[dahart]

Wikipedia does use Wikipedia, a privately owned organization, as an example of a digital commons.

The ‘tragedy’ that the top comment referred to is losing unlimited access to some of GitHub’s features, as described in the article (shallow clones, CPU limits, API rate limits, etc.). The finiteness, or natural limit, does exist in the form of bandwidth, storage capacity, server CPU capacity, etc.. The Wikipedia article goes through that, so I’m left with the impression you didn’t understand it.

[bawolff]

> Wikipedia does use Wikipedia, a privately owned organization

The Wikimedia organization does not actually own wikipedia. They do not control editorial policy nor own the copyright of any of the contents. They do not pay any of the editors.

[dahart]

They do own the servers. The rest of your comment is what demonstrates why Wikipedia counts as “commons”. Much of the same can be said for GitHub too.

[nkmnz]

It is really annoying that you're shifting the goal post by bringing up Wikipedia (as an example, not the article), which is very much different from Github in many ways. Still, Wikipedia is not a common good in my book, but at least in the case of Wikipedia I can understand the reasoning and it's a much more interesting case.

But let's stick with Github. On which of the following statements can we agree?

Z1) A "Commons" is a system of interacting market participants, governed by shared interests and incentives (and sometimes shared ownership). Github, a multi billion subsidiary of the multi trillion dollar company Microsoft, and I, their customer, are not members of the same commons; we don't share many interests, we have vastly different incentives, and we certainly do not share any ownership. We have a legally binding contract that each side can cancel within the boundaries of said contract under the applicable law.

Z2) A tragedy in the sense of the Tragedy of the Commons is that something bad happens even though everyone can have the best intentions, because the system lacks a mechanism would allow to a) coordinate interests and incentives across time, and b) to reward sustainable behavior instead of punishing it.

A) Github giving away stuff for free while covering the cost does not constitute a common good from... 1. a legal perspective 2. an ethical perspective 3. an economic perspective

B) If a free tier is successful, a profit maximizing company with a market penetration far from saturation will increase the resources provided in total, while there is no such mechanism or incentive for any participant in a market involving a common good, e.g. there will be no one providing additional pasture for free if an Allmende is already destroying the existing pasture through overgrazing.

C) If a free tier is unsuccessful because it costs more than it enables in new revenue, a company can simply shut it down – no tragedy involved. No server has been depreciated, no software destroyed, no user lost their share of a commonly owned good.

D) More users of a free tier reduce net loss / increase net earnings per free user for the provider, while more cattle grazing on a pasture decrease net earnings / increase net loss per cow.

E) If I use less of Github, you don't have any incentive to use more of it. This is the opposite of a commons, where one participant taking less of it puts out an incentive to everybody else to take their place and take more of it.

F) A service that you pay for with your data, your attention, your personal or company brand and reach (e.g. with public repositories), is not really free.

G) The tiny product samples that you can get for free in perfume shops do not constitute a common good, even though they are limited, "free" for the user, and presumably beneficial even for people not involved in the transaction. If you think they were a common good, what about Nestlé offering Cheerios with +25% more for free? Are those 20% a common good just because they are free? Where do you draw the line? Paying with data, attention, and brand + reach is fine, but paying for only 80% of the produce is not fine?

H) The concepts of "moral hazard" and "free riders" apply to all your examples, both Github and Wikipedia. The concept of a Commons (capital C) is neither necessary nor helpful in describing the problems that you want to describe wrt to free services provided by either Github of Wikipedia.

[dahart]

Nope, no goal posts were moved, Wikipedia and GitHub are both private entities that offer privately funded free services to everyone, and due to the widespread free access, both have been considered to be examples of digital commons by others. I didn’t make up the Wikipedia example, it’s in Wikipedia being offered as one of the canonical examples of digital commons, and unfortunately for you it pokes a hole in your argument. If your ‘book’ disagrees with the WP article, you’re free to fix it (since WP is a digital commons), and you’re also free to use it to re-evaluate whether your book needs updating.

You seem to be stuck on definitions of ‘commons’, and unfortunately that’s not a compelling argument for reasons I’ve already stated. Also unfortunate that there are fundamental terminology flaws, or made up definitions, or straw men arguments, or incorrect statements, or opinions in every single item you listed.

“Tragedy of the Commons” is a phrase that became an economic term of art a long time ago. It’s now an abstract concept, and gets used to mean (as well as defined by) any situation in which a community of people overusing shared resources causes any loss of access to those shared resources for anyone else in the community. “The tragedy of the commons is an economic theory claiming that individuals tend to exploit shared resources so that demand outweighs supply, and it becomes unavailable for the whole.” (Investopedia) I’ve already cited multiple sources that define it that way, and so far you’ve shared no evidence to the contrary.

There are also tons of examples online where the phrase has been used to refer to small, local, or privatized resources, I found a dozen in like one minute, so I already know it’s incorrect to claim that people don’t use the phrase in the way I’m suggesting.

Even though the phrase does not depend on any strict definition of commons (or of tragedy), none of your argument addresses the fact that what’s common in, say, Germany is not freely available to Iranians, for example. Land is often used in ‘tragedy of the commons’ examples. Hardin’s original example was sheep grazing on “public” land, and yet there is really no such thing as common land anywhere on this planet, all of it is claimed by subgroups, e.g., countries, and is private is some sense. The idea of commons, and even some of the alternate dictionary definitions, make explicit note that the word is relative to a specific community of people. Nothing you’ve said addresses that fact, and it means that ‘Tragedy of the Commons’ has always referred to resources that are not common in a global context. GitHub and Wikipedia are more common than “public” land in America in that global sense, because they’re used by and available to more people than US land is.

What I can agree with is that it’s common for people to mean things like land, air, and water, when using or referring to the phrase, and I agree those things count as commons.

[nkmnz]

You're confusing public goods with common goods. That's your personal tragedy of the commons.

> “The tragedy of the commons is an economic theory claiming that individuals tend to exploit shared resources so that demand outweighs supply, and it becomes unavailable for the whole.” (Investopedia)

EXACTLY. This is NOT what is happening in the case of Github. As explained plenty of times, Github has the incentive to INCREASE their supply, making MORE available for the whole, if the whole demands MORE. Also, they are a centralized, coordinated entity, that can change the rules for the whole flock, which is one of the famous coordination problems associated with common goods. They can also discriminate between their contractual partners and optimize for multi-period results for reducing moral hazards and free-riding. It must be stupidity to not see these fundamental difference on the systems level.

> I didn’t make up the Wikipedia example, it’s in Wikipedia being offered as one of the canonical examples of digital commons

Yeah, the example in the article is Wikipedia, not Github. That's your example. All my statements refer to 100% to Github and probably only 90% to Wikipedia. That said, there are true digital commons, e.g. the copper cables connecting the houses in your street. Unsufficient number of bands in old wifi standards.

Since Dunning-Kruger has entered the chat, I'm going to leave. Have a good day; you will have a hard time having serious conversations if you do not accept that it helps everyone to favor precise language over watering down the meaning of concepts, like some social scientists and journalists seem to prefer for self-marketing purposes.

[dahart]

> You’re confusing public goods with common goods.

Am I? Where did I do that? The distinction between common and public is defined as whether or not the thing can succumb to tragedy of the commons. If public goods are “non-rivalrous”, then land is not a public good, it’s a common good, right? And “common” land is owned by nation states, or by smaller geographic communities, is it not? Therefore, ownership is always involved and the land is not available for use by people from other nation states, right?

Above, you said “there’s no exclusive ownership of a commons”. But sheep grazing on “commons” land is generally land owned exclusively by a country, nation, state, province, city, etc.. I assume what you meant was that no one person or sub-group within the geographical community owns the commons.

> This is NOT what is happening in the case of GitHub.

That’s not true, the article we’re commenting on gave examples of at least three different specific things that GitHub has limited in response to overuse, and the comment that started this thread was reacting to that fact. If they have incentive to increase their supply, why didn’t they actually do it? Logic can’t override history.

> there are true digital commons, e.g. the copper cables connecting the houses in your street

That’s not true, that’s not a commons at all, and not what the phrase “digital commons” means. In the US, the cables are owned by the telcom providers that installed them, they are private property. Maybe there are public cables where you live, but in that case, it seems like maybe you are the one confusing public and common goods. The phrase ‘digital commons’ generally speaking refers to digital goods, not physical goods. (But there is some leakage into the physical world, which is why some digital commons are susceptible to the tragedy of the commons.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_commons (Do note that GitHub is listed there as an example of a digital commons.)

> It must be stupidity to not see these fundamental difference on the systems level

FWIW, you’ve flatly broken HN guidelines here, and this reflects extremely poorly on you and your argument. From my point of view, I can only interpret this lack of civility to mean you you’re frustrated about not being able to answer my questions or form a convincing argument.

Please review, and strive for better: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[xp84]

GP shouldn't have said something insulting, but I do think it's you who are being obtuse here in not acknowledging that this is at least very different than the field everyone can graze on that gets overgrazed, that is the most simple and widely-accepted type of commons. It's probably not worth arguing semantics at all ("is this a commons?") because there isn't a "Tragedy of the Commons" central authority that could ever adjudicate that. Any definition of commons could be used; the only thing that matters is if the definitions are useful to define what's going on and to compare it to other situations.

In this case, GitHub can very cheaply add enforceable rules and force heavy users to consume only what they consider a tolerable amount of resources. The majority who don't need an outsized amount of resources will never be affected by this. That is why there is no 'tragedy' here.

It would be as if the grazing field were outfitted with sheep-facial-recognition and could automatically and at trivial cost, gently drone-airlift any sheep outside the field after they consume 3x what a normal sheep eats each day. In what most of us think of as a ToC situation, there is little that can be done besides closing the field or subdividing it into tiny, private plots which are policed.

[dahart]

The singular point of debate here from my side has been whether the phrase ‘tragedy of the commons’ applies to cases where the ‘commons’ are owned to the exclusion of some people, and nothing else. I don’t believe I have failed to acknowledge the differences between physical and digital commons, but let me correct that impression now: GitHub certainly is very different from a sheep-grazing field in almost every way. GitHub is even different from Wikipedia in many ways, just like GP said. I am arguing those differences, no matter how large, do not matter purely in terms of whether you can call these a ‘commons’, and I’ve supported that opinion by showing evidence that other people call both GitHub and Wikipedia a ‘digital commons’. If any definition of commons can be used, including privately owned land that is made available to the public, then I think you and I agree completely. The Wikipedia article about this phrase actually points out what I’ve been saying here, that common land does not exist.

There is a central authority on this topic: the paper by Hardin that coined the phrase. It’s worth a read. He defined ‘tragedy’ to be in the dramatic sense, e.g., a Greek or Shakespearean tragedy: “We may well call it ‘the tragedy of the commons,’ using the word ‘tragedy’ as the philosopher Whitehead used it: ‘The essence of dramatic tragedy is not unhappiness. It resides in the solemnity of the remorse-less working of things.’”

Hardin did not define ‘commons’, but he used multiple examples of things that are owned to the exclusion of others, and he even pointed out that a bank robber thinks of a bank as a commons. He himself blurred the line of what a commons means, and his actual argument depends only on the idea that commons means something shared and nothing more. In fact, he was making a point about human behavior, and his argument is stronger when ‘commons’ refers to any shared resources that can be exhausted by overuse at all. Hardin would have had a good chuckle over this extremely silly debate.

The actual points Hardin was making behind his phrase ‘Tragedy of the Commons’ were that Adam Smith’s ‘Invisible Hand’ economics, and Libertarian thinking, are provably wrong, and that we should abolish the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights, specifically the right to breed freely, because he believes these things will certainly lead to overpopulation of the earth and thus increased human suffering. The only actual ‘commons’ he truly cared about in this paper is the earth’s space and food supply. The question of ownership is wholly and utterly irrelevant to his phrase.

GitHub adding rules that curtails people does limit some people’s access, that’s the point. How many people it affects I don’t know, and I don’t think it’s especially relevant, but note that in this case one single GitHub user being limited might affect many many people - Homebrew was one of the examples.

“Tragedy” never referred to the magnitude of the problem, as you and GP are assuming. Hardin’s “tragedy” refers to the human character flaw of thinking that shared things are preferable to limitations, because he argues that we end up with uncontrolled (worse) limitations anyway. His “tragedy” is the inevitability of loss, the irony of misguided belief in the very idea of a commons.