Hope you don’t mind forthright commentary seeing as you asked for comments! I like the article overall and I always enjoy your writing style, but I feel the section on Open Source software is weak.

I am guessing that you are an Open Source enthusiast yourself (at least a flag-waver from the sidelines), and I appreciate the difficulty in explaining the concepts behind the movement without resorting to technical jargon.

However, assuming that this article is for a non-technical audience, I would suggest stripping out several phrases that are laden with meaning for OSS advocates but mean nothing to the general population.

In particular, I would consider modifying or removing references to “embrace, extend and extinguish”, “copyleft” and the specific programming languages of C++ and Visual Basic — the statement works just fine without them.

Also, I’d consider ‘removing’ some ‘quotes’ — if the words won’t make sense to the general readership, either explain them or remove them. Either way, most of the quotes are unnecessary IMO.

Just my 2c.

I’d like to respond to your kind words by taking your advice, but let me go through it.

A lot of the writing decisions you criticise were the product of a fair bit of thought and I couldn’t come up with improvements with what I did.

I agree that ‘embrace, extent and extinguish’ is jargon. I do however explain it. More to the point, EEE is critical to my exposition of OSS, because I don’t believe that OSS is just ’sharing’ plus the net - the way Wikipedia is.

OSS works because the licence was specifically designed to combat EEE.

As for ‘copyleft’ I kind of agree with you. It is not an expression I like at all and - from memory - I didn’t use it at all in the OSS essay for Policy. I used it here because I needed a short word to describe the licence, and I thought OSS was tautilogical and GPL or GNU was worse.

On naming the computer languages - they’re just a couple of ‘f’ristances’. But maybe they should go. The editor will be in a better position to judge - so I’ll make sure he sees the comments.

What quotes do you have a problem with. Quotes can be a little profligate with words, but they add colour, and there’s no way I’m removing a word of the magnificent Adam Smith quote! But are there problems with others?

Btw, these things are all about judgement, so I’d welcome others’ views on this.

Similarly with your mentions of the “embrace, extend and extinguish” phenomenon and “copyleft”. Your article explains both concepts succinctly and clearly for a lay audience. I certainly wouldn’t remove them.

The mentions of C++ and Visual Basic probably don’t add anything much, but nor are they intrusive or confusing nor do they add unnecessary length.

I’m much more interested in the broad topic you open up than in editing nitpicks - the way in which capitalism at its best involves a flexible amalgam of playful but deadly serious competition, enlightened self-interest and co-operative, collective endeavour and sharing.

The difference between Adam Smith and OSS is that the former assumed co-operation and ethical commercial behaviour would flow automatically from the socialising effect of family, church and community. However, modern global capitalism at least arguably places grave stresses on all these social institutions - at least there is an observable phenomenon of families and communities being fragmented in the interests of flexible production and impulsive consumerism. Of course, one can overstate the extent of that phenomenon, as your article argues. Nevertheless, it’s unlikely that a Grameen Bank concept would work in a first world society like Australia or the US, because the ties of extended family and community are too weak to create a sufficiently powerful sense of social obligation and shame to inhibit default. I don’t think the existence of an evident social shaming mechanism with high profile individuals like Rivkin, Skase or Adler says anything much at all about the probability of it having meaningful operation with less prominent, more obscure individuas (i.e. most of us), where unscrupulous defaulters can and do take advantage of the anonymity and mobility of modern society.

Nevertheless, I agree that the OSS movement shows that a workable competitive/collaborative ethos CAN be created in first world society, and may well be both optimally productive and “worker friendly”, but it can’t be achieved by assuming the existence of strong social ties to civilise self-interest (as Adam Smith does) nor operate by calculatedly harnessing those ties (as the Grameen Bank concept does). In the first world, the social ties and obligations need to be carefully recreated by some means or another. The OSS movement provides a good example of how that can be done.

I wonder how it could be extended to other areas, for example workplace organisation generally? I’ve always tended to see outsourcing, casualisation and the “flexible labour market” as mostly malevolent forces to allow employers to jettison hard-won employment conditions and save a buck at the expense of the workers. But I know that many former employees who’ve been forced into an outsourcing situation have thrived on it and say they’d never willingly go back to being an employee. It’s an observation that many union bosses and lefties generally prefer to ignore or discount. But maybe, rather than fondly hoping to re-impose the old blueprint when they get back into power federally, they’d be better advised to think laterally and find ways to maximise the benefits of the “flexible labour market” by seeking to nurture that magic combination of enlightened self-interst, playful/serious competition and collaborative endeavour. How those sorts of structures and ethoses could be engineered is a topic worth exploring in depth and over time. Sounds like a conference theme to me, at the very least.

It would be interesting to know what default rate the Sisters of the Good Shepherd experience/d on their loans scheme. One suspects that they’re offering the scheme more as a charitable endeavour than a business, and reckon they’re doing well if even some of their customers repay the debt. A business could not operate this way and survive.

That said, I wouldn’t deny that there would be discrete parts of the Australian community where a Grameen scheme can work. For example, many remote Aboriginal communities (in fact some such schemes are operating with the Aboriginal community). And the Chinese community has always operated its own system of financial help and interlocking obligation. It’s one of the big reasons for the success of the Chinese commercial diaspora worldwide. But in both cases, it’s underpinned by a degree of intact sense of community and shared cultural understandings that I think just don’t exist among the broad mass of middle class caucasian Australians. I suspect that most Australians would have Buckley’s chance of persuading a significant group of friends and relations to sign up as co-guarantors for even a very small loan. And in the absence of such interlocking obligations, one suspects that the default rate would be unsustainably high for any commercial credit provider.

Nicholas: I should clarify one aspect of my earlier remarks — I didn’t mean quotations in the sense of the Adam Smith quote. I meant the physical presence of quotation marks around words that probably don’t need them. This was the paragraph that really seemed a little excessive to me:

“To run on a computer source-code is ‘compiled’ into ‘binary code’ ‒ instructions to a computer written in gazillions of ‘1’s and ‘0’s. ‘Proprietary software’ firms like Microsoft and Adobe typically conceal their source-code to ‘cover their tracks’ and frustrate would be imitators.”

Maybe my objections to terms like ‘copyleft’ are simply a case of being too close to my subject. I dabble in developing Open Source software myself, and while Open Source software developers create some extraordinary technology, some of the terms they create strike me as slightly … immature? smug?

As for ‘embrace, extend and extinguish’, I find it too commonly used by knee-jerk Microsoft-bashers in the Open Source community for it to be a neutral term.

(Apologies for the computer jargon that follows.) I also believe the common use of the phrase doesn’t refer to the misuse of open source code without GPL protection. Rather, it refers to a computer standard (such as SQL or HTML) that has had custom extensions added that prevents customers from choosing their desired vendor implementation of the standard.

In most cases, the various implementations don’t share code — it the question of obeying or disregarding the standard which is key.

I feel like I’m splitting hairs a bit here, and if so, I apologise. However, I think it’s important to recognise that the reason OSS combats EEE is that it creates a community with a vested interest in **maintaining** the standard, rather than in creating a proprietary alternative which can produce lucrative monopoly gains. The GPL and less-stringent alternatives such as the MPL help reinforce this vested interest.

For example, Apple and Red Hat are examples of two companies that use open source as a point of competitive advantage. In Apple’s case, embracing open source revitalised a struggling company because people could feel confident that solutions designed for Apple’s OS X were compatible implementations of industry standards.

I certainly agree with your point about too many inverted commas. Will have to do something about that.

I do use EEE as a pejorative. No doubt about it. But its true that I don’t know enough to know when EEE is legitimate - for generating new functionality and when its used as a competitive ruse. On the other hand even where it is legitimate, the appropriate response should usually be to impose some kind of ‘access regime’ on extended standards.

It surprises me that mainstream policy economists are not more vocal about this and don’t talk more about extending access regimes of the kind we have in natural monopoly infrastrucrure to standards in software. The arguments are very similar - and frequently even more compelling.

the question is when, and will any humans be around at that time

Of course, going into the differences between OSS licenses is probably not something you want to do for an article like this, but I thought I’d note here that it’s more complicated than just OSS vs proprietary.

My write up is too GPL conscious and in this sense it is of a piece with most of the other writing about OSS - from lay-people anyway.

Sad thing is, I’m not sure if there is much I can do about it within genere and the word limit. Will give it some thought though.

Thx for the comment.

“In civilized society he [man] stands at all times in need of the cooperation and assistance of great multitudes, while his whole life is scarce sufficient to gain the friendship of a few persons.”

That bright young Scottish whizzkid academic would have purely loved blogging, I reckon.

More generally, I agree that these things aren’t the result of selflessness, but they’re also not (to any great extent) the product of narrowly economic motives. In fact the two are substitutes not complements: the introduction of money kills off the kinds of motives needed to produce things like blogs and OSS

No man is a blog.
I contradict myself?
Very well, wikis contain multitudes.

At least GPL style licences (about which I was writing) effectively ‘leverage’ an existing public asset (existing OSS) to generate more ‒ by preventing those who extend it from privatising it and selling it as proprietary software. The way in which this undermines the incentives for hoarding code means that the bulk of the incentives left are in favour of sharing code. And - voila - a public good is produced without any kind of coercive collectivism or any particularly altruistic or even social motives from anyone though these don’t do any harm and can do some good. I can’t think of any analogous form of economic production (there may be the biological analogy with coral ‒ but then I don’t know enough about coral).

Wikis and bloggs are simply sharing geared up by the minimal marginal costs of sharing over the internet. You can benefit from them, and in doing so you may contribute, but you undertake nothing in consuming the benefit that they produce. Your production therefore is the result of some social, intellectual, altruistic itch that you want to scratch.

Further, I don’t think you can be nearly so categorical in saying that money incentives will be harmful for OSS. Something like 90% of Linux is written within a world of monetary incentives. And Wikipedia didn’t arise without seed funding ‒ and could (perhaps) benefit from some additional funds if they were applied in the right way. I would like to see the public sector do a lot more funding of OSS - at the very least in the same way it is done in the private sector, by funding new projects that would go ahead anyway as open source projects. There should be a huge application for htis in the public sectors of the world.

Finally I do agree with you that the readers of Aurora might have been better served with an article about blogs and wikis, but I hope they’re not ill served by the article on OSS.

You can’t teach an old blog new tricks.