Should Open Source Communities Avoid Contributor Agreements? (ComputerWorld) [LWN.net]

Should Open Source Communities Avoid Contributor Agreements? (ComputerWorld)

Posted Aug 27, 2010 19:18 UTC (Fri) by nicooo (guest, #69134)
Parent article: Should Open Source Communities Avoid Contributor Agreements? (ComputerWorld)

From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_market

> The theory holds that within an ideal free market, property rights are voluntarily exchanged at a price arranged solely by the mutual consent of sellers and buyers. By definition, buyers and sellers do not coerce each other, in the sense that they obtain each other's property rights without the use of physical force, threat of physical force, or fraud, nor are they coerced by a third party (such as by government via transfer payments)[1] and they engage in trade simply because they both consent and believe that what they are getting is worth more than or as much as what they give up.

There's nothing special about contributor agreements, other than the fact that the "open source community" is an ideal free market.

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Should Open Source Communities Avoid Contributor Agreements? (ComputerWorld)

Posted Aug 31, 2010 2:26 UTC (Tue) by gdt (subscriber, #6284) [Link]

We need a IANAE abbreviation ("I am not an economist"). Because I am, and it is obvious that free software is not an "ideal free market".

Consider these things particular to free software:

- The existence of positive externalities which are not captured in the price. This is the very point of the saying "free as in freedom, not free as in beer".

- The inability to transfer ownership. The difficulty of doing that for projects lacking contributor agreements is the very point of the article. Related to that is the ease by which projects can be "forked" -- that is, the assets of a transfer of ownership may not end up being transferred whatever the paperwork says.

Consider these attributes of software markets in general:

- Price-setting in software isn't really about supply and demand, since supply has such a low margin cost that it can be near infinite. That oddity of software markets makes free software possible.

- The barriers to entry formed by the user's investment in learning to use a particular product. This "user lock in" has both helped and hindered the spread of free software.

So let's move on from a 1960s view of economics and its attitude that a free market is the only sort of market worth having. Modern economics is much more about exploring the world as it is, rather than making a complex world fit into one idealised model.