Imagine a future world where the population is stable, all natural resources have been located (e.g. no unknown reserves of oil), all nations have stable democratic governments, and there is no war. And since this is a thought experiment let’s assume this world is sustainable. Its population might fluctuate a bit but does not grow or shrink over the long term, and its economy is based on renewable resources rather than stealing from future generations for the gratification of the current one. Finally, let’s also assume that every nation has roughly the same standard of living. That means there is no artificial cost-of-labor differential to be exploited by any nation and no economic forces driving immigration/emigration between nations.
How does the economy in such a world grow?
With any luck — that is, if we can change our collective behavior and not ruin the planet first — some future generation will be able to answer that question in a way that provides a rich and rewarding life for everyone.
Today’s notion of economic growth is based squarely on three ideas:
- population growth
- endless discovery of new natural resources
- increasing productivity
#1 and #2 go together. #1, population growth, continually provides more workers, hence the economy can produce more. However, it also requires more to be produced in order to sustain those new workers, thus it requires #2, the endless discovery of new natural resources.
An economy built on this foundation is just a Ponzi scheme and has the same outcome:
There was something clueless in Ponzi’s cleverness. He had set a scheme in motion that was sure to collapse sooner or later. He was pulling in a pile of cash, but only at the expense of going into even greater debt. [source]
We are seeing the cracks in the scheme today with clean air, clean water, fertile soil, and new sources of oil all becoming harder to obtain, yet like Charles Ponzi most people remain clueless about the consequences of our cleverness. So we are left with #3, increasing productivity, as the only realistic way to maintain economic growth over the long haul.
Increasing productivity is what your boss is talking about when asking you to “work smarter.” Because this future world we are imagining must be sustainable — with a stable population and an economy based on renewable resources — working smarter is the only way to grow its economy, which is another way of saying: If these future people want to have more “stuff” they can only get it if they are smarter about how they use their available resources or invent new ones. They aren’t going to stumble upon a whole new continent or two like the Europeans did in 1492, and, since we postulated that the nations of this hypothetical world have roughly the same standard of living, one country can not rely on using the “cheap labor” of another to increase its wealth. No, these future people can only grow richer by working smarter.
That has to send shivers down the spines of some CEO’s, politicians, lobbyists, and wealthy stockholders. Lacking the familiar tools of (to use the language of the far left) exploiting the less powerful and stealing from future generations, some people are just, well, clueless.
Thankfully, most people have a bigger toolbox which includes at least these three age-old implements for increasing productivity:
- Time management: Figure out where you are wasting time and eliminate it.
- Reorganization: Put people, processes, and things in a more efficient arrangement.
- Invention: Create something new, where the cost of the new thing is lower than the cost of the thing or things it replaces.
This is where the title of this essay comes in: Open source software (OSS) does all of these things incredibly well, not every open source project, but enough to make them worth examining. (See this previous post for a list of some of the top OSS projects.)
Of the many kinds of open source projects, we’ll just look at one kind here, what might be called the purest, the kind a person or small group does because they need or want a particular program that either doesn’t exist or costs more than they can afford. I can’t think of any successful project which was created solely because someone thought it would be good for the world. That every successful one is, is a nice, often unintended, side-effect.
a story
For example, take jEdit, the premier plain text editor (see this review). With apologies to its creator Slava Pestov I’ll summarize its story like this:
Slava was about 15 years old when he set out to create a text editor for his own use. Once he had something generally useful, he licensed it with the popular GPL free software license and made it available to anyone — not just the tool but the source code with which he built it as well. As other people began to use jEdit they made suggestions, reported bugs, and sometimes offered patches.
In the software world a patch is a bug fix; it contains the specific lines of source code to add, remove, and change to fix a problem. You can’t provide a patch to a program without having access to the source code from which the program was built, thus a key component of the open software idea is to ensure source code availability to anyone and everyone. This is just the opposite of commercial software in which the source code is zealously guarded from everyone except the team working it — and even then often on a need-to-know basis and always with the team members signing contracts ensuring they can not use any part of it in any other work, ever. [Almost without exception, intellectual property rights (IPR) belong to the corporation, not the individuals whose intellect actually created the property.]
Anyway, after a while Slava has this small army of people helping to make jEdit better and it’s not costing him a cent. People are helping because they want a better product to use. It’s not altruism, everyone is getting something out of the effort.
Of course most users don’t contribute anything back due to lack of time, skill, or interest. After all, there is no requirement you must contribute in order to use jEdit or any other open source software. Open source developers are quite happy with this situation. Any user may occasionally offer a good suggestion, might suggest the product to others (free marketing), and, no matter what contribution they make, each user counts toward the total number of users which one measure of how good/useful the work is. And, most importantly, “freeloaders” don’t have any negative effect on the project.
This is the opposite of the commercial situation. If someone makes an illegal copy of Windows, to Microsoft it’s theft pure and simple. As a for-profit organization, they can only see the illegal copy as potentially lost revenue. Contrast that with the copy of Debian’s GNU/Linux I’m using along with jEdit and Xilize to write this post. [update: I should also include the editing process during which I use WordPress and Firefox with its wonderful and in my case much needed spellchecker.] All the developers of those open source projects see in me is a potential source of help. I might report a bug, supply a patch, or make a good suggestion that finds its way into a future version of their work. And if I don’t do any of that, they don’t care. My use of their products doesn’t harm them in any way. They aren’t expecting short-term direct profits. (Indirect and future profits of money, fame, respect, etc. are another story.)
Back to Slava.
Over the years jEdit grew up. The notions of plugins was added so developers could add functionality without having to modify the source code which Slava was still maintaining by himself. (As an open source project, anyone could take a copy of the source code and modify it without any interaction with Salva, but then it would become another project and have to find its own user base. This happens frequently and often with good reason but is not usually what most people are interested in as it dilutes the pool of developers on any one version.) Somewhere in this time frame I decided jEdit was good enough to become my day-to-day editing tool and remains so today.
Slava grew up too. He went to college, got a job, and in a shock to the jEdit user community announced he would no longer have time to add functionality to jEdit. To appreciate this fully, you should know
- by this point jEdit with its rich, flexible feature set was one of the most successful and widely used open source tools in history,
- being a developer on such a project is widely see by your peers as a great accomplishment, and
- a project that doesn’t evolve often becomes a dead project.
So a number of people stepped forward and offered to take over maintenance and development. That happened about a year or two ago, and jEdit remains alive, well, and evolving while Slava has gone on to invent a programming language called Factor.
the moral
With no monetary goals, no money changing hands at all, and only looking out for their own interests, a group of people built on the central idea of one individual and produced a piece of work so good, so useful, that jEdit is now used by hundreds of thousands of people who paid nothing for it— mainly programmers and web developers but also (and I’m not kidding) music composers and arrangers. (It’s been around for 12 years and over the last year has averaged 70,000 downloads per month.) As a consequence there are products of all kinds people created using jEdit that would not exist or would have required more effort to produce. And as far as anyone knows all this has had no adverse affect on the planet.
Perhaps in our hypothetical future world, something like open source software development can serve as a model for economic growth. One can dream of a day when useful knowledge won’t have to be kept secret in order to secure profits. A day when we won’t see news like this:
Tens of thousands of people being treated for AIDS will suffer if Swiss pharmaceutical company Novartis succeeds in changing India’s patent law, the humanitarian agency Medecins Sans Frontieres warned on Monday.
Novartis is challenging a specific provision of India’s patent law that, if overturned, would see patents being granted far more widely, heavily restricting the availability of affordable generic medicines, MSF says. — link
Patents, competition, and profit go hand-in-hand. Many see them as fundamentally necessary to any economic system. Yet, open source is about cooperation and knowledge sharing and is incredibly successful in producing highly valued, useful products. We get to choose which model will serve us best going forward.
conclusion
What if Jonas Salk had patented the polio vaccine?
Salk did not seek wealth or fame through his innovations, famously stating, “Who owns my polio vaccine? The people! Could you patent the sun?” [source]
We need the sun and this one planet to survive. Perhaps we can make survival an open source project.
In this essay I’ve only touched the surface of what makes open source development effective. I hope to find the time to write about that more in depth sometime soon.
