[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.