Linked by David Adams on Mon 16th Aug 2004 17:44 UTC
I read something in one of the comments for an OSNews posting a couple weeks ago that sent me thinking. It wasn't an original or profound thought. In fact, it's a rather commonly-held opinion that happens to be quite misguided. It's an opinion summed up by the "open source = communist" meme that gets thrown around in thousands of flamewars all over the internet. In this essay, I will explore why this idea is wrong and demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of economics.
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Wasn't hugely impressed by the article starting out effectively saying "Either you agree or you don't understand economics dummy".
But millions of people are employed planting and harvesting, and the tractor will put them all out of business! And the cotton gin will put all those people picking the seeds out of cotton plants out of work! And mechanical looms will put all those weavers out of work! Oh the humanity!
They WERE put out of work, and things got VERY VERY hard until alternative industries came along to provide jobs.
This is a ludicrous comparison anyway. If you take money out of the software industry, salaries decrease, number of jobs decrease, and most importantly the incentive to actually join the industry starts to fade away. This is already happening, with people choosing to study subjects with better future prospects, software engineers shifting career, etc.
The article's author is right when he says that the total economy isn't going to notice this bleeding away of talent, but that doesn't mean there's no effect. If I magically removed all but 2 of the world's car designers then we'd start seeing a lot of very similar cars (Already do IMHO). Likewise if there is a large reduction in the number of people programming original code, and there are a lot less decent programmers around than people think, then innovation will actually slow down.
The open-source phenomenon (For licenses that allow redistribution) will actually REDUCE innovation. An effect which will be nicely masked by a vast number of slightly modified variations on available stock code.
If, for instance, I gave a class of English Literature students an assignment to write a play about a Scottish King, in an old English style I'd end up with unique plays. However if I also said they could insert as much Shakespeare as they like, and get full credit for the bard's words, how many variations on Macbeth would I get?