[wplug] COLLABORATION AS DISTRIBUTED CAPITALISM?

[David Ostroske]

That's a very good article, Don!

I'm not so sure that the title is such a misnomer, though. You'd be
ignoring the "other side" if you just focused on the not-for-profit
entities. There's a sociological aspect to capitalism that appears
anytime that somebody or some group wants to make something valuable
available to others.

It's worth just looking at the first diagram in the article, "Firms and
CMP's: Mutual Adaptation," to see why these not-for-profit entities are
making free and open-source software even more valuable to itself and to
outside firms.

The not-for-profit entities help to preserve the technical autonomy of
the projects (no market droids!) as well as to maintain the open-source
community's natural currency, their pride in crafting really great
software. That's valuable in and of itself, but it doesn't exist in a
vacuum. That's what this article is about, why these NFP's came to be.

On Mon, 2003-09-08 at 09:24, Vanco, Donald wrote:
> Interesting article at Open:
> http://www.open-mag.com/0936339824.shtml
> ...title is something of a misnomer, it's more about Linux projects as
> not-for-profit entities...
> 
> Don

-- 
--- David Ostroske
    eksortso at linuxmail.org