Open Source, Open Standards & Peer Production

Nick Carr has a lengthy article on the pros and cons of peer production. To some extent, it’s hard to quibble with his basic point that peer production is useful but not a panacea. Clearly, peer production doesn’t work for every project, and it will always rely on a core group of dedicated individuals who do a lot of the work.

But what I found striking about the article is that it spends a lot of time asserting that peer-produced products have problems, but Carr provides hardly any examples. Below the fold, I’ll look at one of the few specific criticisms of free software, which I find to be seriously misguided.

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In addition to subscribing to our own podcast, you should also subscribe to Don Marti’s LinuxWorld podcast. It’s definitely more techie and less policy than our podcast, but it has a fair amount of interesting policy stuff as well.

This week’s episode, for example, is an interesting discussion with Brian Aker of MySQL. The first half is a fairly geeky discussion of MySQL features. But in the second half of the podcast, Don asks about the economic motivation for free software. Aker argues that there are fundamentally two motivations, whether the contributions are from an individual or a company: publicity and testing. That is, first, that opening your software up will cause it to be more widely distributed and popular, hopefully leading to more opportunities to sell services in the future. And secondly, if you have more users, and those users have access to your source code, you’re more likely to have unsolicited bug reports and even (if you’re lucky) bug fixes. Aker says that most free software developers—and companies supporting free software—are not doing it out of abstract altruism. Surprisingly for those who think the free software movement is populated entirely by dirty hippies, opening one’s source code can sometimes be a savvy business strategy.

Aker has more interesting things to say, and I bet Don will have more interesting guests in future weeks, so I encourage you to check out the podcast.

Here’s one other section of Braden’s post that I found problematic:

You don’t have to be a Nobel prize-winning economist to understand that an emphasis on building an ICT sector around inexpensive labor will drive wages down. In a global economy, a worker in a lesser developed country could live on just dollars a day. A race to the bottom is the kind of race the EU will wish it hadn’t entered, let alone run.

The FLOSS study authors say that developers will be so inexpensive that even small and medium-sized companies will hire them to work in-house, which they say will help local employment. However, in a globalized race to the bottom, it’s not a stretch to say that the EU would lose to even cheaper programmers in China, India and the former Soviet bloc. In the U.S., for example, the cost savings of IT offshoring in 2004 reached $7.0 billion, according to a study by ITAA — a 36.2% savings rate…

By increasing demand for FLOSS through preferences and mandates, the EU will find that in a “Flat World”, lower cost developers from other countries would rush to fill that demand. The result is more likely to be an increase in offshoring to China and India—not job creation in the EU.

I think it’s debatable if free software will drive down programming wages, or if most of those jobs can be outsourced to China in either event. But let’s assume he’s right about both of those things. When he writes that this would be “a race to the bottom is the kind of race the EU will wish it hadn’t entered, let alone run,” he seems to be suggesting that such a “race to the bottom” would be a bad thing. It seems to me that this is at odds with the principles of basic economics.

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I thought Braden made some good points in his post yesterday about free software in Europe, but I thought this argument was a bit wide of the mark:

OTJ training has always been a great way to learn programming skills. But is working on FLOSS projects the only way to learn how to code? Buried in a footnote (#48), the report says that “perhaps” OTJ training works for proprietary software too. However, it is a different kind of experience, according to the authors. They say FLOSSers can start in their teens and can learn at home, whereas developers of proprietary software have to learn on the job or start their own firms.

Does FLOSS actually promise new and better ways to learn how to write software? Not really. Aspiring developers have always been able to learn programming skills pre-employment and on their own time. And there’s always been a network of online resources and training material for developers of proprietary software (think: Novell and Microsoft developer certifications).

It’s obviously possible to pick up some programming skills using online resources and proprietary developer certifications, but there are some important differences that make free software decisively better when it comes to developing job skills. In general, practice is more useful the closer it is to the real thing. When you contribute to an open source project, you’re making real changes to real code that are being used by real people. You learn about software development in its full complexity and nuance. There’s just no way that an MSDN training manual can compete with that, no matter how well-written it might be.

Secondly, your contributions to a free software project can often lead directly to paid opportunities helping clients to integrate the software you’re working on into their environment and customize it for their needs. I rather doubt anyone is able to get consulting work based on the example programs they write on their MSDN certification test.

Finally, your contributions to a free software project can allow you to stand out in a way that an MSDN certification cannot. By necessity, a certification program focuses on whether you’ve learned a fairly fixed set of skills. You can demonstrate basic competence through an MSDN certification, but it’s difficult to stand out from the pack. In contrast, when you contribute to free software, it provides a much more nuanced basis on which to evaluate your performance. The MSDN certification shows you studied for a test. The free software contribution shows you can actually produce working code. I have trouble imagining a competent IT manager being more impressed by an MSDN certification than a significant contribution to a free software project.

Are FLOSS developers the future promise of a competitive ICT sector in the EU because they are…cheaper?

That’s the main point of Section 7.4 of the EC’s FLOSS report (Skills Development and Employment Generation), which argues that not only are FLOSSers faster and better than programmers using commercial software, they’re cheaper, too.

This analysis here is another in a series of blog posts on the EC FLOSS report. Previously, I’ve discussed how the report is a call to action for Europe’s policymakers, that FLOSS’s popularity is growing, and that many FLOSS developers live in the EU. The report’s authors claimed that FLOSSers work faster (ie. are more productive),  but as I discussed in FLOSS: The Software Hare that Beats the Proprietary Turtle?, the data didn’t really support that claim. In my last post I concluded that there was only a weak correlation that firms that contribute to FLOSS derive more revenue, on average, than non-contributing companies, and even if there were, the study was devoid of any cause/effect analysis.

By analyzing the EC FLOSS study, I’m not trying to beat up on FLOSS. Overall, the almost 300 page report is more interesting than it appears at first glance, and is actually a good case study on how / how not to devise a study to prove a public policy point. Instead, what really interested me was that the EC sponsored a study advocating for old fashioned industrial policy of preferences and antitrust actions aimed at promoting FLOSS over proprietary software.

Markets aren’t perfect, but government manipulations of supply and demand to achieve a particular result are notorious for very low payback. Moreover, the ICT industry has been a remarkable success in its own right and has driven productivity improvements in nearly every
sector, without the guiding hand of industrial policy like that being called for in the FLOSS study.

Getting back to the meat of this post, the study states that FLOSS developers should be less expensive because just about any teenager can become a FLOSS programmer through informal apprenticeships and learning on their own.

Here’s the logic: increase the supply of workers while holding demand constant, and wages will fall. This is simple economics, but what are the more intricate effects of FLOSS employment generation when it is married to a pro-FLOSS EU industrial policy? Would a FLOSS-driven ICT industry help the EU pursue its Lisbon strategy to increase jobs and growth?

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Matthew Ingram does a good job of explaining what’s wrong with this story on how Heinz’s user-generated ad contest didn’t work very well:

” If any of the advertisers quoted in the New York Times story were told by a “Web 2.0? advisor that they could somehow outsource ad production to “the crowd” and wind up with something just as good as what they produce in-house, then they should sue. But I suspect they weren’t told that. They may have wished that was true, but if wishes were horses then beggars would ride, as my mother used to say (actually, she still says that). Scott Karp at Publishing 2.0 has more on the subject.

As a number of people (including commenters on Scott’s post) have pointed out, however, whether an ad is technically or even creatively as slick and well-crafted as a Madison Avenue spot isn’t the only factor that needs to be considered. In some cases, a quirky, user-created ad like the one Global Nerdy likes, or like the Diet Coke and Mentos video, might actually work better. And getting people to “engage” with the brand may be even more important than the actual technical brilliance of the ad.

I think there are three other factors here that are worth keeping in mind. First, it sounds like part of the problem is that they did too little—not too much—to harness the wisdom of crowds. Users can not only produce ads–they can filter them too. If there were a ton of ads submitted and most of them were crap, why not have the crowd help weed out the bad stuff? Set up a site showing all the submissions (and making it easy to embed them in other sites) and let website visitors vote on the best selections. You probably don’t want to just run whatever the crowd suggests, but you could choose 10 or 20 finalists that way, and then you can pick the best 5 from those.

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Apparently I can get a Dell Dimension E520N pre-loaded with Ubuntu for $429. That’s with an Intel Core 2 Duo, 1 GB of memory, and a 250 GB hard drive. The budget machine from Ubuntu hardware vendor System 76 appears to cost $785 if outfitted similarly.

I’m sure I could get an even cheaper system if I put it together myself, but I frankly am not that interested in hardware. I’m perfectly happy to give Dell $50 or $100 to save me the trouble of figuring out which hardware has good Linux support and then comparison shopping for the best deals.

But I’m curious what y’all think: are there other Linux hardware vendors with more competitive prices? Am I likely to have compatibility or other problems with the Dell systems?

Also: Jeremy Reimer at Ars reports that the “Windows tax” appears to be about $50.


Tech Policy Weekly from the Technology Liberation Front is a weekly podcast about technology policy from TLF’s learned band of contributors. The shows’s panelists this week are Jerry Brito, Tim Lee, Mark Blafkin of the Association for Competitive Technology, and Ryan Paul of Ars Technica. Topics include,

  • Microsoft claims free software is infringing its patents
  • the FTC blasts state regulation of online real estate services, and
  • Google prevails over Perfect 10 in an important copyright case

There are several ways to listen to the TLF Podcast. You can press play on the player below to listen right now, or download the MP3 file. You can also subscribe to the podcast by clicking on the button for your preferred service. And do us a favor, Digg this podcast!

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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?

So nmuch for the ‘new and improved’ GPL, by James V. DeLong, from CNET:

In the month since the release of the third draft of the Free Software Foundation’s GPLv3, much of the open-source community has been oddly incommunicado.

Slashdot and GrokLaw, the major homes for the community’s individual members, bulge with posts. But reaction from the corporate wing of the movement–starting with its semi-official spokesman, the Linux Foundation–is silence.

Why the companies hit the mute button just when one would expect a coordinated chorus of huzzahs is a matter for speculation, but here is a hypothesis: Maybe because after two years of drafting, redrafting and re-re-redrafting, the product finally went to the corporate general counsels, and these folks promptly went ballistic over the ambiguities, uncertainties and risks.