Stephen Weber Exzerpte (OSP)
Ausschnitte aus: Stephen Weber: The political Economy of Open Source Software.
"Coca-Cola sells bottles of soda to consumers. Consumers drink the soda (or use it in any other way they like). Some consumers, out of morbid curiosity, may read the list of ingredients on the bottle. But that list of ingredients is generic. Coca-Cola has a proprietary 'formula' that it does not and will not release. The formula is the knowledge that makes it possible for Coke to combine sugar, water, and a few other readily available ingredients in particular proportions and produce something of great value. The bubbly stuff in your glass cannot be reverse-engineered into its constituent parts. You can buy it and you can drink it, but you can't understand it in a way that would empower you to reproduce it or improve upon it and distribute your improved cola drink to the rest of the world.
The economics of intellectual property rights provides a straightforward rationalization of why the CocaCola production 'regime' is organized in this way. The problem of intellectual property rights is about creating incentives for innovators. Patents, copyrights, licensing schemes and other means of 'protecting' knowledge assure that economic rents are created and that some proportion of those rents can be appropriated by the innovator. If that were not the case, a new and improved formula would immediately be available for free to anyone who chose to look at it. The person who invented that formula would have no claim on the knowledge or any part of the profits that might be made from selling drinks engineered from it. The system unravels, because that person no longer has any 'rational' incentive to innovate in the first place."
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"Collaborative Open Source software projects such as Linux and Apache have demonstrated, empirically, that a large, complex system of code can be built, maintained, developed, and extended in a nonproprietary setting where many developers work in a highly parallel, relatively unstructured way and without direct monetary compensation."
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�"Mark Smith and Peter Kollock have called Linux 'the impossible public good'. Linux is non-rival and non-excludable. Anyone can download a copy of Linux, along with its source code, for free, which means it is truly non-excludable. And because it is a digital product that can be replicated infinitely at no cost, it is truly non-rival. For well known reasons public goods tend to be underprovided in social settings.6 The situation with Linux ought to be at the worse end of the spectrum of public goods since it is subject additionally to 'collective provision' -- the production of this particular collective good depends on contributions from a large number of developers. Stark economic logic seems to undermine the microfoundations for Linux. Why would any particular person choose to contribute -- voluntarily -- to a public good that he or she can partake of unchecked as a free-rider? Since every individual can see that not only her own incentives but the incentives of other individuals are thus aligned, the system ought to unravel backwards so that no one makes substantial contributions.
Linux also is an 'impossibly' complex good. An operating system is a huge, highly complicated and intricate piece of code that controls the basic, critical functions of a computer. It is the platform or the foundation upon which applications -- word processors, spread sheets, databases and so on -- sit and run. To design a robust operating system and to implement that design in code is a gargantuan task. Testing, debugging, and maintenance are frequently even harder. Computer users will run an operating system in a nearly infinite number of settings, with functionally infinite permutations leading to infinite possible paths through the lines of code. Complex software is less like a book and more like a living organism that must continually adapt and adjust to the different environments and tasks that the world confronts it with.
There was a time when a single determined individual could write a reasonable operating system, but given the demands of computer applications at present that is no longer possible. The task needs to be divided, which immediately becomes a problem of coordination within a division of labor. The standard answer to this question has been to organize labor within a centralized, hierarchical structure -- i.e. a firm. An authority makes decisions about the division of labor and sets up systems that transfer needed information back and forth between the individuals or teams that are working on particular chunks of the project. The system manages complexity through formal organization and explicit decisional authority. While transaction costs (particularly of moving information and tacit knowledge around) reduce the efficiency of hierarchical coordination in a complex task like software development, the job gets done and an operating system -- imperfect and buggy, but functional -- is produced."
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"If altruism were the primary driving force behind open source software, no one would care very much about who was credited for particular contributions or who was able to license what code under what conditions. If Linux were simply the collective creation of 'like-minded' individuals who cooperate easily because they are bound together by semi-religious beliefs, there would be little disagreement in the process and little need for conflict resolution among developers. Beyond these overly simplistic and naïve tales lies a more subtle story of social and political economy, that has important implications for arguments about the logic of production in the 'new' economy.
A good explanatory story must be social because Linux is a collective good: it is a body of code built, maintained, developed, and extended in a non-proprietary setting where many developers work in a highly parallel way. It must be political because there exist both formal and informal structures and organizations, that function to allocate scarce resources and manage conflicts as well as promote certain practices and values. And self-evidently it must be economic, because at the core of the Linux process are individuals who engage in some kind of cost-benefit analyses and are maximizing or at least satisficing along some kind of utility function.
No single piece of this story -- even if 'correct' -- would by itself explain the outcome. Another way to put this point is simply to argue that Linux rests on a set of microfoundations -- the motivations of individual humans that choose freely to contribute -- as well as on macrofoundations -- social and political structures that channel these contributions to a collective end.
In addition to elucidating the logic of both, I will argue in this section that the two are autonomous from each other. The macro-logic of open source does not reduce to an aggregation of the motivations of the individuals who participate. More simply, this is not a self-organizing system. And the microfoundations that make up individual utility functions do not follow directly from a social and political structure that is somehow exogenous. I construct my explanation for the Linux process in three steps:
- What are the core microfoundations, the motivations that make up the guts of cost-benefit analyses and utility functions?
- What is the economic logic situating the collective good at play?
- What are the social and political structures that, in the context of individual motivations and the economic logic of software creation, drive the two essential dynamics that lead to successful open source development: maintaining coordination on the focal point, and managing complexity."
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