Houghton leads off his essay (PDF; also linked yesterday) with the familiar instrumental assertion that the production and distribution of knowledge are vital to national (and, cheerleaders for globalization would add, international) economic prosperity. To which my quick rejoinder would be: can we be a little more specific here? As far as economic prosperity goes, the studies I’ve seen are unequivocal in their conclusions: economic inequalities — the gap between the rich and the poor — have grown hugely in the past thirty years. So, Mr. Houghton: economic prosperity for whom?
Clearly, it’s not a question that’s going to get an answer, so perhaps I’d do best to simply point out that the driving goal for the effective production and distribution of information is “prosperity”: let’s get rich.
I’m going to have some more things to say about Houghton, but I need to keep this brief tonight, because I’ve got company coming in about 25 minutes, so I hope you’ll forgive me if I type fast and try to make a brief point by way of comparison to Houghton. Here goes: at the risk of stating the obvious, the open source movement has radically different goals in striving for the effective production and distribution of information. According to the FLOSS and BCG/OSDN (warning: ugly PowerPoint-style PDF) surveys, the chief motivations for participation in open source development projects are
- learning,
- sharing knowledge,
- improving upon things others have written,
- gaining a sense of participation in a cooperative project, and
- gaining a personal sense of accomplishment.
Could one ask for a better set of goals for the writing classroom? Far as I’m concerned, they beat “getting rich” — or “getting a good job” or “getting a good grade” — as motivations any day.
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