I admit that I was deeply skeptical of open source when I first heard of it. But I'm starting to get it, and that presentation helps explain why it works.

The fact that nonprofits pay some of their employess, but generally pay less than a for-profit, seems to me to validate the point about fulfillment. I'm willing to work for less when I know I'm doing good; I see a very concrete link there.

Whether the open-source philosophy can scale up and into other areas is a very good one. The talk noted that conventional carrot-and-stick incentives work when the job involves physical labor or predetermined non-creative mental work; the former describes a lot of "heavy industry", while the latter describes just about all office work. If our system could support expansion of the OS philosophy, it's likely that pay for deterministic work will go up as people who want fullfillment leave the dull jobs; and whenever something gets more expensive, it creates new incentives to reduce the cost, which creates an opportunity for the newly-liberated creative types.

One last thing I'd point out is that there's plenty of precedent for the idea of a strong safety net, and they're hardly all socialism. Robert Heinlein was partial to "social credits", whereby we're all "stockholders" in the economy, and our yearly dividend provides basic financial support. That's the backstory behind his stories that pictured a happy, prosperous world with so many people lacking any apparent means of support. Ever notice that hardly anybody had a job in Heinlein's worlds?

It'd be hella disruptive to embrace the idea of a strong safety net unleashing the power of open source on the world in general, but I think once the dust settles, we'll be living in something a lot closer to utopia than we ever thought possible.