[8327] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
Been reading a book (dangerous thing to do)
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Russell Nelson)
Sun Nov 14 00:50:58 1993
Date: Sun, 14 Nov 1993 00:02:37 EST
From: "Russell Nelson" <nelson@crynwr.com>
To: com-priv@psi.com
[ It may seem like I'm changing the topic, but I'm not. Your brain
is like the World Wide Web -- if you have something that isn't
linked to everything else, it's useless. Every point I make below
is related to everything we've been discussing recently except
perhaps Jamie Love's wife's university's postmaster's recent former
ex-girlfriend's cooking skills. -russ ]
I've been reading the book "Economics in One Lesson", by Henry
Hazlitt. The lesson is, simply enough, that economics is the study
of policy effects on everyone (not just a limited group) in both the
short and long terms (not just the short and not just the long either).
The bulk of the book is examples of bad economics, where people limit
the group they consider, or only consider the short term.
So then I was trying to explain the economics of free software (and
this applies also to any kind of free information) to a friend.
Getting paid for distribution is no problem, same for support. Some
software "creates itself" because it's fun to write (any programmer
who hasn't written a text editor should hide his/her head in shame).
So the only free software that needs help is that which isn't fun to
write.
And putting the two new (to me anyway) bits of information together
made me realize that it *might* be economically more efficient (that
is, create more wealth) if all software was freely copyable, and some
group mechanism was found to create boring software (user groups,
trademark licensing fees, operating system costs, or for the
creatively challeneged, taxes). Our current software industry is
fairly inefficient. Look at the number of TCP/IP stacks that have
been written.
One ramification of the Economics Lesson above is that when you
force people to make uneconomic decisions (e.g. tariffs, price
fixing, subsidization, etc), society is poorer in the aggregate.
Of course what usually happens is that *some* people are made richer,
and everyone else is made even *more* poorer.
For example, proprietary software (or proprietary information, e.g.
page numbers) makes some people richer. But if the software was
freely copyable, then the people who *had* been paying for the
software would still have their wealth.
Now, you could argue (as the head of a software business did to me
recently) that free software "distorts the market" and "destroys
jobs". Not at all. The people who now have more wealth because they
aren't paying for software can do one of three things: they can hoard
it (put the wealth into nonproductive investments), they can invest
it (rent the wealth to people), or they can spend it (which obviously
creates jobs). Very few people are going to do the first, and the
second creates wealth, because the only people who are going to rent
wealth are those who expect to be able to pay the rent by using the
wealth to create more wealth.
--
-russ <nelson@crynwr.com> ftp.msen.com:pub/vendor/crynwr/crynwr.wav
Crynwr Software | Crynwr Software sells packet driver support.
11 Grant St. | 315-268-1925 (-9201 FAX) | Quakers do it in the light
Potsdam, NY 13676 | LPF member - ask me about the harm software patents do.
