No Love for GPL
Dennis Peterson responded to my earlier polemic about “Why I Don’t Love GPL“. I think much of the disagreement comes from my having skimmed over “value transfer” without explaining what I meant. Consider the comment:
Your argument that the “shadow economy” contributes to undemocratic
political influence is valid for non-reproducible goods, but hardly
applies in this case. If goods are freely available to all, how can
they be used to bribe politicians?
In fact, this is exactly the point I was making. In a soviet-style economy which operates on the principle of “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need”, the price of things is fairly irrelevant, and therefore these things are not used as the basis of influence. Instead, people use other means, such as trading favors, guanxi, influence-peddling and all of the things that Americansscorn as “politics and corruption”. Wealth still ends up getting aggregated in the hands of afew, but in this scenario the wealth is measured in terms of power, contacts, influence, and so on.
Mike Tyson illustrates this point. The newspapers scream headlines that “Tyson needs to fight again and make some money because he is broke”. And looking at it on paper, he is constantly on the verge of bankruptcy. On the other hand, Tyson is frequently in legal trouble, and even if he did have piles of cash in his bank account, it would be a target of these lawsuits. A person with such a high-risk lifestyle is wise to accrue wealth in a manner that exposes no targetable assets. Any two-bit drug dealer knows to lease, rent, borrow, but never own anything. Tyson has a reputation for buying mansions and luxury cars for his friends and family. Plenty of people owe him favors. He’ll have no problems staying comfortable for the rest of his life.
How does that relate to the “bribery” comments above? It’s simple, really. People start acting like Mike Tyson when it becomes too difficult or risky for them to accumulate wealth in the way that society would prefer (the measurable way). People are selfish and greedy, period. Money isn’t the problem, it’s just the messenger. If you kill the messenger, you still have people who are selfish and greedy, you just can’t keep track of who and how greedy anymore.
So it should be clear from this that the value exchange I am talking about is not at all related to physical goods. In fact, money as a proxy for value is less important when dealing strictly with physical goods. Physical assets are easy to measure and quantify. You can barter three tons of wheat in exchange for a Boeing jetliner, and it’s pretty easy for both sides to know what they are getting. I think that an objective “generated value” measurement system is most important for things which are least tangible. And as someone once said, “money is information”. As such, money is not a scarce or finite resource — and, even more importantly, neither is value.
The function of money is simply to serve as information about what the aggregate perceivedvalue was to society from a particular offering. And although value is not a finite resource, this “information” is very important, because it helps prioritize people’s efforts. For many things, it’s pretty much the only way to know what is most important to society as a whole. When two different companies offer up two competing products with slightly different feature focus, it is as if they are saying to the public at large “please vote on which one you prefer, and we will use that feedback to determine the future course of our R&D”.
But, I agree with Dennis’s comments about the idea of a “commons”, and agree that some things are appropriately done collectively (like roads, which is something the local government here needs to realize). However, I feel that the comparisons between the road system and software are inappropriate, because roads are based in physical assets, and the “product” involved is generally mature (there are probably not many major “innovations” left in road design). I think there is a fatal flaw in many of the GPL advocates thinking which says that software is pretty much “solved”, and the only improvements left in software are in quality and price. In my opinion, this shows a stunning lack of imagination (and leads to massive wasted man-hours spent making ripoff versions of software to give away for free, only to have the whole software category be obsolete by the time they get there), but that is a topic for another day.