Brad DeLong has a thought-provoking quote from a forthcoming book by Steven Weber on open-source software: “Ever since the invention of agriculture, human beings have had only three social-engineering tools for organizing any large-scale division of labor: markets (and the carrots of material benefits they offer), hierarchies (and the sticks of punishment they impose), and charisma (and the promises of rapture they offer). Now there is the possibility of a fourth mode of effective social organization–one that we perhaps see in embryo in the creation and maintenance of open-source software.”
An earlier post features a longer commentary from a paper by Weber.
