yah! i'm a dorkmeister. everyone can stop sending me offlists correcting my lazy, lamer ass now. thanks! :)
but, let me have one point: please, please, please? esr's example of why people write code is exactly what you were getting at. you were referencing the Cathedral and the Bazaar, yes? the ideas he outlines there, yes?
>i will definitely bow...your opinion
where have you been all my life, ravi?
:)
>to m.p's and your opinion when it comes to
>analyzing the economic/political implications and consequences of
>open source development. i was addressing (no doubt imperfectly!)
>what i read in m.p's post as references to the motivation of open
>source developers and their backgrounds. i agree with your
>classification of my examples as early points in open source, but
>i am not sure that current efforts are much different - i could
>be (and often am) wrong about that!
hmmm. well, i don't think mp was attributing such motivations to coders. rather, i think he said the open source process reminds him of the academic process. my guess was that he meant that it operates as a way of harnessing very cheap labor.
i don't know, join the FoRK list, i see a mix of motivations. but the point is that it's not, utlimately, about motivations. Or, rather, it's about how manifest motivations, what seems obvious, are a way of marshaling our behavior in ways that end up solidifying the conditions of our own exploitation (the latent or hidden function). People can feel that they are doing what they do because they have "noble" reasons--an abiding love of what they do (i certainly feel this way, even though i know better)--or because they need an application to accomplish something. e.g., j.d. dyson just posted his Early Bird app for Code Red: "It'll fire off emails to the offending networks and logs the CR type as well as the attacking IP." (j.d. dyson) (See ttp://www.treachery.net/~jdyson/earlybird/)
additionally, we get kids writing us all the time, 14-17 year olds looking to do free work for us so they can get into the business. It's still a business that you can get into without advanced training. in fact, advanced degrees aren't exactly that important. as yet. we could easily take advantage of these offers.
it doesn't matter what individual's reasons are, they're still throwing themselves before the juggernaut, as marx said. that everyone thinks they're developing some alternative to capitalism or even a slight variation on it--free as in speech, not free as in beer--is even better. (fuckme, i'm starting to sound like marcuse's "one dimensional society")
in that sense, academia is a relevant analogy. academia--the university system--was integral to the rise of industrial capitalism. it was a way of harnessing R&D. If you read about why we went to the German model of the uni system, you will see that the reasons why were bound up with our worship of the German economy. The German model of the research university (as opposed to the liberal arts model) was seen as the key to German economic success in the late 19th c.
academia--and the professions more generally--is a mix of rationalized, bureaucratized training, the development of knowledge, R&D with the charismatic authority system associated with medieval institutions, as someone here called the professions--academia, law, medicine--a couple of months ago. How? we spend a huge amount of time in the beginning of our career as apprentices working for relatively little pay so that we can move into relatively stable positions later. getting that stable position is about jumping through hoops -- in academia, degradation rituals. getting that coveted position as a surgeon is about slaving away as a resident working 70 hour weeks. getting that partnership is about working many hours at the bottom rungs first. etc.
whether or not geekdom will be modeled after the uni system of apprenticeship in a more formalized, rationalized way is still up for grabs. i, personally, think geekdom will organize as craft labor unions much like the ones Dorothy Sue Cobble describes in her work. http://www.rci.rutgers.edu/~cobble/organiz3.pdf
But, unlike Cobble, I have no hope that these are actually better models for unionizing. I used to. But then I read a book I stumbled over in the business section, William Bridges JobShift. In that book, bridges argues for craft like unions to organize masses of independent contractors in what he calls the post-industrial workforce. I've recently seen this model proffered by libertarians who are extremely hostile to the trade union model.