Comment by dahart

1 day ago

> 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

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dahart

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nkmnz  1 day ago

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.

  • dahart  21 hours ago

    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.