I claim that many puzzles and failures of the software world can be explained as public goods problems. Judging from Hacker News, software engineers and Silicon Valley people don’t always know this standard piece of economics. So! Voluntary economic transactions make all parties better off. But not all transactions are voluntary on all sides. If I take the car to work, saving $10 of time, I may cause 10 cents worth of pollution to 1000 people in my neighbourhood. Even though society would be $90 better off if I didn’t drive, those people can’t stop me. My driving is a public bad. Another classic example is overfishing. If everyone can fish from a lake, they will not take account of the cost they impose on others by leaving less fish for them. The lake is a commons.
A personal computer as a 'commons' is a misleading idea.
First, a background issue. The computer you buy today is not "many times more powerful than one from 10 years ago." Moore's law stopped applying years ago:
although inertia keep sit in the public discourse.
Your computer probably contains more memory and a larger hard disc, but the performance is about the same.
But this is not my reason for commenting.
A PC is a vehicle intended to be infected with software.
It comes preinfected with 'free' software intended to extract resources from the computer's owner, e.g., personal data, attention, money (by paying for upgrades), internet bandwidth, etc.
Software tends to be a winner take all market, so companies want to get their product on the market first (so no resources are invested in making it unnecessarily efficient).
As you point out, people get what they pay for (which generates little incentive to fix bugs, but reputation can be a motivator:
If you are interested in data, my book Evidence-based Software Engineering discusses what is currently known about software engineering, based on an analysis of all the publicly available data.
A personal computer as a 'commons' is a misleading idea.
First, a background issue. The computer you buy today is not "many times more powerful than one from 10 years ago." Moore's law stopped applying years ago:
http://shape-of-code.com/2013/12/13/unreliable-cpus-and-memory-the-end-result-of-moores-law/
although inertia keep sit in the public discourse.
Your computer probably contains more memory and a larger hard disc, but the performance is about the same.
But this is not my reason for commenting.
A PC is a vehicle intended to be infected with software.
It comes preinfected with 'free' software intended to extract resources from the computer's owner, e.g., personal data, attention, money (by paying for upgrades), internet bandwidth, etc.
Software tends to be a winner take all market, so companies want to get their product on the market first (so no resources are invested in making it unnecessarily efficient).
As you point out, people get what they pay for (which generates little incentive to fix bugs, but reputation can be a motivator:
https://shape-of-code.com/2015/12/07/so-you-found-a-bug-in-my-compiler-whoopee-do/
).
If you are interested in data, my book Evidence-based Software Engineering discusses what is currently known about software engineering, based on an analysis of all the publicly available data.
pdf+code+all data freely available here: http://knosof.co.uk/ESEUR/