Thanks to Sue Braiden for posting at the Omidyar Network this interesting article by Jem Matzan on The Gift Economy and Free Software.
I found two passages quite provocative and relevant to my musings on beneficence:
Recently CNN called Bill Gates, the co-founder of Microsoft Corp., a "leading philanthropist" for his donations of money, computers and other resources to help third-world nations and poor urban areas of the United States. . . . If he truly wanted to help people, Bill Gates could more easily do it by licensing Microsoft's products in a way that allows his customers to help their community instead of threatening them with legal action if they share.
Indeed, which is the greater beneficence: MS Office as open source or the millions or so Gates will donate to medical causes in Africa in a given year?
The Open Source Development Lab (OSDL) provides access to enterprise-grade hardware and infrastructure resources to Open Source developers who wish to add support or write software for such devices. OSDL relies on money from its members, which are primarily computer hardware manufacturers and service providers who benefit in some way from Free and Open Source Software. Tim Witham, an Open Source advocate and Chief Technology Officer of OSDL, sees Open Source Software as a quid pro quo, a classic business relationship where you get and give in return. By sharing source code like scientists share their theories and discoveries (as mentioned above), greater solutions can be reached. "A gift," he says, "comes with no attachments. Software licenses add attachments; they allow you to keep your intellectual property." So even though you're sharing your ideas and methods, you're still retaining the rights to your work. "I think every major player in Open Source has business in mind," Witham says. "No one is giving anything away." Instead, developers create software which is useful; if it is useful to them, then, like Theo de Raadt, that is the return and if it is shared then others may capitalize on it in the same way. If it was created to be useful to others, then that developer or business generally works on the project with the expectation of some kind of compensation in return. In both cases the return of the Open Source development method is also that other programmers can make your program better for free. So while they get to use it, you get to have it updated, expanded and improved -- again, quid pro quo.
The Open Source "economy" is indeed fascinating, but how might this "gift" economy actually work in a world not united by a common expertise, such as the community of hackers or the community of astrophysicists, etc? In other words, if I'm not part of the community, how do I participate in the quid pro quo referred to by Witham? If I cannot update, expand or improve the product, but merely use it as a tool in doing my other work--thinking and writing not about code but about community itself--I am not in a good position to understand either the quality of the product (will it do what I need?) or the relative value of the product (is $299 too much for the latest MSOffice upgrade?).
It seems that where these inequities of information or skill exist is exactly where the exchange economy of the "market" is essential. In the absence of monopoly or cartel pricing, I can shop for a product to meet my need at the price I can afford. And I can use the medium of money to, in essence, exchange my skills for the skill of the programmers and company that bring me the product I purchase.
Are gift economies, in Matzan's definition, then, best suited as internal operational guides for fairly focused communities of practice? Or are they somehow able to help us better knit our communities at large?