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Coase's Penguin, Or, Linux and the Nature of the Firm [pdf]

https://www.benkler.org/CoasesPenguin.PDF
9•loughnane•5h ago

Comments

w10-1•1h ago
This is the 2002 law article, before the 2006 book on networks that reflected early interest in network effects, arguing that open-source is an emergent mode of production. The same analysis could arguably be applied to the creator or influencer economy. It aged well.

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yochai_Benkler
But he adopting the techniques of transaction cost economics (TCE) while at the same time posing straw man TCE claims (e.g., that TCE says there are only integrated firms and markets). TCE says transaction costs matter most in determining economies of transactions at high scale, and its methods can show how a broad variety of costs end up shaping activity and institutions. It also explains which innovations are disruptive (surprise: they change the transaction costs) and thus how digitalization has had such a huge impact so quickly.

The TCE analysis has become second nature in business strategy, but surprisingly rare in policy circles, its intended audience.

And his analysis in hindsight is a bit wishful. Roughly speaking, while open-source reduces coordination costs, it doesn't reduce the underlying complexity. The big open-source projects get that way through major corporate sponsorship, and they run with very clear dictatorial/oligarchic or bureaucratic decision-making if they evolve.

One of the principles of TCE methodology is to compare not ideal with real, but two actual and viable forms of organization. In this case he's projected ideal benefits without any of the real costs. That was forgivable in 2002 or even 2006, but it would be malpractice now.

A faster heart for F-Droid

https://f-droid.org/2025/12/30/a-faster-heart-for-f-droid.html
292•kasabali•8h ago•122 comments

Quality of drinking water varies significantly by airline

https://foodmedcenter.org/2026-center-for-food-as-medicine-longevity-airline-water-study/
60•azinman2•3h ago•29 comments

FediMeteo: A €4 FreeBSD VPS Became a Global Weather Service

https://it-notes.dragas.net/2025/02/26/fedimeteo-how-a-tiny-freebsd-vps-became-a-global-weather-s...
232•birdculture•7h ago•56 comments

Show HN: 22 GB of Hacker News in SQLite

https://hackerbook.dosaygo.com
358•keepamovin•10h ago•115 comments

A Vulnerability in Libsodium

https://00f.net/2025/12/30/libsodium-vulnerability/
221•raggi•9h ago•25 comments

Zpdf: PDF text extraction in Zig – 5x faster than MuPDF

https://github.com/Lulzx/zpdf
130•lulzx•7h ago•47 comments

Animated AI

https://animatedai.github.io/
7•frozenseven•4d ago•0 comments

OpenAI's cash burn will be one of the big bubble questions of 2026

https://www.economist.com/leaders/2025/12/30/openais-cash-burn-will-be-one-of-the-big-bubble-ques...
213•1vuio0pswjnm7•5h ago•283 comments

Electrolysis can solve one of our biggest contamination problems

https://ethz.ch/en/news-and-events/eth-news/news/2025/11/electrolysis-can-solve-one-of-our-bigges...
130•PaulHoule•9h ago•33 comments

Honey's Dieselgate: Detecting and tricking testers

https://vptdigital.com/blog/honey-detecting-testers/
128•AkshatJ27•5h ago•25 comments

Readings in Database Systems (5th Edition)

http://www.redbook.io/
4•teleforce•1h ago•1 comments

Loss32: Let's Build a Win32/Linux

https://loss32.org/
216•akka47•1d ago•315 comments

L1TF Reloaded

https://github.com/ThijsRay/l1tf_reloaded
4•Fnoord•46m ago•0 comments

Mitsubishi Diatone D-160 (1985)

https://audio-database.com/MITSUBISHI-DIATONE/diatonesp/d-160-e.html
22•anigbrowl•2d ago•12 comments

Toro: Deploy Applications as Unikernels

https://github.com/torokernel/torokernel
119•ignoramous•10h ago•105 comments

Non-Zero-Sum Games

https://nonzerosum.games/
334•8organicbits•15h ago•174 comments

Escaping containment: A security analysis of FreeBSD jails [video]

https://media.ccc.de/v/39c3-escaping-containment-a-security-analysis-of-freebsd-jails
61•todsacerdoti•8h ago•1 comments

Reverse Engineering a Mysterious UDP Stream in My Hotel (2016)

https://www.gkbrk.com/hotel-music
173•bayesnet•1w ago•22 comments

Show HN: RAMBnB.xyz P2P marketplace for RAM rentals

https://www.rambnb.xyz
9•olivierroy•3h ago•1 comments

Professional software developers don't vibe, they control

https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.14012
118•dpflan•7h ago•154 comments

The British empire's resilient subsea telegraph network

https://subseacables.blogspot.com/2025/12/the-british-empires-resilient-subsea.html
165•giuliomagnifico•14h ago•42 comments

Times New American: A Tale of Two Fonts

https://hsu.cy/2025/12/times-new-american/
225•firexcy•14h ago•136 comments

Approachable Swift Concurrency

https://fuckingapproachableswiftconcurrency.com/en/
162•wrxd•14h ago•78 comments

Go away Python

https://lorentz.app/blog-item.html?id=go-shebang
359•baalimago•18h ago•332 comments

Igniting the GPU: From Kernel Plumbing to 3D Rendering on RISC-V

https://mwilczynski.dev/posts/riscv-gpu-zink/
74•michalwilczynsk•13h ago•8 comments

What Happened to Abit Motherboards

https://dfarq.homeip.net/what-happened-to-abit-motherboards/
92•zdw•12h ago•65 comments

Everything as code: How we manage our company in one monorepo

https://www.kasava.dev/blog/everything-as-code-monorepo
182•benbeingbin•7h ago•167 comments

Five Years of Tinygrad

https://geohot.github.io//blog/jekyll/update/2025/12/29/five-years-of-tinygrad.html
188•iyaja•1d ago•86 comments

Hive (YC S14) Is Hiring a Staff Software Engineer (Data Systems)

https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/hive.co/cb0dc490-0e32-4734-8d91-8b56a31ed497
1•patman_h•12h ago

Netflix Open Content

https://opencontent.netflix.com/
601•tosh•17h ago•119 comments