On Wednesday 26 January 2005 10:26 am, Charles, Joshua Micah (UMKC-Student) wrote:
A great book on the subject is "The Future Of Ideas," which I also highly recommend. Personally, I can't understand how you can be pro "Open-Source," and also for Government Regulations. They are contradictory ideas at their core.
As long as we're talking about open-source as a free market then there's a very important difference between open-source and the business world: free markets in the business world are very good at everything but keeping themselves free; in the open-source community there's no power associated with the success of a project and so monopolies that hurt the community are not formable.
Also, while in the open-source community there are unlimited intellectual resources on which the software ecosystem is built -- that is to say that having a developer on your project doesn't deprive anyone else of the ability to put food on their table -- in the business world this isn't so. There are limited physical resources: namely environmental which may be exploited and monopolized.
And so, regulation of the business markets are needed. It's also worth mentioning that open-source wouldn't exist without regulation -- everything would be public domain and who knows what kind of a movement we'd have on our hands.
And since I happen to be in these woods, it's tempting to not mention this: if physical resources were suddenly as unlimited as intellectual ones, would the free market system bring us the beautiful system we see at work in open-source? So all we need now is limitless energy and energy-to-matter conversion ... anyone have that on their to-do list?