Development quote of the week

If you handed an economics undergraduate a description of how open source libraries are produced, without saying what it was, and asked them to predict the outcome, they would tell you it doesn't add up. Non-excludable goods with no price, no contracts, no liability, a median producer headcount of one, and near-total free riding by consumers: there is no model in the textbook under which that arrangement produces anything stable.

Then you run npm install and a few hundred of these impossible goods arrive in seconds, and the commercial software industry sits almost entirely on top of them. Open source breaks more or less the full set of market axioms at once.