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Re: [ox-en] What if the designs of everything were free?

Hi

On Fri 01-Aug-2003 at 04:14:36AM -0700, johan soderberg
wrote:


I just read about a studie from the sixties, in which
the authors concluded that in that time, 30% of the cost
of a car was inbedded in the costs of designing new
models. That proportion is likely to have skyrocked in
the last 40 years. A long-shot guess could be 50-80 % of
a car today is made up of design cost? That would imply
that if design was free, then material goods would be
down with 50-80% too. Clearly not an attractive option
to capitalism!


While not an attractive option to capitalism as a whole it
is something that is potentially attractive to individual
capitalists since it can give them a competative edge in
their battles with other capitalists.

The most used example of this is IBM using Linux in
competition with the likes of Microsoft, another example
might be MIT putting their courses online [1] in part to
enable them to compete better with other universities.

It is somewhat ironic that the dynamic of capitalist
competition is resulting if the adoption of the free
software mode of production since if this mode of
production becomes dominant it will be the end of
capitalism :-)

It is also really unclear what capitalism as a whole can
do about this -- it's kind of like it is eating itself
from inside out.

Chris


[1] http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/08/29/134223

--
http://chris.croome.net/

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