Coase's Penguin, or, Linux and "The Nature of the Firm"

Abstract

The emergence of GNU/Linux as a viable alternative to the Windows operating system and of the Apache webserver software as the leading web server have focused wide attention on the phenomenon of free or open source software. Most of the attention to the economic aspects of the phenomenon has been focused on the question of incentives-why, it is asked, would anyone invest effort in a productive enterprise in whose fruits they do not claim proprietary rights of exclusion-and has been devoted to studying this phenomenon solely in the context of software development. In this paper I expand consideration of the policy implications of the apparent success of free software in two ways. First, I suggest that the phenomenon has broad implications throughout the information, knowledge, and culture economy, well beyond software development. Second, I suggest reasons to think that peer production may outperform market-based production in some information production activities.The first part of the paper expands the observation of the phenomenon of peer production to additional layers of the communications process. In particular, I describe instances of peer production of content, relevance, accreditation, and valueadded distribution as parallels to peer production of software.

Code Reuse in Open Source Software

“…Developers of open source software are known to self-assign to tasks based on their preferences and ability (Benkler, 2002;Bonaccorsi and Rossi, 2003;Yamauchi, et al, 2000) and they seek a creative challenge and fun when writing software (Lakhani and Wolf, 2005;Hertel et al, 2003). Yet, some essential tasks in open source software development are considered to be mundane and boring (Shah, 2006;von Hippel and Lakhani, 2003 found that newcomers to a project reused software they had written for other projects in order to make their first contributions.…”

Ubiquitous Learning and the Future of Teaching

“…4 Asimismo, Yochai Benkler proclama las virtudes del "patrimonio común basado en la producción entre pares." 5 La publicontratación ("crowdsourcing", en inglés) y otras actividades distribuidas similares surgen a partir de una identidad de comunidad no presencial y la refuerzan. La gente parece genuinamente motivada por la idea de que la inteligencia colectiva puede conseguir más que el logro de los individuos e investigadores como Benkler argumentan que tales modelos son más productivos que los sistemas de incentivos basados en el crédito personal que predominan en una variedad de lugares de trabajo.…”

Peer-to-peer work in the digital meaning society 2050

“…Along these lines, in the following we describe the basic logics of peer production and open collaboration according to Yochai Benkler [3,4]. Benkler [4] claims that due to different drivers, peer-to-peer, nonmarket, and non-proprietary production may become not only possible, but the dominant form of production and organisation in the future.…”