It goes by the name bibsort and may be found at http://www.math.utah.edu/pub/bibsort/. Just grab the latest tarball, installation is a breeze. It's perfect for merging multiple bibtex files and getting rid of double entries. To remove identical entries just run: bibsort -f -u < input.bib >output.bib and you're done.

It's been a long-standing puzzle how to overcome social dilemmas, that is, situations in which everyone would be better of when participating in a concerted effort, say switching from an inferior standard to a superior one in the face of switching costs due to network effects.

Now, what can be done about such situations apart from government intervention - always tricky and prone to failure, rent-seeking, etc. - and just waiting and soing nothing? Well, here's an idea, might not be new, just want to write it down lest I forget. What about issuing a bond that finances the organisation of the transition and manages to reap some of the net benefits realised upon successful transition. Of course, such financing does already happen when a firm choses to use penetration pricing, etc to make inroads in an otherwise locked-in market. But does this principle also work when there is not a single firm making the expenditures and then capturing some of the resulting efficiencies? How to arrange such transactions and how to make sure some benefit ends up with the bond issuer and thus ultimately the people buying into the bond?

Don't know yet. Gotta read into this.

Some days ago there was a discussion at slashdot as to which are the best computer games ever. Now, probably there are as many opinions as there are gamers - and here's mine:

• The best game ever must be Sensible World of Soccer, those two-and-a-half-D graphics rock. And, mind you, who really needs a players arm to exceed 4 pixels? Try and get it, plus get a joystick. It does run on dosemu, too.
• Second comes Armageddon Worms. I've recently stumbled over an OSS clone which is very nicely done and much fun to play: Wormux.

Neutrality is a somewhat elusive concept when applied to things that do by their nature bear a relationship with their surroundings, be it people or, say, IT networks. A person that attempts to be neutral will typically try not to do anything that interferes with a social situation of two others. That is, it will act like it does not exist with regard to the other parties. That might work sometimes, but surely not always, for a person that is present will in most instances have a hard time acting like it's absent. For example, two persons are quarrelling in front of a third person, say a friend of them. How shall this person ever be neutral to the situation?

Turning to IT networks. The big question of the day is about the merit of the internet's "application neutral design" (Lawrence Lessig) or "raw connectivity so that services can develop independently at the edges" (Fred Goldstein 2006 ) for internet innovations such as ICQ and BitTorrent. In his book "The Future of Ideas," Lawrence Lessig makes the case that innovation and creativity associated with the Internet are the byproducts of its openness, its role as a commons that is accessible, by design, to all. He puts it in a recent blog entry as such: "Broadband is infrastructure — like highways, if not railroads. If you rely upon markets alone to provide infrastructure, you’ll get less of it, and at a higher price."

The ongoing discussion is not just blackboard economics, but it is important for the imminent political choices to be made regarding the regulation of the internet and its constituent parts:

"Today, the network carrier has a minor, entirely neutral role in this system - providing the pipe for the bits that move the last miles to the home. It has no say about where those bits happened to have originated. Any proposed change in its role should be examined carefully, especially if the change entails expanding the carrier's power to pick and choose where bits come from - a power that has the potential to abrogate network neutrality." (R. Stross, Hey, Baby Bells: Information Still Wants to Be Free, NY Times, January 15, 2006 )

A gentle critique

However, neutrality in the respect of network design is something of a paradox, as Tim Wu has noted thoughtfully. As we have seen above, neutrality is all about being neutral with respect to a certain issue. But transferring bits is the very core of what the internet is all about, and the internet has never been entirely neutral about the bits it delivers. At the very least, it cares about the routing, it cares about avoiding congestion, and - yes - it does care about getting bits from A to B in the first place.

As for the ends where all the miraculous innovation stems from, they are by no means as fixed as the simple model of network-ends-dichotomy suggests. Shall a company's gateway be considered an end, or rather their employees' desktops? Shall a mail server be considered an end, or rather the mailbox on the desktop? The rhetoric stance almost implies the due answer: it always depends. It is entirely plausible to consider a mail server part of the network and an end host at the same time. The former with respect to an email user, and the latter with respect to the internet and the process of immediate email delivery.

And last, as for control, there needs to be ownership of facilities if we as a society want private entrepreneurs to build the networks that form the basis of that abstract thing we call "the internet". The conflict then is inevitable, between private ownership entailing control and the normative call for an infrastructure (Frischmann 2005 ) that allows as wide an array of uses as possible even before we know what those uses might be. How, private investors will ask, and rightly so, will such infrastructure come about?

It is thus not an innocent stance to ask for an infrastructure that has been the result of private investment to be neutral, whatever that term means today and, more importantly, comes to mean tomorrow. The issue has to be understood in terms of a sober law and economics analysis: what are the probable benefits and what are the probable costs of any alternative? The quest for answers is not yet completed and may well never be. But impartial advise aiming to further the overall welfare of our society must not be grounded in vague infrastructure-innovation-arguments, but in sound analysis of the alternative social arrangements surrounding the internet.

One possible alternative to the requiring of neutrality might be to mandate access to network facilities to third parties in order to help competition emerge. That would leave more scope for efficient integration efforts and the development of new service models than a strict enforcement of neutrality.

Open source creates value, no doubt. And, governments tax monetary transactions, typically by levying a certain percentage of the money involved. The short conclusion: no taxes on open source.

Eventually, however, the state will get their share of the value that is being added and traded further down the line. The margins might shrink due to competition, and with it the tax that will end up with the state, but the value that stems from open source in commercial settings will be taxable.

And that value might well exceed the value from proprietary software, since open source creates an infrastructure that allows non-discriminatory access. And, according to Frischmann (2005) an infrastructure that is managed as a commons creates greater value than one that is managed in a private property regime. At the bottom line, then, open source might even generate more taxes, not fewer taxes for the state.

Liberal market proponents dream of markets as perfect equalisers matching all preferences of human agents by means of perfect allocation of all assets. The trouble is that they cannot even remotely describe how this allocation actually happens, for in the real world transactions are more than just bartering.

And, things get worse when we leave the world of Newton's physics and introduce abrupt technological change. Such changes in the available matrix of assets constantly occur rendering previous allocations of assets obsolete. In short, progress changes the desirable equilibrium state faster than such state may possibly be obtained by the due transactions. Reality always lags behind the perfect equilibrium because most assets are allocated with a certain degree of inertia. A floppy drive used to be shipped with a computer to customers who expected them to be useful for some time. Had they known that such drive would soon be rendered almost completely futile, they might not have bought the drive. But, of course, they were in no suitable position to know about imminent changes in the available assets matrix. In fact, no one really knew.

Things become even more complex when considering interdependencies between assets, say a computer and complementary software. Also, we may want to consider dependencies between current assets and future assets. This comprises possible future uses of a current asset in connection with future assets or future needs.

An interesting conflict emerges here between producers and consumers. For producers products are most profitable when they have a very specific use that is not trivial to match. Selling an electric motor will generate way lower profit margins than selling a floppy drive. Of course, the consumer will be fine with the product as long as it matches his preferences. But, a shift in the available asset matrix may at any point render the use of such specific item obsolete. It entails that the current value of that asset is now close to zero. Had the customer bought an electric motor and an imaginary floppy read/write unit he might have been better off.

Such an effect – the unforeseen decrease of asset utility subsequent to a transaction – gives rise to an externality in favour of the producer and to the detriment of the customer. Of course, there are effects that work the other way around, say, the increase of utility of a telephone in the face of more and more friends connecting to the network. However, externalities in favour of producers seem to be structurally more frequent.

Last week we held a panel at Lehmanns Buchhandlung discussing the innovative potential of open source. One important result was the understanding that open source is becoming a major building block of complex IT solutions.

Markus Schröder of Tembit Software GmbH provided real-world examples of open source helping smaller businesses to assemble complex products. In particular, when building a product consisting of various components – say, data base, backend, middleware, server, and clients - open source offers a much greater flexibility, for it allows amendments to the components serving the specific - and most likely unanticipated - end of their use. Thus, there is a lower risk of running into unanticipated problems with the system further down the road. And, last not least, open source is obviously cost effective alternative to commercial software components.

Robert A. Gehring of Technische Universität Berlin and editor of the Open Source Jahrbuch and Eva Brucherseifer of KDE project made another, more abstract point: open source is rarely an end but in most cases a means to the creation of IT solutions. That is, open source software in itself does hardly ever fulfil a specific customer need. Most of the time, some customisation will be required to really put it to a sensible use as a component in a specific context. It is precisely that specificity that often creates the need of a user for a commercial service or consulting company to duly adapt the software. Only when a functionality of a software is sufficiently standardised and supported by other components will the need for major customisation efforts lapse (e.g. data bases management systems, or browsers).

Now, the empirical observations suggest that not only is open source the more efficient economic mode when a certain software functionality, e.g. an operating system, a browser or a data base, is required by a suffiently large number of users but it inevitably entails due to economic reasoning of the actors involved in the process. Customers get greater value with open source, producers may have an incentive due to low opportunity costs in the face of strong competition, and the benefit from cooperation on the supply side (and possibly the demand side, too) may outweigh the costs of giving up control over one’s contributions to a greater good.

For some time now there has been a discussion going on about the process of innovation shifting gradually to consumers as opposed to keep residing with producers.

Eric von Hippel, one of user innovation's most prominent proponents, has repeatedly referred to examples of users innovating in fields such as surfboard crafting. With particular respect to open source, his basic assertion is that user innovation works better than "producer innovation", for users know best what they need and are, at least in some instances, better off innovating themselves rather than waiting for the producer to do so or telling him what to do, for this is costly if not impossible. Also, if a need is too specific low margins expectations will keep producers from fulfilling rather heterogeneous needs. Von Hippel infers that user innovation is a more potent model for innovation than received patterns of "producer innovation".

A critical, yet hitherto largely unnoticed, assumption of the above argument is the strict dichotomy between producers and consumers. However, if we question the oppositeness of producers on the one hand and consumers on the other we might widen the interpretation scope of the argument.

A user that starts innovating, or amending a thing he received in some transaction, might well be thought of as a customer turned producer. The line we might want to draw then may be one between bigger and smaller producers. That is, the argument starts to integrate with received economic wisdom: people buy, people do something to things, and then sell it on. If they receive it for free, or do not sell it but give it away for free (as open source programmers might be understood to do) we may still talk of economic transactions.

Hence, user innovation - that is, customers doing something to products they receive in economic transactions - is not all that revolutionary an idea. And, it is questionable whether the degree to which users innovate is of a new and unheard of quality. Neither is the entailing conflict between producers and consumers over how much power over a purchased product goes to the buyer.

The one thing that might be new, though, is the power that today's producers have to keep the customer from amending a thing and playing with it. Means of technical architecture give producers wide ranging powers over what a consumer might do with something he receives from him, in particular so with immaterial goods such as digital content or software. There might well be a point for policy intervention here as Steven Weber argues in his book Democratizing Innovation. This is particularly true of the field of IP rights that tend to favour bigger over smaller producers. Nevertheless, we should keep in mind that freedom - and with it freedom of choice - is still a pillar our society firmly rests on. Regulation should always be put second to information and competition.

Yesterdays New York Times aptly summarises what cannot possibly be overlooked anymore: "Open-source software efforts once were a fringe phenomenon, chiefly of interest to students and technical experts. Now, however, several open-source projects have become forces to be reckoned with, often having a corporation backing them." (A Microsoft-Red Hat warming trend?, Stephen Shankland, Staff Writer, CNET News.com)

The trend of commercial entities driving not only the adoption but the development open source seems to shape up irreversibly and forcefully. Microsoft and the like seriously condider the future feasibility of their business model based on licencing proprietary code to customers.

This is not only news but it seriously calls into question the standard "intrinsic motivation" argument put forward by a number of scholars. The typical paper on the open source software phenomenon started by saying that open source (mostly Apache and Linux) calls received ecomomic wisdom into question, for their are no overtly extrinsic motivations to be observed. At first glance open source developers just do it "for fun", i.e. their motivation is not to make money but lies in the contribution itself.

Well, fair point. Yet it seems that the whole extrinsic-intrinsic dichotomy is misleading and narrows a possible horizon of interpretation and modelling of open source. Plus, psychologists have a host of models concerned with motivation not just the intrinsic/extrinsic one.

Is the current observation of more and more commercial entities entering the open source field indicating a trend towards some sustainable open source equilibrium? For some time Microsoft and the like have lamented that the whole industry is going to suffer from open source and with it the customers and society as a whole. Now they embrace it. Yes, probably we are witnessing an emerging equilibrium with open source as a force and a result. For the better of all of us, not just a couple of geeks.