Negative Scarcity And The Praxeology Of Open Source Software

Abstract

Economics, which in its 20th-century sense deals only with optimizing the exchange of values, may be generalized to praxeology (von Mises 1949,) a comprehensive science of human action. Under a generalized praxeological definition of scarcity there are contexts in which the scarcity of software becomes negative, so that a rational maximization of return on investment in developing such software occurs when the software is opened to free distribution under a GPL-equivalent license.