In the recent InfoQ article about free Test Driven Development classes in our new 'Gift Economy', there is a misguided notion that fundamental economics have somehow evolved to such an extent that scarcity isn't an economic driver any more:
http://www.infoq.com/news/2010/08/agile-training-gift;jsessionid=0E73B11FC39B86C6019D0CE4B3DD1307
I disagree. As I state in my comment to the article, I suspect the people pushing this gimmick do so more to attack capitalism as a whole than for any other reason.
However, things definitely are different and open source ('free' - sort of) thrives somehow. So what gives? How does scarcity still apply?
What has changed today is the thing that's scarce. Today, it's reputation. Reputation (people's ability to trust and do business with you) leads to better economic prospects and, thus, is valuable.
A good reputation is an increasingly hard-to-obtain commodity in our networked, anonymous culture where it's difficult to know who you can really trust. It didn't used to be that way. You used to build trust naturally through face-to-face business exchange and word-of-mouth.
So, scarcity has always applied and still does - whether you're talking about Open Source software or anything else. Bottom line, everything in life has a limit and, therefore, to some degree or another can be 'scarce' in a fundamental economic sense.
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