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> I didn't get that impression at all. My take is that he's simply providing a view of OSS through the lens of financial transactions. Which totally misses the
by nextaccountic 2y ago
> I didn't get that impression at all. My take is that he's simply providing a view of OSS through the lens of financial transactions.
Which totally misses the point, since open source works as a gift economy [0]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gift_economy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gift_economy
- oblio 2y agoFOSS developers gift their tools, libraries, frameworks, applications, and corporations use them and then don't OSS their cloud control planes (AWS, Azure, GCP), UI frameworks (Apple), app stores (Apple, Google), etc, etc. Some give, others take. I guess that's how things work in gift economies in real life, too.
- ellen364 2y agoGlad someone mentioned the gift economy. So much discussion around FOSS reminds me of ideas from gift economy. E.g. the extent to which a culture assumes a gift is part of gift exchange, with some expectation of reciprocity. Or the concept of “giving while keeping”. I think both ideas exist in copyleft licenses, but were lost in the more permissive MIT-style licenses. Sometimes I wonder if maintainers feel burned because they use more permissive licenses, which might be standard in their ecosystem, but unconsciously have a different gift culture.