From The Economist in 2006: Open-source business: Open, but not as usual.

Two fairly old papers on the economics of open source. The news recently has been that open source allows companies to bring in better, more innovative talent and saves marketing costs, but these papers are interesting nonetheless.

The Simple Economics of Open Source:

The nexus of open source development appears to have shifted to Europe over the last ten years. This paper explains why this trend undermines cultural arguments about “hacker ethics” and “post-scarcity” gift economies. It suggests that classical economic theory offers a more succinct explanation for the peculiar international distribution of open source development: hacking rises and falls inversely to its opportunity cost. This finding throws doubt on the Schumpeterian assumption that the efficiency of industrial systems can be measured without reference to the social institutions that bind them.

The Fading Altruism of Open Source Development:

The nexus of open source development appears to have shifted to Europe over the last ten years. This paper explains why this trend undermines cultural arguments about “hacker ethics” and “post-scarcity” gift economies. It suggests that classical economic theory offers a more succinct explanation for the peculiar international distribution of open source development: hacking rises and falls inversely to its opportunity cost. This finding throws doubt on the Schumpeterian assumption that the efficiency of industrial systems can be measured without reference to the social institutions that bind them.

economics, free software, open source, oss, peer reviewed

I won’t link to The New York Times anymore, but when Ross Mayfield quotes them, I don’t have to.

The story is that life is full of interruptions. The typical office environment today apparently allows workers “only 11 minutes on any given project before being interrupted and whisked off to do something else.” Worse, “each 11-minute project was itself fragmented into even shorter three-minute tasks, like answering e-mail messages, reading a Web page or working on a spreadsheet.”

Interesting stuff. Mayfield points it out as a reason to build more awareness of this in our communication/social software. He also popped this link to Jon Udell’s post on attention economics.

tags: communication, economics, interruptions, mail messages, office environment, office environment, ross mayfield, social networking, social software, spreadsheet, typical office employee

When I first found Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed while waiting for someone or something, I picked it up and started reading in the middle. I found myself immediately taken in to her story and her writing, and was more than a little remise to give it up. Not many non-fiction books about social issues are call page-turners. But this is one.

Ehrenreich attempts three low-wage jobs in three cities for a month each, trying to find housing and food within the budget allowed by such work. She fails. The book is full of details and well researched commentary that might make the deepest conservative question welfare to work ‘reforms’ and the real nature of poverty.

Barbara Ehrenreich, Nickel and Dimed, social issues, poverty, working class, america, economics