Getting Rich off Those Who Work for Free | Hacker News Reader

Getting Rich off Those Who Work for Free

time.com

23 pointsmaurycy11 comments

I'm sorry, but saying that when I use sites like Flickr for free I'm lending them free labour is like saying I'm an employee of NBC for watching TV.

Not quite. Flickr, Youtube, et al. all derive their most value from user contributions. What good would Youtube be if users didn't upload videos?

When described economically, labor is a resource and is one half of the production function:

P = c K^a * L^b

where a, b, and c are constants. P is production, K is capital, and L is labor.

Youtube provides the capital, their site, and the users provide the labor, the adding of value through their videos.

Granted, the actual division isn't so clear cut in this case, or most cases, but by using these sites, you add value in a way that is fundamentally different than when you watch television.

I'm not adding value to NBC's bottom line by watching their television program?? It's called ratings. On the internet, we call them page views.

Either way, I think the equation is changed fundamentally when labour does not need to be incentivized with money. The labour in this case is users, who choose to create value with their own time. How can we have a discussion about efficient inputs of labour when the price tends towards nothing? See, look, I've gone and made my brain hurt!

Who said you don't add to NBC's bottom line when you watch television? Of course you do, otherwise they wouldn't show it. However, what you don't do is you don't improve the quality of their programming, at least not directly.

The equation doesn't change I don't believe, just it's implications. You no longer buy L, you have to earn it with K. Labour isn't free, even when you don't pay for it in money. Its dynamics are just more complicated.

I think he was mainly talking about people who upload pictures to flickr, not so much those who just browse the content. An equivelent comparison would be comeone who uploads to flickr and someone who is interviewed on NBC for free. In fact the article states this exact example.

Bad analogy. Watching TV is always passive. Users of Flickr upload content, comment, categorize... even the most pssive use possible, just browsing, leaves a useful clickstream trail.

dude, you're confusing the concept of 'effort' with the concept of 'labour'. The fact remains that I go to Flickr for purposes of entertaining myself, not for purposes of performing work.

I make software to entertain myself, but I also get paid because it generates value for others, too.

The author doesn't quite get, or fails to mention, that many companies that use Linux or make money from it, like Google, IBM, Motorola, Red Hat, Trolltech, etc., invest money and programmer time back into the open source projects they get software from - and this is not exactly altruistic. Still, not a bad article.

Indeed he doesn't mention it, but this gives me the impression that he does _get_ it:

"Clever entrepreneurs and even established companies can profit from this volunteerism--but only if they don't get too greedy. The key, Benkler says, is 'managing the marriage of money and nonmoney without making nonmoney feel like a sucker.'"

When IBM invests in OSS the above is exactly what they're doing: giving back part of their profit to keep everybody happy.

Still equating OSS to anarchism & altruism, I see. The lessons of capitalism vs communism must have been very hard because lots of otherwise intelligent people can't frame OSS any other way.

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