Revenge of the Software Hippies

When Linus Torvalds began to develop his world famous open-source operating system, Linux, he probably never imagined that businesses worldwide and organizations including NASA would rely on his project to keep their servers running smoothly 24/7. Bill Gates probably never expected that in the eyes of millions, his world famous Windows was only 2^nd best in the face of an operating system that didn’t cost a dime. This is one of the many triumphs of peer produced content that exist in the world today, and while this form of production has its limitations in creative power, its ability to distribute tasks into infinitesimally small workloads to millions of volunteer programmers from around the globe has allowed it to revolutionize media in the digital age.

Many have wondered why peer production really only appears in digital media and not in the physical world; the answer lies in the iterative nature of peer production and its limitations in efficiently using “materials”. In his novel, Benkler describes the basic three-person peer-production team consisting of “the first author, who wrote the initial software; the second person, who identified a problem or shortcoming; and the third person, who fixed it”. This is an example of the iterative process in which peer content is created. Unlike in the construction of a building, potentially infinite “drafts” or updated versions of a piece of open-source software are created, and thus many more bits of data are used in its creation than are present in the final product. It is in this process that peer production finds itself restricted to the digital realm, where the resources of man-hours and free space for data are nearly infinitely available. Such a structure would never thrive in the physical world, as projects have overhead costs that are too high to warrant multiple revisions of production. Hence, the physical market is limited by the creativity and resources of the individual companies that create products.

Peer production also finds limitations in the ability to create innovative content. Suppose for a moment that a person requests that a community of peer software producers on the internet create a game for him. Hundreds of different perspectives will surely clash at this point, as no one idea can be formulated. However, if leadership is established and a single version of the software is created, the peer production group immediately becomes hyper-efficient, locating and resolving issues nearly instantaneously. Perhaps the inability for this system of production to work creatively is a weakness, or perhaps the system was merely intended to refine and not create at all. All that is required for this team of workers to function is a creative spark, a seed that receives its water and nutrients from farmers who come from every corner of the globe, seeking merely to help cultivate the seed into a garden.

Peer production has, in its glorious uprising, unearthed a side of mankind that lay dormant – the “good neighbor” in every volunteer programmer has revealed itself in the form of software development forums like Sourceforge, where the simplest of questions to the hardest of problems are handled by total strangers for no cost, simply out of good will and the desire to see more, better functioning software in the world. The combined efforts of these volunteers has resulted in exactly that: software that rivals that of giant corporations and, in many cases, is deemed more reliable.