From b6c0ffcaf707ee1968a7f29021d20357692a84d0 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Silvio Rhatto Date: Tue, 7 Aug 2018 10:05:58 -0300 Subject: Reorganization --- books/technology/cathedral-bazaar.md | 214 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ 1 file changed, 214 insertions(+) create mode 100644 books/technology/cathedral-bazaar.md (limited to 'books/technology/cathedral-bazaar.md') diff --git a/books/technology/cathedral-bazaar.md b/books/technology/cathedral-bazaar.md new file mode 100644 index 0000000..d9416d2 --- /dev/null +++ b/books/technology/cathedral-bazaar.md @@ -0,0 +1,214 @@ +[[!meta title="The Cathedral & The Bazaar"]] +[[!tag jogo software foss economics]] + +* [The Cathedral and the Bazaar](http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/) +* Author: Eric S. Raymond +* ISBN: 978-0-596-00108-7 +* Publisher: O'Reilly + +## Review + +While Raymond has innumerous insights on the dynamic of the free software +communities, he got political economy wrong, including, but not only by: + +* Choosing to focus on Lockean philosophical considerations. +* Putting altruism as a mode of appearance for an egotistical reward strategy. + +Reading this book years after the "Open Source Revolution" has begun, the whole +"Open Source X Free Software" debate looks even more important than what sometimes +were put as a metaphysical, esoteric dispute. Going beyond the requirement that +a software work is made available giving the "four freedoms", this debate puts +basic questions about the underlying production process all how societies chose +to divide labour and share wealth. + +More than ever before this debate has huge importance and implications, given +our current state of affairs where economic models such as "freemium", +"opencore" and [siren servers](/books/sociedade/who-owns-the-future) are +privatizing and concentrating the notion of property, i.e, transforming even +personal property in a "service": you don't own your gadget or content like +music you purchase, because of DRM, EULAS and the inability to repair your +stuff, see the iRepair movement. + +Raymond assumes that "the verdict of history seems to be free-market capitalism +is the globally optimal way to cooperate for economic efficiency" which, besides +being an "end of history"-type fallacy -- as we didn't tried yet many, many +possible economical systems, but only very few --, has wrong assumptions about +what is "optimal", "cooperation" and "efficient": just look about resource +depletion, absurd wealth concentration by the extremely rich and lack of +basic dignity for most of human population, not to mention animal/nature rights. + +Capitalism is based in the need that something is scarce, if not naturally then +let make it artificial scarce. So there's no way a capitalist business will +sustain itself by giving everything free as in software -- as it's anyway out +of question that it will give anything free as in beer. + +So while the bulk of Raymond ideas are revolutionary in the sense that capitalism +needs to constantly revolutionize itself, fade away in diminishing returns or +go to war mode -- when accumulated production is fanatically destroyed, it does +not offers insights for the main issue of how to replace capitalism which by +the previous definition is inequality-producing machine. + +Embracing open source as a capitalism moto sounds like being a hacker until +page two, which is a prevailing ideology of the Silicon Valley elite, which +sounds much more a meritocracy than hacker culture. We should question things +instead of taking assumptions for granted. + +That's curious, because Raymond cites Buckminster's Fuller "ephemeralization" +concept in the opening words of his "The Magic Cauldron" essay, which could +be explored to a new dimension if economics and politics are understood also +as technological apparatus we use to live better. An ephemeralization, as +Raymond explains, is "technology becoming both more effective and less +expensive as the physical resources invested in early designs are replaced +by more and more information content" (page 115). + +So it's clear when Raymond makes assumptions he is actually making a choice on +capitalist markets and conservative politics (I don't like to use the term +libertarian: it causes confusions as it means different things on different +cultures). + +If we change the assumptions, we can build different, new economies and +politics with other different emergent properties, like those based on values +of emancipation and solidarity. There are other Magic Cauldrons for the Free +Software spell. + +## Ideas while reading the book + +* Hypothesis: sustainability of "Open Source" economic model in Brazil was mostly embraced + by the government, by an army of free lancers and by a small number of business; while + open source is widely used in the country, it's mostly on the free rider mode: everyone + using an open stack but develops unpublished code (either closed source os lazilly left + out of public sight) or "poor gifts" in the expression of Raymond himself. + +## Phenomenology + +* Linus Law: "Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow" (page 30); + "debugging is parallelizable" (page 32). + +* Delphi Effect: "the averaged opinion of a mass of equally expert (or equally + ignorant) observers is quite a bit more reliable a predictor than the opinion + of a single randomly chosen observer" (page 31). + +* Brooks Law: "complexity and communication costs of a project rise with the + square number of developers" (pages 32, 49). + +## Freedom and hierarchy + +* Kropotkin is cited at page 52: "principle of understanding" versus the + "principle of command". + +* Conservative vision: "The Linux world behaves in many respects like a free + market or an ecology, a collection of selfish agents attempting to maximize + utility, which in the process produces a self-correcting spontaneous order + more elaborate and efficient than any amount of central planning could have + achieved." (page 52). Right afterwards he negates the existence of true + altruism. + +## Economics + +A very liberal point of view: + +* Homesteading the Noosphere: "customs that regulate the ownership and control + of open-source software [...] imply an underlying theory of property rights + homologous to the Lockean theory of land tenure" (65). + +* Open Source as a gift economy like a reputation game (81 - 83): + + Most ways humans have of organizing are adaptations to scarcity + and want. Each way carries with it different ways of gaining social status. + + The simples way is the _command hierarchy_ [where] scarce goods are allocated + by onde central authority and backed up by force. Command hierarchies scale + very poorly; they become increasingly inefficient as they get larger. + + [...] + + Our society is predominantly an exchange economy. This is a sofisticated + adaptation to scarcity that, unlike the command model, scales quite well. + Allocation of scarce goods is done in a decentralized way through trade + and voluntary coopreation. + + [...] + + Gift cultures are adaptations not to scarcity but to abundance. They arise + in populations that do not have significant material scarcity problems + with survival goods. + + [...] + + Abundance makes command relationships difficult to sustain and exchange + relationships an almost pointless game. In gift cultures, social status + is determined not by what you control but by _what you give away_. + + -- 80-81 + +He also explains that the reputation game is not the only drive in the +bazaar-style ecosystem: satisfaction, love, the "joy of craftsmanship" are also +motivations for software development (pages 82-83), which is compatible +with the gift economy model: + + How can one maximize quality if there is no metric for quality? + If scarcity economics doesn't operate, what metrics are available + besides peer evaluation? + + Other respondents related peer-esteem rewards and the joy of hacking + to the levels above subsistence needs in Abraham Maslow's well-known + 'hierachy of values' model of human motivation. + + -- 82-83 + +Cites both Ayn Rand and Nietzsche at page 88 when talking about "selfless" +motives, besides their "whatever other failings", saying that both +are "desconstructing" 'altruism' into unacknowledged kinds of self-interest. + +## The value of humility + + Furthermore, past bugs are not automatically held against a developer; the fact + that a bug has been fixed is generally considered more importante than the fact + that one used to be there. As one respontend observed, one can gain status by + fixing 'Emacs bugs', but not by fixing 'Richard Stallman's bugs' -- and it + would be considered extremely bad form to criticie Stallman for _old_ Emacs + bugs that have since been fixed. + + This makes an interesting contrast with many parts of academia, in which + trashing putatively defective work by others is an important mode of gaining + reputation. In the hacker culture, such behavior is rather heavily tabooed -- + so heavily, in fact, that the absence of such behavior did no present itself to + me as a datum until that one respondent with an unusual perdpective pointed it + out nearly a full year after this essay was first published! + + The taboo against attacks on competence (not shared with academia) is even more + revealing than the (shared) taboo on posturing, because we can relate it to a + difference between academia and hackerdom in their communications and support + structures. + + The hacker culture's medium of gifting is intangible, its communications + channels are poor at expressing emotional nuance, and face-to-face contact + among its members is the exception rather than the rule. This gives it a lower + tolerance of noise than most other gift cultures, and goes a long way to + explain both the taboo against posturing and the taboo against attacks on + competence. Any significant incidence of flames over hackers' competence would + intolerably disrupt the culture's reputation scoreboard. + + -- 90-91 + +What about Linus behavior, then? + + The same vulnerability to noise explains the model of public humility required + of the hacker community's tribal elders. They must be seen to be free of boast + and posturing so the taboo against dangerous noise will hold. + + Talking softly is also functional if one aspires to be a maintainer of a + successful project; one must convince the community that one has good + judgement, because most of the maintainer's job is going to be judging other + people's code. Who would be inclined to contribute work to someone who clearly + can't judge the quality of their own code, or whose behavior suggests they will + attempt to unfairly hog the reputation return from the project? Potential + contributors want project leaders with enough humility and class to be able to + to say, when objectively appropriate, ``Yes, that does work better than my + version, I'll use it''—and to give credit where credit is due. + + -- 91 + +## References + +* [Homesteading the Noosphere](http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/). -- cgit v1.2.3