🚀 go-pugleaf

Maciej Stachowiak <mstachow@mit.edu> writes:


>> What "market"?
>> OpenSource Software is not market-driven.
>> When market economy meets information society, the result is "economic
>> distortion".  Correcting this is what RMS's DAT proposal is all about.
>>

>Sure it is. Many parts of it are not a market that involves transfers
>of money, but assuming money is required for markets the kind of
>naiive view of markets that only someone who hasn't studied economics
>would have.

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".

>It is true that many industry rags measure "market leadership" in
>dollars, but this is hardly universal; if you are an OS vendor trying
>to attract ISVs and VARs to your platform, you tell them how many
>units you ship and how much installed base you have in units, both
>absolutely and as a percentage of the market, not what percentage you
>have in dollars.

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.

>> But each single one is better than market economy.

>Economic viability for open source only requires that the software
>market become a service economy rather than a commodity
>economy. Actually, many sectors already _are_ more service-oriented
>than product-oriented, so this shouldn't be too much of a problem. 

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

>Basically, my view, and that of many others, is that customers should
>pay, not for the software itself, but for the labor of creating,
>maintaining and otherwise servicing software, much the way legal and
>medical knowledge operate already.

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.

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