Share and share alike: Why?

Open is not just about the ability to duplicate.  Sharing and sharing alike is truly the mother of innovation.

It's difficult to talk about Open Source, even these days with so much value coming out of that sector, without there being doubts and negativity coming out of the private sector which remains hugely invested in intellectual property.

That is certainly understandable due to concerns of potential loss in revenue on IP assets which are often very expensive.  Some of those IP costs are very real, including human costs, material costs, training costs, and the list goes on.

Yet what is interesting is, many of those costs for IP are actually an artefact of IP law in the first place.  If we had not created laws that assigned equivalent property rights of things like land or building to the  intellectual domain, would people stop making things?

It remains that the biggest argument about IP is that it stimulates innovation, yet as this article will explain, it is actually the open sharing of information that stimulates innovation.

If we really look at the core motivation of IP law, it is to protect potential profitability on investment by preventing competition.  Spend time, effort, and money to create something and then make it legally unique for a significant number of years, in order to make money on it, without competition.

So for example, if someone creates a new type of battery, they patent it and then for as many as 20 years, they have no competition and they do not have to make any new advances except to ensure they have something new when the patent runs out.  Or, if all they did was design the battery, they would not have to create the battery for sale, rather just sell licenses to allow others to create the batteries and simply make money on that design for the next 20 years, without having to do anything more, just by virtue of owning the intellectual property rights.

OK, let's be realistic about this idea.  Who wouldn't want to come up with an idea that could make them money for 30% of their adult life?  And few, if any would deny that someone might deserve this type of compensation, especially if the idea provided a very significant value to humanity.

Yet, we seem to come to the conclusion that without IP law, the person never would have innovated.  Never would have come up with the idea and a way to implement the idea, for the benefit of humanity.  That is the stated claim when it is suggested that IP Law and business are the cause of innovation.

There is always the interesting intellectual debate of whether a person would quit working if they won a million dollars.  On the one side, people often think they would quit working and others believe if everyone had a million dollars, no one would do anything.  But the reality is quite different.  If anything, people quit

their jobs, but they don't quit working.  If we take a look at what retirement brings for people, we often see people with many different motivations to keep doing SOMETHING.  The difference between those who need to work and those who don't is, those who don't need to work, simply choose what work to do and when they want to do it.

If you seek people who have been compensated well for their work, you will find they simply don't quit their jobs when they feel they have "enough" money.  They are simply motivated to continue to work, regardless of whether they have enough money.  They enjoy working.  It is when people stop enjoying their work, that they quit their jobs.

We really see this behaviour when we look at two distinct industries.  That of voluntarism and that of Open Source.  In both these sectors, we see a great many people doing work, without fiscal compensation.  They do the work because they enjoy the work and most likely, believe in a cause.  People are motivated by money when they need money, but they are motivated to work and contribute to society by a very different measuring stick.

So what does that have to do with sharing and sharing alike?

Well, it is the very nature of those who enjoy what they are doing, and do not have some innate fear of not having enough money, for example, that certainly removes a huge barrier for people being open to sharing knowledge, skills, or anything else they are free to give others.  Many people who volunteer or work on Open Source projects, actually have jobs that are paying their salaries, which is not directly related to the project.  They simply take time to contribute to the project.

People innovate, even without IP law.  In fact, they are more driven to innovate when the very nature of competition means that they always need to improve on what they are doing, or find something new and unique to provide.

Simply by sharing and encouraging others to do the same with the shared work, we actually drive innovation by encouraging competition (true, free market) and we also give others tools to potentially innovate in ways we didn't imagine, or did not have the tools or knowledge to innovate, ourselves.

The true and very real value for humanity is not in IP law, rather it is in sharing.  There is a significant cost to acquiring and defending IP.  It doesn't have to cost anything near what it does to innovate something, if we don't have to develop it all on our own.  In a sharing model, we also don't have to worry about the high cost of defending IP.  And for that reason, there is more money available to pay people a better wage for the work that they do, including the work they do for an Open Source project.