Sharing

Concept

What is sharing? The deepest form of sharing is that in the economic sense, when you give something that has value. It could be time, or it could be physical artifacts. Sharing as an ideology gets into character: does a person still share or puts others first when in stress? Are they sharing, or are they just out to save themselves, and even at the detriment of others?

Sharing is a big concept. It is something we learned in kindergarten. But, that was all beaten out of us once we entered the workforce, and a typical focus of an energetic person changes from save the world to make money.

The patent system, one of the central institutions of modern civilization, enforces 'no sharing' economically. In the big sense, 'sharing is little practiced' in today's society. Greed is in.

This gets into mutually-beneficial self-interest. A stupid asshole will steal, use violence, and take from others. An enlightened person would seek to share as much as possible, based on principles of Abundance. This sharing, in the most enlightened sense, would be the sharing of economically significant knowhow. Because this knowhow is abundant and executable - once the knowhow has reached the level of open enterprise knowhow, the 'enlightened sharing person' would also share physical goods with others. The underlying driver of the 'enlightened person' is service and giving - because this person knows that the more they serve and give, the more comees back to them. This is a law of nature, or at least of spiritual nature. Cynycism means having learned the opposite of the principles of sharing and goodness.

Sharing and Fear of Survival

Why point this out? To clarify that when we discuss sharing in open source hardware, we are really talking about sharing economically significant capital - because the substance which we are sharing is product and process designs. Therefore, sharing in open hardware is really about sharing wealth and 'capital'. This helps one understand why Fear of Survival comes up when people are exposed to sharing open source information. It gets down into our reptilian brain level, where fear of survival is real.