Comment by bawolff
15 hours ago
I'm not sure i agree that the Wikipedia article supports your position.
Certainly private property is involved in tragedy of the commons. In the classic shared cattle ranching example, the individual cattle are private property, only the field is held in common.
I generally think that tragedy of the commons requires the commons, to, well, be held in common. If someone owns the thing that is the commons, its not a commons but just a bad product. (With of course some nit picking about how things can be de jure private property while being defacto common property)
In the microsoft example, windows becoming shitty software is not a tragedy of the commons, its just MS making a business decision because windows is not a commons. On the other hand, computing in general becoming shitty, because each individual app does attention grabbing dark patterns, as it helps the induvidual apps bottom line while hurting the ecosystem as a whole, would be a tragedy of the commons, as user attention is something all apps hold in common and none of them own.
One of the examples of digital commons in the article is Wikipedia itself, which is privately owned, so now you can be sure the Wikipedia article does backup my claim at least a little.
The Microsoft example in this subthread is GitHub, not Windows. Windows is not a digital commons, because it’s neither free nor finite. Github is (or was) both. That is the criteria that Wikipedia is using to apply the descriptor ‘commons’: something that is both freely available to the public, and comes in limited supply, e.g. bandwidth, storage, databases, compute, etc.
Wikipedia’s article seems to be careful to not discuss ownership nor define the tragedy of the commons in terms of ownership, presumably because the phrase describes something that can still happen when privately owned things are made freely available. I skimmed Investopedia’s article on Tragedy as well, and it seems similarly to not explicitly discuss ownership, and even brings up the complicated issue of lack of international commons. That’s an interesting point: whatever we call commons locally may not be a commons globally. That suggests that even the original classic notion of tragedy of the commons often involves a type of private ownership, i.e. overfishing a “public” lake is a lake owned by a specific country, cattle overusing a “public” pasture is land owned by a specific country, and these resources might not be truly common when considered globally.
The use of Github is not "something that is both freely available to the public". If you're not the customer, you're the product.
What use of GitHub are you talking about? The use of GitHub by @c-linkage at the top of the thread was, in fact, based on GitHub being free to use. And GitHub’s basic services are free to use. I really don’t know what you mean.
Your oft-repeated customer vs product platitude doesn’t seem to apply to GitHub, at least not to it’s founding and core product offering. You are the customer, and GitHub doesn’t advertise. It’s a freemium model, the free access is just a sort of loss leader to entice paid upgrades by you, the customer.