Microsoft's fear of free software

[Max Sawicky]

> . . .
> In case you're merely unfamiliar with the OSS/FSF position, they
> claim that
> people should be able to share source code freely once its produced, but
> they have no problem with programmers being paid (perhaps a lot) to write
> the code in the first place.  You just shouldn't be able to prevent other
> people from passing around copies of the source code once its written.
> There may be refinements that I'm unaware of, but that's the main thrust.
>
> If you believe strongly enough in Free Software, in the sense that source
> code should be freely available, then you might actually write software
> that people can copy and distribute freely even though nobody is
> willing to pay you to do it, although you would be happy to accept payment
if someone offered.

This is fuel for a clarification of what the Linux/OSS flap
means in economic terms.  I would not understand the "free
software" phenomenon as some little community of altruists
sprouting in an unlikely place, not that programmers or
propeller-heads are any less altruistic than anyone else.
Rather, it is the implicit realization that source code is
properly a free good, from a standpoint of economic efficiency,
narrowly defined.  In other words, the proper marginal
cost for distribution of code is zero, and correct
pricing conduces to improved overall efficiency, including
lots of folks making money in profit-seeking organizations
whose work is related to use of the code.  Copyrights in
this, and arguably other instances such as economics textbooks
and bundled computer software, is inefficient.  Alternative
ways of compensating producers of such goods are worth
exploration.  My colleague Dean Baker has been working
on this for some time now, though with reference to works
of art and popular culture.

Paraphrasing Keynes, debates about free software by madmen
in front of CRT's are really implicit debates about what are
and are not public goods.

MBS