An essay written by Eric S. Raymond about the social workings of open source software development.

John Locke and land ownership.

The culture of giving is an adaptation to excess, not scarcity

I could write another sentence about the harm of self-deception in believing that we truly have “selfless motives” (despite all the psychological and behavioral evidence to the contrary). I could write, but I don’t need to, about destroying “altruism” and reducing it to a clearly unconscious self-interest (among other shortcomings), which Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche and Ayn Rand have already done quite admirably.

From the moment capitalism is able to create a surplus of wealth sufficient to allow many programmers to live in a culture of giving in the post-rare age, the industrial capitalist mode of soft production is ultimately destined to lose out to the competition.

en.icon --- This page is auto-translated from [/nishio/Homesteading the Noosphere](https://scrapbox.io/nishio/Homesteading the Noosphere) using DeepL. If you looks something interesting but the auto-translated English is not good enough to understand it, feel free to let me know at [@nishio_en](https://twitter.com/nishio_en). I'm very happy to spread my thought to non-Japanese readers.