“The recent growth of interest in Linux and “open source” or
“free” software raises questions about the nature of the “gift
culture” of the Internet. Why do people give away information? What
do they hope to gain? How can the Internet continue to work, in a
world in which politics based on shared ownership has serious,
demonstrated problems?”
“The cooperative spirit of the Internet is not a historical
fluke. If human beings allowed their aggressive, suspicious sides
to dominate, we’d live in a world in which people took things by
force instead of buying them.”
“The trend in technology is an exponential improvement of
knowledge and capabilities. Make anything cheap enough, and it will
no longer be scarce enough to be considered an economic good.”
“The behavior of agalmias gives us useful information about the
ways that societies can change and grow. Open source and free
software communities provide us with excellent modern day agalmias
for study, as does the Internet itself. But long term trends in
technology suggest that material scarcity will likely become less
common, and agalmic behavior more common. In studying the behavior
of agalmias we can see intimations of our technological
future.”