Mikael Pawlo argues that the Prisoners Dilemma is alive and well, and has grim implications for open source theorists...
Commentary: The game theory of open code. - . A company selling proprietary software to third parties will never open its code if the company has a competitor. It will never release its software under the GNU GPL. If you consider open code a benefit to society, you may want to propagate open-code legislation ... [Meerkat: An Open Wire Service]
...but IF the Prisoner's Dilemma is the right model for understanding the economics of open source, then the Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma is the better variant to consider and it has more encouraging implications. In the Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma opponents know that they are likely to meet up with one another in the future. This often leads to the predominance of widespread cooperation and a selfishly-successfuly but cooperation-inducing strategy called "Tit for Tat" (see Axelrod's 1984 classic The Evolution of Cooperation, and subsequent work) The strategy goes like this: open the hand of good will to a stranger (cooperate), and thereafter do to him whatever he does to you. The strategy is subtlly powerful because it rewards and encourages others to cooperate with you, punishes them for shortchanging you, and protects you from being overly-exploited. Interestingly, this is indeed reminiscent of the copyleft: "if you be generous with your code I will be generous with mine. But if you charge for yours, you must pay me for mine." Note also that the copyleft reduces the possiblity that your competitor will benefit at your expense in the marketplace--his subsequent improvements are available to you, and you will not go uncredited for your own contributions.
Which implies (IF this is the right model) that the association of the copyleft and the GPL with redistributable source is more than a happy coincidence. These are symbiotic memes which lock each other in, help each other spread, and reduce the competitiveness of the general landscape.
PS. The Open Source definition at http://www.opensource.org/docs/definition_plain.html seems to preclude the copyleft: "The license shall not restrict any party from selling or giving away the software as a component of an aggregate software distribution containing programs from several different sources. The license shall not require a royalty or other fee for such sale." Pawlo's critique of open source may thus be more relevant to the narrow case of "Open Source" than it is to the more general concept of "free" software.
3:22:15 PM 
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