[Ologn]

> What drives our economy? Scarcity... Some people view open source as being about a post-scarcity economy in which human labor isn't need, an economy based on abundance. That's bullshit though.

I don't think that is the case at all.

If I have a woodshop and a customer comes in and hands me wood and nails, and I spend a day banging together a table for them, at the end of the day there is one table. A scarce good - one table is created, no more.

If I spent a day coding an Android app, publish it on Google Play, and it takes off and Android's daily two billion users take to it, my day's worth of work is not used by one person or one family. It is used by two billion people. Perhaps my app is mostly based on gluing together open source Android libraries and non-Android-specific libraries for the open source Android OS.

There is a scarcity and labor needed for the creation of the table or the app. The difference in the case of the app which almost for free goes out to two billion people, is that it's virtually free to copy and distribute it. It's really not even a commodity any more.

[bad_user]

> If I have a woodshop and a customer comes in and hands me wood and nails, and I spend a day banging together a table for them, at the end of the day there is one table. A scarce good - one table is created, no more.

That's natural scarcity. We also have artificial scarcity imposed by laws and technology.

If you think that's unfair, I might agree morally speaking, but then we'd end up talking about how we're actually debating Marx's "labor theory of value" (i.e. value is given by the total amount of labor required to produce it), which was fundamentally flawed.

[crpatino]

What makes Labor Theory of Value fundamentally flawed? The fact that it has the letters M, A, R and X tied to its authoriship?

I agree that toilling at useless task adds zero value in the best case -more often than not, it adds negative value by creating commitments to perform further useless tasks in the future- but what is so wrong with considering costs of production within the value added? I think it makes more sense to recognize zero (or negative) value added task for what they are instead of declaring them "marginally valueable" and then try to push the externality of their cost unto others.

[kingbirdy]

The point is a scarcity of a particular type of resource, though - if you're contracted to make a table, then that one specific table is scarce, but I can still go to IKEA and buy as many tables as I want. Similarly with software, copies of the same piece of software are prevalent, but there's only one specific app that does the thing you need.