Tuesday, September 21, 2010
Week 3 Muddiest Point
While I understand the concept of open source software, I'm not sure I get the economics of it. Does the survival of the open source practice simply rely on a sort of 'programmer altruism?' Are there any models that attempt to explain this phenomenon, or is it a notion akin to 'social authorship'?
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As far as writing the actual operating system and fixing bugs, yes for the most part it does rely on programmers being willing to do the work for no monetary compensation. Though there are companies out there like Red Hat who provide a version of Linux as well as customer and tech support for their products.
ReplyDeleteI would imagine that there are many people out there who would take advantage of the free OS and software and not really contribute to it themselves. However, if there are enough people out there who do believe in a "programmer altruism" or likes do write code in their spare time and share what they come up with then the practice may survive. It seems to have so far but, like you, I would like to see some research or statistics on this.
ReplyDeleteI subscribe to your questions, and I add my own:
ReplyDeleteAre we going to reach a moment when too many products could create chaos - when too many software packages dedicated to the same purpose (accounting, design, etc.) are going to reduce the "portability" of the documents/objects created? Or, will the market make the selection, and we will eventually settle for a couple of choises for a given area (like Pepsi - Coca Cola, Hanes - Calvin Klein, Mac - PC, Home Depot - Lowe's)?