The open source movement shares many features with a workers' commune, and is likely to fail for the same reason: it cannot scale up to meet its own successes. To see the long-term difficulty, imagine a commune entirely owned by its original workers who share pro rata in its increases in value. The system might work well in the early days when the workforce remains fixed. But what happens when a given worker wants to quit? Does that worker receive in cash or kind his share of the gain in value during the period of his employment? If not, then the run- up in value during his period of employment will be gobbled up by his successor—a recipe for immense resentment. Yet that danger can be ducked only by creating a capital structure that gives present employees separable interests in either debt or equity in exchange for their contributions to the company. But once that is done, then the worker commune is converted into a traditional company whose shareholders and creditors contain a large fraction of its present and former employers. The bottom line is that idealistic communes cannot last for the long haul.10 31
There are a number of ideas here. First, "idealistic communes cannot last for the long haul." The skepticism about the staying power of idealism sounds plausible today, though there are some relatively prominent counterexamples. The Catholic Church is also a purportedly idealistic institution. It is based on canonical texts that are subject to even more heated arguments about textual interpretation than those which surround the General Public License. It seems to be surviving the long haul quite well. 32
The second reason for doomsaying is provided by the word "commune." The problems Epstein describes are real where tangible property and excludable assets are involved. But is the free and open source community a "commune," holding tangible property in common and excluding the rest of us? Must it worry about how to split up the proceeds if someone leaves because of bad karma? Or is it a community creating and offering to the world the ability to use, for free, nonrival goods that all of us can have, use, and reinterpret as we wish? In that kind of commune, each of us could take all the property the community had created with us when we left and the commune would still be none the poorer. Jefferson was not thinking of software when he talked of the person who lights his taper from mine but does not darken me, but the idea is the same one. Copying software is not like fighting over who owns the scented candles or the VW bus. Does the person who wrote the "kernel" of the operating system resent the person who, much later, writes the code to manage Internet Protocol addresses on a wireless network? Why should he? Now the program does more cool stuff. Both of them can use it. What's to resent? 33
How about idealism? There is indeed a broad debate on the reasons that the system works: Are the motivations those of the gift economy? Is it, as Shirky says, simply the flowering of an innate love that human beings have always had for each other and for sharing, now given new strength by the geographic reach and cooperative techniques the Internet provides? "With love alone, you can plan a birthday party. Add coordinating tools and you can write an operating system." Is this actually a form of potlatch, in which one gains prestige by the extravagance of the resources one "wastes"? Is open source an implicit résumé- builder that pays off in other ways? Is it driven by the species-being, the innate human love of creation that continually drives us to create new things even when homo economicus would be at home in bed, mumbling about public goods problems?11 34
Yochai Benkler and I would argue that these questions are fun to debate but ultimately irrelevant.12 Assume a random distribution of incentive structures in different people, a global network—transmission, information sharing, and copying costs that approach zero—and a modular creation process. With these assumptions, it just does not matter why they do it. In lots of cases, they will do it. One person works for love of the species, another in the hope of a better job, a third for the joy of solving puzzles, and a fourth because he has to solve a particular problem anyway for his own job and loses nothing by making his hack available for all. Each person has their own reserve price, the point at which they say, "Now I will turn off Survivor and go and create something." But on a global network, there are a lot of people, and with numbers that big and information overhead that small, even relatively hard projects will attract motivated and skilled people whose particular reserve price has been crossed. 35
More conventionally, many people write free software because they are paid to do so. Amazingly, IBM now earns more from what it calls "Linux-related revenues" than it does from traditional patent licensing, and IBM is the largest patent holder in the world.13 It has decided that the availability of an open platform, to which many firms and individuals contribute, will actually allow it to sell more of its services, and, for that matter, its hardware. A large group of other companies seem to agree. They like the idea of basing their services, hardware, and added value on a widely adopted "commons." This does not seem like a community in decline. 36
People used to say that collaborative creation could never produce a quality product. That has been shown to be false. So now they say that collaborative creation cannot be sustained because the governance mechanisms will not survive the success of the project. Professor Epstein conjures up a "central committee" from which insiders will be unable to cash out—a nice mixture of communist and capitalist metaphors. All governance systems—including democracies and corporate boards—have problems. But so far as we can tell, those who are influential in the free software and open source governance communities (there is, alas, no "central committee") feel that they are doing very well indeed. In the last resort, when they disagree with decisions that are taken, there is always the possibility of "forking the code," introducing a change to the software that not everyone agrees with, and then letting free choice and market selection converge on the preferred iteration. The free software ecosystem also exhibits diversity. Systems based on GNU-Linux, for example, have distinct "flavors" with names like Ubuntu, Debian, and Slackware, each with passionate adherents and each optimized for a particular concern—beauty, ease of use, technical manipulability. So far, the tradition of "rough consensus and running code" seems to be proving itself empirically as a robust governance system. 37
Why on earth should we care? People have come up with a surprising way to create software. So what? There are at least three reasons we might care. First, it teaches us something about the limitations of conventional economics and the counterintuitive business methods that thrive on networks. Second, it might offer a new tool in our attempt to solve a variety of social problems. Third, and most speculative, it hints at the way that a global communications network can sometimes help move the line between work and play, professional and amateur, individual and community creation, rote production and compensated "hobby." 38
We should pay attention to open source software because it shows us something about business methods in the digital world—indeed in the entire world of "information-based" products, which is coming to include biotechnology. The scale of your network matters. The larger the number of people who use your operating system, make programs for your type of computer, create new levels for your game, or use your device, the better off you are. A single fax machine is a paperweight. Two make up a communications link. Ten million and you have a ubiquitous communications network into which your "paperweight" is now a hugely valuable doorway. 39
This is the strange characteristic of networked goods. The actions of strangers dramatically increase or decrease the usefulness of your good. At each stage the decision of someone else to buy a fax machine increases the value of mine. If I am eating an apple, I am indifferent about whether you are too. But if I have a fax machine then my welfare is actually improved by the decisions of strangers to buy one. The same process works in reverse. Buy a word processing program that becomes unpopular, get "locked in" to using it, and find yourself unable to exchange your work easily with others. Networks matter and increasing the size of the networks continues to add benefits to the individual members. 40