The (Inflated) Value of Source Code

John Mark
5 min readFeb 10, 2020

Exploding Myths

(1st in a series. Read Part 2 and Part 3)

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So much of what “everybody knows” turns out not to be quite correct at all. Conventional wisdom, while allowing large groups of people to come to a general agreement on complex topics, invariably misses a few things, sometimes a few several big things. The tech world is no stranger to this phenomenon, and neither is the world of open source collaboration. But first, I’ll start with an allegory not based on the tech industry.

If you’ve seen the movie “The Big Short” you know that markets aren’t omniscient, and sometimes markets are very very wrong, especially when fraud is involved. The premise of The Big Short is when a small cadre of investors determined that there was a mortgage bubble before the rest of the market. They decided to make bets (big bets, hence the name) on the eventuality of market prices coming back to reality. What they didn’t understand, and what gives the movie much of its drama, is the cognitive dissonance and circular logic they encountered in their quest to get rich off of everyone else’s losses. The banks and institutional investors insisted that nothing was amiss, and the movie’s protagonists couldn’t believe nobody else saw it coming. The high drama comes about when the protagonists can’t understand why things aren’t going as they thought, and we…

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John Mark

Recovering exvangelical. Long essays on politics, society, tech, and the intersection thereof.