🚀 go-pugleaf

Maciej Stachowiak <mstachow@mit.edu> writes:

>> It is only market driven if you extend the meaning of the word "Market"
>> to a degree where it means everything and nothing.  E.g. to a degree where
>> you can say that the evolution of animal species and ideas and social
>> patterns are all "market driven".
>>

>Yes, they are. The only thing that is _not_ market-driven is anything
>centrally planned. Again, read an econ textbook, economists regularly
>analyze processes that involve no direct exchange of money. These are
>sometimes called "shadow markets".

Why not?
Isn't there also a "market" for power mongering and legitimizing ideas?
Why draw the limit there?
I prefer to draw the limit more narrowly in order to avoid deceptive
argumentation which keeps jumping back and forth between a (normally 
meant) narrow definition and a wider one which allows market worshippers
to enlarge the scope of validity of their theories as they please.
Market incentives are those incentives that, according to A.Smith,
allow greed to be mobilized for the public good.  Market relations are
the point-to-point relations between supplier and demader.  They form
an invisible network that allows a country to consist of greedy individuals
and still progress.

>> This again is an extended use of the word "market", which is understood in
>> context.  Usually a market is measured in dollars, and "percentage of the
>> market" would mean percentage of the cake that you eat.

>Only because dollar markets are easier to analyze quantitatively. In
>any case, if a cheaper piece of software in a category sells twice as
>many copies as an expensive one, they may have the same dollar market
>percentage but the company selling the cheaper software is clearly in
>a strategically superior position.

There are more factors than money, there is also power of coercion involved.
This coercion can be turned into money later, e.g. by forcing me to buy
software I don't like in order to be compatible.  Coercion is potential
money.  If 80% of the servers ran Apache and 10% IIS, Apache would still
have little market power, because it generates neither money nor power of
coercion.  All it does is serve as a safeguard against IIS generating such
power.  Thus, with coercive power calculated in, the market shares still
would be: 0% Apache, 50%+ IIS.  Only the total sum of the market would be
small, because Apache would have taken the tooth out of it.

>> Service-orientation means that creation of the software is not rewarded,
>> only bugfixing and hand-holding is rewarded.  Which means that the only type
>> of open-source software that is rewarded by the Market is 
>> * buggy and poorly documented open source software.
>> * tailored solutions that serve only one customer

>In practice, open source software that is developed primarily by
>commercial concerns (as with Cygnus and the GNU tools) is not buggy or
>poorly documented. Many have made this argument and it's just not
>true. No one would want _any_ service for the software if the software
>were not already very high quality.

Is Cygnus solely service-based? no proprietary code core?
(even SuSE and Redhat have a proprietary core)
Would their business decrease if they concentrated on services and stopped
writing free software, reducing their efforts to tailored solutions only?

>> I would subscribe to this view.  The problem is that OSS creation cannot be
>> rewarded by a market system based on individual demand.  The reason for that
>> is that OSS serves a public demand.

>It serves individual demands too. The public demands are served OK as
>a side effect. Lawyers who make arguments in court on behalf of a
>client have publicly beneficial side-effects too - if their arguments
>are effective, they may be cited as precedents in later
>cases. Public-benefiting side effects do not preclude there being a
>healthy market for a given service.

Evidently, the current market economy allows some public value to be
created in the form of side-effects by idealistic people.  It doesn't
preclude there being a private-value market for these people to make a
living.  That's about what I wanted to say.

--
Hartmut Pilch
http://www.a2e.de/phm/