| Follow @whit537
I'm the founder of Gratipay, an open organization with a mission to cultivate an economy of gratitude, generosity, and love. We help companies and others pay for open source—and we're funded on our own platform. Offline, I live outside Pittsburgh, PA, USA, and online, I live on Slack, IRC, and GitHub.
Authored Comments
I actually haven't read /The Success of Open Source/, so thanks for introducing that to the discussion here! I will have to look into it.
By "various explorations" I sense an allusion to Stephen Walli's recent provocations that, "freeloaders are essential to success," in his talk at All Things Open, and in Meme #6 here:
https://opensource.com/business/16/4/12-memes-explain-open-source-softw…
He and I actually had an interesting exchange about this after his talk. I think he's right that existing "open source business models" are really not open source business models per se, but are rather business models that harvest value from the ecosystem of the open source community (witness the connection with Lister's framing), add additional value, and sell *that* on the market.
As I mention in another comment, what I'm trying to point towards is the possibility of a genuinely open source economy entity. Something that combines the intrinsic motivation and highest levels of personal agency that we find in open source projects, with the economy vitality of the traditional firm.
We've figured out how to produce value in open source projects that exist in a sort of bubble inside the market. What would it look like to dissolve that membrane separating the two? What would a genuinely open source economy look like?
I use "free rider" narrowly according to its standard definition in economics: someone who uses a public good without paying for it. So yes, I would call the person in your example a free rider with reference to the software they use without paying for.
P.S. Sometimes *I* free ride! The "problem" is not so much any given instance of free-riding, as it is the aggregate effect on the good in question. In the case of software projects, the effect is burned out individuals and unmaintained projects.