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Gifts? (was: Re: [ox-en] Richard Barbrook article)



Hi Richard, Graham, list!

Last week (7 days ago) Graham Seaman wrote:
---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Mon, 07 Oct 2002 02:18:37 +0100
From: richard barbrook <richard hrc.wmin.ac.uk>

Below is a short piece which I wrote for 'Passages' - a Swiss art mag.

GIVING IS RECEIVING

A very good text IMHO. It could have been written in Oekonux - but
then it would have been in German I guess ;-) .

The only thing I don't like is the word "gift" in gift economy. Of
course the motivation of wanting to make a gift to someone / the world
may be a motivation for some people, but actually I doubt this
motivation is the biggest motor for what we see in the Internet / Free
Software.

I'm not saying I'm already fully understanding what is happening, but
to me when I'm making a gift, this is a rather personal thing. At
least I must have the vision of a real person the gift is directed to.
For example I put some (small pieces of) Free Software to the Internet
and got (next to) no response. Actually against popular believe I
think most Free Software authors experience that. After all I can see
some download numbers from my personal site and so I can conclude that
there must be people who at least download my work.

However, from this I don't feel I made a gift to someone. Again: To me
a gift is a rather personal thing and often it is linked to some kind
of personal obligation. Did you know that in German the word "Gift"
means poison? I read somewhere that this is not by chance but instead
a result of the obligation part of the gift.

In this sense a gift is part of an exchange - but this is not what is
happening on the Internet in any useful sense of the word. There is a
big flow of information but the typical tit-for-tat of exchange is the
opposite of what is happening in the Internet / Free Software.

So why am I putting Free Software to the Internet after all? Well, to
me over time it became a kind of obligation I feel. I'm using Free
Software day by day and some of my work may help others. This is also
the reason why I started to send patches to the authors I found useful
/ making things work.

An additional special explanation in my case that I wanted to
experience myself what it means to contribute Free Software.

However, this has really nothing to do with gifts in any sense of the
word I can think of. To me this looks far more like a social standard
which is slowly emerging from the practice of Free Software. May be it
can be stuffed into the notion of gift but I feel this is wrong.

Another example where I make freely accessible contributions is of
course Oekonux. Things are quite different here because of course
Oekonux lives from responses. As a result I see my contributions to
the project as anything but gifts. To me this is a collective effort
to achieve something - in this case to understand the opportunities
embedded in the principles of Free Software for a new society which
causes less pain than the one we have. I can't see any other way to
have that and the openness to me is for many reasons an important part
of Oekonux. Indeed the Internet may the only sociotope where this is
possible.

Well, may be this is enough of a challenge to the word "gift" in gift
economy ;-) .


						Mit Freien Grüßen

						Stefan

PS: Richard: If you respond please keep the `list-en oekonux.org' in
the `Cc:'. Thanks.

_______________________
http://www.oekonux.org/


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