Who's pocketing open source wealth?
Shane Greenstein asks, Does
the clothesline paradox apply to IT? If you use
the sun to dry your clothes instead of an electric
dryer, your clothes are just as dry, but measured
economic activity goes down. Same for open source
software. Greenstein writes,
[W]hen a new technology (which uses the free inputs)
substitutes for existing economic activity, on first
glance it looks like the new technology brings about
a decline in total economic activity. That appearance
is misleading, of course, because the savings goes
into other economic activity, but those gains are
diffuse and difficult to identify.
Where do the gains go? Some of them
must end up with open-source-using
companies. Simon Phipps, citing a report
from O'Reilly and Associates, calls this effect the
stealth stimulus package. But gains are
also ending up in paychecks. Software is really two
complementary goods: the codebase and the
maintenance programming. Push the price of
one good to zero, and the price of the other
goes up. For example, Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols reported
on a survey done by Dice.com and the Linux
Foundation.
"While the average pay increase for tech professionals
averaged just two percent in 2011...according
to Dice's annual Salary Survey, in 2011,
Linux professionals saw a five percent increase,
year-over-year, in their pay as well as a 15 percent
jump in bonus payouts."
And that's for "Linux professionals" in general.
For authors of important code on which other
code depends, the deal can be much sweeter. Joey
Hess writes, in a blog comment on David
N. Welton's "In Thrall to Scarcity," "I think that
the scarcity I am taking advantage of is that of deep
knowledge of infrastructure. The kind of knowledge
that you get by writing pieces of code that become
infrastructure."
Using open source in business is sort of like hiring
an employee who owns his or her own tools. In the
case of hiring an open source developer, though, the
"ownership" of the tools is in the form of expertise,
something that's personal and that can't be sold or
securitized. (Put that in your pipe and smoke it,
Karl Marx.)
So who else is profiting from open source? The tax
man. A lot of corporate tax returns look something
like this: "We actually didn't make any profit because
we had to send all our money to Example.com Software
Licensing Trust in Taxhavenistan, so we owe nothing."
As open source tends to reduce easily relocatable
licensing streams, and increase paychecks in Portland
and Mountain View, the public sector is getting a
piece of the open source gains as well.
Syndicated 2012-08-06 14:00:52 from Don Marti
