Tuesday, October 23, 2001

Can Linux billionaires carry the free-software torch?

Salon.com

Both Larry Augustin and Eric Steven Raymond are believers in something called "the gift economy" -- a way of organizing labor in cyberspace that runs counter to the normal business practices of, say, a company like Microsoft. The gift economy, as understood by hackers on the Net, mandates that if you give (your labor, your code, your intelligence) to the greater community, the community will not only flourish, but you yourself will benefit from gifts contributed by other members of that community.

VA Linux, I soon learned, adhered to gift economy principles in ways both little and big. On the little side, VA once gave Raymond a new monitor to replace one of his that had blown up. It had also authorized a VA employee, Sam Ockman (who went on to found another pre-installed Linux hardware company, Penguin Computing), to set up an online home for the then completely non-commercial Debian distribution of Linux. Later, once VA's hardware sales began to climb, and it started attracting significant venture capital, VA began hiring scores of prominent Linux hackers to work on enhancing Linux, and even took the symbolically dramatic step of naming Eric Raymond to its board of directors (a move that has made Raymond a very wealthy man today, with 150,000 shares of stock that is commanding well over $200 per share.)

Why should we care about this corporate generosity? Because the gift economy helped build the Internet. Free software, or open-source software, is the gift economy as applied to the creation of working code. Vast portions of the Net, its mail transport mechanisms, bulletin board discussion forums, even the Web itself, owe their creation to the willingness of programmers to write code, contribute it to the general public and reap the benefits thereof.

The clear result of years of gift economy behavior on the Net has been the creation of a huge publicly accessible infrastructure that facilitates cooperation and collaboration -- a giant tool lending library stocked with useful items of all description. In a world that is increasingly run by and dependent on software, the creation of this library is of incalculable value. But up until very recently, the production of these tools occurred on a more or less uncoordinated, haphazard basis, according to the energy and enthusiasm of hackers working in their spare time.

December 23, 1999

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The Internet is still a Gift Economy

by Ed Phillips

It's free, it's out here, but you're going to have to dig for it. You are going to have to give something away in order to receive something back. You have to participate for it to be real: a gift economy.

The Internet is still a Gift Economy, where the philanthropic gestures of large institutions compete for attention with a blizzard of more idiosyncratic and independent movements. Those more idiosyncratic and independent movements, fueled by obsession, frustration, or love, are where life on the nets resides.

You wouldn't know anything was happening unless you were hooked in, unless you were participating, offering something yourself. It would be overwhelming or meaningless if you weren't oriented by informal networks, links, and email. As far as most are concerned, there is a blizzard, a white-out, of information on the nets. All but the most intrepid are numbed by this blizzard of information. You won't even go out into the blizzard unless you fancy yourself some kind of Admiral Perry or unless you have cohorts or maps, unless you are a native.

Professionalism hasn't come to the nets just yet, much to the chagrin of the institutions and the entrepreneurs. The New Philanthropists, the would-be commercial presences, are the missionaries of the nets. The incorrigible natives are now accepting well-crafted hand-outs from the missionaries. The missionaries are hoping that the natives will learn the value of their brands, hoping that the natives will begin to participate in a money economy of sorts. Professionalism will follow charity.

These natives of the nets are particularly incorrigible because they "tribalized" the nets in an attempt to escape the emptiness of their own advanced money economies. We know the story only too well, never mind the catchwords we use to describe "the context of no context." Instead of replaying the over familiar story of plebeianized, rationalized, and now completely tautologous, advanced money economies and their media, I just want to touch on the possibility that thoughtful writing on the nets is a gift economy. A difference.

June 2, 1997

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