Need some advice? Don't have anybody to talk to? Short on cash? Well what do you do? Well before the Internet outburst, I would say that you're out of luck. But now, you can find communities of people who can give you meaningful advice for free. For free?!?! Well, why not? Just because your counselor charges $50 an hour doesn't mean that everybody does. All you have to do is go to a site like Teen Advice or Student Advice or Coolnurse and advice is in your face. Just propose a question concerning you, and I am confident that you will receive an answer pretty quickly. But why do people go through all this trouble of helping others if they aren't receiving a profit? Are people really that nice and warm-hearted that they would do that? Well, sorry to break it to you, but the answer is yes. Internet savvy people call this service an "open source," meaning that it has open access. Other examples of open source networks are Mozilla FireFox, Linux kernel, and Audacity. So why do people spend their time creating software and programs that they do not even get paid or credited for? Many people used to think that "without this compensation, many socially desirable and useful works would never be created in the first place." (Open source. (2007, February 3. Wikipedia) But this has been proved incorrect, an example is that I am using a product of open access, Mozilla FireFox, a web browser, to write this blog.
So let say for example that I have a question about eating a more healthy diet. I can either go to a nutritionist and pay for his/her service, or I can log onto the web for free. What would you do? Well I would at least try the web first, and if I could not find my answer there I would move on. One problem with open access is that you do not know who is giving you this advice or service. Because open access does not credit itself, how credible is it? Not very. I could be advised that a healthy diet includes eating candy at every meal. This is not the same response a trained professional would give me. Or how do I know that the program with open access does not have viruses in it? How well do you trust the open access community will determine how much of it you use.
So back to the main idea here, Peter Kollock calls a gift, "a transaction involves a diffuse and usually unstated obligation to repay the gift at some future time" (Kollock, The Economies of Online Cooperation). So how do I repay somebody I do not know for giving me advice over the Internet? You really can't return that gift or favor directly to that person. One thing you can do though is help out other people with their problems. This creates a type of community on the web, of people helping each other through open access. But where is the line drawn? There has to be an eventual stopping point to this, because people are going to lose their jobs and business to this online community. You can't just keep on giving things a way for free without receiving anything in return. This gift giving mentality has to end before people start losing jobs. So open sourced and open access fields started getting licenses to limit its growth (DiBona, Open Sources). So we face the issue of today's world. There are many people involved in the open source community, but they now have mild restrictions on them. These people are now protected from any liabilities because they are giving away a free service. And now looking to the future of the issue. Big business like Microsoft are trying to bring down open access sources from taking away from their business. As long as people are willing to make programs and other various goods for free, it is going to be very hard to stop them. Maybe the only way big businesses like Microsoft or Intel can win is to but out these smaller people providing free services.
Citations:
1. Open source. (2007, February 3). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 16:00, February 7, 2007, from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Open_source&oldid=105420698
2. Kollock, Peter.(1999). Communities in Cyberspace: The Economies of Online Cooperation: Gifts and Public Goods in Cyberspace. London: Routledge. http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/soc/faculty/kollock/papers/economies.htm
3. DiBona, Ockman, Stone, Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution, January 1999. http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/opensources/book/perens.html
Photo Sources:
1. http://images.linspire.com/applications/3373/508/Audacity/blurb_audacity.jpg
2. http://www.coolnurse.com/
3. http://teenadvice.student.com/
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