19.1 Michael feldstein - open source, economics, and higher education  (Page 6/8)

We typically reduce all of economics to supply and demand, but it could be equally well formulated in terms of cost and benefit. Every system of production, whether it is a company, a market, or an open source community, has its costs. On one end of this spectrum, firms work because they can balance relatively lower costs of command-and-control structures relative to a higher cost market. On the other end, commons-based peer production such as open source projects can have lower costs than either firms or markets in a networked environment, where communication of participants and distribution of goods are far lower than we experienced in the industrial economy that those of us who are voting age and older experienced for most of our lives. It isn’t intuitive to us because we’re not used to having to live and work in space, having spent most of our lives on the ground. I’m here to tell you that the laws of physics still apply. It’s just our intuitions about them that need to be adjusted.

Comments

1. gavin baker - october 31st, 2007 at 12:30 pm

This is my favorite post of the series. Thanks, Michael, for an accessible introduction that makes me want to dig even deeper into Coase and Benkler.

I’m a bit disappointed in the conclusion, though. I had my hopes up for a smoking-gun ending: a prescription for higher ed on the basis of what we know about commons-based peer production.

I’ve read plenty of such prescriptions (and dashed off “Rx” a few times myself), but they inevitably seem to fail to connect the dots. I was struck by the question “Open source works in practice, but does it work in theory?” It may sound academic, but it’s actually quite practical. To fully leverage these forces, we need a complete cycle from practice to theory to practice. There are plenty of practitioners, and there’s good theory (albeit not widely-enough understood), but the chain frequently fails when attempting to extract practical knowledge — well-formed prescriptions — from the theory.

Most of the attempts to do so boil down to something like “universities should support FOSS because it’s the right thing to do”. Perhaps ironically, it seems that many of academia’s FOSS practitioners purposefully ignore theory, reducing the motivation to use or produce FOSS to “it seemed like a good idea (it might save money, etc.” or some sort of imitation. As Gary Schwartz wrote in his post for the series: “Whereas many university people enjoy a spiritual affinity for open source software, our interest is more pragmatic.” To stereotype, one group’s motivation is religious, with no concern for practicality; another group’s motivation is just to get through the fiscal year without going over budget, with no concern for bleeding-heart causes. We’ve got theory that explains and reconciles the forces — but nobody’s applying it.

To stick with the space metaphor: If someone was designing a rocket, no engineer would mimic previous designs “because it’s the right thing to do”. Similarly, no engineer would mimic previous designs “because it seems to work”. We would expect the practitioners to apply a theoretical foundation. If the president walked in to NASA and demanded, “Explain why this will work,” there’d better be a solid explanation — and I’d expect the aerospace engineers to be able to deliver it. But if the president went to NASA’s software engineers and asked the same question about their open source projects, I doubt sincerely they could give a complete, succinct, coherent, convincing explanation. (Not to pick on NASA.) It really seems like the practice of FOSS isn’t theory, applied — it’s guesswork or beliefs . That’s not because the theory isn’t there (as this post expertly demonstrates); it’s because the theory isn’t being applied. How do we change that?