Loved the Daniel Pink video: life & work aren't only about Profit at any cost.
longer version at: http://stevej-on-it.blogspot.com/2016/11/why-open-source-google-facebook-amazon.html
Humans in groups benefit more from general co-operation than competing fiercely all the time.
Competition creates 'challenge' and prevents complacency and laziness - it's not a bad thing in itself.
But competition comes with downsides:
it's economically 'inefficient', re-inventing the wheel repeatedly.
In Engineering terms, everyone reinvents the wheel, repeating some, not all, mistakes
and no one group ever learns all the 'good' things. Until they merge or are bought up...
Monopolies, or Oligopolies, actively suppress competitors, reduce diversity and multiply costs to consumers.
They may be 'private', but they are anti-competitive and economically disastrous for the markets they hold captive.
Think "Too Big to Fail" and the 2008 global financial crash to understand it's more than just goods affected.
Open Source actively prevents the worst outcomes & encourages the best that Capitalism has to offer: competition of ideas, sharing of Information and knowledge and building on the work of others.
Open Source scales, encourages invention, diversity, novelty & rewards innovation, hard work & risk taking.
It actively prevents asymmetric rewards and 'winner takes all'.
This is capitalism in action. It's mass competition within truly free markets.
Open Business _is_ risky: you can't be complacent or stop Putting the Customer First.
A simplistic analysis might brand Open Source "socialist", but it is the precise opposite.
Open Source underpins fierce, wide-spread competition, while allowing customers needs to be met.
Open Source truly levels the playing field, allowing anyone to earn money based on merit not an inherited position or privilege.
Open Source is an unfamiliar model to many:
it's fierce competition, that embraces sharing, egalitarian market access and equitable rewards for work.
It's the Epitome of Adam Smith's Free Market, not anything else.
Sharing source code removes information-based market distortions: all sellers and buyers have full market information.
Google, Facebook and Amazon got huge on the back of Open Source and actively contribute their work back.
Notably, not _all_ their work, but key parts.
These big Internet companies have huge turnovers, have made their shareholders rich and are known for being fiercely competitive. Their success is based on Open Source & they know this: actively supporting developers & projects.
To characterise their commercial success as solely due to Open Source, or within the reach of every 2-person start-up is wrong. For every super-large Open Source business, there are tens of thousands of failed startups, thousands of short-lived businesses, hundreds of sustainable mid-scale businesses and a large community of individuals that share and benefit in the work over time.
Open Source is driven in the short-term by profits or altruism funded by research grants or personal interest and exertion.
In the long-term, we know from Google, Facebook et al (& foundations like 'Apache' and 'GNU'/'FSF'), that money is the fuel for Open Source development: and it's mainly contributed 'in kind' by big corporates acting in their own commercial interests.
IBM, HP, Redhat & Canonical/ubuntu, even Intel and Microsoft, collectively spend billions each year on software & testing they seemingly 'just' give away. For them, this is not philanthropy, it's a hard-nosed business investment that repays itself many-fold.
If large Corporations at the heart of the US economy think Open Source makes financial, business and marketing sense, then what is everyone else missing?
Money makes the world go round and Open Source generates stunningly large sales and profits for those smart enough to embrace it and realise it confers a competitive advantage.
It's just good business.
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