Re: [ox-en] Re: Free Software is not a gift
- From: Michael Bouwens <michelsub2003 yahoo.com>
- Date: Sat, 21 Oct 2006 21:04:53 -0700 (PDT)
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Hi,
Every relationship is an exchange, even every you do, as a relation to an action or an object; there is exchange of energy and values.
The question is: what kind of exchange.
The kind of gifting that takes place in peer production does not require a return from a particular person, so it is a form of 'generalized exchange', not reciprocal exchange.
If I'm correct the concept of gift economy denotes the latter, and peer prodruction is emphatically not a gift economy.
The most useful categorisation of modes of human exchange for me, is that of the anthropologist Alan Page Fiske in Structures of Social Life.
(see Relational Model in the search box of p2pfoundation.net)
Free Software and peer production of course is based on social relationships, the question is: which kind.
It is more impersonal than the gift economy thing in the sense of the lack of reciprocal obligations; but it is personal in the sense that it comes from the free association of the individual.
Michel
Gregers Petersen <gp.ioa cbs.dk> wrote:
magius wrote:
2006/10/20, Stefan Merten :
I'm not quite sure what actually goes on with these returning comments - is it
an ongoing discussion ?
but, the question is indeed interesting - then if free software is not a gift,
then there is no exchange --> and if there is no exchange there will be no
social relationship (and definitely no reciprocity, in the sense of what Marcel
Mauss wrote) --> and then (being an anthropologist) it is getting quite exiting
then there is definitely some sort of social relationship represented in free
software ...?
And now I'm hoping this is an ongoing discussion
--
Gregers Petersen
Anthropologist, Ph.d fellow
Department of Organization & Industrial Sociology
Copenhagen Business School
Kilen, Kilevej 14A, 4.
DK - 2000 Frederiksberg
gp.ioa cbs.dk
(+45) 3815 2811
Skype: gregers.ioa
www.cbs.dk/staff/gp
www.icco.dk
Free Software & Ownership
www.wireless-ownership.org
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