[ox-en] Re: List of questions

Hi CTVN and all!

3 weeks (23 days) ago CTVN wrote:
> thats really an interesting posting and one good basis to work on. thx for  
> that.

:-)

>> Relationship to money
>> ---------------------
>> 
>> How can the relationship between peer production and the still
>> dominant system of money can be understood? What are ways of
>> coexistence not damaging peer production? What are models to pour
>> money into peer production projects without damaging them? What are
>> goals of such pouring?
[...]
> mozilla is very successful (in terms of market share) and they had last
> year a budget of more than 70 million (largely coming from google).
                                         ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

To me this is another example of how results of peer production are
useful for capitalists. Am I wrong when I think that Google uses
Mozilla to fight Microsoft? So the answer to the last question above
would be: The goal is to strengthen the own position on the market.
IBM did this before and seemingly peer production was not damaged by
this.

> there
> are lots of add ons available - free and commercial.

Indeed literally lots! It is a bit similar to the Java world where you
have a ecosystem with lots and lots of Free Software but also
proprietary software. However, I don't know a single major proprietary
software you really need in average cases...

> so to me it seems its
> not impossible to combine extrinsic with intrinsic motivation and
> achieving quite some quality output that challenges existing commercial
> projects also in terms of market share.

There is some sort of co-existence. What I'm interested in is to
understand this co-existence better, to be able to describe it and to
formulate conditions telling what works and what not.

>> More Selbstentfaltung
>> ---------------------
>> 
>> Some tasks which are societal useful are hard to conceptualize as
>> Selbstentfaltung - see `"How is the toilet cleaned?"`_ for an
>> instance. What means do exist to make them Selbstentfaltung?
> 
> i would also make a distinction/grading according to the levels of
> interest of the tasks. writing code certainly is the most interesting -
> but even in open source projects there are lots of things (writing
> documentation, bug fixing, beta testing) that, im sure, are only done
> because they are necessary and not because they are really wanted
> "natively" by the developer/user.

Well, having developed software for quite a long time now I see it
different - though this might also be a matter of age ;-) . Today I
enjoy tasks like leading projects or architecting large software
systems. There were times, however, when I was not interested in this.
I love to write documentation because often when you write
documentation you fully understand what you are doing. And tests are
paramount of course. Automated tests like unit tests give you the good
feeling that your software is still correct - even after a large
refactoring.

Automated tests bring me to another point, however. In software it is
often easy to bring more automation in freeing humans from the boring
tasks. In fact I think a good software developer needs to be creative,
curious and lazy. This way he will automate boring stuff away and at
the same time raises productivity and opens the door for more
Selbstentfaltung.

I really think that if you set this dynamic of automation free in the
rest of the world you will come to similar results.

> depends on how you define
> "selbstentfaltung".

Yes. For me StefanMz is the one who can define this best :-) .

> personally, i dont call something "selbstentfaltung"
> when you do tasks because you have to as the project needs it. my
> take is that even in open source projects, there is quite some amount of
> tasks that are only done because they are needed. and in the real, well
> organised world there are trillions of such tasks outthere where cleaning
> the toilet is just the top of the ice berg.

But would you agree that they are there because there are structural
means (aka money) to force people to do them?


						Grüße

						Stefan
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