Thanks a lot for pointing us to this article and study. Of course, as always, I've got instant critique :o) A society whos every member has a work-contract is not only a fiction but unhealthy in the understanding of economists. One of them once told me that an industrial society at least needs something like 3% unemployment to function as envisioned by the neo-classical theory. Which leads me to my second point: From the "ethno-economist's" vantage point the study and the article clearly fall into the category of the formalist view -- as opposed to the substantiavist one. That means the two authors take the neo-classical theory for granted; the validity of it is presupposed and not challenged in any way. Anthropological models like gift-economy don't come to their minds. Currently the phenomenon of open-source software is tried to be understood in terms of gift-economy (There's a project at Infonomics in Maastricht, The Netherlands). I've got much more thoughts on the case but will have an in-depth look first. Tnx again for the interesting links.

Yes, I was talking about the FLOSS-project. On their website there are numerous links to papers (final report, workshop-proceedings, comments, presentations and so on) about the finished project -- very worthwhile to have a glance upon. The other thing I had in mind is an article by (our member :o) Chris Kelty on Free Software/Free Science published by First Monday (In regard to First Monday see this story). In his article Chris discusses "Free Software as a Problem of Value and Reputation".