Competition is a Feature, not a Bug

Reading through the comments on this post on the economics of open source, I was surprised to find the following comment by Tony Healy of the Institute for Policy Innovation:

Clearly, free software is a big boon to Google and every other large corporation, just as low wages are. But neither provide benefits to programmers. Many advocates of open source actually have explicit open source lobbying roles with corporates, but misrepresent their claims as being in programmers’ interests. That is, their job is to lobby for free inputs.

Unfortunately the progamming profession is young and has no awareness of its own interests, nor consciousness of labour market disciplines that are part of the structure of older professions. Also, the lack of access barriers removes the consciousness of their own value that is implicitly taught to people entering other professions.

I would be fascinated to know what “labor market disciplines” and “barriers” he’s referring to, and which “older professions” he thinks programmers should be emulating. Maybe he thinks programming should be more like the medical profession? Or the real estate industry?

It’s absolutely true that increased competition often drives down the wages of producers in a particular industry. It may very well be that by eliminating barriers to entry in the software profession, free software is exerting downward pressure on wages in the software industry. (although it also makes them more productive, so my guess is that it will actually lead to higher wages in the long run) In either case, it’s bizarre to see somebody from a nominally free-market organization citing the intensely competitive nature of the market for programmers as a problem that needs to be solved. As he himself notes, competition among producers means lower prices for consumers. If that’s the effect free software has on the software industry, isn’t that something we should be celebrating?

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