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Re: Gifts? (was: Re: [ox-en] Richard Barbrook article)



Hi Thomas,

A long commentary.... I've left your original comments intact so
anyone else can pick up on them...

On Tue, 22 Oct 2002, Thomas Berker wrote:

Hi!

At 17:28 14.10.02 -0400, Graham Seaman wrote:
But there are other traditions and associations with gifts, linked with
anthropology, literature and art rather than software and left politics.
The best book I know about this is 'The Gift' by Lewis Hyde,  published
in 1979.

I came across similar contributions when I tried to understand the concept 
of a "moral economy" (coined in 1971 by the historian Edward P. Thompson). 
It seems to me that the meaning of "gift" you are referring to is part of a 
strand of academic research, which tried to uncover alternatives to the 
capitalist way of circulation and production of goods in pre-modern, not 
yet modern (Thompson, for instance, is writing about the transition period 
in England), or far-away societies/communities. This often is somewhat 
hidden within the contributions themselves, but I assume more often than 
not it may have been the actual context and motivation for the respective 
anthropological/historical/sociological research. And this, by the way, 
pretty much describes the reasons for my interest in Free Software as well.

That gifts continue to exist in modern societies in my opinion speaks in 
favour _and_ against using "gift economy" as label for all those things, 
which are to do with Internet and which (nevertheless?) are challenging 
capitialism. On the one hand, that most people know that exchanging gifts 
somehow is (and should be) different from exchanging commodities definitely 
is an advantage. However, gifts in commodified societies have connotations, 
which were mentioned by Stefan (e.g.: "He gave me a gift worth 20 Euro, now 
I can't give him one worth much less or more"), and which can become a 
problem for someone who wants to get the message through.

I confess not to have an alternative suggestion. Maybe Negri/Hardt are 
right and the time has come for the label 'communism' again? Anyway, I 
guess labelling is an important political question in this phase of 
Oekonux's fight, since (at least in my experience) arguing against 
misunderstandings is its main occupation when it comes to contact with a 
broader public - which is a pity, isn't it?

Yes, I agree that 'gift' in this sense is actually a problem in that it
has a slightly different meaning from the normal one. The word
'selbstentfaltung' has a similar problem. There seems to be a consensus 
on the list that that kind of problem is inevitable. 'Communism' obviously
has similar problems (not dismissing that point, just leaving it for 
another time).

 When I said that the idea of the gift economy might be a useful
complement to the idea of selbstentfaltung, I was thinking more of the
concept than just the word as label. I try to follow some of the german
list, but don't always understand a lot, so it may be I've misunderstood
the ideas - if so please correct me - but summarizing some of the 
oekonux.de ideas in a brutally over-simple way:

Free software development can be organized completely differently from
capitalist work; it may be the kernel ('keimform') of a different mode of
production. But we can only tell it may be one because it produces a
product (free software) of general use; unlike, say, woodcarving for a
hobby. The product is the guarantee of existence of the really important
thing, the new way of working. But - free software is also produced by
people working in the old way. Sun employees developing Tomcat, say, or
even any firm which wants to look good and has some old unused proprietary
software they can 'throw over the fence' unchanged, with a gpl stuck on
it. So now we need to make a distinction - there is free software, which
is copylefted, but produced in the old way, and 'doubly free software'
('doppelte freie software' (sp?)) which is free software produced in the
new way. If I've got this right, it seems a very convoluted way of looking
at it to me.

I think the gift economy idea simplifies this a bit without throwing 
anything basic out (maybe it could also add the beginnings of a theory of 
distribution to the theory of production):

A gift is something that can be passed on to others, something that can be
given (if you keep it for yourself it stops being a gift). In the case of
software, 'giving' implies also improving - I can't give you vi, because
you can take that any time you want without my say-so. But I can give
vi++, my new super-improved version. As a gift, you can take it, produce
vi+++, and give that, and so on. Copyleft is a legal guarantee that once
something has become a gift, it will stay a gift. 

For gifts to circulate in this way requires the existence of a gift
economy. This is just another name for the 'keimform' of people producing
in the new way. It's inconceivable that IBM, Sun, and the other companies
could continue producing free software without the people outside the
business world producing free software in the new way - what would they 
do, trade it with one another? Now if my company chucks out some old
software with the gpl on it, this is not a gift, because it cannot yet
circulate. If it ever does circulate, it will be because someone thought
it important enough to work on it, understand it, comment it, create
a community around it - that's the point where it becomes a gift, not the
point where someone attaches the gpl to it. It becomes a gift when it
is absorbed into the new mode of production (you could say this is just a 
rewording of the 'doubly free' idea, but I think it's clearer because
it's not a static label, it involves some human action)  

With the fuzzier cases where commercially produced free software is
genuinely intended to enter the gift economy - say Mozilla - you have
a similar phenomenon, but this time penetrating the firm itself. Now
they are not producing a potential gift, but an actual gift. To do this,
they have to become partly absorbed in the new economy. They have to
let their design decisions etc be at least partly controlled by the hordes
of Mozilla developers who are not part of AOL and have no connection with
their commercial interests at all. Their own staff have to be using free
software for development. Their staff have to learn how to work in a
co-operative way; etc. In other words, if a company is genuinely producing
a gift it has to be partly taken over by the new potential mode of 
production - obviously they are going to gamble that this will only be
on the fringes of the company, that they can limit any damage from it,
and control it if they need to. Which may or may not be true. But what
they produce is not 'singly free software' - the gift economy idea avoids
that bit of metaphysics...

I'm sure Stefan Mz will now tell me I've misunderstood everything :-)
I hope so, I don't think the 'doppelte freie software' topic ever came
up on the english list so it would be good to have a better explanation
here (tho' just before the conference when everyone is rushing around
organizing may not be the best of times..)

Graham



Best, Thomas (Be)

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