The Power Of Joy

Software is everywhere in the modern world. Even software-less widgets are touched by it in some way. Perhaps via the CAD software used during design, or the point of sale system used to sell it, or the inventory system used to track it. Software is ubiquitous. It is also expensive. Extremely expensive. It can take years to build and require teams of tens to hundreds of software engineers, each with compensation packages costing hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. And you need more than just the software engineers: product managers, project managers, testing staff, operations staff, and management are all required. It's pricey. But this is just how the software economy operates.

Well, it's how one of the software economies operates. There is a second one. And it's this other economy which has allowed software to expand into every part of our lives. Underlying every company is a mountain of software that they did not write and did not pay for. It's the operating systems they use on their servers, the editors their programmers use, the plethora of open source libraries and tools that are sprinkled throughout their workflows. Freely available software, created by this second economy, finds it's way into every part of the software development process, and therefore our lives.

We don't spend much time thinking about this. We take it as the nature of the world that software sometimes costs nothing and sometimes costs thousands of dollars. It's not as if there are particular categories of software that cost money and others that don't: if there is software you can pay money for, there is an alternative that's free. On top of that, rarely does commercial software not include some freely available software components.

The first economy of software is the commercial one. It operates on the rules of capitalism. One builds something and then they sell it to a customer for money. The second economy doesn't have a well known name. Usually we call it "open source". This is inadequate for three reasons. First, there is software that is freely available that isn't considered open source. Second, the openness of the source isn't what matters. Most people who use open source software never look at the source, they just use the software as a dependency or run the application. Third, "open source" is a property of the software, not a property of the economy which produces it. That is, we need a term that describes the economy in the same way that "commercial" describes the commercial software economy.

So what does commercial describe? Enabling commerce. More specifically, enabling participants to generate a profit by engaging in commerce. This is why it costs money to acquire. Through that lens, what is it that freely available software and its economy enables? Something people value far more than money: joy.

Enjoying Software

Those who maintain freely available software usually don't do it because they want to make a profit and people don't tend to do things for nothing. But if you talk to people who maintain freely available software, it's clear that they do it because they enjoy it. The process of building software itself is the reward. For some, it's a little more. The ability to help others solve problems brings them joy as well. It's that they've written useful software that is rewarding.

This isn't exclusive to software. There are plenty of people who voluntarily do things just to help others. While most of the time, we don't think about it as joy, that is the feeling that one experiences when engaging in those activities. It's been hidden in the words we use. Most people who maintain freely available software enjoy doing it, and when they stop enjoying it they stop doing it. The word enjoy derives from the prefix en- meaning to make and joy¹, so when one enjoys something they receive joy from it.

That is what we should call this second economy: the joyous software economy. It's what we should use in place of "open source". It enables us to talk about the two economies in a compatible and blended way.

So, we have the commercial software economy and the joyous software economy. These two economies are co-dependent, they need each other to exist. As an example, the commercial software economy provides salaries to people. Since those same people enjoy writing software, they go and produce software in the joyous software economy. That software can then be used to reduce the cost of building software in the commercial economy. In many cases, the aforementioned company couldn't produce the same software created by the joyous economy, even if they had the technical and financial means to do so.²

There is a problem. Joy is a finicky thing. What actually brings people joy depends a lot on the person. Even once we establish that something brings one joy, there needs to be enough joy compensation for the activity to be worth it.³ Complicating this even more is the reality that joy is an emotion that's difficult to measure and human fallacies come into play. Some people will continue to produce software even if it brings them little or no joy, sometimes out of a sense of duty, sometimes because of the sunk cost fallacy. Unfortunately, for far too many joyous software economy maintainers, they have slid from being compensated with joy to being compensated with anxiety.

In recent years, the joyous software economy has become unsustainable. One could argue that it's always been unsustainable, but there has been a noticeable shift in recent years. Players from the commercial software economy have created internal environments that burn people out so much that no matter how much joy they'll get from the joyous economy, they don't want to participate in it.

I argue the most significant detriment has been the large amount of toxicity that has seeped into both economies. People value their mental health far more than they did before. All that time stuck at home for months caused people to think about what was worth it in their life and what wasn't. The commercial economy can sustain a great deal of toxicity, because people value money enough that they will continue to inhabit a toxic environment for sustained periods of time. The joyous economy cannot sustain toxicity because it degrades joy almost entirely. This toxicity needs to be dealt with if we are to return the joyous economy to sustainability. And this matters to both. Since the two economies are codependent, a significant degradation in one can collapse both. See XKCD #2347. Or Heartbleed.

The Way Back To Joy

So we need to repair the joyous economy. But first we need to understand a few things:

• What has caused all this toxicity?
• Can we shift the joyous economy from one that relies purely on joy to one that relies on a balance of money and joy?
• How do we rid the joyous economy of toxicity?
• Once repaired, how do we get more people to participate in the joyous software economy?

This entry is the start of a series on the joyous economy. The goal of the series is to answer the aforementioned questions and further explain and document the joyous software economy.