The Tyranny of Language, Part II

Posted on February 26th, 2006 by Chris.
Categories: Chris, General/Misc..

In the last article, we discussed the idea that people preferred to read things that were easy to read, and also gained a sense that confusing writing often resulted from: a) the desire to hide information, and b) a natural tendancy for writers to associate the confusing with the intelligent.

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3 comments.

More on the economics of open source

Posted on February 24th, 2006 by Tim.
Categories: General/Misc., Tim.

 Liu’s article makes alot of sense to me concerning the economics of open source software, by which he means FOSS (Free Open Source Software). The ideas he presents are the foundations of the philosophies of the GPL/FOSS community. A strong argument for open source is that my contribution helps me, and it costs me nothing to share my contribution with everyone else on the planet. When everyone is doing this, I can obtain a large return on my work by participating in the community of open source development.

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8 comments.

The Economics of Open Source

Posted on February 24th, 2006 by Chris.
Categories: Chris, General/Misc..

Prerequisites: An understanding of the fundamentals of economics

Update: Gas is correct to say I’m referring to Free Open Source Software (FOSS), and not open source in its entirety.

Open source software has a unique set of economic rules to follow. Interestingly, it appears to go against the basic idea that people create software for profit; without this incentive it might appear that no one would want to produce software. While this has some obvious truth to it, there are some economic principles at work behind open source. While I could reexplain them in depth, there are already a number of articles on the economics of open source, so I’ll only include a short summary.

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1 comment.