All good comments so far. I'd like to expand the conversation beyond "giving" and "taking." I'd like to talk about <em>sharing</em>. There's a sense of <em>economy</em> when one gives and takes. You can barter for something you want with something you have. And when you give what you have in order to take what you want, there's an exchange. You and your trading partner have both lost what you each gave. But knowledge isn't <em>lost</em> when it is shared. That's what makes it fundamentally different than the material economy.
Before Open Source, there was Free Software. Combining them, we can talk about FOSS. I think it's more accurate to describe the foundation of the movement (dating all the way back to Free Software) to be about sharing. Free Software encoded knowledge in machine language so that Linus could benefit from that knowledge when writing, compiling and debugging his kernel. And so it goes. The beauty of FOSS manifests itself in the diverse community that has built up around sharing knowledge. Wikipedia credits that ethos with its success.
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All good comments so far. I'd like to expand the conversation beyond "giving" and "taking." I'd like to talk about <em>sharing</em>. There's a sense of <em>economy</em> when one gives and takes. You can barter for something you want with something you have. And when you give what you have in order to take what you want, there's an exchange. You and your trading partner have both lost what you each gave. But knowledge isn't <em>lost</em> when it is shared. That's what makes it fundamentally different than the material economy.
Before Open Source, there was Free Software. Combining them, we can talk about FOSS. I think it's more accurate to describe the foundation of the movement (dating all the way back to Free Software) to be about sharing. Free Software encoded knowledge in machine language so that Linus could benefit from that knowledge when writing, compiling and debugging his kernel. And so it goes. The beauty of FOSS manifests itself in the diverse community that has built up around sharing knowledge. Wikipedia credits that ethos with its success.