Money Ruins Everything, but we have to talk about it anyway

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In Money Ruins Everything (blog post, complete article), John Quiggin and Dan Hunter look out at the new forms of creative expression introduced by the Internet (blogs, wikis, citizen journalism, and to some extent open-source software) and conclude that today’s most important innovations are driven by the collaboration of amateurs with non-economic motives. They give this development progressive political overtones by labelling it "the ‘amateur collaborative content’ movement" [p216] and explicitly identify it as a non-commercial alternative to the market. I don’t know Dan Hunter’s other writings but Quiggin, at least, is a social democrat whose views I usually agree with and whose writings I read often and respect, so I don’t disagree lightly with him. But the picture they paint is a distorted one so I have to.

[Note to regular readers: you may want to move right along – much of what’s here is stuff I’ve written earlier in other contexts. It’s just more of the same, but it needs to be said.]

There are three major things wrong with the paper.

  • A portion of the activity they describe as non-commercial is in fact commercial.
  • They exaggerate … Continue reading

    • Paying for Linux

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    Last week on ‘Linux Goes Corporate’: After Nick Carr mentioned my post on the Linux Foundation report and on Linux as corporate joint venture, Timothy Lee and Ed Cone/Clay Shirky responded and then Doc Searls put in his two cents worth. The main point of the responses is that the shift from hobbyists to professionals is not important. For example:

    "the open source model is about organization, not who signs your paycheck" (Lee).

    "the idea that the minute you pay people to do something, you have the right to manage them and the right to completely take over that work for the benefit of the company — that’s not true" (Shirky).

    "in all the conversations I’ve had over the years with kernel
    developers, none has ever copped to obeying commands from corporate
    overlords to bias kernel development in favor of the company’s own
    commercial ambitions. In fact, I’ve only heard stories to the contrary" (Searls).

    The professionalization of Linux matters because it marks a change. Open source now is not the same as ten years ago when The Cathedral and the Bazaar was written.

    Despite the historical revisionism … Continue reading

    Linux Grows Up and Gets a Job

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    Linux started as a hobby project. But it is now 17 years old and it has grown up, and a recent report by the Linux Foundation, which extends a series of investigations by Jonathan Corbett, shows that it is no longer a hobby, it is out in the working world.

    The report looks at the Linux kernel, and so does ignores all those other pieces of the operating system (drivers, applications, desktop interfaces and so on). Still, the kernel is the heart of the OS and "one of the largest individual components on almost any Linux system. It also features one of the fastest-moving development processes and involves more developers than any other open source project." So this report, which "looks at how that process works, focusing on nearly three years of kernel history as represented by the 2.6.11 through 2.6.24 releases." is a valuable window on what may happen to successful open source projects as they mature.

    One of the highlights: "over 70% of all kernel development is demonstrably done by developers who are being paid for their work". … Continue reading