John BAKEN here again

SHAREWARE: PURE GENEROSITY OR ULTERIOR MOTIVES 101?

From the discussions in Chapter 9 of Communities in Cyberspace ("The Economics of Online Cooperation: Gifts and Public Goods in Cyberspace").

Kollach discusses the seemingless unending plethora of free information given out in almost all virtual communities. I often use a program called the Slate Citation Machine to create proper citation and bibliographic styles (MLA, APA, Chicago, etc.) for citing resources. When magnanimous (sp?) individuals put "shareware" out for the general virtual population to just use, are they really THAT generous, or do you think that usually there is an ulterior motive behind the gesture? By the way, if you don't know the program, it might be worth a look/see--just type "Slate Citation Machine" into Google and you'll see it. Very handy program (for me, anyway).

John BAKEN