Sharing

Concept

• 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 Political Ponerology is a real phenomenon of power gravitating to psychopaths in the workforce, which discourages sharing
• Open source and libre culture aims at bringing sharing back to adults.

When we say sharing, we must consider the word from an economic perspective to clarify the relevance of sharing to open source. For example, a child shares an apple with a friend. The apple is an artifact. From the economic perspective, it is capital. When we discuss sharing in the open source context - we must be clear that we are sharing economically-significant information. Sharing refers to capital.

Point is: sharing in open source is very powerful. It is more than giving a one-time artifact to someone: it is giving productive capacity, which can yield much more than a one-time artifact.

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.