<story><title>The strange economics of open-source software</title><url>http://www.philipotoole.com/the-strange-economics-of-open-source-software/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>brc</author><text>I don&amp;#x27;t find it strange at all, and looking at a proper classical economist - they would have no trouble explaining it.&lt;p&gt;Most people, when understanding economics tend to make the jump directly to money&amp;#x2F;cash when explaining prices and market action.&lt;p&gt;But to be correct you have to look at utility.  There&amp;#x27;s little question as to why companies install open source software - the TCO can be lower.  But why do people contribute their time in building it?&lt;p&gt;The answer is that the reward of being part of an OSS team brings great utility to a developer, and this is true even for marginally successful OSS projects.  So people exchange their time for intangibles like reputation, credibility markers ( the author casually drops in which projects he is involved in) as well as the ability to leverage involvement into actual cash like well paid consultant gigs, books or successful blogs.&lt;p&gt;So there isn&amp;#x27;t any strangeness going on at all.  OSS makes sense from a company point of view, and it makes sense from an individual developer point of view.</text></comment>
<story><title>The strange economics of open-source software</title><url>http://www.philipotoole.com/the-strange-economics-of-open-source-software/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>dfc</author><text>Wow, I was expecting a little more economics in a post titled &amp;quot;the strange economics of OSS.&amp;quot; It is too bad the post makes such grand claims without any modicum of effort to back them up with data; these are very interesting research questions. The two most hand wavy claims have to be &amp;quot;it is almost taken for granted that the source code for most software is freely available&amp;quot; and &amp;quot; it is at larger, older firms, that the least amount of open-source software is written.&amp;quot; As far as the former goes you really have to ignore Apple&amp;#x27;s ecosystem, video games and anything related to industrial automation or espionage in order to make such a claim. As far as the latter claim goes IBM, Intel, Oracle, HP, Texas Instruments etc are often at the top of contributions to the Linux kernel by company. To be honest thee latter claim is rather empty without some methodological framework that defines &amp;quot;older company&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;most open source software.&amp;quot;</text></comment>