A discussion of hybrid open source and proprietary licensing models.

[Marshall W Van Alstyne <marshall AT MIT.EDU>]

Quoting Matthias Urlichs <smurf AT smurf.noris.de>:

> Marshall Van Alstyne:
> > 
> > A third goal is to enumerate licensing tradeoffs then to put them into a 
> > simulation model of a socially optimal license.  The code for this would 
> > of
> 
> > course be fully open.  A simulation would move a debate over licensing 
> > tradeoffs into a kind of recursive open science where the design of 
> > systems
> 
> > for developing code becomes an open social construct in code.
> 
> Frankly, I cannot see how that might be possible.
> 
> The distinction of free/gratis and free/libre is difficult enough for
> *people* to understand, and that's the least of your worries -- there
> simply is no universally accepted economic model, and part of this
> discusson is about economy. If the assumptions your model is based on
> are under dispute, what do you think will happen to the conclusions the
> simulation will arrive at?

The beauty here is that we don't actually need a universally accepted economic
model.  Rather we need one capable of "docking" in the modeling literature. 
This is a model that can represent the assumptions of not just one specific
model, but of multiple models.  

Then, if we believe a specific claim to be true under one set of assumptions, 
we
can ask is there any set of values that will also make it true under another
set of assumptions?  This process can be highly informative -- both about the
conclusions, and about whether the assumptions really lead to different
results.

A further virtue of simulation is that it forces us to be precise about our
assumptions in the first place.  In fact, we all use "mental models" to draw
our inferences but the assumptions we use are often implicit and not available
for discussion.  Even where assumptions differ, trying to model them forces a
measure of clarity on us in how we specify them.

MVA