19.1 Michael feldstein - open source, economics, and higher education

So far this series has included many outstanding contributions that ranged from the deeply philosophical to the deeply pragmatic. My contribution aims to be somewhere between philosophical and pragmatic. (I won’t pretend to be deep.) I want to address some practical concerns about open source by drawing on economic theory. In speaking with many friends and colleagues in higher education, I still find that many of them are puzzled and skeptical regarding open source. They just don’t trust it. They don’t see how it could possibly work.

Now, given that they use open source software every time they open a Firefox browser, connect at home or work over a Linksys router, or start up their Apple computer (or iPhone), and that they likely use open source software almost every time they send an email or view a web page over the servers that keep the internet running, this is a strange concern to have. “Sure, open source works in practice, but does it work in theory?” In some ways, it is a distinctly academic way of viewing the world.

At the same time, there is something counterintuitive about the way open source seems to defy our sense of economics. How could a globally distributed group of volunteers, incited and led by an M.S. student in computer science, possibly develop an operating system that would eventually rival one built by Microsoft, a company with 80,000 employees and tens of billions of dollars in annual revenue at its disposal? And if we don’t understand the mechanisms that make this phenomenon possible, how can we trust them? How can we trust our students’ education to it?

For an answer, I’m going to look to the work of Harvard Law professor Yochai Benkler, as articulate in his article “ Coase’s Penguin, or Linux and the Nature of the Firm ” and his book The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transform Markets and Freedom . Benkler, in turn, draws upon the Nobel Prize-winning work of economist Ronald Coase, whose seminal work explained the economic justification for that fundamental engine of capitalism, the firm. If you believe Benkler (and I do), then the reason that the existence open source (and other products of commons-based peer production such as open educational resources) defies our sense of economics is the same reason that the behavior of a black hole defies our sense of physics: the conditions under which they operate are different than the ones we have seen in our everyday lives. If you can understand these differences, then you see that the laws of physics (or economics) still apply. The world makes sense again.