[_meqs]

Honestly I think this opens up a really interesting discussion in open source. I know this is satire, but bear with me.

If I see a project, and I get curious about its test results, I can just look at the logs of the tests running and the ways in which they're run. I can see exactly what's going on, and if something weird's going on, I can fork the project, enable tests, and start a discussion with the maintainers. Maybe it's important enough that the tests are enabled and the code is fixed.

What's really interesting to me about this is that there's no competition in sight. There are no market pressures that make someone look at the code or fix it, it's just the desire for good code. Whereas with market pressures, I'm incentivized to lock down code and hide test results! You can say that's an edge case or uncommon, but the fact of the matter is that it happened. Anyway, this makes me curious about two things:

1. In software specifically, does the reduction of competition necessarily contribute to a more collaborative and more productive development process than what we expect with traditional systems?

2. If 1 is true, how widely does this scale? What could be better if some of the control of owners was removed? For instance, if the test processes of VW were public, none of this would have happened.

I've spent so long being told that competition is the be all and end all of productivity, so I'm just curious about what's happening here, and I want to know how far it goes.

[atomflunder]

I don‘t think it‘s true that there is no competition in the example you give, rather competition simply happens along a differen axis.

In the open source space there are certain characteristics that make your project more likely to succeed. Being, well, open is obviously one of them, just like passing emission tests is a factor in cars. So, open source projects have to be competitive along the openness axis in order to succeed, just like VW needs to pass these tests, one way or the other. To me it seems like the same mechanism really, just fed with different incentives.

[toomanyducks]

Are the produced mechanisms really the same when the incentives change? That's not really something I can quite get myself to believe.

The incentives in free software, in my limited experience, are to grow a productively maintained system, not necessarily a profitable one (assuming, of course, the existence of some outside source of stable income). And with that motivation, I feel that competition disappears. When I look at an alternative solution to a problem I'm trying to solve, it's more in the lense of 'oh, that's a good idea!' than anger that their solution is better than mine. Then, if I'm lucky, it might be the type of thing that can be refactored out into a library and shared across implementations. I still feel that competition precludes that, regardless of incentives.