From b6c0ffcaf707ee1968a7f29021d20357692a84d0 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Silvio Rhatto Date: Tue, 7 Aug 2018 10:05:58 -0300 Subject: Reorganization --- books/tecnopolitica/cathedral-bazaar.md | 214 -------------------------------- 1 file changed, 214 deletions(-) delete mode 100644 books/tecnopolitica/cathedral-bazaar.md (limited to 'books/tecnopolitica/cathedral-bazaar.md') diff --git a/books/tecnopolitica/cathedral-bazaar.md b/books/tecnopolitica/cathedral-bazaar.md deleted file mode 100644 index d9416d2..0000000 --- a/books/tecnopolitica/cathedral-bazaar.md +++ /dev/null @@ -1,214 +0,0 @@ -[[!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