Re: [ox-en] New economic model for free technology?

• From: Stefan Merten <smerten oekonux.de>
• Date: Mon, 03 Oct 2005 12:46:36 +0200

Hi Karel and all!

Very interesting thread :-) . May be we get some real advances here
:-) .

One short remark on this.

5 days ago Karel Kulhavy wrote:

On Tue, Sep 27, 2005 at 10:53:29PM [PHONE NUMBER REMOVED], Franz Nahrada wrote:

Hardware development might mean prototyping, material costs etc.

That's negligible. The time is the problem. Material cost is 10% of
Ronja devel cost.

This is true for Ronja and probably a lot of other products. However,
when trying to get a more general perspective there are another lot of
products where you need an enormous apparatus to actually produce
things.

I once wondered why in pharmacy there is no such development like in
Free Software. I could imagine that there are a lot of bright people
in this area who would love to develop Free Medicine but they
obviously don't. From Christian Wagner I learned that the machinery
you need for research alone is much too expensive to do things like
that as a hobby. Though there is certainly movement in this scene this
need for huge machinery is a big obstacle.

So as a small conclusion I think we could distinguish a couple of
poles:

* Products which need no material input whatsoever and are made from
  information alone

  This is clearly the pole where Free Software is on. Producing Free
  Software today means nothing much than a PC and an Internet
  connection at least once in a while. Today this is common at least
  in the industrialized zones of this planet.

* Products which need very little information to get produced

  Actually I have no idea what such products might be ;-) . Virtually
  every product needs a lot of (societal) knowledge to get produced.
  May be wastes of any kind could be seen in this way.

* Products which need a lot of machinery to get produced

  In our industrial world a lot of products fall into this category.
  For instance computer chips need relatively little material input -
  at least if you account only for the part you finally have in hand -
  but need *lots* of expensive machinery to get produced.

* Products which need a lot of input material to get produced

  This would be products which need a lot of raw material but little
  material processing. Cooking comes to mind where you can do without
  a recipe but not without the vegetables, meat, etc.

I guess it makes sense to categorize Free Products along these lines
and to check what they have in common to understand what the chances
are and what the problems.


						Mit Freien Grüßen

						Stefan

PS: Ahm - in the end it became a longer remark ;-) .

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• References:
  • Re: [ox-en] New economic model for free technology?
    • From: Karel Kulhavy

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