The Simple Economics of Open Source

[Cameron Laird]

In article <slrn8g26tu.p7o.neelk at brick.cswv.com>,
Neel Krishnaswami <neelk at alum.mit.edu> wrote:
			.
			.
			.
>One of the interesting things about this thread is that it has given
>me a bit of insight into what economics looks like to people who
>haven't internalized its assumptions. I'm afraid that I'm tainted
			.
			.
			.
>the effort. Most people don't even bother digging up evidence to
>support their prejudices, let alone try to come to a careful decision.
>And searching the Census and BLS websites is *easier* than hacking on
>the Python core.
My wife says it reinforces her prejudices about
economists (or "dart-throwers", as she calls us)
that we would think the "Census and BLS websites"
have anything to do with "a careful decision."
			.
			.
			.
>snobbery. I read an article last year where two economists developed a
>model predicting that a disproportionate fraction of groundbreaking
>academic papers should be wrong. Basically, they assumed that since
>funding stems from status, and status stems from writing ground
>breaking papers, there's an incentive to draw flashy, counterintuitive
>conclusions rather than confirming prior work. (They did observe that
>their work implied their paper was probably wrong, since it was
>advancing a flashy, counterintuitive proposition. :)
>
>
>Neel

This has been part of academic folklore for a long,
LONG time--oh!; that means I should describe the
"flashy, counterintuitive, but already widely-known-
without-being-well-marketed" category.

Wrestling this back toward the neighborhood of Python
looks like a challenge; all I can think to say is 
that economics has no monopoly on generation of a
comfortable explanation for open-source community
process.  Anthropology, sociology, rhetoric, theology,
architecture, ... all recognize familiar elements in
what we do.
-- 

Cameron Laird <claird at NeoSoft.com>
Business:  http://www.Phaseit.net
Personal:  http://starbase.neosoft.com/~claird/home.html