The singular point of debate here from my side has been whether the phrase ‘tragedy of the commons’ applies to cases where the ‘commons’ are owned to the exclusion of some people, and nothing else. I don’t believe I have failed to acknowledge the differences between physical and digital commons, but let me correct that impression now: GitHub certainly is very different from a sheep-grazing field in almost every way. GitHub is even different from Wikipedia in many ways, just like GP said. I am arguing those differences, no matter how large, do not matter purely in terms of whether you can call these a ‘commons’, and I’ve supported that opinion by showing evidence that other people call both GitHub and Wikipedia a ‘digital commons’. If any definition of commons can be used, including privately owned land that is made available to the public, then I think you and I agree completely. The Wikipedia article about this phrase actually points out what I’ve been saying here, that common land does not exist.
There is a central authority on this topic: the paper by Hardin that coined the phrase. It’s worth a read. He defined ‘tragedy’ to be in the dramatic sense, e.g., a Greek or Shakespearean tragedy: “We may well call it ‘the tragedy of the commons,’ using the word ‘tragedy’ as the philosopher Whitehead used it: ‘The essence of dramatic tragedy is not unhappiness. It resides in the solemnity of the remorse-less working of things.’”
Hardin did not define ‘commons’, but he used multiple examples of things that are owned to the exclusion of others, and he even pointed out that a bank robber thinks of a bank as a commons. He himself blurred the line of what a commons means, and his actual argument depends only on the idea that commons means something shared and nothing more. In fact, he was making a point about human behavior, and his argument is stronger when ‘commons’ refers to any shared resources that can be exhausted by overuse at all. Hardin would have had a good chuckle over this extremely silly debate.
The actual points Hardin was making behind his phrase ‘Tragedy of the Commons’ were that Adam Smith’s ‘Invisible Hand’ economics, and Libertarian thinking, are provably wrong, and that we should abolish the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights, specifically the right to breed freely, because he believes these things will certainly lead to overpopulation of the earth and thus increased human suffering. The only actual ‘commons’ he truly cared about in this paper is the earth’s space and food supply. The question of ownership is wholly and utterly irrelevant to his phrase.
GitHub adding rules that curtails people does limit some people’s access, that’s the point. How many people it affects I don’t know, and I don’t think it’s especially relevant, but note that in this case one single GitHub user being limited might affect many many people - Homebrew was one of the examples.
“Tragedy” never referred to the magnitude of the problem, as you and GP are assuming. Hardin’s “tragedy” refers to the human character flaw of thinking that shared things are preferable to limitations, because he argues that we end up with uncontrolled (worse) limitations anyway. His “tragedy” is the inevitability of loss, the irony of misguided belief in the very idea of a commons.
There is a central authority on this topic: the paper by Hardin that coined the phrase. It’s worth a read. He defined ‘tragedy’ to be in the dramatic sense, e.g., a Greek or Shakespearean tragedy: “We may well call it ‘the tragedy of the commons,’ using the word ‘tragedy’ as the philosopher Whitehead used it: ‘The essence of dramatic tragedy is not unhappiness. It resides in the solemnity of the remorse-less working of things.’”
Hardin did not define ‘commons’, but he used multiple examples of things that are owned to the exclusion of others, and he even pointed out that a bank robber thinks of a bank as a commons. He himself blurred the line of what a commons means, and his actual argument depends only on the idea that commons means something shared and nothing more. In fact, he was making a point about human behavior, and his argument is stronger when ‘commons’ refers to any shared resources that can be exhausted by overuse at all. Hardin would have had a good chuckle over this extremely silly debate.
The actual points Hardin was making behind his phrase ‘Tragedy of the Commons’ were that Adam Smith’s ‘Invisible Hand’ economics, and Libertarian thinking, are provably wrong, and that we should abolish the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights, specifically the right to breed freely, because he believes these things will certainly lead to overpopulation of the earth and thus increased human suffering. The only actual ‘commons’ he truly cared about in this paper is the earth’s space and food supply. The question of ownership is wholly and utterly irrelevant to his phrase.
GitHub adding rules that curtails people does limit some people’s access, that’s the point. How many people it affects I don’t know, and I don’t think it’s especially relevant, but note that in this case one single GitHub user being limited might affect many many people - Homebrew was one of the examples.
“Tragedy” never referred to the magnitude of the problem, as you and GP are assuming. Hardin’s “tragedy” refers to the human character flaw of thinking that shared things are preferable to limitations, because he argues that we end up with uncontrolled (worse) limitations anyway. His “tragedy” is the inevitability of loss, the irony of misguided belief in the very idea of a commons.