Comment by ekjhgkejhgk
1 day ago
I wouldn't call it tragedy of the commons, because it's not a commons. It's owned by microsoft. They're calculating that it's worth it for them, so I say take as much as you can.
Commons would be if it's owned by nobody and everyone benefits from its existence.
> so I say take as much as you can. Commons would be if it’s owned by nobody
This isn’t what “commons” means in the term ‘tragedy of the commons’, and the obvious end result of your suggestion to take as much as you can is to cause the loss of access.
Anything that is free to use is a commons, regardless of ownership, and when some people use too much, everyone loses access.
Finite digital resources like bandwidth and database sizes within companies are even listed as examples in the Wikipedia article on Tragedy of the Commons. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons
No, the word and its meaning both point to the fact that there’s no exclusive ownership of a commons. This is importantl, since ownership is associated with bearing the cost of usage (i.e., deprecation) which would lead an owner to avoid the tragedy of the commons. Ownership is regularly the solution to the tragedy (socialism didn’t work).
The behavior that you warn against is that of a free rider that make use of a positive externality of GitHub’s offering.
That is one meaning of “commons”, but not all of them, and you might be mistaking which one the phrase ‘tragedy of the commons’ is using.
“Commons can also be defined as a social practice of governing a resource not by state or market but by a community of users that self-governs the resource through institutions that it creates.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commons
The actual mechanism by which ownership resolves tragedy of the commons scenarios is by making the resource non-free, by either charging, regulating, or limiting access. The effect still occurs when something is owned but free, and its name is still ‘tragedy of the commons’, even when the resource in question is owned by private interests.
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Still, because reality doesn't respect boundaries of human-made categories, and because people never define their categories exhaustively, we can safely assume that something almost-but-not-quite like a commons, is subject to an almost-but-not-quite tragedy of the commons.
That seems to assume some sort of… maybe unfounded linearity or something? I mean, I’m not sure I agree that GitHub is nearly a commons in any sense, but let’s put that aside as a distraction…
The idea of the tragedy of the commons relies on this feedback loop of having these unsustainably growing herds (growing because they can exploit the zero-cost-to-them resources of the commons). Feedback loops are notoriously sensitive to small parameter changes. MS could presumably impose some damping if they wanted.
> That seems to assume some sort of… maybe unfounded linearity or something
Not linearity but continuity, which I think is a well-founded assumption, given that it's our categorization that simplifies the world by drawing sharp boundaries where no such bounds exist in nature.
> The idea of the tragedy of the commons relies on this feedback loop of having these unsustainably growing herds (growing because they can exploit the zero-cost-to-them resources of the commons)
AIUI, zero-cost is not a necessary condition, a positive return is enough. Fishermen still need to buy fuel and nets and pay off loans for the boats, but as long as their expected profit is greater than that, they'll still overfish and deplete the pond, unless stronger external feedback is introduced.
Given that the solution to tragedy of the commons is having the commons owned by someone who can boss the users around, GitHub being owned by MS makes it more of a commons in practice, not less.
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And indeed MS/GitHub does impose some "damping" in the form of things like API request throttling, CPU limits on CI, asking Homebrew not to use shallow cloning, etc. And those limits are one of the reasons given why using git as a database isn't good.
An A- is still an A kind of thinking. I like this approach as not everything perfectly fits the mold.
There is an analogy in the sense that for the users a resource is, for certain practical intents and purposes, functionally common. Social media is like this as well.
But I would make the following clarifications:
1. A private entity is still the steward of the resource and therefore the resource figures into the aims, goals, and constraints of the private entity.
2. The common good is itself under the stewardship of the state, as its function is guardian of the common good.
3. The common good is the default (by natural law) and prior to the private good. The latter is instituted in positive law for the sake of the former by, e.g., reducing conflict over goods.
> There is an analogy in the sense that for the users a resource is, for certain practical intents and purposes, functionally common. Social media is like this as well.
I think it's both simpler and deeper than that.
Governments and corporations don't exist in nature. Those are just human constructs, mutually-recursive shared beliefs that emulate agents following some rules, as long as you don't think too hard about this.
"Tragedy of the commons" is a general coordination problem. The name itself might've been coined with some specific scenarios in mind, but for the phenomenon itself, it doesn't matter what kind of entities exploit the "commons"; the "private" vs. "public" distinction itself is neither a sharp divide, nor does it exist in nature. All that matters is that there's some resource used by several independent parties, and each of them finds it more beneficial to defect than to cooperate.
In a way, it's basically a 3+-player prisonner's dilemma. The solution is the same, too: introducing a party that forces all other parties to cooperate. That can be a private or public or any other kind of org taking ownership of the commons and enforcing quotas, or in case of prisonners, a mob boss ready to shoot anyone who defects.
The whole notion of the "tragedy of the commons" needs to be put to rest. It's an armchair thought experiment that was disproven at the latest in the 90s by Elinor Ostrom with actual empirical evidence of commons.
The "tragedy", if you absolutely need to find one, is only for unrestricted, free-for-all commons, which is obviously a bad idea.
A high-trust community like a village can prevent a tragedy of the commons scenario. Participants feel obligations to the community, and misusing the commons actually does have real downsides for the individual because there are social feedback mechanisms. The classic examples like people grazing sheep or cutting wood are bad examples that don't really work.
But that doesn't mean the tragedy of the commons can't happen in other scenarios. If we define commons a bit more generously it does happen very frequently on the internet. It's also not difficult to find cases of it happening in larger cities, or in environments where cutthroat behavior has been normalized
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Ostrom showed that it wasn't necessarily a tragedy, if tight groups involved decided to cooperate. This common in what we call "trust-based societies", which aren't universal.
Nonetheless, the concept is still alive, and anthropic global warming is here to remind you about this.
She not “disprove” the existence of the tragedy of the commons. What she established was that controlling the commons can be done communally rather than through privatization or through government ownership.
Communal management of a resource is still government, though. It just isn’t central government.
The thesis of the tragedy of the commons is that an uncontrolled resource will be abused. The answer is governance at some level, whether individual, collective, or government ownership.
> The "tragedy", if you absolutely need to find one, is only for unrestricted, free-for-all commons, which is obviously a bad idea.
Right. And that’s what people are usually talking about when they say “tragedy of the commons”.
Ostrom's results didn't disprove ToC. She showed that common resources can be communally maintained, not that tragic outcomes could never happen.
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yeah, it's a post-hoc rationalization for the enclosure and privatization of said commons.
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It has the same effect though. A few bad actors using this “free” thing can end up driving the cost up enough that Microsoft will have to start charging for it.
The jerks get their free things for a while, then it goes away for everyone.
I think the jerks are the ones who bought and enshittified GitHub after it had earned significant trust and become an important part of FOSS infrastructure.
Scoping it to a local maxima, the only thing worse than git is github. In an alternate universe hg won the clone wars and we are all better off for it.
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Why do you blame MS for predictably doing what MS does, and not the people who sold that trust & FOSS infra to MS for a profit? Your blame seems misplaced.
And out of curiosity, aside from costing more for some people, what’s worse exactly? I’m not a heavy GitHub user, but I haven’t really noticed anything in the core functionality that would justify calling it enshittified.
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A public park suffers from tragedy of the commons even though it’s managed by the city.
Right. Microsoft could easily impose a transfer fee if over a certain amount that would allow “normal” OSS development of even popular software to happen without charge while imposing a cost to projects that try to use GitHub like a database.
Well, till you choose to host something yourself and it becomes popular
Tragedy of the Microsoft just doesn't sound as nice though
I doubt anyone is calculating
Remember how GTA5 took 10 minutes to start and nobody cared? Lots of software is like this.
Some Blizzard games download 137 MB file every time you run them and take few minutes to start (and no, this is not due to my computer).