In The Gift (1983), the poet and essayist Lewis Hyde set out to explain why art and markets sit so awkwardly together. His answer drew on anthropology: many societies run two economies side by side. In a market economy, things are exchanged, and the exchange ends the relationship. In a gift economy, things are passed on, but the passing creates and maintains bonds between people.
Hyde’s central rule is that the gift must always move. A gift that is hoarded or sold stops being a gift; one that keeps circulating gains value as it goes, because each person who passes it on adds to the community it holds together. A gift is not like other personal property. It may not be treated as property a person owns as all.
Free software as a gift economy
Free software is one of the clearest working examples of Hyde’s idea in the modern world. WordPress is licensed under the GNU General Public License, version 2 or later. Anyone may use, study, change, and share it, and anything derived from it carries the same freedoms forward. The license is a legal mechanism for keeping the gift moving: you cannot take a GPL program, improve it, and lock it up.
That matters for Counterfoil in two ways. First, it is why this site and its catalogue plugin are built on WordPress and released under the GPL: a tool for studying convivial tools should be one. Second, it is a reminder that licence alone is not enough. A gift economy also needs people who give their time, and Bion’s and Shirky’s warnings about groups apply to open-source projects as much as anywhere. Plenty of free software is technically open and practically abandoned.
The boring internet
Terry Godier makes a related argument about the web in his essay “The Boring Internet” (2026). The parts of the internet that have lasted longest are the plain protocols nobody owns: email, the web itself, RSS, IRC. Platforms built on top of them rise and fall; the protocols underneath keep working. Godier also builds Current, a calm RSS reader, which puts the argument into practice.
An open protocol is a gift in Hyde’s sense: it is passed on, not sold, and it becomes more valuable as more people use it. A platform is closer to a market. It can be generous for a while, but its value is captured at the centre and the relationship ends when the platform decides it does.
Questions for the catalogue
- Is this tool a gift or a sale? Can people who receive it pass it on, changed or unchanged?
- Does it build on open protocols, or does it replace them with a private one?
- Who gives the time to keep it going, and what does the tool do to keep them?
This site publishes an RSS feed of its research, for the same reasons.
Sources
- Godier, Terry. “The Boring Internet.” Terry Godier. May 5, 2026. https://www.terrygodier.com/the-boring-internet.
- Hyde, Lewis. The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property. New York: Random House, 1983.
- WordPress.org. “GNU General Public License.” WordPress.org. Accessed October 4, 2026. https://wordpress.org/about/license/.