Re: economic efficiency of free software

On Tuesday, February 17, 2004, at 11:31 AM, 
[email protected] wrote:

> On Mon, Feb 16, 2004 at 05:42:36PM -0500, Russell Nelson 
> ([email protected]) wrote:
>> But ... Jean, software *is* scarce, and I am being denied software
>> that I desire by the market.
>>        I can think of a half-dozen programs that I'd like to have,
>> which are scarce because they don't exist.
>
I think that it MAY not be scarce (notice I am not making some 
assertion here only an argument). So much software is generated in 
house. The software you want may indeed exist. However, either the cost 
of sharing is too high, the rewards of sharing are too low or the cost 
of creating a closed product is too high.  Alternatively, the cost of 
sharing is not too low but there is a terrible need for a standard 
mechanism to enable sharing between firms rather than between 
individuals.

Of course once that happens risk quite an ugly open source economy 
whereby those that are "in" get all the code and those that are "out" 
are second class users without the ability to build businesses on the 
code (e.g., service).  The non-discrimination is critical here. But 
there are so many licenses it could happen in an open code environment 
where shared code takes the place of patent pools in the process of 
preventing new entrants. If I were IBM I might be thinking along those 
lines once Linux beats back MS. To prevent others from  taking 
commoditization up the value chain could I  use an open code pool to 
try to lock off some section as mine alone and thus quite lucrative? I 
am not a business person but I would love to hear some thoughts on this.

Thanks,
Jean