On Tue, Oct 28, 2003 at 01:25:19PM -0600, Lars E. Olson wrote: > I'm sure everyone recognizes this as the Freeloader Effect. Alice > doesn't care about the economy as a whole as much as she cares about her > own net worth. What's to stop that from happening?
Point well taken. This is the ``incentive'' problem that I mentioned
briefly in my essay.
In this case, programmers who need to balance their own checkbooks
will write bits and pieces of GNUCash, collaborating over the Internet
and making their code freely available to all the other programmers
who need to balance their checkbook. Hundreds of programmers chipping
in an hour or two a week (the bazaar software development model) can
produce amazing results.
Others can sell books and teach classes on using GNUCash, or they can
write special extensions for certain business entities. If a piece of
software can save a company $10,000 over the next year, they will pay
$5,000 to have it written now and released as Open Source code rather
than sit around and wait for some other business with their same needs
to do the same. If they have to wait for three years for someone else
to do it, they will lose $25,000, so it makes sense for them to just
pay a programmer now to do the work. It's a simple matter of return
on investment.
Think of ``Alice'' not as one single person, but as a representation
of a group of people who make coordinated economic decisions. Lots of
business models for providing income to Free Software developers have
been proposed; it is currently unclear which is going to be the best.
Personally, I happen to prefer IBM's way of going about it at the
moment. ;-)
Mike
.___________________________________________________________________.
Michael A. Halcrow <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Security Software Engineer, IBM Linux Technology Center
GnuPG Fingerprint: 05B5 08A8 713A 64C1 D35D 2371 2D3C FDDA 3EB6 601D
Tis man's perdition to be safe, when for the truth he ought to die.
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