One of today's most remarkable "knowledge commons" is open-source software (OSS). GitHub is a service that hosts code repositories for software projects, and currently hosts over 100 million projects, the vast majority of which are open source. Out of the ten most popular programming languages, four of them are open-source (Ratan, 2016; Putano, 2017). The producers of those languages coordinate their efforts to improve their language using git, an open-source product for coordinating and merging the work of multiple people on a common project. When the people constructing these tools want to create a new version, they typically turn to an open-source tool like make, which automates building software products. These languages and tools are often used on a Linux platform, an open-source operating system. And where is the authoratative source code for Linux stored? On git, which was in fact created as a way to manage Linux development. And the most popular version of a very popular open-source language like Python is built in C, but what's more that C code is often compiled using gcc, another open-source software product.
The interdependency of these projects means that the world of open-source software is a complex capital structure (Lachmann, 1978), in which their are multiple dependencies among the multitude of open-source projects. As Kelty puts it, open-source "communities" are "concerned with the ability to build, control, modify, and maintain the infrastructure that allows them to come into being in the first place" (2008, p. 7). They are "not simply a technical pursuit but also the creation of a 'public'" (2008, p. 7).
This paper aims to explore how the cultural artifacts supporting the development of open source capital goods are produced and reproduced by the open source movement, and how they provide essential support to the generation of capital goods by the open source community. In particular, it will examine why anyone contributes to open-source software at all, given that any individual programmer and any organization using software can always "free-ride" on the efforts of anyone who does decide to contribute to an open-source project. From Hardin (1968) on, social theorists have recognized the temptation to over-use and under-maintain any common resource as an important problem. Regarding our topic, over-use is not an issue: no one can exhaust the supply of open-source software. But why should anyone at all work on its provisioning? Of course, on rare occasions, the builders of some open-source software are able to become wealthy as a result, but the vast majority of the contributors to open-source projects are working full-time jobs to pay their bills and working on open-source projects in their spare time. Even an open-source superstar like Guido van Rossum, the creator of the Python programming language, has had to work full-time jobs at Google and Dropbox to support himself (Wikipedia contributors, 2019).
Ostrom (2015, 46-49) divides the problems facing self-organizing governance of commons into "appropriation" and "provision" difficulties. Appropriation problems involve how to regulate taking resources out of the commons, while provisioning problems are about how to invest in maintaining and enhancing the common resource pool. An important aspect of open-source software is that there are only provisioning problems: anyone can "appropriate" as many copies of some open-source software as they would like, and there are still an infinite number of copies left to download. (This aspect of the problem has been recognized by, say Schweik and English, 2007.) So the focus of this paper will be on "Why does anyone contribute at all?"
Ostrom admits that the rational-choice framework has some difficulties in dealing with self-organizing to ameliorate collective action problems: "As Bates (1988) points out, the presence of collective benefits as a result of designing new institutions is itself a second-order dilemma" (2015). Open-source software has been as wildly successful as it has because of a set of rules and norms that have arisen around the creation, maintenance, and use of OSS.
The movement to create free and open source software had ideological roots: the chief early proponent of free source software was Richard Stallman, who famously said, “Free software is a political movement; open source is a development model.”
The notion of "open-source software" arose in the 1990s as a more ideologically neutral term compared to "free software.” This paper does not wish to enter into the debate as to what term is most appropriate for what are commonly today called "open-source" projects, but instead to look at the extent to which the concrete capital goods produced by the open-source community depend upon cultural aspects of open source.
Although Stallman and his allies had some success in creating free software, most notably the set of GNU programming tools, 15 years after the movement began (in 1983), the vast majority of software in use was still proprietary.
But the migration of software from desktops and closed networks onto the Internet slowly began to change that. The standard “web stack“ in the early 2000's consisted of Linux, Apache, MySQL, and Python or PHP: every component being a piece of open source software.
But of even more importance to the startling success of open source software since that time has been the spread of the culture surrounding it: a culture of sharing source code and knowledge freely among programmers. The robustness of this culture has manifested itself in several ways. For one thing, there are entire, large technical artifacts devoted to sharing information, such as Wikipedia, Stack Overflow, and Git Hub. For another, large, for-profit software companies increasingly find that to recruit and retain good software engineers, they must allow those engineers to contribute to open source projects. Furthermore, in many cases, the companies themselves have wound up turning what were proprietary, internal projects into open source projects, as they find having the open source community maintain the software they use to be more efficient than maintaining it themselves, even if this allows competitors to freely use the software so developed.
Some historical topics:
Is there a way out of the dilemma presented to us by the existence of vast amounts of open-source software in a world of self-interested, "rational" agents? I suggest that indeed there is: if one's framework suggests some phenomenon cannot exist, and yet it persists in existing, then it is the framework that is wrong. And in this case, the framework is methodological individualism (MI).
Consider the following passage from Ostrom (2015, 95):
As Elster (1989, p. 41) states, "punishment almost invariably is costly to the punisher, while the benefits from punishment are diffusely distributed over the members." Given the evidence that individuals monitor, than the relative costs and benefits must have a different configuration than that posited in prior work. Either the costs of monitoring are lower or the benefits to an individual or higher, or both.
Ostrom overlooks the fact that there is a quite different answer to the puzzle of why monitoring occurs: it is possible that humans actually enjoy enforcing norms of fairness, having a natural propensity to do so, and they suffer at the idea that unpunished transgressions of such norms are occurring.
That overlooked possibility might be regarded as a mere theoretical diversion, except that there is empirical evidence that supports it, as well as alternate anthropologies to MI that would lead us to expect such a situation to hold. For instance, Brosnan and de Waal found that "Monkeys refused to participate [in an exercise] if they witnessed a conspecific obtain a more attractive reward for equal effort, an effect amplified if the partner received such a reward without any effort at all. These reactions support an early evolutionary origin of inequity aversion." (2003, p. 297) Note that from the point of view of most "rational choice" theories, this behavior is "irrational," since the monkees, by rejecting an unfair reward, instead received no reward: as the researchers put it, "subjects forfeited a directly accessible food that they readily accept and consume under almost any other set of circumstances" (2003, p. 298).
Another experimental result, often regarded as an anamoly (or even a monstrosity!) by rational choice theorists, is that individuals will quite often reject unfair offers in the Ultimatum Game, despite the "irrationality" of such a rejection, since they therefore receive no payoff, instead of the payoff that was perceived as unfair. (See, for instance, Henrich et al. 2004)
On the theoretical level, classical anthropology was clearly not methodologically individualist. When Aristotle (1992) declared that "man is a political animal," he was claiming that human individuals are dependent on the prior existence of a social order that can sustain them. Or, as Paul put it in 1 Corinthians 12:
Just as a body, though one, has many parts, but all its many parts form one body, so it is with Christ. For we were all baptized by one Spirit so as to form one body -- whether Jews or Gentiles, slave or free -- and we were all given the one Spirit to drink. Even so the body is not made up of one part but of many. Now if the foot should say, “Because I am not a hand, I do not belong to the body,” it would not for that reason stop being part of the body. And if the ear should say, “Because I am not an eye, I do not belong to the body,” it would not for that reason stop being part of the body.
Or consider Herodotus's (1949) analysis of the Persian Wars as stemming from a long history of conflict between Greek civilization and Persian civilization: individuals certainly have their parts to play in his story, but the major actors are these historical collectives.
So what justifies MI's rejection of the reality of social wholes that we find throughout classical anthropology? MI's claims to truth certainly are not empirically verifiable: "Germany invaded Poland in 1939" and "In 1939 very many Germans decided to rush across the border and shoot at Polish soldiers" are not descriptions of two different sets of facts, so that we could see which facts really occurred and decide between the two statements that way. No, the two statements are two different ways of describing the same set of facts. Methodological individualists often attempt to resolve this incomensurability by claiming, "only individuals act" or "only individuals choose" (see, for instance, Boettke 2007, Gibson 2012, Boaz 2017, Gordon 2009, or Mises 2006), without argumentation, as though this were self-evidently, or perhaps a priori true. But as Pierre Manent notes, this assertion actually blinds the asserters to what is decisive in world affairs:
"As I've said, our political regime and our way of life invite us to reduce all spiritual masses to the individuals that constitute them. Finally, however, however much we may desire to see everywhere only rights-bearing subjects and individuals seeking their own interests, we run into a number of great collective facts that are decisive for world affairs." (2016, 40)
Furthermore, as Alasdair MacIntyre demonstrates, the notion that individuals qua are the locus of decision-making and practical reasoning is a distinctively modern idea, that far from appearing as a priori true to thinkers of earlier times, would have appeared patently false:
My thesis is not that the procedures of the public realm of liberal individualism were cause and the psychology of the liberal individual effect nor vice versa. What I am claiming is that each required the other and that in coming together they defined a new social and cultural artifact, "the individual." In Aristotelian practical reasoning it is the individual qua citizen who reasons; in Thomistic practical reasoning it is the individual qua inquirer into his or her good and the good of his or her community; in Humean practical reasoning it is the individual qua property on property participant in a society of a particular kind of mutuality and reciprocity; but in the practical reasoning of liberal modernity it is the individual qua individual who reasons. (2014, 338)
Of course, any theory, including MI, can be maintained in the face of any amount of supposedly contrary evidence, so long as one is willing to alter auxilliary parts of the theory, or of companion theories, to fit the new evidence. This was first noted in the work of Pierre Duhem (1991), and later re-inforced by the considerations of W.V.O. Quine (1951). Or, as David Lewis put it, "The theory survives its refutation -- at a price" (2004, p. ix). But if we acknowledging the empirical findings and philosophical considerations cited above, it seems clear to me that the price to pay for maintaining a commitment to MI is too high: as Hodgson (2007) notes, once we acknowledge the importance of social relations in all plausible MI explanations, it is hard to see why we should retain the one-sided emphasis on "individualism" in such explanations.
One reason some might want to cling to MI despite the high price to be paid for doing so is the idea that the only alternative to MI is "methodological holism." But that is just wrong, as, for instance, Caldwell (1988) points out. The methodological pluralism Caldwell advocates is common in "hard" sciences such as physics, where explanations may be in terms of elementary particles, or molecules, or collections of molecules, such as gases, liquids, and solids, and in biology, where "genes" in classical genetics turn out to be an irreducible to the concepts of molecular genetics (see Kitcher, 1984).
Once we recognize that humans are inherently social beings, the puzzle of the existence of successful collective action in the face of "collective action problems" dissolves: humans evolved as social, group-oriented creatures, and it is simply natural for human beings to try to resolve conflicts through group-wide agreements. Whether this reality is understood naturalistically (is it a "puzzle" that the cells cooperate to produce a body?) or spiritually (see Paul, 1 Corinthians 12), once this perspective, argued by philosophers such as Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, and Aquinas, and confirmed by modern ethology in its study of primates, the puzzle instead becomes why are the cases where humans are not able to successfully manage a commons together?
So why do programmers contribute?
Raymond (XXXX?): "it is an ethical duty of hackers to share their
expertise by writing open-source code and facilitating access to
information and to computing resources wherever possible."
Tozzi (2017, p. 44): "Unix programmers... collaborated across
continents and shared code with one another freely, despite
economic incentives against working in such a way."
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