Comments on: Open Source is not Altruism

By: ordnas

ordnas — Thu, 16 Aug 2007 11:42:06 +0000

@Jean-Marc: I totally agree with you – maybe my initial post is not clear enough. Yes, “altruism is strategic egoism”! Also, thanks for the pointer.

By: Jean-Marc Liotier

Jean-Marc Liotier — Thu, 16 Aug 2007 11:18:47 +0000

For the reasons you enumerate, and for many others, free software indeed exists mostly because it is profitable to those who produce and support it. But I disagree with the way you present this as not being altruistic. Altruism is not an attitude born of ethical reasonings : altruism is strategic egoism !

This article ( http://www.everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=1267594 ) makes a good job of presenting how game theory demonstrates how altruism is for social animals like us the best strategy to maximize profit.

Self interest and social development are aligned after all… Isn’t it beautiful ?

By: Mauri G Gronroos

Mauri G Gronroos — Wed, 31 Jan 2007 01:51:37 +0000

I quite agree. Open Source doesn’t mean that we give something away for free. It means, we try to encourage people to give their ideas and contributions to our use.

This is exactly where we aim with our research that starts on March 05, 2007. We’ll launch an interactive Web 2.0 concept in China to examine how a social network grows from zero to one million. The theory says, the growth will follow the Fisher-Pry curve (s-curve). However, it can be a linear or a bell curve as well.

This is an Open Source research project, i.e. any serious researcher (or student) can obtain background information and the statistics that the software collects. Thgs is clearly the “altruism part”. The “Selfishness part” is, though, we await all collaborative researchers to share the results with us in non-commercial contextes.

If any of you is interested in this OS project, you can read more or even join at: http://www.km-int.net.