Re: [ox-en] Re: Free Software is not a gift
- From: "George N. Dafermos" <georgedafermos yahoo.com>
- Date: Fri, 13 Apr 2007 04:35:05 -0700 (PDT)
Hello friends,
I should have written this comment a long time ago,
but slipped off my mind entirely. During the last
Chaos Communication Congress in Berlin in the end of
2007, I attended Gregers Petersen's presentation on
the relationship between "the gift" and practices of
free software development.
I liked the presentation: well informed and thorough.
I took the liberty of inviting Gregers to the next
Oekonux meeting, as I reckon his contribution could
further the discussion in pertinent ways, and so
gladdens me to see his involvement in the preparations
for the upcoming workshop at Klab9. However, I have a
comment/questions which I am afraid eluded me in
Berlin, so here comes:
According to Gregers's presentation, the developers of
free software do NOT want to establish a personal
relationship through their free exchanges of source
code. Thus, since the gift (according to M. Mauss) is
a form of exchange which seeks to etablish and
establishes a social bond, Gregers concludes that
practices of free software are NOT having to do with
the gift. My comment: Mauss is explicit that one of
the primary functions of the gift is that it
establishes a social bond, but he adds that the social
relationship established through the exchange of the
gift is NEVER between *individuals* (as in the
seller-buyer dialectic), but it always encompasses and
unites groups of people. Cast in this light, I'd say
that the gift is present in practices of free software
insofar as a "gift" of source code by one group of
people in given to a project which involves (heavily
or not) other groups of developers too, and thus seeks
to establish a bond between the two (or more) distinct
groups of developers.
In a more romantic vein, Mauss never hesitated to
emphasise the more humane character of a society based
on the form of exchange which is the gift. In his
writings, the gift becomes a weapon against the
immiseration which accompanies the modern forms of
exchange upon which contemporary societies are
founded. It was this impassionate and ferocious
critique that attracted the Situationists to the
potlach and the gift (and still continues to captivate
the imagination of radical thinkers), rather than the
*instrumental rationality of the system of the gift*,
which was (I felt) what Gregers's presentation was
exclusively centred on. However, as we know (from
Horkheimer, Castoriadis...), "instrumental rationality
has clearly no value in itself", in light of which it
becomes increasinly more important to question and
elucidate the goals, the ends, the values before
moving on to determine which means should be employed
and how.
george
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