Nobody pays for open source. We can force them to.

The first time I thought it would be a good idea to write a blog post about the economics of open source was 2013, so this post has been in the works a while. The closest I got before today was 2022, when I wrote a stream-of-consciousness rant into my iOS notes that ended with basically "nothing fucking works". And then that sat there for 4 more years, because "nothing works" is too depressing to bother writing 5000 words about. Now, finally, I have an idea. It's gonna take 5000 words to get there, though, so if you don't have that kind of time, skip to the part about registries. Open source is a game with a stable outcome, and the outcome is that free wins I've written before about hawks and doves, which is a model from evolutionary biology. You have a population of animals competing for some resource. Some of them fight for it (hawks) and some of them share it (doves). A population that is all hawks is unstable: everybody's constantly getting hurt, and the first two doves to show up cooperate with each other and out-compete everyone. A population that is all doves is unstable too: the first hawk to show up competes with everybody and wins every time. What's stable is a mixture of both types, in proportions such that changing your behaviour doesn't help you, so nobody does. That mix is called an evolutionarily stable strategy, or ESS, and the important word is "stable." It's not the best strategy (arguably that's all doves, where nobody gets hurt), it's just the one the population ends up at and can't leave. I find it a useful way of thinking about software, because software has hawks and doves too. Closed source is the hawk.