Why free-riding doesn't apply to some online collaboration
On the Freedom to Tinker blog, Timothy Lee explores the irrelevance of the economic notion of "free riding" when it comes to many kinds of online collaboration. As Lee notes, many thinkers on this subject have talked about how projects like Wikipedia "overcome" the free-rider anxiety (the idea that someone else will benefit from your labor without having to contribute to it), but that's not quite right: when someone else's enjoyment of your labor costs you nothing, and buys you fame, then you don't have a free-rider problem at all:
The second problem with the "free riding" frame is that it fails to appreciate that the sheer scale of the Internet changes the nature of collective action problems. With a traditional meatspace institution like a church, business or intramural sports league, it's essential that most participants "give back" in order for the collective effort to succeed. The concept of "free riding" emphasizes the fact that traditional offline institutions expect and require reciprocation from the majority of their members for their continued existence. A church in which only, say, one percent of members contributed financially wouldn't last long. Neither would an airline in which only one percent of the customers paid for their tickets.The Trouble with "Free Riding"
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I can think of several Internet sites other than Wikipedia, where "free riding" or the ability freely view or use the work that someone else has done and implement it for your own use has done much more good than if the works were to be copy written and sold in some form. Sites, such as ihacked, hack a day, instructables, MAKE, to name a few, are freely taking the work of smart, creative people and spreading that knowledge - inspiring others to do the same. Intentionally or not, getting people to create, even by emulation, has to be a good thing and would be put to much less use if the user had to buy the ideas in some form or another.
Duh!
from the post: A church in which only, say, one percent of members contributed financially wouldn't last long. Neither would an airline in which only one percent of the customers paid for their tickets.
Neither will a church or an airline whose heads are pulling down 7 to 9 figure salaries.
The selfish fear of "free riding" or worse yet "other's profit" seems to be at the heart of the GPL. (FSF : Why Copyleft) Maybe it's not always appropriate...
This seems to be a case of "if you don't get it, it can't be explained to you". People with interests in things like to share those things. Simple as that. If you like books, you want to evangelize books to everyone. If you like movies, you evangelize movies. If there is a forum where someone can write about subjects that interest them in the hopes of spreading that interest, people will do so. The same engine is behind piracy of books, movies, music, and software-- someone likes some piece of media, and they want to share it with their peers, even if "peer" means just some other anonymous persons on the internet who you'll never actually interact with. Call it "karma". Call it "whuffie". But don't expect people who's lives center around the desire to make lots money to understand the work being it's own reward.
...Actually, the "free rider" anxiety is replaced by the "vandal attack" anxiety, where pedantic misanthropes - many of whom are admins - come along and revert hours of work simply because of a whim. It's one of the reasons I quit contributing to Wikipedia articles quite some time ago, as I fail to see how two catamitic teenagers from Englandland know enough about various subjects to rule whether article changes should be allowed.
#6: Ahem. [citation needed] Ahem.
Seriously, a link to the edit(s) in question?
Also, it sounds highly unlikely that an admin would have reverted your edits, as that's not what admins do. It's a lot more likely that some random other editor reverted your edits, in which case you should have tried to engage them in discussions to determine what they felt the problem was (it could have been that you didn't reference your work, it could just have been that you weren't following the style guide - hell, it could have just been vandalism), and to come to some kind of consensus as to what should go in to the article.
Anyway, this just illustrates the point in the link - even with fudslingers to supplement the free-riding, the encyclopaedia continues to get enough contributors to survive.
Another reason that there's no free-riding problem is that a lot of the internet collaborative work is resources that would get lost anyways. People are editing Wikipedia or similar projects when 15 years ago they would be playing Solitaire. Wikis function sort of like distributed computing sort of like GIMPS or SETI@Home but for human brains.
There is actually a significant number of Wikipedians who are anxious about free riders. When there was a rumour that wikipedia would have advertising the whole Spanish wikipedia team forked off to start a separate ad free encyclopedia. The threat of similar action is one of the things that has kept ads off wikipedia ever since.
Many wikipedians are commited to wikipedia being not just free but also copyleft i.e. anyone can use the content but they have to share their version under the same free licence as wikipedia. This does mean that when the project is forked then the ideas each parallell fork comes up with can be considered and can be incorporated into other forks if useful, minimising duplication and wasted effort. Even failed experiments are useful since they are carried out in public where others can learn from your mistakes.
#4 - Copyleft is not a response to the problem of free riders. Nothing in the GPL requires users to contribute back to a software project in any way. You are not required to submit your changes to a piece of GPL'd software to the upstream developer, merely to grant the same freedoms you got from them to anybody to whom you give a copy or derivative work.
Copyleft is simply a refusal to contribute to non-free software. To quote the document you linked to:
"Someone who uses your code in a non-free program is trying to deny freedom to others, and if you let him do it, you're failing to defend their freedom."