Why Discuss Free Software?

Reader Deane had some great questions that I thought would be worth addressing in a new post:

Your major contention seems to be that closed-source software would be less efficient than open source because the latter is more decentralized..

but arnt’ you really talking about a management style here? I think its completely plausible for a closed-source software to have a very decentralized development process.. isnt that how google seems to do stuff? i dont know about microsoft.

Does this have anything to do with the source being open? i dont think so.

Any product development seems to need a degree of centralization, with teams, firms n so on. the degree of centralization depending on the relative cost/benefits of the management decision.

So i don’t see the point really of having a debate on open source vs closed source software. or to the fact that what’s efficient at creativity n so on, as libertarians i thought we’d trust the market to make those kind of decisions, on a product by product basis.

First of all, let me make clear that I don’t see this as a debate about “open source vs. closed source software.” Both styles of software development have their place, and I certainly wouldn’t want to be misunderstood as being opposed to closed-source development. I just think that the advantages of open source software development processes tend to be underestimated, and that in particular Lanier’s criticisms were rather misguided.

Now, it’s certainly true that my argument for the advantages of open source software is largely about more efficient organization of development efforts. That is, I’m interested in figuring out how to best organize programmers to produce useful software efficiently. Much of this process will be “below the radar screen” for consumers, but that doesn’t mean it’s irrelevant. It matters to the average consumer for two reasons. First, a better development process means that programmers will produce more, better, and cheaper software for them to use. Secondly, open source software vendors are less likely to try to lock their customers into their particular software platform. That gives consumers the peace of mind that they could switch to a competing software vendor and take their data with them.

Open source software is inherently more decentralized than closed-source software because open source software projects can solicit contributions from those outside of the firm, whereas proprietary software firms can only get contributions from within the firm. As a result, the managers of closed-sourced software projects need to figure out which programmers are best suited to work on a piece of software and hire them, as opposed to simply releasing the software and seeing who expresses interest. The result is that closed-source software projects tend to be much more top-down in their organization than open-source projects.

Now, I agree with you that this is something that the market should sort out. But there are two reasons I think it’s worth discussing open source software on a public policy blog. First, there’s some disagreement over what it means to let the market sort it out. For example, as I wrote in a Cato study two years ago, the Digital Millenium Copyright Act is a government intervention in the software industry that places open source software projects at a competitive disadvantage. I’m certainly willing to let open- and closed-source software compete on a level playing field, but as long as government policies are biased against open-source software, I think it’s important to educate people about the advantages of open source software and why we should be concerned about policies that undermine it.

Second, as libertarians we advocate non-coercive ways of solving social problems. The market is one example of that, and a very important one, so libertarian thinkers like Hayek have devoted a lot of time to explaining how the market works and why it tends to work better than state coercion. I believe that peer production (which encompasses free software, Wikipedia, the blogosphere, and other decentralized means of producing useful information without the aid of price signals) is another important example of productive cooperation without state coercion. Understanding how peer production works is useful to liberty for the same reason that understanding the free market is useful: it allows us to explain to people why state intervention isn’t required to solve a variety of social problems.

I think it’s unfortunate that so far, most of the people doing this have hailed from the left. Ironically, they liberally cite libertarian thinkers in doing so. See, for example, Benkler’s citation of Coase and Wu’s citation of Hayek. They do a great job of explaining how and why peer production works, and I think it’s a shame we libertarians didn’t get there first.

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