Re:Linux, art, and open source culture (Score 1)

Thanks, Ron.

I think it would be very interesting to study the cultural practices of the free software community. There's a lot of good data in Eric Raymond's stuff, as well as the things that have been written on the gift-exchange culture of open source. It's amazing what elaborate and subtle systems of creating and maintaining relationships of trust and mutual benefit there are, and in an world where no one can see anyone else's face.

I'm struck by the similarities to the practices of the aristocracy in archaic Greece (say, 8th to 6th century BC). These people established and maintained reciprocal relationships over distances of hundreds of miles, and through the course of many generations. Thus it was possible (as it is in a sense with the open source community) for people who had never met to know that they were guest-friends. Foremost among their methods was the exchange of valuable gifts (and the vehement rejection of the use of money or of any attempts to place a cash valuation of those gifts), which would bring prestige to the giver and benefit the recipient while putting an obligation on him to return the favor at some later date. They also shared a vast knowledge of ``right ways'' to think about things and do things which were, in principle, unforgeable. In a sense, these were both communication and authentication protocols. (So also with e-commerce: the problem of anonymous authentication is not new.)

Anyway, this is getting kind of off the topic. But it's interesting stuff.

Cheers,

Jed