The Commons as New Economy & What This Means for Research

Abstract

Suppose the entire social and commercial fabric supporting the creation of software is changing-changing by becoming completely a commons and thereby dropping dramatically in cost. How would the world change and how would we recognize the changes? Software would not be continually recreated by different organizations, so the global "efficiency" of software production would increase dramatically; therefore it would be possible to create value without waste, experimentation and risk-taking would become affordable-and probably necessary because firms could not charge for their duplication of infrastructure-, and the size and complexity of built systems would increase dramatically, perhaps beyond human comprehension. As important or more so, the activities of creating software would become the provenance of people, organizations, and disciplines who today are mostly considered consumers of software-there would, in a very real sense, be only a single software system in existence, continually growing; it would be an ecology husbanded along by economists, sociologists, governments, clubs, communities, and herds of disciplines. New business models would be developed, perhaps at an alarming rate. How should we design our research to observe and understand this change? There is some evidence the change is underway, as the result of the adoption of open source by companies who are not merely appreciative receivers of gifts from the evangelizers of open source, but who are clever thieves re-purposing the ideas and making up new ones of their own.