Re: What about changing the rules?

[Ray Cromwell <ray@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Ok, this is the absolute last post from me on this subject, I just don't
want my position misrepresented.

> For those who say that a collective generating $x revenue, when split among
> the members yields only $0.50 or whatever nonsense. Think about it. Any
> viable commercial institution today that generates revenue gives its
> employees far less than an equal share of profit, and yet people manage to
> draw a living wage from it. Don't confuse profit with turnover. Wages in a
> traditional model are part of the turnover and so when one looks at
> splitting the profit we end up with a small figure.

  I never said a collective couldn't be successful, the question is,
do they scale? He was talking about a huge virtual collective of
20,000 to 100,000 people. At that size, you'd need $1-5billion in
revenue to pay your workers a modest salary. Can you name any
collectives or non-commercial entities of this size which take in
billions of revenue besides governments, the world religions, or the
large charities? (and of those, money is still pushed to the top to
the people managing the organizations)

  Can a collective of 10-20 programmers succeed? Sure, IMHO, most
startup companies before they aquire funding are defacto
communes. Take Excite, 6 guys living in a garage. Or my own situation,
where I and my partners pay each others living expensives for the past
year. Also, we have the FSF, KDE, Apache Group, etc as examples.
(although I wouldn't call those economic successes for the developers)


  I was under the impression that the idea was to scale up to something
that could take on commercial entities like MS by exploiting the 
"open-source effect" and getting tens of thousands of people to work
on something. Only, instead of the people getting *nothing* (ala the
RedHat situation), they would be given ownership or wages. It is
only in this scenario that the economics don't work out.

 As wonderful as Redhat's success is, they could not even begin to afford
to pay everyone who worked on the software they distribute. Nor could
RedHat stock (assuming an IPO and $1billion market capitalization)


> Anything a corporation can do a collective can do. the only difference is a
> collective doesn't syphon of monies, or push them toward the top, but
> evenly ditributes them on a fair and commonly agreed basis.

 Yes, corporations, CEOs, managers, marketing people, salesman, and
"suits" are bad, they steal hard earned money from the programmers who
truly deserve it. If only the programmers could figure this out, and
get together by themselves, they could break free of their chains, and
usher in a new era... 

 The question that always comes to my mind is, if collectives are so
efficient (no people siphoning money off the top), and offer so many
benefits to the workers, and since software development takes almost
no capital cost (no capitalist needs to be present to buy the tools or
factory), why aren't they any successful mega-size-collectives out there?

  All transaction costs and barriers have fell. Communications costs
are near nill. Money flows with ease. The equipment needed to develop
costs $500 at your local PC store. All of the possible things that
could stand in the way of a large software collective are at historic
lows. Hell, you could have 50,000 Indian programmers in your
collective working from India.  I guess we will see if this can pan
out. IMHO, human nature is the road block. Programmers don't need
anarcho-communism to get freedom. It just seems silly to me, that so
many geeks out there are pulling down $80,000/year, becoming
millionaires overnight, or living an expensive but bohemnian lifestyle
doing consulting, for anyone to be worried about being a downtrodden
member of the proletariat.  Maybe the economy is different in the UK,
but in the US, if you live in New York, California, or the DC area,
you can make twice the national median wage by just doing HTML
whacking.


 I'm not a cynic as someone else suggested. Cynicism is the last
refuge of an idealist. I'm a healthy skeptic, and when someone
proposes a grand scheme of changing the very nature of the way things
are done today, you have to be just a little skeptical and critical.
I wish him well. If he fails, he won't lose much except opportunity
cost, since it is trivial to set up a open-source collective on the
net.

Cheers,
-Ray








 












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