Re: Gifts? (was: Re: [ox-en] Richard Barbrook article)
- From: Thomas Berker <thomas.berker gmx.de>
- Date: Wed, 30 Oct 2002 15:13:28 +0100
Hi Graham,
today I try to make it short.
At 10:03 24.10.02 -0400, Graham wrote:
> So, Free Software (FS) is produced freely in a new way and distributed
> freely in a new way. I guess the latter part is quite clear: GPL + digital
> reproducability cancels bourgois proprietorship and Internet + digital
> reproducability revolutionises global distribution.
OK, this should probably be a totally different thread, but that's
something I don't agree with.
I haven't put too much thought in this yet. I make a mental note that this
is contested and try stay with our topic.
So yes, I guess you're right that 'gift' is not something that helps to
explain it to people who don't know about the topic in the first place.
But I still think it's a useful idea in itself - the fact that it may not
help in 'propaganda' doesn't mean it is wrong.
If I am using the common understanding of what gifts are as starting point,
then I am not only interested in the chances to convince the world. I see
that my last email might have given this impression. No, I think that
common sense is something, we actively have to deal with, either through
critical appraisal, or by using it as point of departure, depending on the
respective context and content. But that is an epistemological question
(language, perception, truth, metaphors, ...) I do not want go into today.
And of course in such a position there is quite a lot of pragmatism as
well: I am just bored of talking in a restricted - yet (maybe) more concise
language - to people that share its basic vocabulary not being able to
convince anyone not speaking my particular dia-/socio-lect.
And, repeating myself, it's not the fact that the software is a gift
that makes the difference; it's the fact that part of the company is
now inserted into the gift economy, which means that some people in the
company are now working in a different way. For example, from a situation
where all decisions are made by a manager, they are now in a situation
where they can tell the manager 'you can't decide that because it doesn't
fit with what the outside developers would accept'. It's a partial loss
of control for the company hierarchy.
I find your point convincing (repeating yourself sometimes really helps!).
I would add some other structural developments, which 'insert' _some_
traditional companies into new ways of producing goods, which might not
only be temporary and which resemble the FS-way. They are maybe more
limited in their effect, I am not sure about this yet. There are three
rather wide-spread problems:
- The problem of anti-Taylorist affects against hierarchies and alienated
organisation structures,
- the problem of globally dispersed teams working together supported by
ICTs, and
- the problem of users, which refuse to do what the designers want them to do.
For these and maybe even more contemporary problems FS has found a genuine
solution. If I was a Human Ressource Manager I would refer to lessons
learned from FS-development. Hey, these guys do the impossible: They work
spatially dispersed, effectively, self-organised and without salary! ;-)
I'm still not convinced it's only a metaphor. I'd rather see it as one of
two ways of looking at what's happening. You can understand everything in
terms of a theory developed to explain capitalism: competition based on
scarcity, marginal costs, etc; which obviously explains some things well,
but badly distorts others (none of the papers that try to bring FS back
in to the marginalist fold seem at all convincing to me). Or you can say
there are two radically different things going on here, each of which
needs its own theory. In the case of FS the theory still needs developing
Isn't the really annoying thing about capitalism that it changes without
being abolished and revolutionised? I think we should get used to that
feature. Capitalism is not the same as it was 100 years ago, nor was it
revolutionised in the meanwhile. Some things are changing some remain the
same (above all the distribution of power tends to be extraordinarily
sticky). Thus, I would rather say theory needs developing to keep pace with
the changes and that is not only true for the case of FS.
Ooof, too long....
Yes I know, it's not easy :-)
Thomas
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