On Thu, Apr 29, 2010 at 12:53:15PM -0600, Duncan Patton a Campbell wrote: > Howdy List? > > This may, at first blush, seem to be more spam unrelated > to the work of Open BSD. But it seems to me over the > years one of the major criticisms of the Free/Open software > movement has come from classical economics/ecology in the
Really? I've never seen one that wasn't a press release from Microsoft; please to cite your sources. > form of Garrett Hardin's Tragedy of the Commons. If we > are to believe Hardin's thesis then building something > like a free operating system (or "free" ideas in general) > is the essense of pointless vanity. There is no parallel. The tragedy of the commons happens because of the overuse of a limited resource; the open source software world more closely resembles (in no small part because it grew out of) academia; if the tragedy of the commons were true for open source software, it would be true for universities as well, and humanity would have succumbed to gibbering idiocy long ago as human intellect was mined to the point of exhaustion. Now, since you have a magical thinking box that you're using to communicate with a large number of people automagically over the intertruck (itself something that would've been subject to the aforementioned process), the assertion is rather rediculous on its face, and ignores the fundamental difference between the two areas: human knowledge is entirely additive, whereas physical resources are consumed in some manner. You take an idea, and it's still there for someone else; you take a fish, and you've fucked somebody else out of their dinner. It's a false analogy, and I need something better *cough*girlfriend*cough* to do with my evenings. > > But here: > > http://www.physorg.com/news191765285.html > > we have a games model showing that resources managed by > a communicant group are not necessarily exploited to > extinction. Interestingly the ability to impose > sanctions in the form of fines for overexploitation > did not appear to enhance resource productivity, > only the ability to make ongoing agreements about > constructive action appear to have mattered. > > If you think this is "off topic" and irrelevant to > misc at openbsd org please accept my apologies and > press delete now ;-) > > Dhu
