Economist David Friedman tells a joke that goes like this: Two economists walked past a Porsche showroom. One of them pointed at a shiny car in the window and said, “I want that.” “Obviously not,” the other replied.239 The joke is about revealed preference: the idea that we can only understand consumer preferences based on their actual behavior. If we were to rewrite the joke about open source software, it might go something like this: Two developers cloned a popular open source project. One of them pointed at a donation button on the README and said, “That’s a great idea.” “Obviously not,”
...more
