On Tue, 2003-10-28 at 12:25, 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?
I'm not going to get into Mike's analogy. I will point out, however, that free loading hasn't turned out to be as big a deal as some people worry for one simple reason: software that needs to get written will get written. Sure, Alice can wait for Bob to pay for everything. But what if it she needs it in 3 month and the cost of not having it is greater than the cost of having it? With open development, Alice and Bob can discover one another and decide it is mutually beneficial to cooperate. (If I let you stand on my shoulders and grab two coconuts, we both have one more coconut than before when neither of us could reach it. Sure, it cost me a coconut to get your help, but I wouldn't have been able to do it alone.) I for one am happy to see less useless software being written. -- Stuart Jansen <[EMAIL PROTECTED], AIM:StuartMJansen> Programming in Java feels like C without the sense of accomplishment.
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