Coase's Penguin, or Linux and the Nature of the Firm

摘要

The paper explains why open source software is an instance of a potentiallybroader phenomenon. Specifically, I suggest that nonproprietary peer-productionof information and cultural materials will likely be a ubiquitous phenomenon ina pervasively networked society. I describe a number of such enterprises, atvarious stages of the information production value chain. These enterprisessuggest that incentives to engage in nonproprietary peer production are trivialas long as enough contributors can be organized to contribute. This impliesthat the limit on the reach of peer production efforts is the modularity,granularity, and cost of integration of a good produced, not its total cost. Ialso suggest reasons to think that peer-production can have systematicadvantages over both property-based markets and corporate managerialhierarchies as a method of organizing information and cultural production in anetworked environment, because it is a better mechanism for clearinginformation about human capital available to work on existing informationinputs to produce new outputs, and because it permits largers sets of agents touse larger sets of resources where there are increasing returns to the scale ofboth the set of agents and the set of resources available for work on projects.As capital costs and communications costs decrease in importance as factors ofinformation production, the relative advantage of peer production in clearinghuman capital becomes more salient.