You have to remember that we are working with models, typologies, which are present as templates in reality, but often under hybrid conditions.

Equality Matching requires you to repay what you received, striving to regain equality that was distorted by the gift, but in communal sharing, you give what you can, and take what you need.

For Wikipedia, any individual can contribute, but does not get any direct exchange in return, though he benefits indirectly in various ways, similary for voluntary contributors to free software projects.

Most users in Bittorrent would be using it in such a fashion, though in this case, a for the users mostly hidden mechanism indeed introduced a measure of some kind of reciprocity. In this case I would say that the model has been hybridized … I think it depends on the measure and continuum of abundance vs. scarcity. Where one worries about cost-recovery, one introduces measures that impinge on the purity of the non-reciprocal arrangement. To the degree that things become conditional on reciprocity, to my mind, we move away from pure communal shareholding.

Michel

However, I don’t yet understand what you mean by non-reciprocity as the basis for a P2P economy. If BitTorrent (BT) did not force downloaders to sharer some of their upstream bandwidth then it would fail to harness enough collective bandwidth to make it a viable mass sharing tool. This aspect amounts to Communal Sharing of bandwidth, i.e. everyone is sharing the collective bandwidth. Even more than that, most BT communities enforce share ratios, which amounts to Equality Matching.

So you have CS and EM at the foundation of the most popular P2P model on the Internet.

And both CS and EM involve reciprocity, but with CS it’s not 1:1 but 1:many and many:1, so you can download 100GB of movies and give e.g. 1G of your bandwidth to the collective bandwidth. With EM, you’d have to give 100GB of your bandwidth to the collective bandwidth.

My point is that Communal Sharing of collective bandwidth does involve reciprocity between each peer and the P2P network.

Yes/no?

Can you clarify what you mean by non-reciprocal exchange as the basis for P2P economy?

🙂

Thanks,

Marc