Comment by nkmnz
1 month ago
I'm contradicting your interpretation of the Wikipedia article. It does not support your initial statement that a) Github's (or any other company's) free tier constitutes a commons and/or b) the "overuse" of said free tiers by free riders could be the base of a tragedy of the commons (ToC). The idea is absurd, since there is no commons and also no tragedy. To the contrary. Commons have an external or natural limit to how much they can provide in a given time without incurring cost in the form of depreciation. But there is no external or natural limit to the free tier. The free tier is the result of the incentives under which the Github management operates and it is fully at their discretion, so the limits are purely internal. Other than in the case of commons, more usage can actually increase the amount of resources provided by the company for the users of the free tier, because a) network effects and b) economies of scale (more users bring more other users; more users cost less per user).
If Github realizes that the free tier is too generous, they can cut it anytime without it being in any way a "tragedy" for anybody involved - having to pay for stuff or service you want to consume is not the "T" in ToC! The T is that there are no incentives to pay (or use less) without increasing the incentives for everyone else to just increase their relative use! You not using the github free tier doesn't increase the usage of Github for anybody else - if it has any effect at all, it might actually decrease the usage of Github because you might not publish something that might in turn attract other users to interact.
Wikipedia does use Wikipedia, a privately owned organization, as an example of a digital commons.
The ‘tragedy’ that the top comment referred to is losing unlimited access to some of GitHub’s features, as described in the article (shallow clones, CPU limits, API rate limits, etc.). The finiteness, or natural limit, does exist in the form of bandwidth, storage capacity, server CPU capacity, etc.. The Wikipedia article goes through that, so I’m left with the impression you didn’t understand it.
> Wikipedia does use Wikipedia, a privately owned organization
The Wikimedia organization does not actually own wikipedia. They do not control editorial policy nor own the copyright of any of the contents. They do not pay any of the editors.
They do own the servers. The rest of your comment is what demonstrates why Wikipedia counts as “commons”. Much of the same can be said for GitHub too.
It is really annoying that you're shifting the goal post by bringing up Wikipedia (as an example, not the article), which is very much different from Github in many ways. Still, Wikipedia is not a common good in my book, but at least in the case of Wikipedia I can understand the reasoning and it's a much more interesting case.
But let's stick with Github. On which of the following statements can we agree?
Z1) A "Commons" is a system of interacting market participants, governed by shared interests and incentives (and sometimes shared ownership). Github, a multi billion subsidiary of the multi trillion dollar company Microsoft, and I, their customer, are not members of the same commons; we don't share many interests, we have vastly different incentives, and we certainly do not share any ownership. We have a legally binding contract that each side can cancel within the boundaries of said contract under the applicable law.
Z2) A tragedy in the sense of the Tragedy of the Commons is that something bad happens even though everyone can have the best intentions, because the system lacks a mechanism would allow to a) coordinate interests and incentives across time, and b) to reward sustainable behavior instead of punishing it.
A) Github giving away stuff for free while covering the cost does not constitute a common good from... 1. a legal perspective 2. an ethical perspective 3. an economic perspective
B) If a free tier is successful, a profit maximizing company with a market penetration far from saturation will increase the resources provided in total, while there is no such mechanism or incentive for any participant in a market involving a common good, e.g. there will be no one providing additional pasture for free if an Allmende is already destroying the existing pasture through overgrazing.
C) If a free tier is unsuccessful because it costs more than it enables in new revenue, a company can simply shut it down – no tragedy involved. No server has been depreciated, no software destroyed, no user lost their share of a commonly owned good.
D) More users of a free tier reduce net loss / increase net earnings per free user for the provider, while more cattle grazing on a pasture decrease net earnings / increase net loss per cow.
E) If I use less of Github, you don't have any incentive to use more of it. This is the opposite of a commons, where one participant taking less of it puts out an incentive to everybody else to take their place and take more of it.
F) A service that you pay for with your data, your attention, your personal or company brand and reach (e.g. with public repositories), is not really free.
G) The tiny product samples that you can get for free in perfume shops do not constitute a common good, even though they are limited, "free" for the user, and presumably beneficial even for people not involved in the transaction. If you think they were a common good, what about Nestlé offering Cheerios with +25% more for free? Are those 20% a common good just because they are free? Where do you draw the line? Paying with data, attention, and brand + reach is fine, but paying for only 80% of the produce is not fine?
H) The concepts of "moral hazard" and "free riders" apply to all your examples, both Github and Wikipedia. The concept of a Commons (capital C) is neither necessary nor helpful in describing the problems that you want to describe wrt to free services provided by either Github of Wikipedia.
Nope, no goal posts were moved, Wikipedia and GitHub are both private entities that offer privately funded free services to everyone, and due to the widespread free access, both have been considered to be examples of digital commons by others. I didn’t make up the Wikipedia example, it’s in Wikipedia being offered as one of the canonical examples of digital commons, and unfortunately for you it pokes a hole in your argument. If your ‘book’ disagrees with the WP article, you’re free to fix it (since WP is a digital commons), and you’re also free to use it to re-evaluate whether your book needs updating.
You seem to be stuck on definitions of ‘commons’, and unfortunately that’s not a compelling argument for reasons I’ve already stated. Also unfortunate that there are fundamental terminology flaws, or made up definitions, or straw men arguments, or incorrect statements, or opinions in every single item you listed.
“Tragedy of the Commons” is a phrase that became an economic term of art a long time ago. It’s now an abstract concept, and gets used to mean (as well as defined by) any situation in which a community of people overusing shared resources causes any loss of access to those shared resources for anyone else in the community. “The tragedy of the commons is an economic theory claiming that individuals tend to exploit shared resources so that demand outweighs supply, and it becomes unavailable for the whole.” (Investopedia) I’ve already cited multiple sources that define it that way, and so far you’ve shared no evidence to the contrary.
There are also tons of examples online where the phrase has been used to refer to small, local, or privatized resources, I found a dozen in like one minute, so I already know it’s incorrect to claim that people don’t use the phrase in the way I’m suggesting.
Even though the phrase does not depend on any strict definition of commons (or of tragedy), none of your argument addresses the fact that what’s common in, say, Germany is not freely available to Iranians, for example. Land is often used in ‘tragedy of the commons’ examples. Hardin’s original example was sheep grazing on “public” land, and yet there is really no such thing as common land anywhere on this planet, all of it is claimed by subgroups, e.g., countries, and is private is some sense. The idea of commons, and even some of the alternate dictionary definitions, make explicit note that the word is relative to a specific community of people. Nothing you’ve said addresses that fact, and it means that ‘Tragedy of the Commons’ has always referred to resources that are not common in a global context. GitHub and Wikipedia are more common than “public” land in America in that global sense, because they’re used by and available to more people than US land is.
What I can agree with is that it’s common for people to mean things like land, air, and water, when using or referring to the phrase, and I agree those things count as commons.
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