Tuesday, December 21, 2004

The large centralized for profit corporation is in many ways a creature of the industrial revolution. At the turn of the century centralized management and decentralized capital investment made sense, because productivity gains required large financial investments. The pooling of financial resources provided the large investment capital required and a centralized professional management class marshalled those financial resources for maximum profit. While two tier structure of investors and managers has proved efficient (the modern corporate form employs more people than any other business organization), this structure also creates tensions and conflicts of interest that require extensive legal oversight and therefore inefficiency. Now consider the success of Linux and Mozilla Firefox, to name just two examples of successful Open Source projects. Both are examples of self-organizing, value creating "communities" that required neither centralized professional management nor large far flung financial capital investments. Given the possibility of creating desirable products (can we leave it to "intangibles" such as software and creative works for now?) via collaborative efforts such as Linux and the Mozilla Project, can we envision economic models that permit these "productive collaborators" to reap the economic benefits of what they produce while at the same time allowing the underlying functionality (in the software context), ideas (creative works - music, text, audio and video) to be shared and re-used more freely (I'm not advocating the end of property). That is the question that this site is dedicated to exploring. Today the main, retort to this question is "Services". By that I understand that if you give the software away you can provide support to it for a fee. Or if you give the music away, you sell tickets to a show later. While I don't dispute the value of those revenue streams it seems to me there's more to it than just that. Thus this site. Please join me in this exploration! 8:36:14 PM    comment []

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