[jltsiren]

A gift economy only exists between people who agree that they are participating in one.

Gifts between equals create expectations of reciprocity. If you use open source software, you are expected to contribute. Accepting a gift without an intention to reciprocate is an admission of social inferiority. Users who don't see themselves as socially inferior to developers are not participating in the gift economy and not bound by the social contract.

[ragall]

> If you use open source software, you are expected to contribute.

No, not in a million years.

[hinkley]

No, emphatically not. We are surrounded by them and people behave as if they are without acknowledging it. Saying it isn’t so doesn’t change the fact that we give more attention to people who [give] us free shit. It’s baked into our little monkey brains.

[hinkley]

> Accepting a gift without an intention to reciprocate is an admission of social inferiority.

I wish I'd read your response more thoroughly before responding from my phone in a parking lot.

You do not understand gift economies at all. You've reduced them to transactionality, which is capitalism, and capitalism kills gift economies for fun.

Robin Wall Kimmerer is a molecular biologist who is also a mother and a member of the Anishnaabe peoples. Braiding Sweetgrass is a book everyone should read, but you especially. The Serviceberry is a much shorter and denser discussion of gift economies but I doubt it's approachable for anyone who has read nothing of hers.

[jltsiren]

Perhaps we are talking about two different concepts called "gift economy".

The gift economy concept I'm familiar with has been used to describe various non-state polities, where people exchange gifts to maintain relationships and establish social standing. Gifts between peers are expected to be of similar value, while patrons are expected to give their clients more valuable gifts than they receive.

[hinkley]

Well you’ve got less of a capitalist filter on that than I feared but I think you’ve got the cart before the horse.

The parts that relate to open source are this: when you have riches, you share them. People making a genuine effort to reciprocate when they are able (which may be months or years from now) makes the social structure function (if you like, by the rule of large numbers - someone always has more than they need when others do not).

If you do share in kind, your social status is unaffected by this aspect of your culture. If you are consistently more generous, your status increases. Call it Bayesian if you like. He helped us in the past, he will help us again in the future, so let’s keep him safe.

If you’ve ever been nominated as a maintainer on someone else’s project, this is usually why. You’re one of the top contributors not already on the core team, and they either like you a lot, or the contributions from others have fallen off and even they know this is not sustainable, and you’re the next best option.

There is an element of gifts given to strangers, which I’m claiming should also show up in how you receive “visitors” to your project, but I think outside of fiction this is typically set at a best effort level. It’s acceptable to set it at the “decency” level discussed elsewhere in this thread. But a lot of people don’t and then yell back when people scold them for it.