Mike Linksvayer

Richard Stallman in Gnu’s Bulletin Vol. 1 No. 1, February 1986:

There are plenty of ways that programmers could make a living without selling the right to use a program. This way is customary now because it brings programmers and businessmen the most money, not because it is the only way to make a living. It is easy to find other ways if you want to find them. Here are a number of examples.

A manufacturer introducing a new computer will pay for the porting of operating systems onto the new hardware.

The sale of teaching, hand-holding and maintenance services could also employ programmers.

People with new ideas could distribute programs as freeware, asking for donations from satisfied users, or selling hand-holding services. I have met people who are already working this way successfully.

Users with related needs can form users’ groups, and pay dues. A group would contract with programming companies to write programs that the group’s members would like to use.

In the intervening twentysomething years much practical experience has been gained, evidenced by large businesses employing many programmers following these models. Well, except for the last one, which has turned out to be insignificant so far, though perhaps there remains lots of experimentation before it plays out.

What the above misses is that most software is not created for licensing (commercial or public) and most programmers’ jobs do not depend on licensing, much as most musicians are not in the pay of the recorded music distribution business.

I’ve always had reservations about non-profit and similar phrasings. Nathan Smith’s alternative delights me:

I like to call this the “purpose-driven voluntary sector,” as distinct from (a) the profit-driven voluntary sector, i.e. the private sector, and (b) the purpose-driven coercive sector, i.e., the public sector.

Don’t forget the profit-driven coercive sector (AKA kleptocracy, to varying degrees). Of course there’s a fair amount of overlap.

The most exciting parts of the purpose-driven voluntary sector involve peer production.

Smith also used this terminology in an excellent comment on the nonprofit boom last October:

Some labor economists have distinguished the “intrinsic rewards” (love of the work itself) and the “extrinsic rewards” (money, benefits) from working.

By working for a non-profit, you may sacrifice some extrinsic rewards for some intrinsic rewards. As people get more and more affluent, it makes sense that more and more people will be willing to make that trade-off.

I think of non-profits as the “purpose-driven voluntary sector.” It’s distinct from the pure profit sector, officially dedicated to profits, and the government sector, which is ultimately financed through coercion. If more and more public goods can be provided through the purpose-driven voluntary sector, government can shrink.

Patri Friedman just posted a nice essay concerning his basic views on copyright and patents, which I’ll summarize as “Policy should aim for economic efficiency …”:

So an economically optimal regime would have different rules for different industries, protecting some but not others, based on their exactly supply/demand curves.

“… but don’t forget about enforcement costs.”:

But really, it doesn’t matter. There is just no fucking way that IP protection is worth the police state it would take to enforce it. And unenforced/unenforceable laws poison society by teaching people not to respect the law.

This leads more or less to my understanding of the Pirate Party sentiment, something like “There’s nothing wrong with copyright per se, but any civil liberties infringement in the name of copyright protection is totally unacceptable.”

I recommend Friedman’s essay, but of course the reason I write is to complain … about the second half of the essay’s last sentence:

Therefore I favor accepting the inevitable as soon as possible, so that we can find new ways to compensate content producers.

This closing both gives comfort to producerists (but in the beginning of the essay Friedman says that people love to create — I agree, see paying to create — and Tom W. Bell has a separate argument that should result in less concern for producers that I’ve been meaning to blog about, but should be obvious from the title — Outgrowing Copyright: The Effect of Market Size on Copyright Policy) and is a stretch — copyright might make alternatives less pressing and interesting, but it certainly does not prevent experimentation.

While I’m complaining, enforcement costs aren’t the only often forgotten problem.

Last month another site for aggregating donation pledges to open source software projects launched.

I’m not sure there’s anything significant that sets Cofundos apart from microPledge featurewise. Possibly a step where bidders (pledgers) vote on which developer bid to accept. However I’m not certain how a developer is chosen on microPledge — their FAQ says “A quote will be chosen that delivers the finished and paid product to the pledgers most quickly based on their current pledging rate (not necessarily the shortest quote).” microPledge’s scheme for in progress payments may set it apart.

In terms of marketing and associations, Cofundos comes from the Agile Knowledge Engineering and Semantic Web research group at the University of Leipzig, producers of DBpedia, about which I’ve written. Many of the early proposed projects are directly related to AKSW research. Their copyright policy is appreciated.

microPledge is produced by three Christian siblings who don’t push their religion.

Cofundos lists 61 proposed projects after one month, microPledge lists about 160 after about three and a half months. I don’t see any great successes on either site, but both are young, and perhaps I’m not looking hard enough.

Cofundos and microPledge are both welcome experiments, though I don’t expect either to become huge. On the other hand, even modest success would set a valuable precedent. In that vein I’ve been pretty skeptical about the chances of Fundable, they seem to have attracted a steady stream of users. Although most projects seem to be uninteresting (pledges for bulk purchases, group trips, donations to an individual’s college fund, etc), some production of public goods does seem to being funded, including several film projects in the small thousands of dollars range. Indeed, “My short film” is the default project name in their form for starting a project.

It seems to me that creating requirements and getting in front of interested potential donors are the main challenges for sites focused on funding open source software like Cofundos and microPledge (both say they are only starting with software). Requirements are just hard, and there’s little incentive for anyone to visit an aggregator who hasn’t aggregated anything of interest.

I wonder if integrating financial donations into project bug tracking systems would address both challenges? Of course doing so would have risks, both of increasing bureaucracy around processing bugs and feature requests, necessity of implementing new features (and bugs) in the relevant bug tracking software, and altering the incentives of volunteer contributors.

Via Open Knowledge Foundation Blog.

Wikipedia (actually the Wikimedia Foundation) started another fundraiser yesterday. I’ll just reference what I’ve said in the past:

• Outsourcing charity … to Wikipedia
• Defeatist dreaming
• I support advertising on Wikipedia
• Wikipedia advertising redux
• Wiki search advertising

I am convinced by comments on the above posts and conversations since that it will take a huge shift in Wikipedia community opinion for advertising to have a chance. The time for direct argument in relevant venues is distant. If you agree with me that advertising on Wikipedia will allow the foundation to greatly speed the fulfillment of its commitment, you can make your support known without rancor:

1) When you donate, leave a comment that says “I support advertising on Wikipedia.”

2) On your Wikipedia user page (mine), add the following code, with obvious meaning (|{{PAGENAME}} may not be obvious–it’s a hack to make your name sort correctly in the relevant category listings):

[[Category:Wikipedians for optional advertisements|{{PAGENAME}}]]
[[Category:Wikipedians who think that the Wikimedia Foundation should use advertising|{{PAGENAME}}]]

Fortuitously Mozilla posted their 2006 financial statements today:

Mozilla’s revenues (including both Mozilla Foundation and Mozilla Corporation) for 2006 were $66,840,850, up approximately 26% from 2005 revenue of $52,906,602. As in 2005 the vast majority of this revenue is associated with the search functionality in Mozilla Firefox, and the majority of that is from Google. The Firefox userbase and search revenue have both increased from 2005. Search revenue increased at a lesser rate than Firefox usage growth as the rate of payment declines with volume.

Congratulations to Mozilla. The Open Web’s prospects would look far worse if Mozilla did not have the wisdom to exploit this revenue source. Now, what about the prospects for Free Knowledge?

Addendum 20071123: The Wikimedia Fundraiser Blog is running Why Wikipedia Does Not Run Ads, a post linked to in the fundraising ad now running on Wikipedia.

microPledge looks like the most interesting effort to provide a platform for funding creation of public goods through donations that I’ve seen in awhile (which isn’t saying much). Their projects could be thought of as assurance contracts — you either get the software or your money back. Would be interesting to see them attempt to offer dominant assurance contracts — … or your money back, plus. They also have what looks to be a reasonable approaches to payments to creators while a project is in progress and quitting creators.

But the amounts pledged so far are micro.

Via Erik Möller and Jeff Bone.

Evan Prodromou gave an excellent presentation on Commercialization of Wikis: Open Community That Pays the Bills. Check out his slides.

A few points:

• Other stuff will be recognized as having wiki nature, e.g., LibriVox.
• Four categories of wiki businesses: service provider (Wikispaces, Wetpaint, PBWiki), content hosting (wikiHow, Wikitravel, Wikia), consulting (SocialText), content development (WikiBiz). My comment: at first blush Wikia would seem to be a service provider, but they are also deeply involved in content creation and community management.
• Down with crowdsourcing and the notion that wiki contributors are suckers or sharecroppers. Better to think of wikis (and wiki businesses) as platforms for knowledge. Contributors use your wiki to help each other, not to give you free content. My comment: I’m not so down on crowdsourcing. Yes, it is MBA language, but the typical examples usually involve compensating contributors. Crowdsourcing shouldn’t be conflated with sharecropping, nor confused with community purpose.
• For wikis purpose more important than friends or ego for blogs (cf. blogs and social networking).

Seven rules for commercial wikis:

1. Have a noble purpose — e.g., shared knowledge (use a free license), help a community.
2. Demonstrate value — most interesting example is “carry the torch”; wiki communities can be transient, an entity that keeps focus helps.
3. Be Transparent.
4. Extract value where you provide value — most obviously, advertising for hosting.
5. Be personally involved.
6. Run with the right crowd — e.g., open source and open content, or you will be suspect of being a crowdsourcer.

It appears that Prodromou’s Wikitravel lives by these rules and has succeeded.

Update 20070317: Prodromou has a roundup of blog responses to his presentation. It was great indeed catching up with him.

Modern research on “brain drain” indicates it is mostly beneficial, which comports with my intuition, repeated here:

Over the long term I’d bet brains are not zero sum — a brain drain really just means increased returns to education. Mobility means more people in the developing world will pursue higher education. Add to that increased flow of knowledge and capital to the developing world from migrants and concern over “brain drain” sounds very much like yet another disingenuous excuse for keeping the current system of inter-jurisdiction apartheid in place.

The International Migration of Knowledge Workers: When Is Brain Drain Beneficial? highlights another way brain drain benefits all. Abstract (emphasis added):

We consider the welfare effects of the emigration of workers who produce a public good (knowledge). We distinguish between the knowledge diversion and knowledge creation effects of such emigration, and show that the remaining residents of a country can gain from emigration, even when tastes for knowledge goods exhibit a kind of ‘home bias’. In contrast to existing models of beneficial brain drain (BBD), our results do not require agglomeration economies, education-related externalities, remittances, return migration, or an emigration “lottery”. Instead, they are driven purely by the public nature of knowledge goods, combined with differences in market size that induce greater knowledge creation by emigrants abroad than at home. BBD is even more likely in the presence of weak sending-country intellectual property rights (IPRs), or when source country IPR policy is endogenized.

Very cool.

Via Katherine Mangu-Ward.

Wikiseek has launched. It’s a reasonable idea, searching Wikipedia and sites Wikipedia links to (recalling search engines that have used Dmoz to seed crawls). It’s much faster than Wikipedia’s built in search, but doesn’t satisfy me, as its Wikipedia results are out of date and imcomplete (indicators of the former include turning up deleted articles and finding nothing for ‘wikiseek’).

I find it interesting that Wikiseek’s footer says:

The majority of the revenue generated by Wikiseek advertising is donated to the Wikimedia Foundation.

That’s nice — apparently Searchme, Inc., intends to use Wikisearch to demonstrate its vertical search prowess — and it inspires a potential non-intrusive revenue model for Wikipedia that precisely copies Mozilla’s: sell inclusion in the search box/search page.

This wouldn’t be worth the hundreds of millions annually that tasteful text ads on articles could be (and the ability to fully fund^* the Wikimedia Foundation’s mission), but it would surely obviate the need for begging to cover the costs of running Wikipedia.

^* If politicians can use that vacuous phrase to indicate they “support education” I can use it in support of funding free knowledge projects.

Jamendo is one of the most interesting music sites on the net (in terms business, community, and technology — there’s no competition yet for the vastness and bizarreness to be found on archive.org, yet). They’re trying every Web 2.0 trick and have somehow managed to avoid becoming overwhelmed with crap. I’ve listened to dozens of the 2,100 albums on Jamendo. While only a small fraction of these have strongly agreed with my taste, just about everything (weighted toward electronica and French rock) sounds professional.

Now Jamendo has introduced an advertising revenue sharing program with participating artists.

Several video sites are attempting variations on this theme (among them Revver, Lulu.tv, and Metacafe), but as far as I know Jamendo’s is the first attempt in the audio space. One might think an audio site would have a harder time making web advertising work than a video site (videos are usually watched within a web page and can have clickable ad areas or bumpers even if not), but I gather that listening via (usually Flash-based) audio players embedded in web pages is increasingly common (and Jamendo upgraded theirs recently), as will be media players that “play” a web page in a browser interface.

One data point: although Jamendo heavily promotes download of high quality copies, primarily via BitTorrent, their statistics indicate that low quality http “streaming” has accounted for more bandwidth. There are many obvious caveats here, but I think all points above indicate that advertising-supported web audio should not be ruled out, even if it is granted that web video has more potential.

Digg Jamendo’s revenue share page.

Wikimedia Foundation is over halfway through a fundraiser. I hope that when you give you leave the following public comment:

I support advertising on Wikipedia.

Evan Prodromou summarizes a completely unwarranted controversy regarding a matching fund (bottom of page):

All fine so far, right? But a small logo in the donations notice — seen by non-logged-in users on every page of every WMF site — was considered by many Wikipedians and other WMF editors as dangerously close to the line on advertising — or over it. There have been several prominent users who have left the project because of it.

I’m not sympathetic with these folks; in fact, I’m in solid opposition. I think that Wikipedia’s huge amount of Web traffic is a resource that the Foundation is squandering. Traffic like Wikipedia’s is worth tens of millions if not hundreds of millions of dollars in ad revenue per year. That’s money that could go to disseminate free (libre and gratis) paperback pocket encyclopedias to millions of schools and millions of children, in their own language, around the world.

It’s irresponsible to abuse that opportunity.

I strongly agree and will repeat exactly what I said during last year’s Wikimedia fund drive:

Wikipedia chief considers taking ads (via Boing Boing) says that at current traffic levels, Wikipedia could generate hundreds of millions of dollars a year by running ads. There are strong objections to running ads from the community, but that is a staggering number for a tiny nonprofit, an annual amount that would be surpassed only by the wealthiest foundations. It could fund a staggering Wikimedia Foundation bureaucracy, or it could fund additional free knowledge projects. Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales has asked what will be free. Would an annual hundred million dollar budget increase the odds of those predictions? One way to find out before actually trying.

In somewhat related news, Mozilla just reported 2005 financial information, showing 800% revenue growth:

In 2005 the Mozilla Foundation and Mozilla Corporation combined had revenue from all sources of $52.9M. $29.8M of this was associated with the Foundation (both before and after the creation of the Corporation). The bulk of this revenue was related to our search engine relationships, with the remainder coming from a combination of contributions, sales from the Mozilla store, interest income, and other sources. These figures compare with 2003 and 2004 revenues of $2.4M and $5.8M respectively, and reflect the tremendous growth in the popularity of Firefox after its launch in November 2004.

The combined expenses of the Mozilla Foundation and Corporation were approximately $8.2M in 2005, of which approximately $3M was associated with the Foundation. By far the biggest portion of these expenses went to support the large and growing group of people dedicated to creating and promoting Firefox, Thunderbird, and other Mozilla open source products and technologies. The rate of expenses increased over the year as new employees came on board. The unspent revenue provides a reserve fund that allows the Mozilla Foundation flexibility and long term stability.

An advertising-fueled Wikimedia Foundation could fund dozens of much needed Mozilla Firefox sized projects. And many Creative Commons (which just successfully completed its much more modest annual funding campaign) initiatives. :)

Update: Welcome Slashdot readers. The major objection to ads on Wikipedia takes two forms:

• Advertising is profane.
• Advertising would compromose Wikipedia’s neutrality.

A common response to the first is that those who don’t like ads can run an ad blocker. Easier still, those who don’t like ads can log in — there’s little reason to display ads to logged in users, who probably generate a tiny fraction of pageviews. But I don’t think either of these responses will satisfy this form of the objection, as it is basically emotional. Some people object to the knowledge that ads exist, even if not experienced personally. I suppose these people don’t use search engines. It’s a wonder they can stand to use the net at all. I discount them completely.

The second is completely unrealistic. How would third party text ads, e.g., via AdSense, compromise neutrality? There’s simply no vector for an advertiser to demand changes and zero reason for Wikipedians to comply. Wikipedia is not a small town newspaper beholden to the local department store, not even close. It isn’t even Slashdot, which as far as I can tell has not been compromised by years of running ads. To people with this objection: show me a community site that has gone astray due to advertiser influence.

Sponsors, “being managed by Wikipedia staff (like in newspaper ads, i.e. no uncontrolled 3rd party feeds)”, as suggested by Kuba Ober, are far more dangerous than third party ads, because then there is a vector between advertiser and someone with power at Wikipedia.

There may be an opportunity for Wikipedia to completely rethink and remake advertising, or merely compete in some fashion with what some are calling Google’s near monopoly, but now it would make tremendous sense to use AdSense or Yahoo! or both — and I suspect Wikipedia could manage to keep a greater share of revenue than a normal web publisher. Rick Yorgason mocked up what AdSense would look like in the place of the current fundraiser’s donation banner.

Slashdot commenter jklooserman summarizes objections from Wikiproject no ads:

1. Wikipedia’s philosophy is non-commercial
2. Ads put at risk Wikipedia’s principle of Neutral Point of View (NPOV)
3. The information that constitutes Wikipedia is wealth for the community

I don’t see “non-commercial” in any form on the Wikimedia Foundation home page. I do see this, in large text:

Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. That’s our commitment.

The next line, all bold, asks for help in the form of donations.

Much more money, hundreds of millions, would speed the arrival of that world and fulfillment of that commitment.

As above, there is no realistic scenario for ads undermining neutrality on Wikipedia.

The third objection strikes me as a non-sequitur. In any case, the point of obtaining more resources would be to increase the wealth of the community — of all human beings.

jklooserman also pointed out that there’s a category of Wikipedians who think that the Wikimedia Foundation should use advertising. Add it to your user page if you agree.

Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia says to dream a little:

Imagine there existed a budget of $100 million to purchase copyrights to be made available under a free license. What would you like to see purchased and released under a free license?

…

I was recently asked this question by someone who is potentially in a position to make this happen, and he wanted to know what we need, what we dream of, that we can’t accomplish on our own, or that we would expect to take a long time to accomplish on our own.

One shouldn’t look a gift horse in the mouth and this could do a great deal of good, particularly if the conditions “can’t accomplish on our own…” are stringently adhered to.

However, this is a blog and I’m going to complain.

Don’t fork over money to the copyright industry! This is defeatist and exhibits static world thinking.

$100 million could fund a huge amount of new free content, free software, free infrastructure and supporting institutions, begetting more of the same.

But if I were a donor with $100 million to give I’d try really hard to quantify my goals and predict the most impactful spending toward those goals. I’ll just repeat a paragraph from last December 30, Outsourcing charity … to Wikipedia:

Wikipedia chief considers taking ads (via Boing Boing) says that at current traffic levels, Wikipedia could generate hundreds of millions of dollars a year by running ads. There are strong objections to running ads from the community, but that is a staggering number for a tiny nonprofit, an annual amount that would be surpassed only by the wealthiest foundations. It could fund a staggering Wikimedia Foundation bureaucracy, or it could fund additional free knowledge projects. Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales has asked what will be free. Would an annual hundred million dollar budget increase the odds of those predictions? One way to find out before actually trying.

Via Boing Boing via /.

Tim Lee has a wonderful take on Chris Anderson’s The Long Tail. The punchline, in my estimation:

When supply exceeds demand, as it seems to for both music and punditry, the equilibrium price is zero.

I think to be technically correct “at p=0″ needs to be inserted before the first comma, but nevermind, read the whole thing.

The story of The Pig and the Box touches on many near and dear themes:

• The children’s fable is about DRM and digital copying, without mentioning either.
• The author is raising money through Fundable, pledging to release the work under a more liberal license if $2000 is raised.
• The author was dissuaded from using the sampling licnese (a very narrow peeve of mine, please ignore).
• I don’t know if the author intended, but anyone inclined to science fiction or nanotech will see a cartoon assembler.
• The last page of the story is Hansonian.

Read it.

This was dugg and Boing Boing’d though I’m slow and only noticed on Crosbie Fitch’s low-volume blog. None of the many commentators noted the sf/nano/upload angle as far as I can tell.

Another excellent post from Tim Lee (two of many, just subscribe to TLF):

The oft-repeated (especially by libertarians) view that there’s no such thing as a free lunch is actually nonsense. Civilization abounds in free lunches. Social cooperation produces immense surpluses that have allowed us to become as wealthy as we are. Craigslist is just an extreme example of this phenomenon, because it allows social cooperation on a much greater scale at radically reduced cost. Craigslist creates an enormous amount of surplus value (that is, the benefits to users vastly exceed the infrastructure costs of providing the service). For whatever reason, Craigslist itself has chosen to appropriate only a small portion of that value, leaving the vast majority to its users.

As a political slogan I think of TANSTAAFL as applying only to transfers though perhaps others apply it overbroadly. Regardless the free lunches of which Lee writes are vastly underappreciated.

The strategy has another advantage too: charging people money for things is expensive. A significant fraction of the cost of a classified ad is the labor required to sell the ads. Even if you could automate that process, it’s still relatively expensive to process a credit card transaction. The same is true of ads. Which means that not only is Craigslist letting its users keep more of the surplus, but its surplus is actually bigger, too!

Charging money also enables taxation and encourages regulation. Replacement of financial transaction mediated production with peer production is a libertarian (of any stripe — substitute exploitation for taxation and regulation if desired) dream come true.

Put another way, that which does not require money is hard to control. I see advocacy of free software, free culture and similar as flowing directly from my desire for free speech and freedom and individual autonomy in general.

In the long run, then, I think sites that pursue a Craigslist-like strategy will come to dominate their categories, because they simply undercut their competition. That sucks if you’re the competitor, but it’s great for the rest of us!

Amen, though Craigslist, Wikipedia and similar do far more than merely undercut their competition.

Raph Levin announced that the GPL release of Ghostscript now uses current Ghostscript code.

By switching to the GPL, we’re reaffirming our commitment to the free software world. One big reason for this decision was to reduce the lead time between bugs being fixed in the development tree and users seeing the fixes, especially those users dependent on Linux distributions.

This seems notable, as for years Ghostscript has served as the usual example of the free the future, sell the present open source business model. Previous GPL releases were about one year/one version behind AFPL (which restricts commercial use) releases.

Ghostscript is also notable for having a long running bug bounty program.

Addendum 20060608: The quote above doesn’t address the business reasons for making the current codebase GPL. Perhaps all paying customers are unwilling to release under GPL. If so Artifex would lose no commercial licensing revenue and gain some goodwill and outside contributions and reduce the amount of effort required to do releases of year or more old code.

Today’s LA Times has a story about a group trying to get 5,000 people to buy timeshares on a Fijian island as part of a social experiment. A cynic would think Tribewanted.com has figured out how to create reality TV very cheaply by getting people who claim to dislike reality TV to pay to be cast members. I’m not that cynical.

Sounds like a reasonable idea, with passing resemblance to far more ambitious projects such as seasteading and the Free State Project. I hope Tribewanted succeeds and is copied by dozens of copycat projects catering to different groups.

The Tribewanted FAQ says:

If, in the unlikely event that Adventure Island doesn’t go ahead, tribewanted will refund 100% of all membership fees. Unfortunately, if a tribe member decides to cancel their membership or not visit Adventure Island they will not be able to get a refund of any kind.

They could’ve made it even easier to sign up by offering a greater than 100% refund in case the project does not go ahead.

Via Boing Boing.

Now I know why I don’t play MMORPGs.

Bore me with a spoon golf club level bazillion sword of power networking.

Not that I begrudge anyone else’s fun. Enjoy!

No, not as in “artists need to think of themselves as businesses” or “open source business models” but as in entrepreneurs sharing the motivations of artists and open source contributors.

Entrepreneurship as a non-profit-seeking activity (PDF). The average entrepreneur could make substantially more money as an employee and obtain substantially better returns investing in the market rather than in the entrepreneur’s enterprise. Low risk aversion and over-optimism do not explain low financial returns to entrepreneurship. However, the majority of “breakthrough” innovations are made by entrepreneurs rather than big firms. So why start a business?

The studies discussed give a direct indication of the non-monetary benefits associated with entrepreneurship. Being an entrepreneur seems to be attractive, not because it leads to a high income or wealth, but rather because it provides non-pecuniary satisfaction from being one’s own boss, from broad possibilities to use one’s skills and abilities, and from a resulting richer work content. Although no direct evidence has been presented, it can be hypothesized that similar aspects are responsible for Åstebro’s (2003) finding that entrepreneurs’ are willing to engage in innovative activities despite of poor expected financial returns. Amabile (1983, 1997), for example, argues that people often undertake creative endeavors simply because they like to engage in interesting, exciting and personally challenging activities.

Conclusion:

Entrepreneurship is a crucial function in market economies. It is therefore important to understand what motivates people to engage in it. In this paper, it has been argued that traditional economic views on why individuals undertake entrepreneurial activities are incomplete. Entrepreneurship is not only and not even mainly a quest for profit. Rather, it is more accurately characterized as a non-profit-seeking activity. Contrary to the belief that people engage in entrepreneurship in order to make profits, a considerably body of empirical research shows that entrepreneurship is not particularly attractive in monetary terms. Being an entrepreneur emerges to be rewarding because it provides individuals with non-monetary satisfaction from aspects like higher autonomy, greater possibilities to use their skills and abilities, and the chance to be creative in pursuing their own ideas. It has been illustrated how these non-monetary benefits can be incorporated into economic theories of entrepreneurship. Further efforts along these lines seem instrumental in arriving at an improved understanding of entrepreneurship.

None of this surprises me, though I was completely ignorant of these studies. I suspect “artist” or “open source developer” would work in place of “entrepreneur” throughout most of the paper.

Via Will Wilkinson.

A little over two years ago I wrote about copying content between Wikitravel and World66 (they’re both using the same Creative Commons license that allows this). Wikitravel “won more” from the operation due to permitting more flexible editing.

Now they’ve both won through simultaneously announced acquisition by Internet Brands.

An Alexa traffic rank graph of Wikitravel, World66, and carsdirect.com, I believe the most popular Internet Brands site:

Congratulations again to Wikitravel cofounder Evan Prodromou. It’s fantastic to see projects and people like this get some commercial recognition after years of dedication to the “commons” (very broadly speaking) — see also Webjay and MusicBrainz.

Ross Mayfield has a short post on the acquisitions the best part of which is this:

Terms of the deal are not disclosed, but if you find them you could add them to this wiki page.