Open Source Community - just another WalMart or fundamentally better?

Matt Asay's AC/OS blog pointed me to an interesting presentation on Open Source software given by Robert Lefkowitz. It's an interesting and at times extremely entertaining look at Open Source software and how really from the buyers perspective it isn't anything magical or completely different from other products.

At least that is what I think the conclusion is supposed to be. Without the words that accomplished the presentation its difficult to tell - some of the slides seem to be so tongue-in-cheek that its entirely possible the meaning of the presentation was supposed to be something completely different.

The way I see it is if a product on the shelf then you are mostly getting what you pay for. What you get that you didn't pay for at the point of purchase is actually paid for in some other way in which you didn't notice. My feeling is that the intangible costs of Open Source ownership are on the whole larger than regular products - because they amortize less of the costs into the purchase price - which is often close to nothing or actually nothing (if you are given a CD, download a binary, or compile source code yourself). Where the Open Source product quality is high there are usually more intangible costs you don't know about. Perhaps somewhere, someplace a company is paying its engineers to maintain that open source project, or someone made a fortune at a dot com and is no devoting their "free" time to the project. Who knows?

In one respect buying Open Source because its cheap or free is kind of like buying products at WalMart. Both WalMart and the Open Source community market themselves as purveyors of goodness, both appeal, by and large to our fundamental (and economically required) cheapness. Yes I know many people use Open Source software for other reasons, especially in the early adoption pahse, but does your average Firefox, Apache or Open Office user really care? In the end uou walk away with a cheap product which may or may not do what you wanted to do and last as long as you expected. But who knows what the intangible costs were associated with acquiring the product from WalMart or your friendly Open Source community? Granted that a large number of studies have been focused on the overall impact of WalMart on our society and good deal of people want to believe the end game of WalMartization is bad, very bad.

But what about Open Source? Cost of ownership studies - yes, code quality studies - yes, ease of use studies - yes, but so far as I know a thorough analysis of weather Open Source as a whole is good for society has yet to appear. Its all guy feeling (mostly in the positive) and base appeals our base sense of socialism (if we have one) and feel good "lets all get along together" nature.

So ultimately I think the argument about Open Source is whether, by and large, for society it is a better (by which I mean "efficient use of society's resources") way to create, distribute and maintain software. As I said, that is a question which I have yet to see a good answer for, but unlike Matt Asay I'm no expert on this field, perhaps he has one?