--- title: Ben Rockwood on OSS and The Contribution Society date: 2006-07-03T21:10:03Z modified: 2006-07-03T21:10:03Z permalink: "https://redmonk.com/jgovernor/ben-rockwood-on-oss-and-the-contribution-society/" type: post status: publish excerpt: "" wpid: 650 categories: - Uncategorized timestamp: 2006-07-03T21:10:03Z tags: - Uncategorized --- [The Blog of Ben Rockwood](http://cuddletech.com/blog/pivot/entry.php?id=686 "The Blog of Ben Rockwood") “When I contribute to a project its because I enjoy it and like to help, not because I get something from it. I’ve never made a penny from a project that I’ve worked on. In fact, in all my years, outside of my employment, I’ve only been paid for the Oracle book that SAGE published, and some people have graciously donated gear to me to whom I’m eternally greatful. Perhaps I have a diffrrent view, but this is all about people, not organizations. I didn’t write Toasterview so that some mega-bank didn’t have to shell out for OpenView, I wrote it because the admin working for that mega-bank had cheap ass management that wouldn’t give him what he needed, and I wanted to make that guys life a little easier. I don’t write docs because I think i’m gonna gain, I write it because I want to give to my fellow admins and developers something that I didn’t have.” I can see why Simon Phipps would point to open source as “connected capitalism”… given the audience he was talking to at OSBC. But given he used that phrase, assuming he did, is it any surprise that many open source contributors would feel alienated? Simon is smart enough to know how these comments will be taken, and to cry “ignore the press” kind of misses the mark. If you need to call out a Scott McNealy-style apologism, the kind that smart Sun execs know only too well: “what he _really_ meant was…” then you’re surely just not framing successfully. “[pay at the point of deployment](http://blogs.zdnet.com/open-source/?p=696)” is a _clarification_? Trying, for the sake of discussion, to boil OSS into capitalism is like boling old horse bones down into glue – the result is a sticky mess, which loses the skeleton that made the horse worthy of study in the first place. I don’t mind an analysis that looks at why capitalism is interested in using OSS – but to go the other way and boil down the phenomenon into self-interest is reallty just to fall into [austistic economics](http://www.adbusters.org/metas/eco/truecosteconomics/post-autistic.html) thinking. I should stress that I am reacting to Ben, reacting to an article he read about what Simon said, rather than referring to Simon’s speech itself. But I think Ben’s argument is worth bearing in mind. In many cases Its not about self-interest, even enlightened self-interest, but helping people and [making a contribution](http://www.redmonk.com/jgovernor/archives/000508.html). If our economics can’t explain the phenomenon, then we need a more effective economics. Economic thinking, as it stands, does a pretty poor job of explaining why OSS is thriving. We need to be able to [reverse out of the current thought model](http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/webmink?entry=freedom_to_leave), to work on a new, more inclusive and accurate framework… I am sure Simon has been misrepresented, and I look forward to hearing more on the hows and whys of OSS from Simon. He is one of smartest thinkers on the subject, period. But you can’t argue with Ben Rockwood’s passion or his contribution.