GiftSociety

When society is well-off, people have enough money for their basic needs. Having even more money is not as valuable anymore. $100 when you are poor mean a lot, but $100 when you are rich mean little.

When enough people are rich, something else happens: Fame and reputation becomes more important. This is often called a reputation economy or a gift society. See MeatBall:ReputationEconomics and MeatBall:GiftSociety.

MeatBall:ReputationEconomics

MeatBall:GiftSociety

When writing FreeSoftware in your spare time, you are participating in the gift society, giving your work away and expecting fame and glory.

FreeSoftware

You can also write free software for money, in which case you are selling a service. Basically you are selling the hours and days you spend on the project.

• *How does innovation work in the gift society?** Writing innovative works are just bigger gifts, that part was easy. But assume you have an unpopular new idea. Nobody wants to join your project, it seems hopeless. You also can’t convince a venture capitalist or a big company to hire you to implement your unpopular new idea.

• *Using a non-free license you could wager on your own success.** If it doesn’t work out, you loose. You can still decide to release it as free software just so your idea and code doesn’t die completely. If it does work out, however, you can collect enough cash to finance your investment. If you feel ethical, you can still release the software under a free license when you have recovered your investment (and an extra bonus, perhaps).

The problem with this approach is its dependency on your good will. How am I going to believe that you *will* release your software as free software “real soon now”.

You could set up a legal construct forcing yourself to release the software as free software upon certain conditions; this would mitigate the problem a bit. People would still have to take you to court, however in order to enforce their right. Downloading free software doesn’t have this problem. The barriers are about as low as they can get.

There still is a small fraction of developers left, however. The project is unpopular with fellow developers, big companies, and venture capitalists. And using a legal framework is something they don’t want to get into.

The question to ask now, is: “Do we as a society want to promote these people, eventhough they weren’t able to convince anybody else with enough money?”

The extra clause “with enough money” already shows what the problem is...

Anyway, back to the question: Do we want to promote it? If we do not, these people will have to use a non-free license and place a wager on themselves. Since everbody else is using a free license, can we say that free software made such wagers more difficult.

Notes to continue the essay:

“fame vs fortune” from http://www.shirky.com/writings/fame_vs_fortune.html, *Fame vs Fortune: Micropayments and Free Content* by Clay Shirky.

http://www.shirky.com/writings/fame_vs_fortune.html