Louis-Philippe Véronneau - economicshttps://veronneau.org/2022-11-04T00:00:00-04:00Book Review: Chokepoint Capitalism, by Rebecca Giblin and Cory Doctorow2022-11-04T00:00:00-04:002022-11-04T00:00:00-04:00Louis-Philippe Véronneautag:veronneau.org,2022-11-04:/book-review-chokepoint-capitalism-by-rebecca-giblin-and-cory-doctorow.html<p>Two weeks ago, I had the chance to go see Cory Doctorow at my local independent
bookstore, in Montréal. He was there to present his latest essay, co-written
with Rebecca Giblin<sup id="fnref:giblin"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:giblin">1</a></sup>. Titled <em>Chokepoint Capitalism: How Big Tech and
Big Content Captured Creative Labor Markets and How We'll Win Them …</em></p><p>Two weeks ago, I had the chance to go see Cory Doctorow at my local independent
bookstore, in Montréal. He was there to present his latest essay, co-written
with Rebecca Giblin<sup id="fnref:giblin"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:giblin">1</a></sup>. Titled <em>Chokepoint Capitalism: How Big Tech and
Big Content Captured Creative Labor Markets and How We'll Win Them Back</em>, it
focuses on the impact of monopolies and monopsonies (more on this later) on
creative workers.</p>
<p>The book is divided in two main parts:</p>
<ul>
<li>Part one, <strong>Culture has been captured</strong> (chapters 1 to 11), is a series of
case studies that focus on different examples of market failure. The specific
sectors analysed are the book market, the news media, the music industry,
Hollywood, the mobile apps industry and the online video platforms.</li>
<li>Part two, <strong>Braking anticompetitive flywheels</strong> (chapters 12 to 19), looks at
different solutions to try to fix these failures.</li>
</ul>
<p><img src="/media/blog/2022-11-04/cover.jpg" width="70%" style="margin-left:15%" title="A picture of the book cover" alt="A picture of the book cover"></p>
<p>Although Doctorow is known for his strong political stances, I have to say I'm
quite surprised by the quality of the research Giblin and he did for this book.
They both show a pretty advanced understanding of the market dynamics they look
at, and even though most of the solutions they propose aren't new or
groundbreaking, they manage to be convincing and clear.</p>
<p>That is to say, you certainly don't need to be an economist to understand or
enjoy this book :)</p>
<p>As I have mentioned before, the book heavily criticises monopolies, but also
monopsonies — a market structure that has only one buyer (instead of one
seller). I find this quite interesting, as whereas people are often familiar
with the concept of monopolies, monopsonies are frequently overlooked.</p>
<p>The classic example of a monopsony is a labor market with a single employer:
there is a multitude of workers trying to sell their labor power, but in the
end, working conditions are dictated by the sole employer, who gets to decide
who has a job and who hasn't. Mining towns are good real-world examples of
monopsonies.</p>
<p>In the book, the authors argue most of the contemporary work produced by
creative workers (especially musicians and writers) is sold to monopsonies and
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oligopsony">oligopsonies</a>, like Amazon<sup id="fnref:amazon"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:amazon">2</a></sup> or major music labels. This creates a
situation where the consumers are less directly affected by the lack of
competition in the market (they often get better prices), but where creators
have an increasingly hard time making ends meet. Not only this, but natural
monopsonies<sup id="fnref:natural"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:natural">3</a></sup> are relatively rare, making the case for breaking the
existing ones even stronger.</p>
<p>Apart from the evident need to actually start applying (the quite good)
antitrust laws in the USA, some of the other solutions put forward are:</p>
<ul>
<li>Transparency Rights — giving creative workers a way to audit the companies
that sell their work and make sure they are paid what they are due.</li>
<li>Collective Action</li>
<li>Time Limits on Copyright Contracts — making sure creators that sell their
copyrights to publishers or labels can get them back after a reasonable
period of time.</li>
<li>Radical Interoperability — forcing tech giants to make their walled-gardens
interoperable.</li>
<li>Minimum Wages for Creative Work — enforcing minimum legal rates for workers
in certain domains, like what is already done for screenplays in the US by
members of the Writers Guild of America.</li>
<li>Collective Ownership</li>
</ul>
<p>Overall, I found this book quite enjoying and well written. Since I am not a
creative worker myself and don't experience first-hand the hardships presented
in the book, it was the occasion for me to delve more deeply in this topic.
Chances are I'll reuse some of the exposés in my classes too.</p>
<div class="footnote">
<hr>
<ol>
<li id="fn:giblin">
<p>Professor at the Melbourne Law School and Director of the
Intellectual Property Research Institute of Australia, amongst other things.
<a href="https://law.unimelb.edu.au/about/staff/rebecca-giblin">More on her here</a>. <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:giblin" title="Jump back to footnote 1 in the text">↩</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:amazon">
<p>Amazon owns more than 50% of the US physical book retail market and
has an even higher market share for ebooks and audiobooks (via Audible). Not
only this, but with the decline of the physical book market, audiobooks are
an increasingly important source of revenue for authors. <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:amazon" title="Jump back to footnote 2 in the text">↩</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:natural">
<p>Natural monopolies happen when it does not make economic sense for
multiple enterprises to compete in a market. Critical infrastructures, like
water supply or electricity, make for good examples of natural monopolies. It
simply wouldn't be efficient to have 10 separate electrical cables connecting
your house to 10 separate electric grids. In my opinion, such monopolies are
acceptable (and even desirable), as long as they are collectively owned,
either by the State or by local entities (municipalities, non-profits, etc.). <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:natural" title="Jump back to footnote 3 in the text">↩</a></p>
</li>
</ol>
</div>What are the incentive structures of Free Software?2021-02-17T00:00:00-05:002021-02-17T00:00:00-05:00Louis-Philippe Véronneautag:veronneau.org,2021-02-17:/what-are-the-incentive-structures-of-free-software.html<p>When I started my Master's degree in January 2018, I was confident I would be
done in a year and half. After all, I only had one year of classes and I
figured 6 months to write a thesis would be plenty.</p>
<p>Three years later, I'm finally done: the final …</p><p>When I started my Master's degree in January 2018, I was confident I would be
done in a year and half. After all, I only had one year of classes and I
figured 6 months to write a thesis would be plenty.</p>
<p>Three years later, I'm finally done: the final version of my thesis was
accepted on January 22<sup>nd</sup> 2021.</p>
<p>My thesis, entitled <em>What are the incentive structures of Free Software? An
economic analysis of Free Software's specific development model</em>, can be <a href="https://veronneau.org/media/blog/2021-02-17/mémoire.pdf">found
here</a> <sup id="fnref:french"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:french">1</a></sup>. If you care about such things, both the data and the final
document can be built from source with the code in this <a href="https://gitlab.com/baldurmen/memoire-maitrise">git repository</a>.</p>
<h2>Results and analysis</h2>
<p>My thesis is divided in four main sections:</p>
<ol>
<li>an introduction to FOSS</li>
<li>a chapter discussing the incentive structures of Free Software (and arguing
the so called “<em>Tragedy of the Commons</em>” isn't inevitable)</li>
<li>a chapter trying to use empirical data to validate the theories presented in
the previous chapter</li>
<li>an annex on the various FOSS business models</li>
</ol>
<p>If you're reading this blog post, chances are you'll find both section 1 and 4
a tad boring, as you might already be familiar with these concepts.</p>
<h3>Incentives</h3>
<p>So, why <em>do</em> people contribute to Free Software? Unsurprisingly, it's
complicated. Many economists have studied this topic, but for some reason, most
research happened in the early 2000s.</p>
<p>Although papers don't all agree with each other and most importantly, about the
variables' importance, the main incentives<sup id="fnref:complex"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:complex">2</a></sup> can be summarized by:</p>
<ul>
<li>expectation of monetary gain</li>
<li>writing FOSS as a hobby (that includes “<em>scratching your own itch</em>”)</li>
<li>liking the FOSS community and feeling a sense of belonging</li>
<li>altruism (writing FOSS for Good™)</li>
</ul>
<p>Giving weights to these variables is not an easy thing: the FOSS ecosystem is
highly heterogeneous and thus, people tend to write FOSS for different reasons.
Moreover, incentives tend to shift with time as the ecosystem does. People
writing Free Software in the 1990s probably did it for different reasons than
people in 2021.</p>
<p>These four variables can also be divided in two general categories: extrinsic
and intrinsic incentives. Monetary gain expectancy is an extrinsic incentive
(its value is delayed and mediated), whereas the three other ones are intrinsic
(they have an immediate value by themselves).</p>
<h3>Empirical analysis</h3>
<p>Theory is nice, but it's even better when you can back it up with data. Sadly,
most of the papers on the economic incentives of FOSS are either purely
theoretical, or use sample sizes so small they could as well be.</p>
<p>Using the data from the <a href="https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2018/">StackOverflow 2018 survey</a>, I thus
tried to see if I could somehow confirm my previous assumptions.</p>
<p>With 129 questions and more than 100 000 respondents (which after statistical
processing yields between 28 000 and 39 000 observations per variable of
interest), the StackOverflow 2018 survey is a <em>very</em> large dataset compared to
what economists are used to work with.</p>
<p>Sadly, it wasn't entirely enough to come up with hard answers. There <em>is</em> a
strong and significant correlation between writing Free Software and having a
higher salary, but endogeneity problems<sup id="fnref:endogeneity"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:endogeneity">3</a></sup> made it hard to give a
reliable estimate of how much money this would represent. Same goes for writing
code has a hobby: it seems there is a strong and significant correlation, but
the exact numbers I came up with cannot really be trusted.</p>
<p>The results on community as an incentive to writing FOSS were the ones that
surprised me the most. Although I expected the relation to be quite strong, the
coefficients predicted were in fact quite small. I theorise this is partly due
to only 8% of the respondents declaring they didn't feel like they belonged in
the IT community. With such a high level of adherence, the margin for
improvement has to be smaller.</p>
<p>As for altruism, I wasn't able get any meaningful results. In my opinion this
is mostly due to the fact there was no explicit survey question on this topic
and I tried to make up for it by cobbling data together.</p>
<p>Kinda anti-climatic, isn't it? I would've loved to come up with decisive
conclusions on this topic, but if there's one thing I learned while writing
this thesis, it is I don't know much after all.</p>
<div class="footnote">
<hr>
<ol>
<li id="fn:french">
<p>Note that the thesis is written in French. <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:french" title="Jump back to footnote 1 in the text">↩</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:complex">
<p>Of course, life is complex and so are people's motivations. One
could come up with dozen more reasons why people contribute to Free Software.
The "fun" of theoretical modelisation is trying to make complex things
somewhat simpler. <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:complex" title="Jump back to footnote 2 in the text">↩</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:endogeneity">
<p>I'll spare you the details, but this means there is no way to
know if this correlation is the result of a causal link between the two
variables. There are ways to deal with this problem (using an <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrumental_variables_estimation">instrumental
variables model</a> is a very popular one), but again, the survey didn't
provide the proper instruments to do so. For example, it could very well be
the correlation is due to omitted variables. If you are interested in this
topic (and can read French), I talk about this issue in section 3.2.8. <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:endogeneity" title="Jump back to footnote 3 in the text">↩</a></p>
</li>
</ol>
</div>Book Review: Working in Public by Nadia Eghbal2020-11-06T00:00:00-05:002020-11-06T00:00:00-05:00Louis-Philippe Véronneautag:veronneau.org,2020-11-06:/book-review-working-in-public-by-nadia-eghbal.html<p>I have a lot of respect for Nadia Eghbal, partly because I can't help to be
jealous of her work on the economics of Free Software<sup id="fnref:os"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:os">1</a></sup>. If you are not
already familiar with Eghbal, she is the author of <a href="https://www.fordfoundation.org/about/library/reports-and-studies/roads-and-bridges-the-unseen-labor-behind-our-digital-infrastructure/"><em>Roads and Bridges: The
Unseen Labor Behind Our Digital Infrastructure …</em></a></p><p>I have a lot of respect for Nadia Eghbal, partly because I can't help to be
jealous of her work on the economics of Free Software<sup id="fnref:os"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:os">1</a></sup>. If you are not
already familiar with Eghbal, she is the author of <a href="https://www.fordfoundation.org/about/library/reports-and-studies/roads-and-bridges-the-unseen-labor-behind-our-digital-infrastructure/"><em>Roads and Bridges: The
Unseen Labor Behind Our Digital Infrastructure</em></a>, a great technical
report published for the Ford Foundation in 2016. You may also have caught her
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W2AR1owg0ao">excellent keynote</a> at LCA 2017, entitled <em>Consider the Maintainer</em>.</p>
<p>Her latest book, <em>Working in Public: The Making and Maintenance of Open Source
Software</em>, published by Stripe Press a few months ago, is a great read and if
this topic interests you, I highly recommend it.</p>
<p>The book itself is simply gorgeous; bright orange, textured hardcover binding,
thick paper, wonderful typesetting — it has everything to please. Well, nearly
everything. Sadly, it is only available on Amazon, exclusively in the United
States. A real let down for a book on Free and Open Source Software.</p>
<p>The book is divided in five chapters, namely:</p>
<ol>
<li>Github as a Platform</li>
<li>The Structure of an Open Source Project</li>
<li>Roles, Incentives and Relationships</li>
<li>The Work Required by Software</li>
<li>Managing the Costs of Production</li>
</ol>
<p><img src="/media/blog/2020-11-06/cover.jpg" width="70%" style="margin-left:15%" title="A picture of the book cover" alt="A picture of the book cover"></p>
<p>Contrary to what I was expecting, the book feels more like an extension of the
LCA keynote I previously mentioned than <em>Roads and Bridges</em>. Indeed, as made
apparent by the following quote, Eghbal doesn't believe funding to be the
primary problem of FOSS anymore:</p>
<blockquote>
<p><em>We still don't have a common understanding about </em>who's<em> doing the work,
</em>why<em> they do it, and </em>what<em> work needs to be done. Only when we understand
the underlying behavioral dynamics of open source today, and how it differs
from its early origins, can we figure out where money fits in. Otherwise,
we're just flinging wet paper towels at a brick wall, hoping that something
sticks.</em> — p.184</p>
</blockquote>
<p>That is to say, the behavior of maintainers and the challenges they face — not
the eternal money problem — is the real topic of this book. And it feels
refreshing. When was the last time you read something on the economics of Free
Software without it being mostly about what licences projects should pick and
how business models can be tacked on them? I certainly can't.</p>
<p>To be clear, I'm not sure I agree with Eghbal on this. Her having worked at
Github for a few years and having interviewed mostly people in the Ruby on
Rails and Javascript communities certainly shows in the form of a strong
selection bias. As she herself admits, this is a book on how software <em>on
Github</em> is produced. As much as this choice irks me (the Free Software
community certainly cannot be reduced to Github), this exercise had the merit
of forcing me to look at my own selection biases.</p>
<p>As such, reading <em>Working in Public</em> did to me something I wasn't expecting it
to do: it broke my Free Software echo chamber. Although I consider myself very
familiar with the world of Free and Open Source Software, I now understand my
somewhat ill-advised contempt for certain programming languages — mostly JS —
skewed my understanding of what FOSS in 2020 really is.</p>
<p>My Free Software world very much revolves around Debian, a project with a
strong and opinionated view of Free Software, rooted in a historical and
political understanding of the term. This, Eghbal argues, is not the case for a
large swat of developers anymore. They are <em>The Github Generation</em>, people
attached to Github as a platform first and foremost, and who feel "Open Source"
is just a convenient way to make things.</p>
<p>Although I could intellectualise this, before reading the book, I didn't really
<a href="https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/grok">grok</a> how communities akin to npm have been reshaping the modern FOSS
ecosystem and how different they are from Debian itself. To be honest, I am not
sure I like this tangent and it is certainly part of the reason why I had a
tendency to dismiss it as a fringe movement I could safely ignore.</p>
<p>Thanks to Nadia Eghbal, I come out of this reading more humble and certainly
reminded that FOSS' heterogeneity is real and should not be idly dismissed.
This book is rich in content and although I could go on (my personal notes
clock-in at around 2000 words and I certainly disagree with a number of
things), I'll stop here for now. Go and grab a copy already!</p>
<div class="footnote">
<hr>
<ol>
<li id="fn:os">
<p>She insists on using the term <em>open source</em>, but I won't :) <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:os" title="Jump back to footnote 1 in the text">↩</a></p>
</li>
</ol>
</div>Musings on long-term software support and economic incentives2020-10-19T00:00:00-04:002020-10-19T00:00:00-04:00Louis-Philippe Véronneautag:veronneau.org,2020-10-19:/musings-on-long-term-software-support-and-economic-incentives.html<p>Although I still read a lot, during my college sophomore years my reading
habits shifted from novels to more academic works. Indeed, reading dry
textbooks and economic papers for classes often kept me from reading anything
else substantial. Nowadays, I tend to binge read novels: I won't touch a book …</p><p>Although I still read a lot, during my college sophomore years my reading
habits shifted from novels to more academic works. Indeed, reading dry
textbooks and economic papers for classes often kept me from reading anything
else substantial. Nowadays, I tend to binge read novels: I won't touch a book
for months on end, and suddenly, I'll read 10 novels back to back<sup id="fnref:dune"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:dune">1</a></sup>.</p>
<p>At the start of a novel binge, I always follow the same ritual: I take out my
e-reader from its storage box, marvel at the fact the battery is still pretty
full, turn on the WiFi and check if there are OS updates. And I have to admit,
Kobo Inc. (now Rakuten Kobo) has done a stellar job of keeping my e-reader up
to date. I've owned this model (a Kobo Aura 1<sup>st</sup> generation) for 7
years now and I'm still running the latest version of Kobo's Linux-based OS.</p>
<p>Having recently had trouble updating my Nexus 5 (also manufactured 7 years ago)
to Android 10<sup id="fnref:nexus"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:nexus">2</a></sup>, I asked myself:</p>
<blockquote>
<p><em>Why is my e-reader still getting regular OS updates, while Google stopped
issuing security patches for my smartphone four years ago?</em></p>
</blockquote>
<p>To try to answer this, let us turn to economic incentives
theory.</p>
<p>Although not the be-all and end-all some think it is<sup id="fnref:incentives"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:incentives">3</a></sup>, incentives
theory is not a bad tool to analyse this particular problem. Executives at
Google most likely followed a very business-centric logic when they decided to
drop support for the Nexus 5. Likewise, Rakuten Kobo's decision to continue
updating older devices certainly had very little to do with ethics or loyalty
to their user base.</p>
<p>So, what are the incentives that keep Kobo updating devices and why are they
different than smartphone manufacturers'?</p>
<h2>A portrait of the current long-term software support offerings for smartphones and e-readers</h2>
<p>Before delving deeper in economic theory, let's talk data. I'll be focusing on
2 brands of e-readers, Amazon's Kindle and Rakuten's Kobo. Although the
e-reader market is highly segmented and differs a lot based on geography,
Amazon was in 2015 the clear worldwide leader with 53% of the worldwide
e-reader sales, followed by Rakuten Kobo at 13%<sup id="fnref:ereader_sales"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:ereader_sales">4</a></sup>.</p>
<p>On the smartphone side, I'll be differentiating between Apple's iPhones and
Android devices, taking Google as the barometer for that ecosystem. As mentioned
below, Google is sadly the leader in long-term Android software support.</p>
<h4>Rakuten Kobo</h4>
<p>According to <a href="https://help.kobo.com/hc/en-us/articles/360019690433">their website</a> and to this <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kobo_eReader#Chronological_Overview">Wikipedia
table</a>, the only e-readers Kobo has deprecated are the original
Kobo eReader and the Kobo WiFi N289, both released in 2010. This makes their
oldest still supported device the Kobo Touch, released in 2011. In my book,
that's a pretty good track record. Long-term software support does not seem to
be advertised or to be a clear selling point in their marketing.</p>
<h4>Amazon</h4>
<p>According to <a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=GKMQC26VQQMM8XSW">their website</a>, Amazon has dropped support for
all 8 devices produced before the Kindle Paperwhite 2<sup>nd</sup> generation,
first sold in 2013. To put things in perspective, the first Kindle came out in
2007, 3 years before Kobo started selling devices. Like Rakuten Kobo, Amazon
does not make promises of long-term software support as part of their
marketing. </p>
<h4>Apple</h4>
<p>Apple has a very clear <a href="https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT201624">software support policy</a> for all their
devices:</p>
<blockquote>
<p><em>Owners of iPhone, iPad, iPod or Mac products may obtain a service and parts
from Apple or Apple service providers for five years after the product is no
longer sold – or longer, where required by law.</em></p>
</blockquote>
<p>This means in the worst-case scenario of buying an iPhone model just as it is
discontinued, one would get a minimum of 5 years of software support.</p>
<h4>Android</h4>
<p>Google's policy for their Android devices is to provide software support for <a href="https://support.google.com/pixelphone/answer/4457705?hl=en">3
years after the launch date</a>. If you buy a Pixel device just
before the new one launches, you could theoretically only get 2 years of
support. In 2018, Google decided OEMs would have to provide security updates
for <a href="https://www.theverge.com/2018/10/24/18019356/android-security-update-mandate-google-contract">at least 2 years</a> after launch, threatening not to license
Google Apps and the Play Store if they didn't comply.</p>
<h2>A question of cost structure</h2>
<p>From the previous section, we can conclude that in general, e-readers seem to
be supported longer than smartphones, and that Apple does a better job than
Android OEMs, providing support for about twice as long.</p>
<p>Even Fairphone, <strong>who's entire business is to build phones designed to last and
to be repaired</strong> was not able to keep the Fairphone 1 (2013) updated for more
than <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairphone_1#Software_updates">a couple years</a> and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairphone_2#Software">seems to be struggling</a> to keep the
Fairphone 2 (2015) running an up to date version of Android.</p>
<p>Anyone who has ever worked in IT will tell you: maintaining software over time
is hard work and hard work by specialised workers is expensive. Most commercial
electronic devices are sold and developed by for-profit enterprises and
software support all comes down to a question of cost structure. If companies
like Google or Fairphone are to be expected to provide long-term support for
the devices they manufacture, they have to be able to fund their work somehow.</p>
<p>In a perfect world, people would be paying for the cost of said long-term
support, as it would likely be cheaper then buying new devices every few years
and would certainly be better for the planet. Problem is, manufacturers aren't
making them pay for it.</p>
<p>Economists call this type of problem externalities: things that should be
part of the cost of a good, but aren't for one a reason or another. A classic
example of an externality is pollution. Clearly pollution is bad and leads to
horrendous consequences, like climate change. Sane people agree we should
drastically cut our greenhouse gas emissions, and yet, we aren't.</p>
<p>Neo-classical economic theory argues the way to fix externalities like
pollution is to <em>internalise</em> these costs, in other words, to make people pay
for the "real price" of the goods they buy. In the case of climate change and
pollution, neo-classical economic theory is plain wrong (spoiler alert: it
often is), but this is where band-aids like the carbon tax comes from.</p>
<p>Still, coming back to long-term software support, let's see what would happen
if we were to try to internalise software maintenance costs. We can do this
multiple ways.</p>
<h3>1 - Include the price of software maintenance in the cost of the device</h3>
<p>This is the choice Fairphone makes. This might somewhat work out for them since
they are a very small company, but it cannot scale for the following reasons:</p>
<ol>
<li>
<p>This strategy relies on you giving your money to an enterprise <u>now</u>,
and trusting them to "Do the right thing" <u>years later</u>. As the years
go by, they will eventually look at their books, see how much ongoing
maintenance is costing them, drop support for the device, apologise and move
on. That is to say, enterprises have a clear economic incentive to promise
long-term support and not deliver. One could argue a company's reputation
would suffer from this kind of behaviour. Maybe sometime it does, but most
often people forget. Political promises are a great example of this.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Enterprises go bankrupt all the time. Even if company X promises 15 years of
software support for their devices, if they cease to exist, your device will
stop getting updates. The internet is full of stories of IoT devices getting
bricked when the parent company goes bankrupt and their servers disappear.
This is related to point number 1: to some degree, you have a disincentive
to pay for long-term support in advance, as the future is uncertain and
there are chances you won't get the support you paid for.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Selling your devices at a higher price to cover maintenance costs does not
necessarily mean you will make more money overall — raising more money to
fund maintenance costs being the goal here. To a certain point, smartphone
models are <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Substitute_good">substitute goods</a> and prices higher than market prices will
tend to drive consumers to buy cheaper ones. There is thus a disincentive to
include the price of software maintenance in the cost of the device.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>People tend to be bad at rationalising the total cost of ownership over a
long period of time. Economists call this phenomenon
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperbolic_discounting">hyperbolic discounting</a>. In our case, it means people are far more likely
to buy a 500$ phone each 3 years than a 1000$ phone each 10 years. Again,
this means OEMs have a clear disincentive to include the price of long-term
software maintenance in their devices.</p>
</li>
</ol>
<p>Clearly, life is more complex than how I portrayed it: enterprises are not
perfect rational agents, altruism exists, not all enterprises aim solely for
profit maximisation, etc. Still, in a capitalist economy, enterprises wanting
to charge for software maintenance upfront have to overcome these hurdles one
way or another if they want to avoid failing.</p>
<h3>2 - The subscription model</h3>
<p>Another way companies can try to internalise support costs is to rely on a
subscription-based revenue model. This has multiple advantages over the previous
option, mainly:</p>
<ol>
<li>
<p>It does not affect the initial purchase price of the device, making it easier
to sell them at a competitive price.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>It provides a stable source of income, something that is <em>very</em> valuable to
enterprises, as it reduces overall risks. This in return creates an incentive
to continue providing software support as long as people are paying.</p>
</li>
</ol>
<p>If this model is so interesting from an economic incentives point of view, why
isn't any smartphone manufacturer offering that kind of program? The answer is,
they are, but not explicitly<sup id="fnref:subscribe"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:subscribe">5</a></sup>.</p>
<p>Apple and Google can fund part of their smartphone software support via the 30%
cut they take out of their respective app stores. A <a href="https://sensortower.com/blog/app-revenue-and-downloads-2019">report from Sensor
Tower</a> shows that in 2019, Apple made an estimated US$ 16 billion
from the App Store, while Google raked in US$ 9 billion from the Google Play
Store. Although the <a href="https://fortune.com/fortune500/2019">Fortune 500 ranking</a> tells us this respectively
is "only" 5.6% and 6.5% of their gross annual revenue for 2019, the profit
margins in this category are certainly higher than any of their other products.</p>
<p>This means Google and Apple have an important incentive to keep your device
updated for some time: if your device works well and is updated, you are more
likely to keep buying apps from their store. When software support for a device
stops, there is a risk paying customers will buy a competitor device and leave
their ecosystem.</p>
<p>This also explains why OEMs who don't own app stores tend not to provide
software support for very long periods of time. Most of them only make money
when you buy a new phone. Providing long-term software support thus becomes a
disincentive, as it directly reduces their sale revenues.</p>
<p>Same goes for Kindles and Kobos: the longer your device works, the more money
they make with their electronic book stores. In my opinion, it's likely Amazon
and Rakuten Kobo produce quarterly cost-benefit reports to decide when to drop
support for older devices, based on ongoing support costs and the recurring
revenues these devices bring in.</p>
<p>Rakuten Kobo is also in a more precarious situation than Amazon is: considering
Amazon's very important market share, if your device stops getting new updates,
there is a greater chance people will replace their old Kobo with a Kindle.
Again, they have an important economic incentive to keep devices running as long
as they are profitable.</p>
<h2>Can Free Software fix this?</h2>
<p>Yes and no. Free Software certainly isn't a magic wand one can wave to make
everything better, but does provide major advantages in terms of security, user
freedom and sometimes costs. The last piece of the puzzle explaining why Rakuten
Kobo's software support is better than Google's is technological choices.</p>
<p>Smartphones are incredibly complex devices and have become the main computing
platform of many. Similar to the web, there is a race for features and
complexity that tends to create bloat and make older devices slow and painful
to use. On the other hand, e-readers are simpler devices built for a single
task: display electronic books.</p>
<p>Control over the platform is also a key aspect of the cost structure of
providing software updates. Whereas Apple controls both the software and
hardware side of iPhones, Android is a sad mess of drivers and SoCs, all
providing different levels of support over time<sup id="fnref:snapdragon"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:snapdragon">6</a></sup>.</p>
<p>If you take a look at the platforms the Kindle and Kobo are built on, you'll
quickly see they both use <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I.MX">Freescale I.MX SoCs</a>. These processors
are well known for their excellent upstream support in the Linux kernel and
their relative longevity, chips being produced for either 10 or 15 years. This
in turn makes updates much easier and less expensive to provide.</p>
<p>So clearly, open architectures, free drivers and open hardware helps
tremendously, but aren't enough on their own. One of the lessons we must learn
from the (amazing) LineageOS project is how lack of funding hurts everyone.</p>
<p>If there is no one to do the volunteer work required to maintain a version of
LOS for your device, it won't be supported. Worse, when purchasing a new
device, users cannot know in advance how many years of LOS support they will
get. This makes buying new devices a frustrating hit-and-miss experience. <a href="https://wiki.lineageos.org/devices/jflteatt">If
you are lucky</a>, you will get many years of support. Otherwise, you risk
your device becoming an expensive insecure paperweight.</p>
<p>So how do we fix this? Anyone with a brain understands throwing away perfectly
good devices each 2 years is not sustainable. Government regulations enforcing
a minimum support life would be a step in the right direction, but at the end
of the day, Capitalism is to blame. Like the aforementioned carbon tax, band-aid
solutions can make things somewhat better, but won't fix our current economic
system's underlying problems.</p>
<p>For now though, I'll leave fixing the problem of Capitalism to someone else.</p>
<div class="footnote">
<hr>
<ol>
<li id="fn:dune">
<p>My most recent novel binge has been focused on re-reading the <em>Dune</em>
franchise. I first read the 6 novels written by Frank Herbert when I was 13
years old and only had vague and pleasant memories of his work. Great stuff. <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:dune" title="Jump back to footnote 1 in the text">↩</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:nexus">
<p>I'm back on LineageOS! Nice folks released an <a href="https://forum.xda-developers.com/google-nexus-5/orig-development/rom-lineageos-17-1-nexus-5-hammerhead-t4039273">unofficial LOS
17.1</a> port for the Nexus 5 last January and have kept it updated since
then. If you are to use it, I would also recommend updating TWRP <a href="https://forum.xda-developers.com/google-nexus-5/orig-development/recovery-twrp-hh-nexus-5-hammerhead-t4047653">to this
version</a> specifically patched for the Nexus 5. <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:nexus" title="Jump back to footnote 2 in the text">↩</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:incentives">
<p>Very few serious economists actually believe neo-classical
rational agent theory is a satisfactory explanation of human behavior. In my
opinion, it's merely a (mostly flawed) lens to try to interpret certain
behaviors, a tool amongst others that needs to be used carefully, preferably
as part of a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pluralism_in_economics">pluralism of approaches</a>. <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:incentives" title="Jump back to footnote 3 in the text">↩</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:ereader_sales">
<p>Good data on the e-reader market is hard to come by and is
mainly produced by specialised market research companies selling their
findings at very high prices. Those particular statistics come from a
<a href="https://www.marketwatch.com/press-release/ereader-market-size-share-2020-by-development-history-business-prospect-trend-key-manufacturers-price-supply-demand-growth-factor-and-end-user-analysis-outlook-till-2024-2020-07-20">MarketWatch</a> analysis. <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:ereader_sales" title="Jump back to footnote 4 in the text">↩</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:subscribe">
<p>If they were to tell people: <em>You need to pay us 5$/month if you
want to receive software updates</em>, I'm sure most people would not pay. Would
you? <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:subscribe" title="Jump back to footnote 5 in the text">↩</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:snapdragon">
<p>Coming back to Fairphones, if they had so much problems
providing an Android 9 build for the Fairphone 2, it's because <a href="https://www.xda-developers.com/in-depth-capitulation-of-why-msm8974-devices-are-excluded-from-nougat/">Qualcomm
never provided</a> Android 7+ support for the Snapdragon 801 SoC it
uses. <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:snapdragon" title="Jump back to footnote 6 in the text">↩</a></p>
</li>
</ol>
</div>Paying for The Internet2019-08-06T00:00:00-04:002019-08-06T00:00:00-04:00Louis-Philippe Véronneautag:veronneau.org,2019-08-06:/paying-for-the-internet.html<p>For a while now, I've been paying for The Internet. Not the internet connection
provided by my ISP, mind you, but for the stuff I enjoy online and the services
I find useful.</p>
<p>Most of the Internet as we currently know it is funded by ads. I hate ads and …</p><p>For a while now, I've been paying for The Internet. Not the internet connection
provided by my ISP, mind you, but for the stuff I enjoy online and the services
I find useful.</p>
<p>Most of the Internet as we currently know it is funded by ads. I hate ads and I
take a vicious pride in blocking them with the help of great projects like
<a href="https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/">uBlock Orign</a> and <a href="https://noscript.net/">NoScript</a>. More fundamentally, I believe
the web shouldn't be funded via ads:</p>
<ul>
<li>they control your brain (that alone should be enough to ban ads)</li>
<li>they create morally wrong economic incentives towards consumerism</li>
<li>they create important security risks and make websites gather data on you</li>
</ul>
<p><img src="/media/blog/2019-08-06/sale_pub_sexiste.jpg" title="A sticker with a feminist anti-ads message" alt="A sticker with a feminist anti-ads message" height="30%" width="30%" style="float:right"></p>
<p>I could go on like this, but I feel those are pretty strong arguments. Feel free
to disagree.</p>
<p>So I've started paying. Paying for my emails. Paying for the comics I enjoy
online <sup id="fnref:comics"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:comics">1</a></sup>. Paying for the few YouTube channels I like. Paying for the
newspapers I read.</p>
<p>At the moment, The Internet costs me around 260 USD per year. Luckily for me,
I'm privileged enough that it doesn't have a significant impact on my finances.
I also pay for a lot of the software I use and enjoy by making patches and
spending time working on them. I feel that's a valid way to make The Internet a
more sustainable place.</p>
<p>I don't think individual actions like this one have a very profound impact on
how things work, but like riding your bike to work or eating locally produced
organic food, it opens a window into a possible future. A better future.</p>
<div class="footnote">
<hr>
<ol>
<li id="fn:comics">
<p>I currently like these comics enough to pay for them:</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://existentialcomics.com/">Existential Comics</a></li>
<li><a href="http://thedevilspanties.com/">The Devil's Panties</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.lunarbaboon.com/">Lunarbaboon</a></li>
<li><a href="https://questionablecontent.net/">Questionable Content</a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.smbc-comics.com/">SMBC Comics</a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.mrlovenstein.com/">Mr. Lovenstein</a></li>
</ul>
<p><a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:comics" title="Jump back to footnote 1 in the text">↩</a></p>
</li>
</ol>
</div>From Cooperation to Competition or How Code Became Proprietary2018-12-29T00:00:00-05:002018-12-29T00:00:00-05:00Louis-Philippe Véronneautag:veronneau.org,2018-12-29:/from-cooperation-to-competition-or-how-code-became-proprietary.html<p>After two semesters of hard work, I'm happy to say I've finished all the classes
I had to take for my Master's degree. If I work hard enough, I should be able to
finish writing my thesis by the end of August.</p>
<p>Last night, I handed out the final paper …</p><p>After two semesters of hard work, I'm happy to say I've finished all the classes
I had to take for my Master's degree. If I work hard enough, I should be able to
finish writing my thesis by the end of August.</p>
<p>Last night, I handed out the final paper for my <em>History of the Economic
Thought</em> class. Titled "From Cooperation to Competition or How Code Became
Proprietary", it is a research paper on the evolution of the Copyright Law in
the United States with regards to computer code.</p>
<p>Here's the abstract:</p>
<hr>
<p>With the emergence of computer science as a academic research domain in the 60s,
a new generation of students gain access to computers. This generation will
become the first wave of hackers, a community based on a strong ethos promoting
curiosity and knowledge sharing. The hazy legal framework of computer code
intellectual property at the time enables this community to grow and to put
forward cooperation as a mean of economic production. Meanwhile in the 60s, the
American politicians take advantage of the revision of the <em>Copyright Act</em> to
think about the implications of applying copyright to computer code. After
failing to tackle computer issues in the 1976 revision of the <em>Copyright Act</em>,
the Senate creates the Commission on New Technological Uses of Copyrighted Works
(CONTU). The final report of the CONTU will eventually lead computer code to be
recognised as a literary work and thus copyrightable. A few years later,
American courts finally create a strong case law on these issues with the 1983
Apple v. Franklin court case.</p>
<hr>
<p>Sadly, I haven't had time to translate the whole paper to English yet (it's in
French). Maybe if enough people are interested by theses issues I'll take the
time to do so.</p>
<p>If you want to read my paper in French, you can download the PDF <a href="https://veronneau.org/media/blog/2018-12-29/paper.pdf">here</a>.</p>