Project Title: Economic Implications of Open Source Software
BASIS Advisor: Dr. John Hight
Internship Location: Rao Research and Consulting
Onsite Mentor: Chetana Rao
The intention of this project is to examine and improve upon Mustonen's model of a copyright firm acting as a monopoly with the exception of a copyleft competitor, operating under the assumption that if a given programmer's perceived complementary income from working on a copyleft project is greater than the wage that they would earn working for the copyright firm, then the programmer will join the copyleft firm\cite{Mustonen}. Programmer "skill" is evenly distributed across the interval [0,1], and the skill of the marginally hired programmer in the copyright firm is known as the threshold productivity, a*. There is, however, very little evidence pointing to the notion that programmer skill is distributed as such; it is more likely that this is a decision made by Mustonen to simplify his model. The goal of this project is to reconstruct his model as if the skill of programmers were normally distributed across the interval [0,1], and then examine the implications that this change has on Mustonen's statements made regarding his model. Further research and study into making succinct models will be performed at Rao Consulting, with more emphasis on the data analysis aspect.
My Posts
Week 10- Conclusion
May 27, 2020
Hey all, Thanks for supporting me through my data journey. It means a lot to me. As I finished up my presentation draft, I realized that my internship had very little to do with what I had studied beforehand, since cost data wasn’t actually explicitly in the database, and even if it was, I didn’t […]
Week 9- Managing expectations
May 27, 2020
Hey all, I finally decided upon a smaller set of asphalt pavement roads to focus my study on. This means that I can exclude concrete as a whole, which might not have been a bad idea in the first place, since my on-site mentor said that the effects of heavy loads on asphalt are more […]
Week 8- “Comeback, kid!”
May 27, 2020
Hey again, Why hate the you from three weeks ago, who thought that they knew what they were doing, when you can hate the you that exists in the present, who is confident that they have no direction but can’t seem to inspire themselves to find one? Remind me to cross “life-coach” off of my […]
Week 7- This is becoming more daunting as it progresses
May 27, 2020
Hey all, It’s generally agreed upon that mistakes are a just a part of a larger learning curve, but a healthy mindset doesn’t make mistakes any more convenient in their immediate aftermath. When I stumbled upon an (incorrect) assumption I was making about what actually defined what a “heavy load” was, a falsehood that essentially […]
Week 6 – Mild Improvement
Apr 24, 2020
Hey all, I have completed, or sufficiently optimized, my work with the training data (An arbitrary 80% of roadways from the study), and with that comes joy accompanied by ambition for further improvement— a sentiment shared by the general public, who now have an excuse to stay at least six feet away from me at […]
Week 5-
Apr 17, 2020
Hello Everybody, Hope everyone is faring well. While I am less than ecstatic that my workplace has been moved yet again, this time from my basement to my bedroom, in order to quarantine my brother. While I don’t think he has the Coronavirus, as the symptoms don’t exactly align, you can never be too careful. […]
Week 4- Data collection
Mar 28, 2020
Hey everyone, Still working on data collection, but the light at the end of the tunnel has become a bit more visible as I’ve started to examine other factors such as climate and base. Soon I’ll be able to check out the actual wear and tear inflicted on the roads to examine the effect of […]
Weeks 1-3: How quirky am I for being openly incompetent?
Mar 18, 2020
Hey all, Only after my first two weeks of on-site work (On-site being a combination of my house, BASIS school grounds, and the actual office in which my mentor works) have I realized how vast the data set I am working with for the next two months is. I guess that’s to be expected, though: […]