Open Source Group Collaboration and Joint Application Development: Mother was right. Sharing is good. At least that seems to be the consensus of thought leaders who gathered in February to discuss the "Economics of Sharing," and how the rise of the global network has rendered protectionist practices obsolete.

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Mother was right. Sharing is good. At least that seems to be the consensus of thought leaders who gathered in February to discuss the "Economics of Sharing," and how the rise of the global network has rendered protectionist practices obsolete.

Panelists in the Participation Age event at Sun's Santa Clara campus included Sun CEO Scott McNealy, Timothy Bresnahan, professor of economics, Stanford University; Philip Evans, senior vice president, Boston Consulting Group; Raman Khanna, founding managing director, Diamondhead Ventures; and Elisabeth Rhyne, senior vice president of international operations and policy, ACCION International. Andreas Kluth, technology correspondent for The Economist, moderated the discussion.

Andreas: Scott, you recently wrote a piece called "The Economics of Sharing" where you talk about the new Participation Age and whether or not a protectionist business model in the past century is over. Tell us more about this.

Scott: There is a lot of conversation about open source, community development, proprietary intellectual property, the issues of Napster and music being downloaded for free, software patents — basically a lot of issues around intellectual property. The world is different now than it was in the olden days, like when my dad was working and you had barriers to entry to markets that were quite significant (geographic, cultural, time-based) where folks could create a market niche that was defensible over time.

With the network, technology, and wireless, those barriers are gone and now you've got to compete globally and you'd better specialize, be good at what you do, and you'd better share, participate, and partner in ways that were not necessary back then. Nobody started a computer company since 1982 that is still around in any meaningful way. When we got started in '82 there were some entrenched enterprise players like Intel, Microsoft, and IBM. If we had gone proprietary, we could've become the next Microsoft. But let me tell you, there are way more DECs in the world than there are Microsofts.

So for entrepreneurs and start-ups and anybody who is not in the position of Intel, Microsoft, or IBM, you have to ask yourself, "How do I share? How do I participate? How do I build a community?" I tell customers all the time, "He or she who dies with the most rich and/or smart folks in your online directory wins." You've got to build that community and build trust with it such that you are open, transparent, fair, and level. We have been driving that model for a long time and I think it's important for people to understand that it's not about free open source Linux — that is such a tiny, insignificant component of what's going on in sharing and community development. The whole idea here is to uplevel the conversation and make it a much broader one.

Andreas:Timothy, you're an economics professor. What do you say about the economics of sharing from that perspective?