Wednesday, 1 July 2009
The New New New Economy
« Ajax Push is Easy | Main | Ajax Push for Data Visualization »The recent federal ruling on the open source economic standard is certain to have far-reaching consequences, but should not be surprising considering the current difficulties faced by the financial sector. A historical perspective will help us to understand it better:
The gold standard was in effect in some form until 1971, but did not allow sufficient flexibility or circulation for a modern economy. The next major phase was the New Economy, where web site hits were the unit of exchange. Perhaps if page views had been used instead, the collapse of the dot-com boom could have been avoided. Then, the New New Economy returned to money and added risk as the units of exchange, resulting in a destructive feedback loop with the most serious consequence being the abandonment of the automobile as a cultural focus.
With the New New New Economy, though, we've finally got it right. Instead of gold or the output of differential equations, the New New New Economy is based on the exchange of open source. Open source code has many advantages as the basis of a financial system: it is scarce (human labour is required to create it), it cannot be forged (it must compile and pass the test suite), it is durable (when stored under version-controlled conditions), and it is fungible (who wouldn't trade any of their stuff for some source code?).
Infrastructure changes will include the addition of computer terminals to grocery stores so that source code can be developed and saved at the time of food purchase. The greatest impact on the american consumer, however, will be the other regulations in the same bill requiring all open source exchanges to take place in metric units!
In the meantime, however, it is important to contribute to your favorite open source projects (such as ICEfaces) through traditional monetary means, by purchasing support. Your contributions translate directly into the generation of more lines of open source code, and constitute a vital part of the stimulus for the New New New Economy.
Posted by at 6:24 PM in Entries by Ted Goddard