Salon.com
Both Larry Augustin and Eric Steven Raymond are believers in something called “the gift economy”—a way of organizing labor in cyberspace that runs counter to the normal business practices of, say, a company like Microsoft. The gift economy, as understood by hackers on the Net, mandates that if you give (your labor, your code, your intelligence) to the greater community, the community will not only flourish, but you yourself will benefit from gifts contributed by other members of that community.
VA Linux, I soon learned, adhered to gift economy principles in ways both little and big. On the little side, VA once gave Raymond a new monitor to replace one of his that had blown up. It had also authorized a VA employee, Sam Ockman (who went on to found another pre-installed Linux hardware company, Penguin Computing), to set up an online home for the then completely non-commercial Debian distribution of Linux. Later, once VA’s hardware sales began to climb, and it started attracting significant venture capital, VA began hiring scores of prominent Linux hackers to work on enhancing Linux, and even took the symbolically dramatic step of naming Eric Raymond to its board of directors (a move that has made Raymond a very wealthy man today, with 150,000 shares of stock that is commanding well over $200 per share.)
Why should we care about this corporate generosity? Because the gift economy helped build the Internet. Free software, or open-source software, is the gift economy as applied to the creation of working code. Vast portions of the Net, its mail transport mechanisms, bulletin board discussion forums, even the Web itself, owe their creation to the willingness of programmers to write code, contribute it to the general public and reap the benefits thereof.
The clear result of years of gift economy behavior on the Net has been the creation of a huge publicly accessible infrastructure that facilitates cooperation and collaboration—a giant tool lending library stocked with useful items of all description. In a world that is increasingly run by and dependent on software, the creation of this library is of incalculable value. But up until very recently, the production of these tools occurred on a more or less uncoordinated, haphazard basis, according to the energy and enthusiasm of hackers working in their spare time.
December 23, 1999