“Nobody can keep open house in a great city.”

—JANE JACOBS, The Death and Life of Great American Cities261

"在大城市里，没有人能够保持开着门的房子。”

—JANE JACOBS, 美国伟大城市的死与生261

When explaining why nobody wants to pay for software, people often cite the free-rider problem, which is the idea that if you can’t exclude others from consuming a good they’ll use it without paying. Eventually, the good becomes overused, as producers lack the resources—usually provided by consumers—to supply it.

在解释为什么没有人愿意为软件付费时，人们经常引用 "搭便车问题"，即如果你不能阻止他人消费一种商品，他们就会使用这种商品而不付费。最终，由于生产者缺乏资源--通常是由消费者提供的资源--来供应这种商品，这种商品就会被过度使用。

It’s easiest to see how free-rider problems apply to non-excludable, rivalrous goods, a situation better known as the tragedy of the commons. If a public park is free to access, people will use it without paying for maintenance and upkeep. As more people flock to the park, its quality is diminished. The trash cans will overflow, the crowds get packed, the grass ground down to mud. To address this problem, we typically pay for public parks with our taxes; some national parks also charge an entrance fee.

最容易看到的是，搭便车问题如何适用于非排他性的、有竞争关系的商品，这种情况更被称为公地的悲剧。如果一个公共公园是免费开放的，人们就会使用它而不支付维护和保养费用。随着越来越多的人涌入公园，公园的质量就会下降。垃圾桶会溢出，人群拥挤，草地被磨成泥巴。为了解决这个问题，我们通常用税收来支付公共公园的费用；一些国家公园还收取门票。

But when it comes to public goods—i.e., goods that are both non-excludable and non-rivalrous, like software—it’s a bit harder to see where the free-rider problem applies. After all, a thousand people can read the same article, or use the same snippet of code, without diminishing its quality.

但是，当涉及到公共物品--即既非排他性又非竞争性的物品，如软件--时，就很难看到搭便车问题的适用。毕竟，一千个人可以阅读同一篇文章，或使用同一段代码，而不会降低其质量。

In the physical world, public goods are usually provided by the government, paid for by taxes: street lights, national defense, clean air. Should the government provide our open source software? Most developers will probably read that sentence and scream a resounding “NO!”*

在物质世界中，公共物品通常由政府提供，由税收支付：路灯、国防、清洁空气。政府应该提供我们的开放源代码软件吗？大多数开发者可能会读到这句话，然后大叫一声 "不！"*。

Economists tell us that we tend to rely on governments to provide our public goods because otherwise they’ll become underproduced over time, meaning that consumers are unlikely to provide them on their own, due to the free-rider problem.

经济学家告诉我们，我们倾向于依靠政府来提供我们的公共产品，因为否则它们会随着时间的推移变得生产不足，这意味着由于搭便车的问题，消费者不太可能自己提供这些产品。

But in the online world, we don’t have governments to provide our public goods. Open source software, in particular, often involves developers from different countries committing code to the same project. If an open source project has one developer in Australia and another in India, which government’s job is it to support production? Whose laws govern the project’s code?

但在网络世界中，我们没有政府来提供我们的公共产品。尤其是开放源码软件，经常涉及来自不同国家的开发者向同一个项目提交代码。如果一个开源项目的开发者在澳大利亚，另一个在印度，哪个政府的工作是支持生产？谁的法律管理项目的代码？

Early lessons from open source cryptography help to illustrate why governments are ill-suited to meet the regulatory needs of open source developers.

开源密码学的早期教训有助于说明为什么政府不适合满足开源开发者的监管需求。

In the 1970s and 1980s, many software developers used the Data Encryption Standard (DES) to encrypt digital data. DES was adopted by the United States government as an official standard in 1977. But the National Security Agency (NSA) also changed the DES to make it weaker so they could break it, if needed, with a sufficiently powerful computer. As other countries started making their own encryption standards, developers decided they wanted something more secure than the DES.