so fundamental that there are a lot of users who will need that.

On a side note, I always found James DeLong’s open cynicism toward open source amusing in light of this.

I would say that RMS is indeed on the fringe today. The GNOME and KDE projects, for example, seem to be run by people who do not share his vision as they are both friendly to commercial developers and even get a lot of support from them. Additionally, many projects ranging from the who Apache group, to X.Org and the BSD projects never shared his goals to begin with.

Where open source does not make much sense as a business model is in non-platform software. It cannot be supported on its own because people don’t need commercial support for CD burner software, IM clients, etc. Platform software is by its nature, so fundamental that there are a lot of users who will need that.

On a side note, I always found James DeLong’s open cynicism toward open source amusing in light of this.

I would say that RMS is indeed on the fringe today. The GNOME and KDE projects, for example, seem to be run by people who do not share his vision as they are both friendly to commercial developers and even get a lot of support from them. Additionally, many projects ranging from the who Apache group, to X.Org and the BSD projects never shared his goals to begin with.

That is true of some major open source project, but not true of others. Most popular open source development tools were written with only minimal commercial input. Perl, Python, Ruby and the GNU tools are good examples of that.

Now, it is true that commerically-oriented activity has been pivotal for many more specific projects from Firefox to KDE. Still, what’s the point? I don’t think that anyone but purists, ie ideologues, would take issue with the notion that commercial enterprises have been very important to the development of these projects. For many of us, it’s not an ideology. I don’t see the point of even wasting your time with the ideologues like RMS as they tend to be on the fringe.

I like your statement that not “anyone but purists, ie ideologues, would take issue with the notion that commercial enterprises have been very important” to open source. This is where most discussions on open and proprietary software should begin, with the purists not involved…

One of the first corporate adoptions of the open source business model came from IBM, under the leadership of the very capable Louis Gerstner. IBM’s marketing campaigns aside, Gerster, a former McKinsey executive, didn’t lead IBM in that direction without clear insight into how he could combine open source development and a business model. I write a bit about this here (http://weblog.ipcentral.info/archives/2006/08/chips_on_big_bl_1.html)