My, my. It has been a long time since I’ve posted, hasn’t it? Well, here’s one for you: cooperative business models.
Business in the West has traditionally been seen to be competitive. And it is, of course, to a certain degree. That’s even healthy, of course—to a certain degree. As Pope Pius XI taught us, competition “within certain limits [is] just and productive of good results” (Quadragesimo Anno, p. 44), and no distributist would say that all competition has to be done away with. However, Pius XI also taught us that competition “cannot be the ruling principle of the economic world” (id.), and it’s here that distributists generally part ways with their capitalist confreres on this issue.
How, after all, is innovation and development supposed to occur without competition, the capitalists ask? Without the incentive to beat out their competitors, why would anyone devote money, time, and expertise to solving problems? And if people aren’t devoting these thing to solving problems, how can we expect any industry to advance? Do you want us all plowing with wooden shares on inadequately rotated crops again?
To which the distributists can cite any number of examples, many of which have been cited to directly on this site. One that’s often neglected, however, is one that’s at the forefront of one of the most innovative and quickly-changing industries in the world, computers and the software that runs them. So for purposes of this brief article, I will respond to this capitalist argument with one simple word: Linux.
GNU/Linux, actually. It’s by now a well-known phenomenon that has been enormously successful in the computing world, effectively competing with the likes of Sun Microsystems (once an industry powerhouse with its SPARC servers and Solaris operating system; now much reduced, being purchased by database company Oracle), Microsoft, IBM, and Hewlett-Packard. A clone of Unix, versions of which were sold competitively by IBM, HP, AT&T, Sun, and other companies, GNU/Linux has overtaken all of them.
GNU/Linux is used on an incredible 443 of the top 500 supercomputers in the world. It has become by far the most dominant system in this field. Of the top ten most reliable sites on the Internet in December 2009, six were running some version of Linux. (Two more were running FreeBSD, another free operating system; only one was running a Microsoft server.) Despite being powerful enough to run the world’s supercomputers and the world’s most reliable web servers, it’s still versatile enough to be a strong competitor in the smartphone market (Google’s Android, for example, is based on Linux), and it’s got a small but not negligible share of the desktop market, as well. (The author uses it exclusively himself.)
Whether Linux is better or worse than its competitors is beside the point here; what’s significant is that it is a competitor, and that much no one can deny. How did it get to be such? How did Linux become such a significant player in such a wide variety of operating system markets? Surely it must be by the most cutthroat of competition, doing whatever it can to outsmart and outplay the other players in the field?
No. It did so by cooperation.
It was recently announced by the kernel community (Linux is, technically, a kernel, or the central core of the operating system; in other words, the part of your operating system that interacts directly with the bare metal of your hardware) that a full 75% of developers of the Linux kernel are paid. This is a big deal for a kernel that started out almost twenty years ago with a guy in his dorm room coding an operating system for fun. Red Hat, a Linux corporation, unsurprisingly contributed the most code, some 12%. But Intel, the chip manufacturer, contributed 8%, IBM and Novell contributed 6% each, and Oracle contributed 3%. Some of these companies, like IBM, produce competing operating systems, or once did. Most of them are competitors of each other; for example, Oracle produces its own Linux distribution (Unbreakable Linux), as does Red Hat (Red Hat Enterprise Linux) and Novell (SUSE Linux).
This may bear some explanation. Linus Torvalds, the original coder of the Linux kernel, is still in charge of its development. He is paid by the Linux Foundation, a non-profit which is contributed to by many corporations, from IBM to Google. When people contribute to the kernel, it’s vetted by a huge number of coders and others, until it’s finally (if it’s good enough) approved by Torvalds and put into the kernel itself. Once it’s there, it’s available to everyone on the planet to use as they will. Really; once it’s in the kernel, anybody can use it for whatever they want, as long as they don’t prevent anyone else from doing the same. So when IBM contributes to the Linux kernel, its competitors can take the contribution and use it to compete with IBM. And yet they continue, year after year, to contribute a large part of the improvements to the Linux kernel. And their competitors continue to do the same, even though they’re fully aware that IBM can turn around and use that contribution to compete with them. Essentially, each of these companies, when they contribute to the kernel, is assisting its competitors. This, according to the competition-uber-alles argument, makes absolutely no sense.
These companies have every incentive to improve their product and leave the others in the lurch. So why are they contributing to the Linux kernel, which make all their improvements to that kernel available to all of their competitors?
The simple answer is that doing so makes the world better for everyone.
Companies contribute to the kernel because not only do other companies get the benefit of their work, but they get the benefit of other companies’ work. No one company could possibly have produced an operating system that scales from incredibly massive supercomputers to a cell phone that fits in my pants pocket. It couldn’t happen. It had to be done by an enormous number of developers, all cooperating on the same project; no one company alone could have paid them all. The Unix market was fragmenting and dying when Linux came along; the many different Unix vendors were killing one another by competing instead of cooperating. Linux changed all that; the Unix derivatives are now stronger than ever, and getting stronger by the day. Because companies are cooperating on it, rather than fighting about it.
Their incentive, in other words, doesn’t have to be beating out the competition; it can be making things better for themselves. Certainly, when a company contributes to Linux, it’s not being altruistic; it contributes because it knows that by improving the kernel, it’s making it more useful to others, who will improve it in turn, and that company will then get the benefit of that. And competition isn’t totally out of the picture, either; beating out Microsoft is almost certainly one of the motives that leads these companies to cooperate on the Linux kernel. But it’s not being solely competitive; it’s being cooperative, and competitive within proper limits. It’s recognizing that by cooperating with others to make a better product, it’s able to compete in other areas.
No distributist dislikes competition. But no distributist likes corporate throat-cutting, either. Sometimes competition just isn’t in the best interests of an industry; sometimes the improvement of the industry can only come from cooperation, rather than competition. The sooner many industries realize this, the better off we all will be.
Praise be to Christ the King!
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