So, how does a gratitude based economic system work? Such a thing has been in development for some time. It’s in Open Source software. Most projects have taken to accepting donations. This model is not only applicable to software, but to services.
Jeff Atwood has a great post on making donations to the independent groups that make “free” software.
Some example of donation based services are the IT Conversations podcast site and the TWiT (This Week in Tech) podcast network. Both rely on small ads and donations. The TWiT site is a great example at making it easy to donate. On the left side are four links. Most of them are for recurring donations.