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ABSTRACT
This study brings together findings about two contexts of sharing in order to explore the meaning of the word in the digital environment. First, this study is based on ethnographic research of free software projects and uses the resulting thick description to determine the meaning of sharing in this context. Second, the current literature on sharing usually takes user-generated content (UGC) platforms as its empirical reference, resulting in identifying a distinct meaning of sharing in this context. By combining the two sets of findings into a single narrative, this study makes three points: (1) the academic discourse on free software conceptualizing it as a form of gift-giving antithetical to the ways of capitalist production needs to be revised; (2) the use of sharing in the context of UGC platforms relies heavily on references to the culture of free software; (3) although representatives from both contexts claim to be taking part in the same sharing practices, there are substantial differences in the type of information being shared, the explicitness of the sharing mechanisms, and the organizational context of monetization of the shared objects.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes on contributor
Tomáš Karger is a research fellow at Tomáš Baťa University in Zlín. He is a doctoral graduate of sociology at Palacký University in Olomouc with a dissertation thesis based on ethnographic research of knowledge networks in free and open-source software development. In his work, he addresses the relationship between digital technologies and knowledge dynamics. The topic of knowledge production and transmission represents a general research interest which navigates his work into areas such as technology development or collective memory. He gained experience with qualitative research strategies while participating in several research projects funded by the Internal Grant Agency of Palacký University or by the Czech Science Foundation.
Notes
1 This conflation is also explicitly acknowledged by Arun Sundararajan by pointing out that what is in the context of sharing economy labeled as sharing is otherwise usually seen as a commercial exchange (Sundararajan, Citation2016).
2 GNU General Public License, version 1. https://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-1.0.html.
3 The Open Source Definition. http://www.oreilly.com/openbook/opensources/book/perens.html.
4 Licenses & Standards. http://opensource.org/licenses.
5 Open Source Initiative. http://opensource.org.
6 The chat nicknames have been altered.
7 It needs to be noted that in this case, the assessed project went through a successful crowd funding campaign roughly a year before this conversation took place. In this light, the assessment could be interpreted as criticism of a project that does not fulfil the obligations of its own campaign. However, the fact that Ted refers to a time period before the campaign and that the project frames itself continuously as open source point to a more general problem.
8 The fact that developers with differing values participate on common free software practices was noted already by Kelty (Citation2008, p. 14), while the role of ambiguity as a facilitator of cooperation was described in other contexts of sharing such as Wikipedia or Quantified Self (Barta & Neff, Citation2016; Matei & Dobrescu, Citation2011).
9 History of the OSI. http://opensource.org/history.
10 GNOME git repository. http://git.gnome.org/.
11 GNOME Foundation Fiscal Year 2015 Annual Report. http://www.gnome.org/foundation/reports/.
12 GNOME Foundation Charter. http://wiki.gnome.org/FoundationBoard/Resources/Charter.
13 GNOME Foundation Charter. http://wiki.gnome.org/FoundationBoard/Resources/Charter.
14 Licensing your applications and plugins for use with GStreamer. GStreamer documentation page. http://gstreamer.freedesktop.org/documentation/licensing.html.
15 The absence of the ‘viral’ aspect in popular non-copyleft licenses such as MIT, BSD or the LGPL is seen by some as acceptable (notably the OSI’s Open Source Definition) or even abolishing an unnecessary restriction on code distribution, while others (including the FSF) encourage the use of copyleft as a means of leveraging reciprocity and avoiding the ‘tragedy of the commons’ (Chopra & Dexter, Citation2007, p. 33).
16 Tech Talk: Linus Torvalds on Git. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XpnKHJAok8#t=18m05s.
17 Git push. http://git-scm.com/docs/git-push.
18 Mark Zuckerberg’s Letter to Investors: ‘The Hacker Way’. http://www.wired.com/2012/02/zuck-letter/.
19 Mark Zuckerberg’s Letter to Investors: ‘The Hacker Way’. http://www.wired.com/2012/02/zuck-letter/.
20 Linux Kernel Mailing List. http://lkml.org/lkml/2000/8/25/132.
21 Git http://wiki.pitivi.org/wiki/Git.
22 What the Tech Industry Has Learned from Linus Torvalds: Jim Zemlin at TEDxConcordiaUPortland. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7XTHdcmjenI.
23 Mark Zuckerberg, the Hacker Way and the Art of the Founder’s Letter. http://www.wired.com/2012/02/zuckerberg-hacker/.
24 Mark Zuckerberg, the Hacker Way and the Art of the Founder’s Letter. http://www.wired.com/2012/02/zuckerberg-hacker/.
25 What is web 2.0: Design patterns and business models for the next generation of software. http://www.oreilly.com/lpt/a/1.
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