Markets (was Re: Hayek was right. Twice.)

[Ian Grigg]

> But try constructing an Independence Day without Will Smith. Or the
> special effects. Or the soundtrack. Or the distribution chain. Try
> guaranteeing that it arrives on schedule without making a loss. I think
> you will not be able to accomplish that with a volunteer effort. Try doing
> that tens of thousands of times a year (that's for all of what is
> currently covered by IP) and you're bound to fail. Unlike with Linux, the
> individual parts of most larger projects involving IP are of no use
> without the surrounding whole. Unlike Linux, many IP products aren't
> modular, reusable or decomposable, and so they can only exist if you can
> find a single source of financing for the whole project. In the case of
> modular projects, you can rely on overlapping interests to fill in the
> voids, but most projects aren't like that. Especially if all that the
> creator gets is the ever-diminishing value of a single copy.

I find myself compelled to advertise :-)

http://www.iang.org/papers/task_market.html
addreses this, and whilst the above comments
are highly applicable, I believe there are
ways forward.

See also the work of Eric Hughes, John Walker,
the AMIX, Robin Hanson and others.

> ... Why is nobody willing to guarantee kernel stability, even when
> paid big bucks?

Well, the problem is that you are asking too
much of one OS.  If you want stability, use
FreeBSD (we do).  If you want security, check
out OpenBSD.  If you want portability, try
NetBSD.

If you want to have fun, then Linux is good,
so I hear, but serious business finds itself
unsatisfied.  Mind you, it is getting a whole
lot better!

> >People do even "grand" things without expecting to be paid (or even
> >worse, expecting to die from it), because they want to.
> 
> Well, what stupid people they are. I wouldn't go anywhere as far as
> gettimg myself killed for the common good. Even paying for software I can
> just copy is a stretch. What makes you think most people care enough to Do
> the Right Thing? What makes you think relying on Doing the Right Thing is
> a good idea? I mean, it's been tried before, and the consequences aren't
> worth a second look.

We've had a lot of success with open source.

My company published the Cryptix java library
back in '96, for purely selfish reasons.
Since then, a team of volunteers (including
our own people) have produced lots of versions,
and kept it moderately up to date.  (It's a
bit quiet now, the lists are down, giving
evidence of the unreliability of the open
source model ;-)

We had to write Cryptix, that was a business
requirement as we needed crypto in Java (and
Perl) and nobody had done it before.  But,
once done, I didn't want to pay to keep it
going.  So we open sourced it.  We got the
support and the updates for free, mostly,
thereafter.

I had to pay for bits and
pieces, sure, but when I paid about $6000
(all up) to get the OpenPGP library written,
it compared pretty well to the licence fees
that RSADSI was charging, of $25,000.  I
got a good price because the source then
got opensourced.  Everybody won.  And, I
had to do it anyway, because RSADSI doesn't
deliver OpenPGP :-(

(Of course there are alternate business
models.  Baltimore, IAIK, RSADSI are some
famous names that decided to sell their
crypto software and made a bundle on the
stock exchange.  But, when it comes down
to it, their model failed, because they
were seduced into the apparent gold mine
of PKI...  But that's getting distracted!)

There are other benefits to the open source
model:  most of the people who've volunteered
have boosted their CVs and picked up good
work because of it.

-- 
iang