[ox-en] Antirivalness
- From: Stefan Merten <smerten oekonux.de>
- Date: Tue, 01 Aug 2006 20:13:15 +0200
Hi list!
We had the terms rival and non-rival goods a couple of times here.
I'm still reading this **excellent** book from Steven Weber ("The
Success of Open Source") and he makes a very interesting point about
the rivalness of Free Software (Page 153f.):
[...Thinking about classical concepts and thoughts about non-rival
good which are all not very satisfying for Free Software...]
I believe the solution to this problem lies in pushing the concept
of non-rivalness one step further. Software in many circumstances is
more than simply non-rival. Operating systems like Linux in
particular, and almost software in general, actually are subject to
positive network externalities. Call it a network good, or an
anti-rival good (an awkward, but nicely descriptive term). In simpler
language, it means that the value of a piece of software to any user
increases as more people use the software on their machines and in
their particular settings. Compatibility in the standard sense of a
network good is one reason why this is so. Just as it is more
valuable for me to have a fax machine if lots of other people also
have fax machines, as more computers in the world run a particular
operating system or application it becomes easier to communicate
and share files across those computers. Each becomes slightly more
valuable to existing users as each new users enters the picture.
Open source software makes an additional and very important use of
anti-rivalness, in maintenance and debugging. Remember the argument
that there exists an infinite number of paths through the lines of
code in even a moderately complex piece of software. The more users
(and the more different kind of users) actively engage in using a
piece of software, the more likely that any particular bug will
surface in someone's experience. And once a bug is identified, it
becomes possible to fix it, improving the software at a faster rate.
Thus is hugely important to the economics of software users, because
customization, debugging and maintenance usually accounts for at
least half (and sometimes considerably more) of the total cost of
ownership of enterprise software.
The point is that open source software is not simply a non-rival good
in the sense that it can tolerate free riding without reducing the
stock of the good for the contributors. It is actually anti-rival in
the sense that *the system as a whole positively benefits from free
riders*. Some (small) percentage of free riders will provide
something of value to the joint product - even if it is just
reporting a bug out of frustration, requiring a new feature, or
complaining about a function that could be better implemented. In
fact one wonders if it makes sense to use the term "free rider"
here. Regardless - the more "free riders" in this setting, the
better.
Mit Freien Grüßen
Stefan
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