The tragedy of the commons predicts only three possible outcomes. One is the sea of mud. Another is for some actor with coercive power to enforce an allocation policy on behalf of the village (the communist solution). The third is for the commons to break up as village members fence off bits they can defend and manage sustainably (the property-rights solution). When people reflexively apply this model to open-source cooperation, they expect it to be unstable with a short half-life. Since there’s no obvious way to enforce an allocation policy for programmer time over the Internet, this model
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