The economy of the commons can be so efficient and creative that it sometimes outperforms the market. The Linux operating system, now in use on one-third of the nation's servers, is perhaps the best proof of this fact, along with hundreds of other open source software communities. Countless Web communities achieve valuable types of coordination and collaboration that a market regime, with its expensive legal, marketing and payment apparatus, could not easily match.
This is a key reason online enterprises based on social networking -- including open source software, friend-of-a-friend communities, peer-to-peer file sharing, instant messaging, viral marketing -- are thriving, while conventional enterprises that seek to manipulate and control online consumers are less successful.
Online sharing and collaboration is cheap, easy and socially convivial -- a reality that does not necessarily compute in the neoclassical economic model.
[Source: David Bollier via In These Times]
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