I just managed to cross the river from my current abode to give a talk at Northeastern, courtesy of the Consortium on Technology and Society.
A small but very enthusiastic crowd received the talk very well, with great questions. One thing the book doesn’t address upfront, but which is perpetually the most obvious question is the so-called “motivation” question. That is, why do people do all this work creating free software (or free anything) and then give it away. In some ways, this question is central to the success of free software itself, in the form it’s taken as a result of Raymond’s formulation of it as a “gift economy” and so forth… an issue I attacked with gusto very early on, but never returned to (c.f. “Hau to do things with words“).
However, I think the book actually answers this question strongly, if not as straightforwardly as it could: the reason people contribute to free software is in fact because it makes things public. It is the relative certainty that contributors have–based on the license terms and the existing community–that is the minimum necessary “motivation” for contribution. I think the question is asked backwards if one asks “what motivates X to do Y?” rather than asking what motivates X to give away Y after it’s done?” In the absence of the license and the community, contributions to free software would diminish absolutely, even if the creation of software and other materials continued for differenet reasons.
Of course, this doens’t explain why millions of people contribute reviews to Amazon, or give away ideas and intellectual property to corporations… but the question is still the same I think: not why do people write reviews for amazon, but what motivates them to give up their property in order to see it there.
COMMENTS / 2 COMMENTS
kavita on Jun 08 08 at 2:02 amChris, I agree with much of this, obviously. But I would push to further reformulate the last sentence ["to give up their property"]. In the 17th century property was not actually a thing [either to be hoarded or given away]; rather, property was a relation. [Mostly, "relations to" land, which is a thing - thus the slippage in the use of the term, until the full flowering of commodification in the following 2 centuries, which made it seem natural to see relations as things... but that's a longer story]. Anyway, I am playing with the idea that in fact this older notion of property as a relation (not a thing) is what’s going on in this “giving away.” When people ask you this question they seem to be fixated on the thing (software, content, music, etc) as the precious property-thing which must be treated in a proprietary manner. But of course if we look at the social relations around that thing (as you do in your work), we see that people are not just giving it away (no “pure” gifting); there are complex exchange relations, as there are in gift economies. [which is another story, and one that you've helped open up before.]
cheers,
– Kavita
PS – great site ! congrats on the book!!
Christopher Kelty on Jun 08 08 at 6:08 pmthanks kavita, i agree that “give up their property” is probably not the right way to express it. Having worked extensively through the various approaches to property and gifts in the anthropology literature, it’s hard to find the right tack on this–it just gets more coonfusing. I wouldn’t conceive of it in epochal terms though. Property is very much conceived in terms of relations today, but only in some idioms, as when economists and lawyers speak of property as a “bundle of rights” and not as any tangible thing per se. Rights are relations to persons and things (or persons and persons, or increasingly things and things), and there is always a slippage in legal and economic language between a system that distinguishes according to rights granted by a sovereign and natural rights, even today I think. What’s hard I think is determining whether there is actually a misrecognition happening here (as in a classic misrecognition of the relations of production or a more subtle misrecognition of the nature of rights). I like to think that when people insist that they own a thing (i.e. this CD is Mine) they are expressing something rather than misrecognizing a legal fact (i.e. that they actually don’t own it, but own a piece of plastic that implies a contractual relation with a copyright holder). But what exactly are they expressing… I think they are expressing something more than just hyper-individualized consumer mis-recognition of the social relations of production (which certainly happens in many cases), and might be expressing a desire to make that thing public in whatever way they want…
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