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[ox-en] Re: [ox-en] Re: [ox-en] Re: [ox-en] Re: Material peer production (was: Re: [ox-en]Motto for the 4th conference)



On Mon, 14 Jan 2008 22:07:21 -0800 (PST), Michael Bauwens
<michelsub2003 yahoo.com> wrote:

Research demonstrates that there is a wide variety of motivations, not
just what you state,

As far as I understand, research demonstrates the same thing in all fields,
medicine,
teaching, fire fighting, and I imagine even hedge fund managers will list
rewards or interests
beyond wages alone as a component of their motivation.

This doesn't change the fact that that where you have specialized labour,
you have have exchange,
and where you have exchange, you have a certain expectation of reciprocity
required, at the least for 
the material substance of the contributers.

If the exchange is not reciprocal at all, how do free software developers
subsist? 

As far as I know, mostly from wage labour.


but this is not the point. The point is that: each
freely contribute towards the common pool,

Mostly they contribute to the pool because a common stock of information
assets
is immediately usable in their own, or their employer's production.

Directly or indirectly, the wealth thus produced is the source of the wages
that 
sustain this contribution.


can profit from that common
pool, may or not gain all kinds of different value, BUT, unlike the gift
economy, there is nothing strictly reciprocal about it,

Reciprocity need not be strict. It certainly isn't strict (in terms of
every transaction
being measured) among friends and social groups, nor was it in kin-communal
societies.


this is why anthropologists call it generalized exchange, as opposed to
reciprocal
exchange. As long as you cannot prove, that a contributor is guaranteed a
reciprocal value, we are not in the field of reciprocity.

If that is the measure, then gift communities would also not be reciprocal,
as no
fixed reciprocal value for each transaction is negotiated.

So long as their is an expectation of mutual contribution, the relationship
is, in some
fashion, reciprocal.

The fact that Benkler has argued (in his talk at WOS4 for instance) that
developers of free software
largely believe they benefit more from free software then they contribute
illustrates this.


The comparison with interns is only valid form the point of view of the
corporations seeking to profit from either form. Interns do not work
freely
for a common pool.

Either do most free software developers, who work on the common pool
because they or
their employers want to apply it to other production.


Interesting. I would especially be interested in how the
author imagined such a society coming about.

very similar to yours, by starting out one project that constitutes the
capital to continue growing outwards

Great! If you have any english information on this, pass it on.

I wonder if this has contributed to the existence of collective enterprises
in France such
as Motion Twin and FDN?


-- 
Dmytri Kleiner
editing text files since 1981

http://www.telekommunisten.net


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