One might expect a lot of political posturing from folks who are constructing an alternative to paid labor. But the coders, hackers, and programmers who design sharing tools don’t think of themselves as revolutionaries. The most common motivation for working without pay (according to a survey of 2,784 open source developers) was “to learn and develop new skills.” One academic put it this way (paraphrasing): “The major reason for working on free stuff is to improve my own damn software.” Basically, overt politics is not practical enough. The internet is less a creation dictated by economics
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