Infinite Goods Economies and Developers

Techdirt has done a wonderful job of shaping my thoughts on infinite goods versus scarce goods. The brief on this concept is simple - in the digital age, when information can be infinitely duplicated and distributed at virtually no cost, the rules of economics must change. All goods now break down into two categories, infinite goods and scarce goods. In the music industry, the infinite good is the music, the scarce good is the live performance. In the movie industry, the infinite good is the movie, the scarce good is the theater experience.

In my discussions on this economic concept, one thing that I have been asked repeatedly is on the subject of how a developer fits into this economy. My trade is in code, which is an infinite good, so how do I promote the scarce good by providing the infinite good, and what exactly is the scarce good for a developer?

The answer is simple - I am the scarce good. My code is infinite. A PHP class that I created for advanced DOM manipulation is an infinite good that can be copied and reused and altered infinitely at no cost. The skill that created that class cannot be copied. A PHP class that I created to parse an XML document into a series of SQL calls for installing or updating a CMS is readily available to all who know where to look, but I am only one person with a limited amount of time.

I am an extreme proponent of open source technologies, and I have been asked how I can benefit from giving my code to anyone who wants it. While it is true that I don't earn money off of these objects, I earn money by increasing my value as a developer and thus increasing the pay range I can reasonably expect for a job. Each time I contribute a good piece of code to the open source community, I not only help the community that has given so much to me (I'm currently using Firefox, chatting on Pidgin, coding in Quanta and using Linux Ubuntu 8.04, all open source), but I help myself tremendously by bolstering my reputation as a developer.

So the infinite goods economy doesn't apply only when the scarce good is a tangible object, as I have heard before. A scarce good is simply anything that cannot be duplicated easily, whether that is a theater, a musician performing live or the skill of an individual developer. Next time you run into a situation in your own industry where you see a good that can be infinitely duplicated, just think of how you can use that to promote the things that can't be infinitely duplicated. Once you have that figured out, you have taken the first step towards adapting to the economy of the future.