The main complaint I hear about free and open source software from
people in the computer field is that “You can’t earn money from it.”
Sometimes the claim is thrown about with the superior air of those who
consider themselves versed in the ways of the world–essentially
accusing free software proponents of being economically soft in the
head. At other times the claim is made petulantly, an anxious cry
welling from the breasts of those who have lost jobs in high-tech
fields and spent months looking unsuccessfully for work.

I got a new perspective on this question recently when I read the book
Innovation and Entrepreneurship: Practice and Principles,
published in 1985 by the much-celebrated business researcher Peter
F. Drucker. It discusses, among other things, the sources for new
ideas. One passage that can prove significant in discussions of free
software comes from Chapter 9, titled Source: New Knowledge:

The world’s computer industry began in 1947-8. Not until the early
1980s, more than thirty years later, did the industry as a whole reach
break-even point. To be sure, a few companies (practically all of them
American, by the way) began to make money much earlier. And one, IBM,
the leader, began to make a great deal of money earlier still. But
across the industry the profits of those few successful computer
makers were more than offset by the horrendous losses of the rest; the
enormous losses, for instance, which the big international electrical
companies took in their abortive attempts to become computer
manufacturers.

And exactly the same thing happened in every earlier “high-tech”
boom–in the railroad booms of the early nineteenth century, in the
electrical apparatus and the automobile booms between 1880 and 1914,
in the electric appliance and the radio booms of the 1920s, and so
on.

In other words, during the entire careers of most people who begin
technology revolutions, their industries are losing money.

To understand the promise and meaning of free software, we have to
look beyond it as a business to see it as an element of a larger
society and economy.

What this passage by Drucker tells me, in effect, is that dynamic
societies are willing to sink money into new technology for the benefit
of the larger public, even if it means the ruin of the first people
working in the field. To be true, these industries eventually start to
make a profit–but in a very different form from the first start-ups,
and in vastly different social environments. Why should free software
be held to a standard that other technological innovations cannot
meet?

It just so happened that, during the same weekend I read Drucker’s
book, I also read Dostoevsky’s Gambler. And I thought about
how investment in new technology is itself an awful gamble. A thousand
investments will vanish utterly while a few succeed big. But investors
delude themselves that their money won’t enter the black hole along
with the rest of the cash that society, as we’ve seen, loses in the
gamble on new technology.

What’s hard about free software is that it makes the necessary losses
more explicit. On the other hand, investing in free software is made
easier because its benefits flow more immediately and obviously to the
same ultimate beneficiaries as the other technological
advances–everybody.

What economics are involved in the shift to free software?