Economy of Free Software (was: Re: [ox-en] Slides for Lancaster)
- From: Stefan Merten <smerten oekonux.de>
- Date: Wed, 03 Oct 2007 18:29:02 +0200
Hi Gregers!
Last week (8 days ago) Gregers Petersen wrote:
in order to promote an economy of free software.
And how do you then see this economy which should be promoted - what
kind of economy is it, if it is one?
Well, that probably depends largely on your definition of economy.
AFAIK the textbook definition of economy is coping with scarcity -
which IMHO is a pretty stupid definition. Anyway in this sense Free
Software can not build a economy because there is no scarcity - at
least not for the published products. (I remember Steven Weber
dicussed the question where the scarcity in Free Software is but I
can't remember his answer.)
Wikipedia has a more useful definition:
An economy is the system of human activities related to the
production, distribution, exchange, and consumption of goods and
services of a country or other area.
According to this Free Software clearly *is* already an economy.
Grüße
Stefan
_________________________________
Web-Site: http://www.oekonux.org/
Organization: http://www.oekonux.de/projekt/
Contact: projekt oekonux.de