sharing

Sharing is the joint use of a resource. In its narrow sense, it refers to joint or alternating use of an inherently finite good, such as a common pasture or a timeshared residence. In a broader sense, it can also include the free granting of use rights to a good that is capable of being treated as a nonrival good, such as information. Still more loosely, "sharing" can actually mean giving something as an outright gift: for example, to "share" one's food really means to give some of it as a gift.

Sharing figures prominently in gift economies, but also can play a significant role in market economies, for example in car sharing.

The issue of handling shared resources figures prominently in computer science: for example time-sharing is an approach to interactive computing in which a single computer is used to provide apparently simultaneous interactive general-purpose computing to multiple users by sharing processor time.

Sharing is a key feature in the developing field of free software and open source software, with implications for economics. This is leading to a need to review licensing, patents and copyright, and to controversy in these areas, as well as new approaches like Creative Commons and the GPL.

References

• Yochai Benkler, Sharing Nicely: On Shareable Goods and the Emergence of Sharing as a Modality of Economic Production, Yale Law Journal, Vol. 114, 273-358 (PDF)

• Bruce Perens (2005). "The Emerging Economic Paradigm of Open Source". Retrieved October 25, 2005.

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