Altruistic individuals, selfish firms? (First Monday) [LWN.net]

First Monday takes a look at the structure of motivation in open source software. "A growing body of economic literature is addressing the issue of incentives for individuals who take part in the Open Source Software (OSS) movement, while empirical analyses focus on individual developers but neglect firms that do business with it. During 2002, we conducted a large-scale survey on 146 Italian firms supplying OSS in Italy and this paper compares our data on firms' motivations with data emerging from surveys made on individual programmers. Our objective is to analyse the role played by different classes of motivations (social, economic and technological) in determining the involvement of different groups of agents in Open Source activities." (Thanks to David A. Wheeler)

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Study's take on "innovation vs. imitation"

Posted Jan 13, 2004 14:12 UTC (Tue) by Duncan (guest, #6647) [Link]

Given the all to frequently seen MS distortion of the term "inovation", and
the FUD they sling at open source accusing them of "imitation, not
innovation", the following quote from the study article deserves attention:

<quote>
The highest-ranking incentive is for using Open Source software seems to be
promoting innovation by and in small enterprises. [This motivation] has also
the highest percentage of high scores (4 or 5: 71.9 percent) and the lowest
percentage of low scores (1 or 2: 12.2 percent) . This is a remarkable finding
because it does not corroborate with the hypothesis that Open Source is about
imitation, not innovation.
</quote>

A footnote also mentioned that this question received the lowest number of
"3" or "neutral" responses, indicating that the respondents (again, here mainly
open source service firms, Italian) had a clearer view of how this related to
their overall view and strategy, than with the other questions.

The responses were on the standardized 5-point scale, strongly disagree (1),
disagree (2), neutral (3), agree (4), strongly agree (5). Basically, then, this
question/motivation was the strongest skewed toward strongly agree of any of
them, putting double-underline emphasis on the contrast between what MS
says, and what these companies give as their strongest reason for going open
source.

I just found that little tidbit to interesting to pass up commenting on. =:^)

Duncan

Early literature

Posted Jan 13, 2004 16:38 UTC (Tue) by ncm (subscriber, #165) [Link]

Here is a related, early. condensed summary of economic motivations for Free Software participation,

http://linuxtoday.com/news_story.php3?ltsn=1999-08-19-004-10-NW

quoted below:

Why do people spend time and money improving software for others, free? The question has two remarkably simple answers.

Suppose you are using some Free Software in your business. You find a bug or discover you need a new feature, so you take care of it (or hire it done) yourself. Then you have what you need, and you don't really have to do anything else.

However, a new version of the program will soon be released. You must decide whether you want to use the new version, and if so you must integrate your changes into it. This happens each time a new version comes out. If you were to send in your changes and get them integrated into the mainline code, each new version would already have your changes.

As long as you keep your changes private, nobody else is using them. Once your changes get integrated into the mainline code, other people start using them, and improving them. As a result, each new release of the program not only has your changes integrated, it may have improvements on your changes.

Thus, publishing your changes (1) cuts your own workload and (2) attracts free assistance from others with similar needs.

The process doesn't depend on altruism or a sense of community, although many people are also motivated that way. It doesn't depend on people working to establish a reputation, although many are. It doesn't depend on proprietary alternatives being intolerably restricted, expensive, or buggy, although they often are.

A third answer

Posted Jan 13, 2004 17:42 UTC (Tue) by southey (subscriber, #9466) [Link]

To run the application on non-author supported OS or hardware. Do you really want a slow generic binary if you have a Pentium IV, Athlon or another species? Related that this is so you, as an author, don't have to worry about maintaining binaries of multiple OS's and CPU's.

Altruistic individuals, selfish firms? (First Monday)

Posted Jan 13, 2004 22:37 UTC (Tue) by iabervon (subscriber, #722) [Link]

With respect to the innovation versus imitation question, I suspect that
the most common desire is for something "just like Windows, except...".
People have ideas for small changes that would make their lives easier,
and companies have small ideas that would make them more profitable. In
all ways other than the particular innovative one, they are satisfied
with and accustomed to proprietary solutions. Therefore, a lot of effort
is expended imitating proprietary software, and then a liitle effort is
spent on innovation. However, Free Software does make innovation possible
and available to small businesses and individuals, since it then allows
small amounts of effort to have the desired effects. This fits with the
fundament Free Software rationale, that everyone wants slightly different
things from their software, so users benefit greatly from the ability to
make small arbitrary modifications.

More on innovation vs. imitation

Posted Jan 14, 2004 12:29 UTC (Wed) by Duncan (guest, #6647) [Link]

> I suspect that the most common desire is for something
> "just like Windows, except...". [] In all ways other than the
> particular innovative one, they are satisfied with and
> accustomed to proprietary solutions. Therefore, a lot of
> effort is expended imitating proprietary software, and then
> a liitle effort is spent on innovation.

That has indeed been historically true, but Linux and Linux apps are now
beginnining to have to deal with being "caught up", and are asking the
question "What do we do now?"

Proprietary-ware advocates predict that as that happens, Linux developers
will begin to look a bit like the proverbial dog that finally catches the car he
was chasing -- just a bit foolish, as they caught it, but again, "What now?"
They insist that FLOSS cannot be truly innovative, and that as that point is
reached where there isn't as much imitation to do, FLOSS growth will slow
and then stagnate.

Of course, FLOSS developers and the community in general likes to think
that the fact that most of what we've done to date appears to be imitation is
just been because we had so far to go to catch up, that naturally it
was both easiest to go after imitation first, and logical that such would be the
case, as after all, the simplest and first occuring solutions and
implementations will be territory already covered by previous designs, so
even if it's original at that stage, it can LOOK like imitation. We believe that
now that we are "getting there", we will (and we believe we have started)
branch out into innovation, "previously unexplored territory", as it were.

While I obviously support the common FLOSS belief, I admit that the big
question has yet to be resolved with FLOSS the dominant factor in
tommorrow's scale of ever expanding computing, as compared to the success
of yesteryear on a far smaller scale. Open source or not, back then the fact
was, often only a handful of folks could afford (or were lucky enough to be
employed in) the luxury of playing with the hardware, and thus the
OPPORTUNITY to use the software, opensource or not.

The big question does remain.. Will FLOSS be at least as effective at
innovation as closed source has been, with deployment of computers what it
is today and continuing to grow and saturate the farthest corners of the
globe? MS says no, it CAN'T be, because that sort of "innovative design"
takes costly coordinated hard work that isn't the sort of thing people do
unless they are PAID to do it, and the only effective way to maintain the pay
is to maintain the lock-up on intellectual property. The FLOSS community
says YES, A THOUSAND TIMES YES, growing and multiplying and
changing and adapting and evolving far faster than proprietary solutions ever
could.

Honestly, the argument can rage both ways, and we all have our positions,
but only time will tell, as it's beginning to look like FLOSS will actually have
it's time in the spotlight as the dominant solution, to prove itself.

That said, and bringing this back to the subject at hand, I found it interesting
that even the "selfishly motivated" companies in the survey ended up so
STRONGLY emphasizing their belief in the innovation ability of free source.
It's inice to see it isn't only the geeky individuals, out there, that believe this
way, and believe it strongly enough to base their business plan and therefore
very survival on it.

Duncan