When people think about economics they usually just think in terms of money but economics is about understanding the flow of limited resources within systems in an effort to make those systems more efficient (or if you are cynical making those systems be more efficient for a specific group). Money is just a system we have used to quantify the worth of those resources to counteract the inefficiencies of bartering. Since money has the ability to be traded for almost any resource (including money itself) it holds a lot of power and has become the focus of most of economics.

However, in the Open Source community a majority of our transactions do not include money. At least not directly. In fact, a majority of our capital is payed in the measure of time and effort; both by the consumers and producers. Both are highly limited resources which in the Open Source world aren’t really given the thought they deserve.

First consumers often give the impression that they think producers have all the time and energy in the world but only a small portion of the community can be classified as producers, and even a smaller subset are full time producers. The only way to grow time and energy in an efficient way is to get more people to become producers. The power of Open Source is not that it is freely available but that anyone can become a producer. Providing that producers work together in some sense of a direction, Open Source growth should be exponential and eventually overtake proprietary development in terms of an efficient economic model and generation of capital. That is why the GPL and other reciprocal licenses are in the long term a better model as they prevent the “picking up and going home once the market expands” syndrome – though there are other forces that effectively prevent that for projects under other licenses. That is all another post though.

The other place where both time and effort are not given enough thought is in the use of the final product. In fact many projects fail to productize their efforts, choosing to leave that up to vendors. I cringe when I hear things like, Linux can do anything you want, you just have to configure XYZ. I don’t know anyone who truly wants something that can do everything. They want something that can do what they want without too much time and effort put into it. Every time we require our users to expend time and effort that is resources they are spending. If the cost is too high they will simply look elsewhere. Believe it or not, the worth of time and effort are readily quantifiable by looking how much people spend a year on unneeded conveniences. It is pretty high.

An example of time and energy wasted is logging into open services. Logins are inevitable but why in a world that prides itself on community are we beaten to the single signon party by the likes of MS Passport or Google checkout? Taking an example from Sound Juicer, the cd ripping app, I have a number of cds which I pick up at local venues because I heard something I liked when walking by. Sound Juicer gives you the option to upload track info to the MusicBrainz database. Unfortunately all this option does is bring me to a login/signup screen after I took the time to enter in all of the track data. Having to get yet another account for something I don’t really care about anymore because I already have the track info is just too much effort to spend so I end up just closing the browser window. Sound Juicer and MusicBrainz does get the consumer seal of approval for making it easy to grab track info when ripping my cds but they missed an opportunity to convert me into a producer which would bring even more value to their consumers. In fact the track grabbing functionality is so transparent – no configurations needed, no extra actions are required – that it is a quintessential example of how an app should be productized. Why adding to the DB isn’t more wiki like or federated with other open services, such as wikipedia, slashdot, lwn, distributions, etc. is somewhat of a mystery. It isn’t a mystery altogether though -

Time and effort on the producer side needs to grow and producers need to work closer together, building bridges instead of just looking to grow their own little island. The Open Source ecosystem, while priding itself on community has often neglected to build technology which works like a community. More cohesion between these islands allows them to grow and innovate on their own but still act as an integrated/efficient experience for the user, minimizing the time and effort it takes to use our software. By having an integrated experience all the way to the producer level we have more of a chance to convert consumers to producers thereby adding more time and effort capital to the entire ecosystem. Make it easier to both consume and produce in the Open Source ecosystem and traditional economics will take over to propel it to the mainstream as it has done in small subsets such as in the business server market.

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