Let me just say quickly that for those of you who might not have read Benkler's article you'll find it very rewarding if you're at all interested in understanding why we participate in social software. Reading it really opened some mental doors for me. It has become something of a touchstone for the discussion on wikis.

I wish to comment on both articles, which I think are interesting reads.

On the Internet:

As a network expands, the ease of the network and its ubiquity can cause diminishing returns. Back in the 1980s, when I received a few e-mails every day they were all from university staff and other students. By the early 1990s, I received the random spam, but so rarely as to not care. Today, I receive more than 500 e-mails a day directed to my primary accounts.

While Mac mail and Thunderbird manage to trash most of the junk, and various filters are set to recognize friends and family, the end result is that I sometimes miss potentially important messages. To prevent a deluge of junk mail, I now aggressively trash anything not clearly related to my Web pages, writing, programming, or the university.

I now tell friends, family, and even clients to call me if something is an emergency, replacing my previous requests for e-mail. A white-list or "trust-key" system is not workable, do to the amount of e-mail from my Web pages to which I do attempt to respond.

Within a week of receiving my new university e-mail, -at-csufresno.edu, I received twice as much spam as mail from my students, classmates, and faculty. I now ask my students to mail an unpublished address I maintain for them, which uses a nonsensical user name to black spam using "common name" lists.

Within two days of posting a guestbook on my Web site, after removing the last one following two violent and rather threatening messages, I received more than two dozen spam posts, with links to scam sites. I now use a verification process, but it is a demonstration of how the Internet and Web can be rendered more painful than useful.

As for the Community:

It all depends on how one makes his or her money. I will use free software for the tasks I perform professionally. Why not write or design using free software? It lowers my overhead and increases my profits. Plus, if I have a question the support via the newsgroups is often superior to Adobe, Quark, or Microsoft.

As a programmer, I would release some things to the community or help with projects, but I would not release the bulk of my custom software. The key is what the purpose of a project is. If I am writing a general-purpose solution, why not share the basics? I have no problem with sharing the Lego bricks. I do have a problem with sharing my final solutions.

I contribute utility code because improvements to the utilities make my larger development projects easier. IBM, Borland, and Apple support "free" software for their own commercial purposes. Eclipse is a tool, not the final result, the same as other community projects. Companies "donate" a lot of money to free software projects not because they are kind... but because doing so helps their business plans.

It is a lousy comparison, I admit, but business leaders have long realized being involved in service organizations helps their businesses. Volunteer work through Rotary, Lions, or other groups, is meant to increase your public exposure. You might not have your name on things, but people know you anyway.

Programmers know each other. They join newsgroups and mailing lists, and you quickly recognize which individuals you would hire for a project. A few dedicated souls might not care about such things, but most people I know on open source projects do use it to look for work and self-promotion. At least a few have book contracts as a result of the efforts, which leads to speaking engagements and training seminars.

I know there are two GNU compiler team members currently asking around for contract work at rather high rates. I suppose they sold out after settling down in their 30s. I don't blame them, since my companion would kill me if I worked for free all the time.