Re: Markets (was Re: Hayek was right. Twice.)
On Thu, 4 Jul 2002, Ian Grigg wrote: >See also the work of Eric Hughes, John Walker, the AMIX, Robin Hanson >and others. Believe me, they're all known to me and properly appreciated. >Well, the problem is that you are asking too much of one OS. If you >want stability, use FreeBSD (we do). If you want security, check out >OpenBSD. If you want portability, try NetBSD. But that's precisely my point. If you want to serve an interest which is widely spread, with little willingness to pay on behalf of each of a couple of million beneficiaries, you will have a public goods problem. One way to arrive at such a problem is to demand everything of a single system. But at the same time there are a number of monolithic problems which achieve the same by themselves. That's what I was talking about. >Mind you, it is getting a whole lot better! [...] We've had a lot of >success with open source. Of course. We might argue that has to do with the dependency of a gift economy on income effects feedback which gives a good deal of nice outcomes when people are nevertheless getting richer. Somewhat pointedly the question becomes, could Open Source keep up the rise in income by itself? Is it a productive part of the entire economy or a parasite on existing forms of welfare creation? >We had to write Cryptix, that was a business requirement as we needed >crypto in Java (and Perl) and nobody had done it before. But, once done, >I didn't want to pay to keep it going. So we open sourced it. We got >the support and the updates for free, mostly, thereafter. Again, my point in a nutshell. When a problem is grave enough to warrant an investment on behalf of a single developer, that single developer *will* develop the software and, at the very least in the absence of copyrights, face a very low price on open sourcing the code. But there's still the kind of software which gives some tens of millions of people a per capita benefit of, say, $1 a year while requiring a clear, centralized development effort with considerable cost. Cryptix hardly lies in that category, even while extremely useful to a number of people. >But, when it comes down to it, their model failed, because they were >seduced into the apparent gold mine of PKI... Aye. PKI is a tarpit. You get into it, but only rarely do you find someone who cashed out on it. In this case it isn't the market that fails, though... >There are other benefits to the open source model: most of the people >who've volunteered have boosted their CVs and picked up good work >because of it. Nobody's putting open source down, here. Far from it. My point was an economic one, having little to do with those forms of software development which obviously work. It wasn't even meant to advocate a particular approach to financing the production of goods infected by the problem. Instead it was a simple reminder of the limitations of the commonly accepted image of free market, purely bilateral trade attaining efficiency in a general sense, without any regard for transaction cost analysis. Sampo Syreeni, aka decoy - mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED], tel:+358-50-5756111 student/math+cs/helsinki university, http://www.iki.fi/~decoy/front openpgp: 050985C2/025E D175 ABE5 027C 9494 EEB0 E090 8BA9 0509 85C2
Re: Markets (was Re: Hayek was right. Twice.)
On Wed, 3 Jul 2002 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: >Again, If you offered the average guy the deal "Would you like on demand >access to all movies and television shows ever made, even if it meant >fewer and lower budget movie releases in future?", I think most people >would go for on demand access to everything. That might well be. But being that you're tapping into something largely produced under existing copyright law, I fail to see why this is an argument against continuing the practice of copyright in some form. Sampo Syreeni, aka decoy - mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED], tel:+358-50-5756111 student/math+cs/helsinki university, http://www.iki.fi/~decoy/front openpgp: 050985C2/025E D175 ABE5 027C 9494 EEB0 E090 8BA9 0509 85C2
Re: Markets (was Re: Hayek was right. Twice.)
On Wed, 3 Jul 2002, Gabriel Rocha wrote: >Property does not always consist of physical goods. Of course not. Am I not making this precise point? >To use some of your examples, the polical process involves votes, which >are the property of the person casting the ballots, likewise, at least >in this country, ballots are cast voluntarily. However, that sort of property isn't anywhere near the kind one would expect of a free market commodity -- it isn't severable. You can't legally sell or buy votes. >Time and effort are both considered "property" to be used as deemed fit >by the person possessing, in this case, the skills to use them on an >Open Source What can I say, barter in time and effort is probably the best sign of a gift economy in action. >I can't think many things more modular than movies, except perhaps >theatre, but movies have even more latitude. Actors can't be switched? >Sets can't be constructed out of "nothing" on a computer screen? Of course they can. However, not one of those parts is useful in itself. You don't sell a set without the actors, or vice versa. That's the problem. With Linux, each individual utility is useful in itself. If someone needs the functionality, one just codes it and releases. In many cases that's a few days work, and a good part of the benefit goes to the coder himself. Consider then something like a novel. It's not very useful if you tear out the last 50 or so pages, is it? Whoever is making and paying for the effort (perhaps with his time, as is the case with volunteer projects) has to be willing to invest enough to finish the work before it acquires real value. That value is then thinly spread over a considerable number of readers many of whom have to be willing to pay for the effort if the novel is to come to being in the first place. When I talk about modularity, I talk about it in the economic sense of divisibility, not the technical one of being able to create a single act of a play, a movie set, a Java class or an actor's performance in isolation. The trouble with public goods comes around when no single person is willing to pay for the whole project, but a million or so in toto would be, barring transaction costs from things like freeriding. If you grok it, I can't help you. >Movies can't be made with virtually no budget? Hollywood blockbusters? Hardly. That was what I was talking about from the start. Besides, I do know a couple of Finnish low budget directors. Only rarely do I find the tenacity to actually delve into their work. Money isn't everything in movies, either, but it's still a lot. >As someone who actually helps people with unix problems and who is a >unix user, I want to let you know that you fall into the "stupid user" >category if you can't get a linux distro to install on your computer. First, there is nothing wrong with being a "stupid user". Stupid users are who software is mostly for, aren't they. Second, it's not the whole install, it's details like getting X to work with a nonstandard display memory config. I'm not exactly unknowledgeable about software, but I'm no kernel hacker either. Do you think most people should be? >Throw in the fact that "usefulness" is an entirely relative term, and >you have a really poor argument. Throw in the fact that this precise relativity is what the whole of economics revolves around, and the table turns quite nicely. >Often the economic argument made is that people do what is in their best >interest. The problem that arises is when people who aren't very bright >(hint, hint) assume that that means financial reward of some kind. Did I somehow limit the question to money? If so, that's certainly not all that I meant. The economics of public goods apply perfectly well to nonfinancial compensation. In fact, copyrights do not have anything to do with money, per se, only with the establishment of a property right in abstract things. If people behave the way you seem to think they do, we will slide into a nonfinancial information economy even in the presence of copyright; Coase was brought into this, and it's still relevant. If you start from the normal assumptions relating to laissez-faire economics, you'll also assume transaction costs to be negligible and a stable, unique equilibrium to exist, in which case any initial allocation of property rights will lead to the precise same outcome. >Well, libertarians usually, though not always, go along with free >markets, which is not what you're advocating. Actually I'm not advocating a whole lot, here. Right now I'm mostly making a point about public goods and Coase's theorem, and their connection to the institution of intellectual property rights. As I said, I'm an IP abolitionist and free-marketeer myself. >Usually, any economic theory that assumes that anything could have no >value to anyone is wrong. But if you read what I've posted so far a bit more carefully, you'll see that that is not at all what I've assumed. >Bilateral trade is the
Re: Markets (was Re: Hayek was right. Twice.)
On Thu, 4 Jul 2002, Sampo Syreeni wrote: > But try constructing an Independence Day without Will Smith. Or the > special effects. Or the soundtrack. Or the distribution chain. Try > guaranteeing that it arrives on schedule without making a loss. Luckily movie industry will not be hit by the free distribution as bad as music industry. This is because a major portion of their money comes from people going to cinema to see the movies. They don't do that because they don't have a copy at home, but because they wish to see it in a big screen with awsome sound effects. And that is something we just don't have yet in every house - and something that will be a big investment for a long time. And digitilizing will reduce movie makers costs for transferring the movies to the theaters as well, giving them another edge there. That allows one to go for a global premiers and gather enough payers in the first week to pay for the movie. Now music industry has concentrated in bringing music to peoples homes, and they will be in trouble when people start getting all their music from internet for free. There are nice ways of getting around this as well, as some have pointed around - market will provide... -- Mikko"One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them, One Ring to bring them all And in the Darkness bind them."
Re: Markets (was Re: Hayek was right. Twice.)
-- James A. Donald: > > Again, If you offered the average guy the deal "Would you like > > on demand access to all movies and television shows ever made, > > even if it meant fewer and lower budget movie releases in > > future?", I think most people would go for on demand access to > > everything. On 4 Jul 2002 at 10:40, Sampo Syreeni wrote: > That might well be. But being that you're tapping into something > largely produced under existing copyright law, I fail to see why > this is an argument against continuing the practice of copyright > in some form. A moment ago you were arguing maximum utility (your public good argument) Now you concede utility, and argue rights, but copyright, unlike real property, is merely a conventional right, created by the will and power of the state, not a natural right. If that convention ceases to be convenient and useful, ceases to have utility, we should not continue it. And if you are going to argue from long established conventional rights, copyright has been extended by twenty years every twenty years, so it is not a long established conventional right. Returning to your public good argument. As more and more stuff piles up, the production of new stuff becomes a less and less valuable public good. At the same time, as with any "public good", congress (being in the pocket of state created interest groups) creates greater and greater incentives to produce more and more of this public good. If an anarchic free market underproduces public goods, government subject to interest groups overproduces public goods, a problem that is particularly serious with such dubious public goods as "defense", cultural or racial purity, and so on and so forth. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG AuUb5hhEidar6RcqijVgtwYwp/KmvStrc0T7DzHr 2RvexEhEvdWrbHJCBYyEdaMKK39UOJQJRBt9gjbKk
Re: Markets (was Re: Hayek was right. Twice.)
On Thu, Jul 04, at 01:26AM, Sampo Syreeni wrote: | >I can't see a market defined as anything else than "private property and | >voluntary exchange". | | Then you really must be blind. Markets not based on private property or | volition abound. The political process is one of them. Social control is | another. Gift economies, like Open Source, are a third. One might claim | most markets are based on something other than the above mentioned | combination. Property does not always consist of physical goods. Case in point would be the encrypted bits. To use some of your examples, the polical process involves votes, which are the property of the person casting the ballots, likewise, at least in this country, ballots are cast voluntarily. "Gift economics." Who coined that phrase? Don't take credit for it, it is a stupid term. Time and effort are both considered "property" to be used as deemed fit by the person possessing, in this case, the skills to use them on an Open Source (the volunteer kind, since you can't seem to grasp that there are Open Source projects that make money.) | It does indeed. But unlike movies, Linux is a modular project. The kernel | would exist in the absence of the GNU toolset, and vice versa. X would | exist in the absence of UNIX, too. Each of the common desktop applications | could very well have been coded on top of something else than Linux. You're too ignorant to be replied to, I wish I hadn't wasted the time, but I digress. I can't think many things more modular than movies, except perhaps theatre, but movies have even more latitude. Actors can't be switched? Sets can't be constructed out of "nothing" on a computer screen? Movies can't be made with virtually no budget? Get a clue. | Why is it that there's no Buzz for Linux? No decent installer? (Not one of | them survives my hardware...) No workable Unicode support? A stable 64-bit | filesystem? Why is nobody willing to guarantee kernel stability, even when | paid big bucks? 'Cause the project is a gift, and only caters to a single | kind of need: something an individual developer/company really needs and | can afford to develop for him/itself, then losing little by exposing the | code to others. Usefulness thinly spread over a considerable user | community is completely forgotten. As someone who actually helps people with unix problems and who is a unix user, I want to let you know that you fall into the "stupid user" category if you can't get a linux distro to install on your computer. Linux is a new breed of project, if you want it and it really matters to you, the argument goes that you would either do it, (if you're capable, but you clearly aren't) or you pay someone else to do it. (this falls into the heading of "put your money where your mouth is.") Throw in the fact that "usefulness" is an entirely relative term, and you have a really poor argument. | Well, what stupid people they are. I wouldn't go anywhere as far as | gettimg myself killed for the common good. Even paying for software I can | just copy is a stretch. What makes you think most people care enough to Do | the Right Thing? What makes you think relying on Doing the Right Thing is | a good idea? I mean, it's been tried before, and the consequences aren't | worth a second look. Well, here you show your ignorance of economics again. ( on this one point, don't feel too bad, though you are ignorant, you're in a league that is very well populated ) First off, not everyone is motivated by financial gain. "profit" is not necessarily a financial thing, when someone stops and helps you out when you have a flat, the odds are that they are not expecting you to pay them for their help. When someone helps you install linux on your computer, they aren't likely to expect financial remuneration, specially if you go to one of the great many Linux User Groups throughout this country and many others. Often the economic argument made is that people do what is in their best interest. The problem that arises is when people who aren't very bright (hint, hint) assume that that means financial reward of some kind. People are complex creatures, to presume that financial gain is the only motivation for people is a tad naive. | Indeed they are. So are ones assuming that anything not profitable to a | single person couldn't be to a larger number of individuals. Like most | things, private property rights and economic theory based solely on | bilateral trade are a matter of continuous dispute. It's not that I don't | consider them useful (I do; nowadays you could call me, too, a | libertarian), but taking them as granted isn't the way to go, either. Well, libertarians usually, though not always, go along with free markets, which is not what you're advocating. Usually, any economic theory that assumes that anything could have no value to anyone is wrong. Basic relativity (in the subjective sense) states otherwise. Bilateral trade is the only kind of exchange in a
Re: Markets (was Re: Hayek was right. Twice.)
On Wed, 3 Jul 2002, Marcel Popescu wrote: >I can't see a market defined as anything else than "private property and >voluntary exchange". Then you really must be blind. Markets not based on private property or volition abound. The political process is one of them. Social control is another. Gift economies, like Open Source, are a third. One might claim most markets are based on something other than the above mentioned combination. >Irrelevant. Does Linux scale to your intended target any better? It does indeed. But unlike movies, Linux is a modular project. The kernel would exist in the absence of the GNU toolset, and vice versa. X would exist in the absence of UNIX, too. Each of the common desktop applications could very well have been coded on top of something else than Linux. But try constructing an Independence Day without Will Smith. Or the special effects. Or the soundtrack. Or the distribution chain. Try guaranteeing that it arrives on schedule without making a loss. I think you will not be able to accomplish that with a volunteer effort. Try doing that tens of thousands of times a year (that's for all of what is currently covered by IP) and you're bound to fail. Unlike with Linux, the individual parts of most larger projects involving IP are of no use without the surrounding whole. Unlike Linux, many IP products aren't modular, reusable or decomposable, and so they can only exist if you can find a single source of financing for the whole project. In the case of modular projects, you can rely on overlapping interests to fill in the voids, but most projects aren't like that. Especially if all that the creator gets is the ever-diminishing value of a single copy. Why is it that there's no Buzz for Linux? No decent installer? (Not one of them survives my hardware...) No workable Unicode support? A stable 64-bit filesystem? Why is nobody willing to guarantee kernel stability, even when paid big bucks? 'Cause the project is a gift, and only caters to a single kind of need: something an individual developer/company really needs and can afford to develop for him/itself, then losing little by exposing the code to others. Usefulness thinly spread over a considerable user community is completely forgotten. >People do even "grand" things without expecting to be paid (or even >worse, expecting to die from it), because they want to. Well, what stupid people they are. I wouldn't go anywhere as far as gettimg myself killed for the common good. Even paying for software I can just copy is a stretch. What makes you think most people care enough to Do the Right Thing? What makes you think relying on Doing the Right Thing is a good idea? I mean, it's been tried before, and the consequences aren't worth a second look. >If you want them to produce more, feel free to pay them. Arguments "I >don't like that they only produce this much, so YOU should pay them" are >at least inane. Indeed they are. So are ones assuming that anything not profitable to a single person couldn't be to a larger number of individuals. Like most things, private property rights and economic theory based solely on bilateral trade are a matter of continuous dispute. It's not that I don't consider them useful (I do; nowadays you could call me, too, a libertarian), but taking them as granted isn't the way to go, either. Sampo Syreeni, aka decoy - mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED], tel:+358-50-5756111 student/math+cs/helsinki university, http://www.iki.fi/~decoy/front openpgp: 050985C2/025E D175 ABE5 027C 9494 EEB0 E090 8BA9 0509 85C2
Re: Markets (was Re: Hayek was right. Twice.)
-- On 4 Jul 2002 at 1:26, Sampo Syreeni wrote: > But try constructing an Independence Day without Will Smith. Or > the special effects. Or the soundtrack. Or the distribution > chain. Try guaranteeing that it arrives on schedule without > making a loss. I think you will not be able to accomplish that > with a volunteer effort. Try doing that tens of thousands of > times a year (that's for all of what is currently covered by IP) > and you're bound to fail. Unlike with Linux, the individual > parts of most larger projects involving IP are of no use without > the surrounding whole. Unlike Linux, many IP products aren't > modular, reusable or decomposable, and so they can only exist if > you can find a single source of financing for the whole project. > In the case of modular projects, you can rely on overlapping > interests to fill in the voids, but most projects aren't like > that. Especially if all that the creator gets is the > ever-diminishing value of a single copy. Increasingly the locations of big blockbuster movies exist inside a computer, so a substantial reduction in finance would reduce, rather than end the genre. Again, If you offered the average guy the deal "Would you like on demand access to all movies and television shows ever made, even if it meant fewer and lower budget movie releases in future?", I think most people would go for on demand access to everything. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG gWZBRbSRNDjGq8+KjaoqOPxgT5lZ2F9LX2ocm0bc 2zgr4eTiKCozbQHScUv6yEqK35dT0WvEzOV/Rd8Fp
