Here comes Everybody has so many interesting ideas that I hope no one will object if I change the subject to another part I thought was really good: the "bargain" section of the "Promise, Tool, Bargain" chapter. It talks about the growing pattern of complex online organizations governed by norms of reciprocity rather than formal legal rules. One example is the GNU General Public License, a popular free software license (From page 273):

Sometimes contracts are an essential part of the bargain, not because of the direct language of the contract but because of what it says about the service. Linus Torvalds offered Linux under the GPL because that was a way of assuring the developers that their work could never be taken away from them. This was an important way he communicated his bona fides years before Linux was valuable enough to appropriate; Torvalds took this step early on to forego any possibility in the future that he could change his mind and patent or sell Linux. It became valuable precisely because he offered a bargain that limited his future freedom; adoption of the GPL was a serious token of commitment.

One of the things that I think is really interesting about the GPL is that formal legal enforcement is practically irrelevant. After almost two decades in existence, the enforcibility of the GPL has yet to be tested in US courts. Yet it has proven a remarkably popular and durable agreement.

One of the biggest challenges to the GPL came in late 2006, when Microsoft, arch-villain of the free software movement, signed a patent agreement with Novell, a major Linux vendor, in which Novell effectively agreed to pay Microsoft royalties on patents that Microsoft contends are infringed by Linux. I won't get into the details of the agreement, which you can read about here, but in a nutshell the free software community felt that, by implicitly conceding that Linux infringed Microsoft's patents—a charge the Linux community strongly denies—Novell had betrayed the Linux community and was using Microsoft's patent threats to give itself an unfair advantage over other Linux vendors.

The agreement complied with the letter of the then-current version of the GPL even as it flouted its spirit. The Free Software Foundation amended the GPL to make sure that other vendors would not be able to follow Novell's lead, but those changes couldn't be applied retroactively. But the really interesting thing is that the fact that Novell wasn't in technical violation of the GPL didn't really matter. Novell, like every open source company, has close working relationships with thousands of developers and dozens of organizations that develop free software that Novell re-packages and uses to sell support services. These relationships are crucial to its business model, and Novell immediately began to feel blowback from developers who felt they had been betrayed. One of Novell's most prominent developers resigned in protest and was quickly snapped up by Google. The Microsoft-Novell pact is widely considered a blunder on Novell's part, and the other prominent Linux vendors have declined to enter into similar pacts.

What this shows is that the GPL is a social contract in a very literal sense. What matters is not what the contract says, but what the open source software community believe it means. If an organization is believed to have violated the spirit of the GPL, it faces ostracism from other free software organizations, some of its most talented developers may quit, and many other free software volunteers may decide that their talents are best directed to other projects. Novell's crime was not that it violated the terms of the GPL—it didn't—but that it had violated the norms of reciprocity that most Linux developers felt the GPL represented. And because the principle means of enforcing the GPL is ostracism, rather than litigation, the verdict of the community mattered more than the verdict of any court.

We saw another example of the same phenomenon last month when Ars Technica was accused of "ripping off" another blogger's concept of depicting the worldwide roll-out of the iPhone using a mock Risk map. The blogger contends that he did a post with this concept, and that Ars copied him with an article in the same vein a few days later.

Personally, I don't find the accusation particularly credible, although I'm a regular Ars contributor so I might be biased. Risk is a popular enough game that it's not that hard to imagine two people independently having the same idea. But what's really interesting is the fact that this was treated by all parties as a serious accusation. Concepts like that can't be copyrighted, and it's not even clear that such copying would constitute plagiarism. Yet copying the idea without giving credit would clearly be a violation of the generally-accepted principles of reciprocity in the blogosphere.

And like the GPL, this is a norm with real teeth. Bloggers have a great deal of power to direct traffic to one another, and bloggers will avoid linking to sites with a reputation for not giving proper credit to other bloggers. Hence, sites that "play nice" wind up seeing their traffic grow more than sites that are stingy with link love.

This isn't entirely new, of course. The magic community, for example, has used social norms to reward innovation and preserve secrets without getting the legal system involved for far longer than the Internet has been around. But it's cool to see these kinds of norms emerging in larger, more diverse, and more far-flung communities. The costs of producing and exchanging information goods is getting cheaper and cheaper, but the costs of litigation haven't gone down at all; not surprisingly, people are increasingly finding ways to regulate these exchanges using social mechanisms rather than formal legal rules.