Howard Rheingold gibt in einem Interview im Business Week einen Hinweis auf zwei interessante Ansätze zu Open Source.

Then there's open source [software]. Steve Weber, a political economist at UC Berkeley, sees open source as an economic means of production that turns the free-rider problem to its advantage. All the people who use the resource but don't contribute to it just build up a larger user base. And if a very tiny percentage of them do anything at all -- like report a bug -- then those free riders suddenly become an asset.

And maybe this isn't just in software production. There's [the idea of] "open spectrum," coined by [Yale law professor] Yochai Benkler. The dogma is that the two major means of organizing for economic production are the market and the firm. But Benkler uses open source as an example of peer-to-peer production, which he thinks may be pointing toward a third means of organizing for production.

Und es wäre nicht Howard würde er hinter diesen Trends nicht eine fundamentale Veränderung der ökonomischen Produktion vermuten. Lesenswert.

Business Week Interview