[h2o-discuss] Eric Raymond: Another interesting essay...

["Robert S. Thau" <rst@ai.mit.edu>]

Eric Raymond has put forward yet another of his white papers about the
economic and social dynamics of open source development; as with the
others, it has a slightly daffy title, which in this case is "The
Magic Cauldron" (from a strained allusion to a round iron cornucopia
from Welsh myth).  The essay is at

  http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/writings/magic-cauldron/magic-cauldron.html

and there is, as you might expect, a lively discussion on Slashdot:

  http://slashdot.org/articles/99/06/24/1659256.shtml

This paper concentrates on the question which seems to befuddle most
observers regarding open sourcing, namely, what economic rationale can
there be for writing potentially valuable code and then giving it away?
The essay includes a bunch of case studies (Apache, Cisco's print
services code, the Doom game engine, etc.).

Raymond's argument, reduced to its essentials, is as follows.  Most
software is produced by companies for internal use, not for sale.
(See the essay for justification).  The people and companies producing
such bespoke software have a shared economic interest in there being a
common, freely available pool of code which they can customize;
contributing new software of general use to the pool costs them
nothing (since they weren't going to sell the stuff anyway, having no
hope of recouping support costs), and has the benefit of keeping the
pool a going phenomenon.

One implication of this argument is that open-sourcing is not
economically rational in all circumstances --- if you really are
selling secret bits that no one else owns, you have a rational
interest in keeping them secret.  The Doom engine is a particularly
interesting test case; it was mind-blowingly new technology when first
released, and got open-sourced two years later (Raymond argues) when
support costs started piling up, while the technology itself became
old hat.

There are a lot of other interesting points made along the way,
including comments on the business models of a lot of "open source
companies" --- including some which have IPOs looming.  Also, there's
an interesting argument on why software support in the industry is so
generally shoddy; briefly, good support is really expensive (most of
the cost of a software project is in maintenance), but since most
software companies get their revenues mainly from purchases rather
than after-sales support, they have little financial incentive to do
it well.

Recommended.

(And having said that, maybe I'll get around sometime to writing down
what I think is wrong with his last published essay, "Homesteading the
Noosphere"... but I could summarize by saying that I think that a lot
of the behavior he "explains" with his gift-culture arguments in HtN
really results from the straight money incentives he describes in tMC,
and that his explanations for, e.g., reluctance to "fork" project code
in HtN miss the mark as a result).

If you've got any response to these points, BTW, please forward to the
list; it's called "h2o-discuss", so we might as well try to get a
discussion going.

rst