Posted by Hemos on Friday September 10, @03:11PM EDT from the interesting-author-interesting-idea dept. A number of readers alerted us to the latest Andrew Leonard piece over at Salon. He's covering the latest Richard Barbrook book "Cybercommunism". One of the salient points of Barbrook's latest arguement is that all of this free-software/open-source is "superseding capitalism". For those who remember, Barbrook was the author of The California Ideology, a 1996 screed.
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The ironic thing about that piece I thought was that he was describing the hacker "gift culture" at the same time his own paper is limited to "non-commerical" use only. In other words, it's not DFSG compliant!
I don't agree that the hacker culture is a "communist" one. Voluntary associations and donations are very much a feature of such anti-communist systems as anarcho-capitalism as well as anarchy/communism. However, I did love the way he compared the current proprietary software industry to Stalinism.
I don't know about that. Eric Raymond is an anarcho-capitalist, so obviously he doesn't think that is incompatible with a gift culture. Anarcho-capitalism is not even necessarily in conflict with the GNU/FSF view of free software, if you assume that software is something that is not subject to property rights. (There's a big schism among libertarians (US sense) on this one).
The key to both anarchy (or anarcho-communisim or simply communism if you prefer) and anarcho-capitalism is that both are based on voluntary associations. As long as force or private property rights aren't involved (which generally they aren't with free software), both of them explain the free software phenomeon adequately. Another thing they have in common is that neither of them exist in the real world.
Anarcho-capitalism (Score:1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 10, @02:19PM EDT (#165)
I always found anarcho-capitalism to be a contradiction in terms. Capitalism cannot survive without a government to enforce it. Most anarcho-capitalists believe in a very minimal government (with police) in order to protect their privileges. Poverty will increase dramatically in a pure free-market, making the people hard to control. You need a government, with a indoctrined school system and national media to control the people. Such things could ofcourse be handled by private companies but in a real "anarchy" the capitalist economy would not survive because poeple would create their own communist/syndicalist (worker's own the production tools) economy based on fair trade. Such a system would be preferred by the poor.
I think he's wrong is using the term Cybercommunism because it isn't communist. Communism is based on a more equitable distribution of wealth and power run by a centralized power who knows what's best for the masses. The Open Source movement is much more Anarcho-Syndicalist because it is a decentralized movement that rewards both giving to the community and individual effort and work. Both Communism and Capitalism are very hierarchical systems where those people on the top decided what's best for most other people. Libertarianism get's it partially right because they attack that hierarchy but they don't replace it with an egalitarian community oriented society. Like Libertarianism pure Anarchism is very similar with roots in the left rather than the right. Anarcho-Syndicalism is a combination of egalitarian community oriented values of communism and the decentralized anti-hierarchical ideas of Libertarianism.
My point is that in the Open Source community people are working as a collective contributing individual effort for a common goal without being told by a higher authority what to do and exactly how to do it. It's easier to look at the Open Source community as it compares to simple dichotomies of cold war politics but isn't accurate. It's better market speak to say cybercommunism than cyber-neo-anarcho-syndicalist. :)
FYI: Anarcho-Syndicalism was a major movement in northern Spain during the 1930's, and fought with other leftist such as the Communists, Socialists, and Social Democrats against the Fascists lead by Franco. The Fascists won and they were pretty much all killed or driven in to exile.
The revolution will not be televised, it will be wired. Protest.Net, wiring the revolution.
I'll believe it when I see it, it's hard to find an ethos more primal and unbeatable than one based on greed.
KSR's Antarctica had a philosopher talking about an idealogical battle between science and capitalism, about the only new idea in the whole book (the rest being a find and replace of the Mars trilogy). He said scientists presently ruled the economy, setting it up to make enough to do science and find life enjoyable, though I don't believe it.
Belushi was in Animal House, not Animal Farm. Animal Farm is by George Orwell and is brilliant. Animal House is base humor (but hey, I still laugh until I cry when I watch the movie.)
but neither does the current stock market economy. OR at least, it doesn't really reward well (directly or indirectly/deferred) those who are doing the work.
M. Barbrook appears to be a critic of the sort who makes money by selling to lit-crit fans material which would, if posted to Slashdot or USENET, be dismissed as flamage, trolling, or miscellaneous nonsense.
For another example of his postmodern "brilliance", see this Brain Tennis debate between him and Aaron Lynch (also not my favorite guy) on the subject of memetics.
Unfortunately, in certain circles, you can slap the label "postmodern" on 500 screens of line noise and some of these fools will eat it up and talk about how deep and meaningful it all is and/or how it perfectly captures the emptiness of modern life. Blah. Not exactly my favorite thing, and all the more irritating because social critics who actually have something worthwhile to say (such as, IMHO, Noam Chomsky) get drowned out by stupid meta-sound-bites like "The Medium is the Message" or, worse, "Kill Your Television."
It's massively annoying, what can I say? But it sells to shallow people who like to prove how deep they are.
Boy, one would think this guy knew his Marx and Lenin better... AFAIK, Communism is rooted in the idea that the working man would rise up and overthrow the ruling class, distributing the fruits of labor equally to fellow proletariat. This man thinks the free software culture is communism? Bah! Humbug! The Internet is STILL a tiny club of culturally-elite, rich (compared to the rest of the world) burgoise representing everything despised by Marx. Despite our burgeoning population, we represent a tiny fraction of priveleged humanity trodding upon the backs of the repressed masses. We distribute our gifts to other members of this elite class of intellectuals. The Free Software culture is far from Communism. It more resembles Nepotism, with the talented, rich few giving away to the less-talented rich few -- yet all members of the same, elite club. Maybe if we could bring the Internet to the huddled masses with no concept of computers... But we can't even feed most of them. I must agree with the comments noted in the review from others: The idea that the "gift culture" is communism is hogwash.
The Internet is STILL a tiny club of culturally-elite, rich (compared to the rest of the world) burgoise representing everything despised by Marx. Despite our burgeoning population, we represent a tiny fraction of priveleged humanity trodding upon the backs of the repressed masses.
From the latest issue of Wired magazine (and my memory) something like 1/3 to 1/2 of US is online. Something like 1/4 to 1/3 of Jp is online. Most other countries had a smaller fraction online, but this is definitely not a tiny club and it is one which is growing rapidly.
And, much of the ``gifts'' of which you speak are written by poor students and academicians and not culturally-elite rich.
The Free Software culture is far from Communism. It more resembles Nepotism, with the talented, rich few giving away to the less-talented rich few -- yet all members of the same, elite club.
Nepotism is favoritism shown to family members. The free software culture is about the freedom for anyone to use and modify software. For the former, anyone can play, for the latter, admittedly one must be technically able.
I must agree with the comments noted in the review from others: The idea that the "gift culture" is communism is hogwash.
From the latest issue of Wired magazine (and my memory) something like 1/3 to 1/2 of US is online. Something like 1/4 to 1/3 of Jp is online. Most other countries had a smaller fraction online, but this is definitely not a tiny club and it is one which is growing rapidly.
And, much of the ``gifts'' of which you speak are written by poor students and academicians and not culturally-elite rich.
But still, that means that 1/2 to 2/3 of the US doesn't have internet, and as I recently heard on NPR, it's the poor, typically non-white people who don't. It is a tiny club, yes it's growing, but the hacker culture that grew out of the early net is mostly young white males from affluent families.
How do I know they are affluent? Because they can afford college with enough extra time to code, and play on the net -- without working a job to pay for school. Sure, the students themselves are poor, but they aren't necessarily from poor familes or backgrounds.
Nepotism is favoritism shown to family members. The free software culture is about the freedom for anyone to use and modify software. For the former, anyone can play, for the latter, admittedly one must be technically able
Agreed. But we do need to see that everyone can get, use, and take advantage of OSS, not just those affluent enough to have computers, second phone lines, or cable modems.
The funny thing about this whole debate is that Barbrook NEVER mentions the thesis of ``Gift Culture". His concern is with the ``Digerati", & how they mimic the Stalinist Communist Party in being the keepers of the truth, & the vanguard of the revolution.
If the man could write better, the irony of Libertarian technocrats being compared to Communists would be delightful. Unfortunately, he writes about as well as any hack acadmeic New Leftist.
I completely agree that Marx and communism have nothing to do with "gift culture" and open source in general. However...
The Internet is STILL a tiny club of culturally-elite, rich (compared to the rest of the world) burgoise representing everything despised by Marx
That's not true. Culturally elite, maybe (although Marx didn't care much about that), bourgeois -- no. What is bourgeoisie, at least in Marx's times? They are the people who own the means of production and thus do not work, but rather live on the profits from their property. I doubt very much that the majority, hell, even 10%, of the Internet population fits this description. A programmer, and an IT worker in general, is often quite close to the idea of proletariat (cf. Dilbert) -- the fact that he works with this brain rather than his muscles doesn't change much.
we represent a tiny fraction of priveleged humanity trodding upon the backs of the repressed masses
Priviledged humanity, yes (although that still doesn't make us bourgeoisie), but what are those repressed masses? Especially in the rapidly gaining information economy? Hey, aren't they those programmers in the cubicles around, hunched over their keyboard, working overtime, rarely seeing the light of day...
Of course you may be talking about the North vs. South split, but then it's hard to make an argument that the West gets its wealth by robbing the poor masses of the Third World.
We distribute our gifts to other members of this elite class of intellectuals
I guess it must be nice to feel oneself a member of the elite class of intellectuals. Unfortunately, I don't think Internet fills the bill. First, intellectual elite tends to mass in arts, literature, humanities, and not around such technical things as computers. Second, go to AOL and look around. 3leet, aren't they?
It more resembles Nepotism, with the talented, rich few giving away to the less-talented rich few -- yet all members of the same, elite club
Nepotism is actually giving out perks (like highly paid do-nothing jobs in a bureacracy) to relatives. It has nothing to do with elite clubs or gift culture. And no, I don't think that the free software culture resembles an elite club. Anyone can join -- the economic price of entry is quite low (in the West, at least). There is an intellectual price of entry which is significant -- it takes good brains in order to play -- but that is something that Marx and others cannot help with...
Kaa Kaa's Law: In any sufficiently large group of people most are idiots.
Anyone who likens the gift culture to communism clearly has not had enough experience with it. The currency is a little different, but the programmers are well-paid in it, and the best and brightest among them can write their own ticket with just about any company they want.
You'd be hard pressed to find a more elitist culture than the free software community on the planet, and elitism is the anthesis of everything that communism (supposedly) stands for. The irony of that being that every communist government invariably degenerates into "From each according to his ability, to each according to his status in the ruling class." But I digress... Anyway, the upshot of that is that everyone participating doesn't really care that it's elitist (Except for the windows lamers but we don't really care about THEM do we?) since they're out to get some of the status for themselves.
Don't think there's plenty to go around either. For every Linus or Rasterman (Who was apparently able to drive over to VA Research and sit down at a desk despite saying assorted nasty things about his previous employer in a very public forum) there are a hundred RMSes out there with their HURD software languishing while the press lauds GNU/Linux. But everyone wants some, so they don't care.
AFAIK, Communism is rooted in the idea that the working man would rise up and overthrow the ruling class, distributing the fruits of labor equally to fellow proletariat.
I don't claim to be an expert on Marxist theory, but I believe that your nutshell version of Marxism is overly simplistic. For example, one of the Marxist ideals is that the means of production would be owned by those doing the production. In other words, in a typical factory, a worker comes to the plant that s/he does not own, works on equipment that s/he does not own, and, thusly, the end product does not belong to the worker. To a degree, there are certain elements of the GPL and other of the licenses that are usually described as Open Source that fit this ideal. When Joe Byte writes a program, that program can not be claimed by some "factory owner", e.g. Bill Gates and Microsoft. Relative to society at large, a programmer might not be the archtypical proletariat worker. However, in the computer industry, the programmer is the worker. In addition, I don't believe that Marx tried to limit his economics to the procution based economy of the industrial revolution but to imagine a post-industrial economy and so pointing out that the typical programmer does not fit the "blue collar" proletariat labor mold does not in-and-of-itself remove the possibility of a Marxist analysis. I'm not trying to posit that the fit of Marxism and Free (Ideas) Software is exact, but near enough the mark to merit discussion and thought. Worth at least more than a dismissive "Bah!" or a incredulous "Humbug!".
I must agree with the comments noted in the review from others: The idea that the "gift culture" is communism is hogwash.
That is begging the question. ESR (and others) claim that Free (Ideas) Software is gift culture. The counter claim is that Free (Ideas) Software is Marxist. To posit that "gift culture" is not Marxist is like saying that libertarians are not Marxist. While this is a true statement, it is also a no-op. Or are we all supposed to see that it is so obvious that Free (Ideas) Software is gift culture that we treat the double quotes as some kind of interpolation operator and replace "gift culture" with its obvious substitution, 'Open Source'? Well, you should've written that as "$esr->{GIFT_CULTURE}" or else how are we to know?
Oops (Score:1) by Bearpaw on Friday September 10, @11:35AM EDT (#11) (User Info)
If he'd just referred to it as "gift culture" or something like that, he might've gotten some honest consideration. But use of the oh-so-scary c-word condemns his ideas to oblivion, at least in the US.
Quick, somebody post something about how "communism" "lost" the Cold War. I need a good laugh today.
Communism lost the Cold War. cool people don't need sigs.
Ok... (Score:1) by Greyfox(nride@uswest.net) on Friday September 10, @01:48PM EDT (#156) (User Info)
They lost the cold war because there was no money in it (communism.) It was bound to happen, really...
Re:Oops (Score:0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 10, @02:26PM EDT (#173)
Yes, Communism's dead. Just ask anyone in China, North Korea, Vietnam, or Cuba. Particularly those in China who built a nice nuclear warhead from stolen US plans. Getting back on topic, while I love the idea of being able to get some of my most critical software for free, it can't work for everything. I spent easily $20000+ to learn how to program "right" in college (as opposed to doing everything in BASIC from age 10 through HS), and I expect that having gone through years of both college an learning programming on my own time that it will continue to allow me to eat. It would be nice if everything would be open source... --except that no one is going to outright GIVE me a roof over my head and bread in my mouth. "Open Source Communists" who insist that all software should be free need to finish school and taste the cold hard real world. I'd love for humanity to get rid of money, but it ain't likely to happen for a long time.
Re:Oops (Score:0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 10, @03:00PM EDT (#186)
China - you got us there. How they got from 'Confucious' to 'Mao' will always be beyond me.
North Korea - A country can only remain starving and inconsequential for so long.
Vietnam - Communist. Sort of.
Cuba - Cuba's communism will die with Castro, most likely. He seems to be the only one who's enjoying it.
Re:Oops (Score:0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 10, @05:06PM EDT (#198)
Somebody tell you how Communism lost the cold war? Tell me about the great internet explosion in Cuba, Vietnam, and China? How about that for a great laugh?
Does Barbrook have a problem with public libraries? After all, they subvert capitalism by letting people read books without buying them.
Giving away the secrets of math used to be a crime punishable by death (think of the Pythagoreans). Good thing all we have to worry about is capitalism.
Sorry, but I'm going to have to take issue with this. An information "gift economy" does not supersede capitalism; that's ridiculous.
Look at it: An information gift economy (the focus of the Salon piece) essentially allows information to be free (as in speech, not beer, according to the hallowed cliche). Does that mean that the info has no value? No, it means that information's value increases as it spreads. Essentially, it's the distribution of information that becomes important. Linuxcare and RedHat are good examples of this. Linuxcare offers support services, right? The information they provide is essentially already available if you know where to look and how to interpret it. But by providing it in a different format to people who don't know where to look or how to interpret the information themselves, there is value. And I daresay that the founders of Linuxcare were motivated (at least in part) by profit, the foundation of capitalism. RedHat is perhaps a better example, since they freely give away the OS via the Net, and allow you to redistribute copies of what you do buy. Again, the value comes from providing support information and services.
To take it a step further, yes, I can find all the information I want about, say, firewals on the Net. But I still own the O'Reilly book Building Internet Firewalls because there is so much information condensed that having it in book format is valuable. And as Tim O'Reilly has pointed out recently :) profit is among his motivations. Fine, that's the way the world works.
Taking a look away from the information economy (which is still far smaller than the rest of the economy), capitalism is in no real danger. Think GM's going to start giving away cars and trucks to just anybody? How about DeBeers opening up that warehouse?
C'mon folks, let's not get carried away. Information should be free, but that doesn't mean that people aren't going to try to get ahead in life. That's the profit motive, and that's human nature.
To make your point short, you mean the intellectual property such as software, should not be treated as physical property, because its value increase with every distributed copy.
Well, that and the fact that the way it's distributed can add value. And that it is done because of the profit motive, which (theoretically) doesn't exist in communism.
Something I just thought about along those lines...
"the way it's distributed can add value"
Also, the way it's supported and maintained can add value. Look at it this way. Let's say that a communist state builds a road. The workers receive an incentive of some sort to build this road to their own houses so that this one road can lead anywhere in the state(effectively adding value to the road). Now, what happens when that road starts to deteriorate and needs repairs? In the communist state, the road would effectively die, because there is no incentive to maintain the road or to try to make it better. With OS, maintaining, improving, and repairing software is another way to add value to said software.
Not a rant or a contradiction. Just an addition. I have (hopefully) added value to this thread. :-)
Just a little nitpick, but property is the foundation of capitalism. "Profit" exists in any arrangement where some investment of resources yields more value than the resources in their previous state.
Regarding intellectual property, "open source" software is very communistic, in that it distributes ownership to the community (or removes ownership altogether, which is the same thing if the community includes everybody).
Ed was a computer consultant in Pisswaterville, Montana. Today he was out trying to convince a left minded individual to move their organization to Linux instead of NT. He explained how the software was free, and how much money they would save by going with Linux instead of NT. Free OS, free firewall, free mail programs, all the software was free.
So he convinced the individual that going with Linux was better.
Ed left with a smile. You see, he was the only Linux guru in a hundred miles, and, oh, did I mention his consulting fee is $200/hr. ?
Regarding intellectual property, "open source" software is very communistic, in that it distributes ownership to the community (or removes ownership altogether, which is the same thing if the community includes everybody).
Not quite. Even under the GPL, the original author(s) of the software can do anything they want with the software, including changing the license and going completely commercial, if they choose to.
It is not property, per. se., that is the foundation of capitalism, but that the individual maintains the right to do as they choose with that property. Under a fiefdom, for example, it is possible for one to own property without having much, if any, say in what they can do with it.
When the author of 'open source' software distributes it freely (GPL, etc.), they make the choice to do so.
They are not forced, participation is entirely voluntary, and the original author maintains ownership of that property, to do with as they please. Sounds an awful lot like capitalism to me.
The mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be lighted. - Plutarch
They are not forced, participation is entirely voluntary, and the original author maintains ownership of that property, to do with as they please. Sounds an awful lot like capitalism to me.
I don't think you quite grasp that the idea that "property" denies others control over some resource, it does not enable the owner to do what they will with it. Your ability to use property is obvious and implicit. By the same token, I can steal your property and do whatever I want with it, too. That doesn't mean I own it.
By giving code away [1], you have removed control over that property. Sure, you can do whatever you want with it, but so can everyone else. Nobody owns it, because its infinitely reproducable. It isn't really property any longer.
And what's with this "non-forced, voluntary participation" == capitalism stuff? Tell that to sweatshop workers with no education. I'm sure they'd love to tell you about their freedom.
[1] Yes, I know there are usually license restrictions. They exist to prevent exploitment. I think most of us would agree the ideal license is no license (public domain, or BSD and its like)
I don't think you quite grasp that the idea that "property" denies others control over some resource, it does not enable the owner to do what they will with it. Your ability to use property is obvious and implicit. By the same token, I can steal your property and do whatever I want with it, too. That doesn't mean I own it.
This assertion, while true in a sense, is more a matter of legality rather than an issue of capitalism vs communism. Legal boundaries and potential theft notwithstanding, the right of the owner of property to control that property is one of the primary fundamentals of capitalism.
By giving code away [1], you have removed control over that property. Sure, you can do whatever you want with it, but so can everyone else. Nobody owns it, because its infinitely reproducable. It isn't really property any longer.
Only if you actually give it away. As you mention in your footnote, there is usually some kind of license involved. Given that, while the code may be already in the public, all members of the public except for the author, are still bound by that license, regardless of what the author does later in the chain. Admittedly, it may 'water down' any attempt to release that code in a non-free manner, but it does not prevent it, especially if the author enhances it in some way that differentiates it from the original product.
And what's with this "non-forced, voluntary participation" == capitalism stuff? Tell that to sweatshop workers with no education. I'm sure they'd love to tell you about their freedom.
I think this is kind of a non-sequitur. The freedom I'm speaking of is that of an individual having the right to their property, in that what the individual does voluntarily with their property (within the bounds of legality), is part of capitalism.
To reiterate the point I was making (perhaps unclearly), it is the fact that the author of a piece of software has the choice to release it open source, or keep it closed, and this decision is not forced upon him by government or society, and as such, is more representative of capitalism rather than communism.
The mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be lighted. - Plutarch
Capitalistic behavior is about the free exchange of value for value. On this premise, free software isn't inherently anti-capitalist. It just challenges the traditional notion that the value of software resides in the control of its use. For some software, this is true. For other software, the value resides in providing support, documentation, distribution, etc. It's not anti-capitalist of Remington to give away razors if they plan on selling the blades.
----- Taking a look away from the information economy (which is still far smaller than the rest of the economy), capitalism is in no real danger. Think GM's going to start giving away cars and trucks to just anybody? -----
Actually, I expect they will someday. As the car becomes further used not only as a means of transporting a person or persons but also as a means of communicating with the outside world, service oriented relationships between the owner/driver and the service providers (emergency response, map information, tourist info, gas and hopefully someday electricity providers) will become the money-making force.
Giving the car to people will simply give the service providers a means of further enticing the users/owners into buying their service. Just look at the way free-PCs are popping up all over the place.
What this really points out, is that we are moving from a goods-based economy, to a service-based economy. That is still very much capitalism. The internet is not going to change fundamental human greed :)
Re:Nah... (Score:0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 10, @11:54AM EDT (#36)
Exactly. And those who have the skills to give software away are further securing their position in the capitalist society by making themselves highly marketable.
But if this Commie revolution does continue to move forward will our armed forces have to do that stiff-legged marching thing? I really miss that.
I quickly decided to stop reading the California article sometime after:
"The Californian Ideology reflects this ambiguity by simultaneously advocating the New Left utopia of the electronic agora and the New Right's vision of the electronic marketplace. "
He then goes on to refer to both of the above-capitalized groups as "anarchists". I don't know about the rest of you "New Left"ists, but I'm neither left nor anarchist. If pressed, I would say that I'm a very moderate right hardcore-capitalist. Oh well, just another mouth that emits signal/noise 1....
-- Aaron Sherman (ajs@ajs.com) Perl Guy and Executive Glue Sniffer
Oops. Got hit by the infamous slashdot text-is-not-text. That was signal/noise 1
-- Aaron Sherman (ajs@ajs.com) Perl Guy and Executive Glue Sniffer
Re:Wacko alert (Score:0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 10, @01:25PM EDT (#125)
Lots of my friends on the left and right are anarchists, because they oppose political government.
Relative to the mainstream, many computer people's ideology may look almost anarchist, because it is so distrustful of government. But at present only a few people want to completely abolish it; most are extremely frustrated by it.
(I think that, if they would read enough political theory, they would see how it is inherently corrupt. OTOH there is a tradition among many smart people sort of like Existentialism, that says that nothing is inherently right or wrong, and that everything depends in some measure on circumstances or results. So you would have to look at how a particular government performed and what effects it had, rather than criticizing it abstractly on principle. I've been such a fan of abstraction my whole life that I prefer to consider principles and theory, because I've come to believe that they are powerful enough to talk about the real world, and ultimately the only tools we have to make sense of it.)
It seems to me that the "gift culture" is not communism -- to me, it could be more accurately described as an outgrowth of the scientific method -- the free sharing of ideas, publishing of work for peer review, et cetera.
Earlier today we had a great discussion about Knuth, and the TeX software. It seemed to me that he released the software as "open system software" simply because it made sense -- more people would use it because it was free, and because it would improve as bugs are found by users.
If one chooses to look at the "gift culture" and free software from a pure business angle, I think that one could potentially make more money from selling "services" and the "brand" rather than the compiled "intellectual property". Red Hat's stock price comes to mind.
Personally, I would say the "gift culture" and free software is a natural evolution of the software development process. I love the idea that any code I publish under the GPL will grow and mature (almost virally, as described in the article) as more eyeballs and brains improve the program. Labels of any kind on the "gift culture" are not terribly appropriate or accurate, least of all, "communism".
Why should I care if there are "brains" enhancing my code ? I write software, I sell it. Customers want more features, I write another version, I sell it. If the "brains" want to improve something, they are free to start their own projects based on their ideas and experience. It is as simple as that.
> Why should I care if there are "brains" enhancing my code ? >I write software, I sell it. Customers want more features, I write another version, I sell it. >If the "brains" want to improve something, they are free to start their own projects based on their ideas and experience. It is as simple as that.
How far would we be if everybody had to start from Square Zero?
If math students had to derive the quadratic formula on their own time, instead of learning it and moving on to bigger and better math problems?
If chemistry students had to rediscover the Table of Elements in Grade 11?
Those are two different things. And if you don't want to reinvent the whell, you are free to buy my algorithm complete with the source code.It is just another product.
your analogy is deficient. what if you had to "buy" every book you ever wanted to read ? (as opposed to borrowing from a public library). what if you hd to buy every patent to read it ? What if you had to buy every scientific paper and buy the ideas within it so your could build an automobile ? what if you had to buy everything ? Nothing would get done.
As RedHat has clearly demonstrated, it's totally possible to make money on Free Software. RMS and the GPL might be commmunist in philosophy, but their implementation in the real world is based only on capitalism. Free Software is a success because it's making (or saving) money for people. Free software cant superceed capitalism in a capitalist society, the best it can hope to do is prevent the capitalists from being facists by allowing the people their own choice. You'd better bet the capitalists will figure out how to make money on that.
Hmmm. Just a quick question, but *has* RHAT really demonstrated a profit yet? I was under the impression that they weren't expected to do so for a few years, but eh. -- the silly student / he writes really bad haiku / readers all go mad
I really don't want media to go nuts on this and start calling me a "Cyber Commie." Its bad enough that they refuse to discern between hackers -n- crackers.
Speaking of which, I wish I could remember who asked me what the difference between a hacker and a saltine was. ;)
Comparing free software (thought, not beer) and the "gift-culture" to various -isms is a topic that seems to show up fairly often. Invariably the "debate" degenerates into a flame fest as too few people really understand what the various -isms really mean (myself included). The general mistake made is that communism and socialism are equated with a lack of rights and a repressive government. While several very repressive governments have claimed communism it is usually not practiced. Conversly several rather sucessfull socialist democracys exist (Canada, Sweden, and Finland to name a few.)
While the communism vs. open source comparision is valid I would suggest it is more of a socialist democracy. The philosophy of free and open software for everyone is socialist. The fact that the best software gets used (ie elected) is democracy.
Magically, software just gets "created" by programmers who do this on their spare time. There is however one crucial thing missing - how the heck are they going to feed their families ? Work for commercial companies ? Good idea, but then what's the point of advocating free software anyway, since this model is obviously unable to support programmers. Eh, I am tired of this theory. If you develop program you ought to have all the rights to your product. It is your creation, your time was spent on it. If any other programmer want's to benefit from it - sure, let him pay. This model is so fundamental, it is scary that some people sstill advocate "better" ways of doing business.
The ideas of capitalism and communism are rooted in the problem of how to best divvy up scarce resources. There's only so much food, land, oil, etc. to go around. If I have a barrel of oil and I give it away, I've lost something (the use of the oil). Therefore there has to be some system for determining who gets what.
Software works in the opposite way. If I give away a piece of software I write and other people use it, I haven't lost anything (I can still use the software myself). In fact, the software I have actually becomes more valuable if more people use it: 1/I'll be able to exchange files with other people (this is why MS Office is so 'valuable'), 2/I'll get bug fixes and improvements from other people.
In other words, giving away my software is the greedy thing to do. Schemes intended to facilitate distribution of other kinds of wealth just aren't needed.
Of course you've lost something! Time- labor. For some reason people treat these as non-resources, when they are basically the foundation of all resources.... Capitalism actually doesn't have system for deterimining who gets what, orginally, unless you can consider "first come first own" a system. This is basically because property arose before government enforcement of property rights- which really makes things pretty screwed up politically. There really isn't any "just" way for anyone to have oringally come into permanent ownership of a natural resource, which the major problem with moral justifications of capitalism. But as far as software, the point isn't JUST to distribute it freely, but also to CREATE scarcity in certain areas that you cann profit off of, like service, further features, etc. So really it's not all _that_ different.
no you havent lost time and labor - you still use what you wrote originally in the first place and you wouldnt have it if you didnt write it. i.e. you created wealth and are profiting by it..but are also giving it away so it may become more valuable as a result.
Of course you've lost something! Time- labor. For some reason people treat these as non-resources, when they are basically the foundation of all resources....
Capitalism actually doesn't have system for deterimining who gets what, orginally, unless you can consider "first come first own" a system. This is basically because property arose before government enforcement of property rights- which really makes things pretty screwed up politically. There really isn't any "just" way for anyone to have oringally come into permanent ownership of a natural resource, which the major problem with moral justifications of capitalism. But as far as software, the point isn't JUST to distribute it freely, but also to CREATE scarcity in certain areas that you cann profit off of, like service, further features, etc. So really it's not all _that_ different.
The ideas of capitalism and communism are rooted in the problem of how to best divvy up scarce resources
Well, no. The idea of capitalism is basically economic freedom -- anyone (whether noble born or the child of a serf) can run a business with the same rights as all the other people. The idea of communism is public ownership of means of production.
There's only so much food, land, oil, etc. to go around. If I have a barrel of oil and I give it away, I've lost something (the use of the oil).
You're describing classic economics which assume scarcity of resources. This approach is applicable to all societies, not only capitalist and communist ones.
Software works in the opposite way. If I give away a piece of software I write and other people use it, I haven't lost anything (I can still use the software myself)
Again, no. This is a standard argument, but it doesn't work because people forget about opportunity cost. Say, today evening I can go to a movie or to a restaurant (but not both). If I go to a movie, not eating out is my opportunity cost of going to the movies. In the same way, if you give your software away, you incur the opportunity cost because you could have sold it, but didn't. And if you couldn't have sold it, one starts to wonder about the value of this software...
In other words, giving away my software is the greedy thing to do.
Tell it to Bill Gates. He must be gnashing his teeth now, thinking about how he missed his chance.
Kaa Kaa's Law: In any sufficiently large group of people most are idiots.
Yes and no. The basic idea of capitalism is private ownership of the means of production (in other words capital). It is NOT that anyone can own capital (it is nowhere as noble as that), but rather there should not be public capital. This was the assumption the classical economists base their arguments on. That went down the drain during the great depression. Now we are seeing a resurgence of this theory.
Again, no. This is a standard argument, but it.........
But, if you consider that the value of software increases exponentially as the number of users increases, then 'gifting' that software is a reasonable way of increasing it's user base. Then you may also receive 'investment' by those users in the form of patches/features/etc. Thus, you have received a ROI... just not in cash.
So, the original opportunity cost may not be that great of a concern. And, I might point out.... quality of software != value of software. 'Quality' is a programming issue, 'Value' is based on demand (user base + marketing)
> If I have a barrel of oil and I give it away, I've lost something > (the use of the oil). Therefore there has to be some system for > determining who gets what.
Precisely.
Marx: "To each according to his need, from each according to his ability."
Marx lived in an age in which all economics were based on the economics of scarcity. The second half of the little equation implied the use of force.
In a Gift Culture economy, the second half ceases to be an issue; from each according to his whim might be more like it. Given a sufficiently useful thing - say, a SCSI driver - there's bound to be someone willing to get off his duff and code it up, and from that point on, the advantages of OSS which we all know and love, take over. It's in the developer's best interest to see that the code is distributed widely. At that point, anyone who happens to need a SCSI driver can simply download it.
But to call this "communism" - when it requires economic products (software) that were not only nonexistent, but inconceivable within the socioeconomic framework in which communism was invented - smacks of intellectual dishonesty of the highest order.
We'll take it as axiomatic that communism is coercive and bad under the economics of scarcity - you have to coerce people who don't buy into the system to "give" up their material posessions, or you have to coerce them into buying into the system. Whether you deprive them of their stuff or try to reprogram their minds, it's coercive, and leads to the disasters we've seen in the 20th century whenever an attempt is made to implement it on a large scale.
So much for superseding capitalism in any economic activity involving atoms instead of bits. Been there, done that, it didn't work. So let's try it with software:
Under "cyber-communism" - who writes the code for the payroll systems? The point-of-sale terminals? The inventory software for McDonalds? All the other "boring" stuff that isn't "fun"? Or does "from each according to his ability" simply mean that instead of taking your grain or your barrels of oil, the Central Committee will simply take your time and force you to work on some mind-numbingly dull project becase, after all, you're able to code payroll?
So much for superseding capitalism for all the grunt work.
What's left is what we already know to be true - for certain types of software...
> giving away my software is the greedy thing to do. > Schemes intended to facilitate distribution of other kinds of wealth just aren't needed.
...which says it better than I could have. Amen to that.
Back to the cybercommunism article, however - exactly how this very limited subset of economic activity (i.e. the development of cool software of broad-based application) can "supersede capitalism" is utterly beyond me. Furthermore, what this has to do with communism - a philosophical system invented in an age where a Gift Culture was inconceivable - is equally beyond me. But saying that "Giving cool and useful software away is fun" doesn't quite sell as many books as using buzzword-compliant postmodernisms such as "cybercommunism" or the "California Ideology", does it?
I concur with Ami. The arguments offered by the author just don't compute.
> Marx lived in an age in which all economics were > based on the economics of scarcity. The second > half of the little equation implied the use of > force.
I don't know that this is true. One of the things that Marx said would have to happen before his apocolyptic "uprising of the proletariat" (besides instantanious, world-wide communication & workers barely able to live on their income) was that the level of production per amount of work must go up -- i.e., that scarcity must cease being (as much of) an issue. And hey, it's concievable yet that this might happen. Imagine a world out of Asimov where everyone has thousands of personal robots to do their work for them.
So it's not surprising that people who don't really understand OSS would compare it to communism -- it does have some very strong, albeit superficial, resemblances. And what's more, it definitely does bring up the issue of (lack of) scarcity, which according to my understanding of marxism, is essential to communism. Not, I think, that things are really going in the direction Marx predicted.
BTW, it's been a few years since I've read Marx, so I could be wrong in my interpretation....
Communism (Score:2, Informative) by BugMaster ChuckyD on Friday September 10, @11:53AM EDT (#33) (User Info)
It might be useful here to point out that "Communism" is not the same as the former Eastern Bloc/Soviet totalitarian states. In several posts people are talking about dictators and freedom of information, but the repression in the former "Communist" countries has nothing to do with the idea of Communism.
Communism was an idea, a way of organizing economies, the countries refered to claimed to be attempting to implement this idea, but most didn't even claim to have met that ideal and refered to themselves as "Socialist". It also must be pointed out that many countries that profess to be capitalist also are just as repressive as the communist ones were.
Marx had a lot of economic theories about the future of the relationship between the people who do the wrok and the people who own the resources and the means of production, and postulated a better system that could be implemented once the former group had finaly cast off the chains imposed on them the latter.
Communism could be summed up by the phrase "from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs". It has nothing to do with freedom or the lack of freedom according to any of the definitions often used on this board (speech, beer civil)
Communism could be summed up by the phrase "from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs". It has nothing to do with freedom or the lack of freedom according to any of the definitions often used on this board (speech, beer civil)
I remember in the eighties when the mass media potrayed communism as something outright evil. We even get them now on some X-files episodes. The ones communism pose a threat to are the mega-corporations. They are not willing to let their properties controlled by the states, so they spent billions to spread FUD on communism, associating it with unpopular things that has nothing to do with communism. Not that I am in favor of the ideology but I think they are getting more beatings than they deserve.
Capitalism won. With Communism, the state is control. With capitalism, the mega-corporations are in the control. The danger to individualism and freedom has not changed, only the rules of the game. If one entity is not in control, another entity will.
Wrong. If you want "From each according to abilities, to each according to needs" then someone has to determine who needs what. You can't be allowed to determine for yourself what you need, because human greed will always exceed available resources. Therefore there's no way out. Communism has to be repressive.
With capitalism, the corporations are not in control at all. They can't force you to buy anything, and they generally don't refuse to sell anything to you. Unlike communism, you make your own decisions. You're only limited by your own ability to produce.
If you read some of the libertarian and anarchist content on the net you should know that there are 2 forms of socialism: -statist socialism-government uses coercion to get people to work together -libertarian socialism-groups of people work together peacefully to make society better, almost no government here. I could be wrong, but I would bet that most OSS developers are libertarian, not statist socialists. Let's face it, CSS (closed source) will never die.... but it won't have the facist style grip it has economy now in the future. Loop at apple, OSS'ing OS X! They are capitalists people, not communists. As far as the GPL goes, it is only 1 part of the OSS movement, the most radical one. Allowing the proponents of GPL only OSS to define OSS would be like allowing puritans to define christianity. ---Got Coffee?---
Yes, I concur. Statist communism is bad. Libertarian socialism (anarchism) is good. It advocates decentralized decision making and puts freedom at the forefront of its agenda. Futhermore, individualist anarchism revolve around *free market* principles, but with workers selling their own "fruits of labor", insteal of corporation profiting from them.
If you look at the most modern management theory on worker empowerment, decentralised decision making, team building and the such, it bases itself on one common theme - The people who meet the customers and actually do the grunt work are the peopole who are most qualified and knowledgable about their work. In essence, type Y/Z management theory which trust people to actually like to work has many similarities to anarchist ideals.
This contrasts to the original capitalist assumptions that people are in fact lazy and the only motivational factor for them to work is monetary profit (ie. greed). This assumption has turned many of the world's larget companies into bloated bureaucracies such as GM (with it's 15 levels of management to supervise everyone and managment knowing jack about making cars haha). Look what cars GM made in the 80's and you will understand why capitalism, as it was originally intended, has failed.
Capitalism in its truest form exploits both employees and customers for profit. However, we do not live in a strictly capitalist world. We are heavily influenced by capitalism, and for proof, look at how the world is obsessed with intellectual property. Intellectual property is the natural way of extending capitalist control to ideas, literature, music, movies and software.
However, does capitalist property controls belong in the realms of ideas and intellectual (as opposed to physical) works. The argument GNU makes is *no*; property should be physical; ideas should be free (as in speech).
That is the reason why RMS stands so firmly on the issue why FS should not be called OSS. The political and ideological implications for free software is that is ensures the ultimate preservation for freedom of ideas; not just resulting in better software, but a better system for the world.
Futhermore, capitalism and free-market are not synonyms. They should not be used as such. It is possible to have a free-market without predominant capitalist ideals. However, many business and political elites would like us to think otherwise.
Free software, on the other hand, is one step in the right direction. It is relieving monopoly control over the intellectual ideas that they should never of had control over in the first place. They do no behave like physical property and they should not be treated as such.
Your article shows how "capitalism" has come to be used by some people to describe the institutions and habits of our fairly corrupt mixed economies of today.
It would be best for individualists to say "laissez-faire" or "free market" rather than "capitalism", because of the connotations of "capitalism". ("Laissez-faire" refers to the moral and political situation relating to people's interactions. "Capitalism", for some people, refers to particular institutions like large joint-stock limited-liability companies, particular kinds of labor-relations practices, particular tendencies on the part of businesses, and so on. But the individualists, by and large, would be happy with any society which respected individual freedom -- whether or not it contained big business and today's "capitalist" institutions.)
So we should really say "laissez-faire" rather than "capitalist" to show that we care about the moral rules governing the situation, not about the success of big business.
That's certainly the outlook of real individualist (right-libertarian) activists, though many -- as in all movements -- have been selling out.
So communism is bad? (Score:0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 10, @11:53AM EDT (#35)
Why are everyone hasting to decline that open source could be communistic?
I'm not saying it is, just getting annoyed of the (mandatory) communism-bashing..
when compared with capitalism. America is a disgrace to mankind, I wouldn't give a shit less if we got taken over by some more powerful country. The "democracy" we have today is an illusion, do you really think your vote counts for anything when you go to the polls? No, it doesn't.
We need an "open sourced" government, where laws are written by the people and for the people,reviewed by peers and voted on by the people.
Our government is getting so large eventually its just going to collapse, they just keep adding layers upon layers of bullshit laws and regulations that its a miracle you can even wake up in the morning without breaking a law.
"Capitalism! Freedom! It's the american way!" My ass it is, if we are so free, why in the hell is 3% of our population in jail? The largest of any industrialized nation i believe, but, it's ok though cause all those people in jail are dirty, bad people and have no place in society right?
fuck america and everything it stands for
Amen (Score:0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 10, @12:33PM EDT (#80)
America's got democracy like the Soviet Union had socialism. The economic decisions of the Soviet Union were quite demonstrably not in the hands of its people--thus it was not socialism. Likewise, since in the US major political and economic decisions are not made by its people ninety percent of the time, it is a ten percent democracy. Gotta luvit.
Freedom includes the ability to be an asshole, and then the responsibility to pay for it. If that means fines, incarceration or execution, so be it: determine thyself, and be treated accordingly.
FWIW, it's the laws that at least partly make you free; in a system without a written Constitution and body of laws that guarantees rights to the people, it's the lack of such that allows blatant dictatorship because the leaders can act without constraints. Or, do you think that folks like Beria or "Iron Felix" Dzerzhinsky worked primarily through written law?
-- the silly student / he writes really bad haiku / readers all go mad
The ONLY place communism works is at select few of America's colleges. One would think that people who defend it would take the time to read what communism really advocates: armed struggle to attain an unsustainable end. You probably support Mumia Abu-Jamal, too, right? The fact that he shot a police officer in the back, then shot him again in the face in a cold, calculated manner also doesn't matter either, right? You are a disgrace. Or haven't you heard that it's not hip to be anti-everything anymore? I want to know why the vaunted 'moderation' of Slashdot allows this kind of crap without a negative score. And if it deserves a positive score, then why. Why doesn't this post deserve troll status?
You mean it doesn't work in a world based on scarcity. In cyberspace scarcity does not exist, it costs nothing for me to share ideas or software, therefore communism can work, just not in the "real world".
It cost you a lot. Suppose you develop great new database based on some revolutionary idea. If you release source code there will be 10 different implementations on the market in no time. I think you can answer for yourself how this would affect your income.
The world views that they describe no longer exist. Communism and capitolism are too often confused for the political systems that advocated them. The old USSR would be just as incapable of making (or even comprehending) something like Open Source as Microsoft. To call it communist is disingenious.
Communism is a political system devised to try and make socialism work in practice. It's failure is not to be found in the nationalistic mumbo jumbo of most of the americans who complain about communism. It's failure lies in the fact that it is unstable. It is unstable because it uses government in crappy ways, i.e. to repress everyone and keep them working. IMHO the free software world is more stable then the commercial software model for basically the same reason that a free market beat out communism---just replace the government with MS. Now, we can argue about wether it is socialism till we are blue in the face, but I don't think that question matters much. The only importent questions are A) is it really a better way for people to interact with one another and B) is it stable. I personally believe the answer to both of these questions is ``add more freedom.''
If you think about the RMS arguments for the GPL (and reladed stuff) you will find it is positivly dripping with stability. Example: We may assume someone will write the software anyway.. then the GPL just gives them a way to get stuff added to it for free. Remember Linus started Linux for fun.. and then think of how much less useful Linux would be to Linus if he had not given it to people.
I gues a point I wanted to make is don't worry about the word socialism.. what you do may or may not fit it's definition.. worry about more importent aspects of what you are doing. Like wether you are really helping yourself (you are not waisting your time.. fun is a good enough reason to do soemthing) and if you are hurting anyone in the process.
Jeff
Campus crusade for Cthulhu -- it found me.
Really? (Score:0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 10, @04:57PM EDT (#197)
If Open Source is so stable, then why bother with licenses a la GPL at all? Why not just declare that 'everybody' owns the source? The problem with communism is that it rejects the notion of personal property.
free software is free. aka open , there are many software companys that make money with free software , but i take it as a gift of freedom . open sorce and free wear gives us the users a say in the development and emplimntaion of such , free software has been around for many years copy left and the whole deal , as a community i think we are an odd mix of communism but is it a communism that works or not , it is more an outlet for freedom. freedom to do what we want with the info we have where we want it . i just dont like the stigma that you get with the label of communism . over years of the cold war we have been tought to hate it , but the thing is with this form of sead communism is that it doesnt rely on every one pitching in it relys on the ppl that want to do some thing . not the ones forced to , we dont force any one to do any hting nor does any one go in with the illuion that they are getting more then gratitue with freeware , it is a gift and i take it as such , and if i can help i will.
Open Source is about Freedom and capitalism is not. So Open Source is anti-capitalist. And I like to think that it is a lot anarchistic (in the sense of lack of power and lack of authority, not chaos), mainly because of it's principles of liberty, equality and solidarity. ). It is not communism because communism is autoritharian, and Open Source projects seens to be very descentralized (except for Linux where Linus Torvalds seens to be a mini-dictator). Everyone can participate, everything is free and people work on it for joy and solidarity.
Sorry but I don't speak english very well, I would talk about it a lot better in my own language (Portuguese).
I would like to note that thery is a very very very interesting article about this topic on this site, please read it even if you do not agree with anarchism or open source, it is worthy: http://old.law.columbia.edu/my_pubs/anarchism.html
And for more reference about anarchism, you can get the package "anarchism" in the debian distro, or read a online faq at: http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/1931/
-- You are in a twisty maze of passages, all alike.
Of course you forget that the final stage of the communism ideology (at least for the non-stalinian) was the 'applied communism' which is basically a form of anarchy. (the masses are in control)
The person who live thru the use of free software let his interests be fulfilled (and controlled) by an oligarchy of programmers. sig.
Not quite communism. (Score:1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 10, @12:06PM EDT (#50)
While I would not agree that free software is a kind of communism (though redbaiting proprietary software vendors would certainly have you believe so), it does undermine a key component of neo-conservative thought on economics: that the greatest efficiency results from competition in the pursuit of individual financial gain.
Free software's superior efficiency is achieved through the collaborative pursuit of a given project's goals, which are as diverse as the project's participants. While this does not necessarily go against the idea of the free market, it definitely calls to question the rule of capital.
What's really subversive about free software is its anti-authoritarian nature. Transcending domination by both the carrot and the stick, it is a threat to both the Stock Market and the Gulag mentalities.
Free Software is more akin to Anarchism than to Communism. And I don't mean in the "anarcho-capitalist" sense. Check out An Anarchist FAQ
Let's define communism (Score:1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 10, @12:12PM EDT (#54)
Take the definition from www.m-w.com:
communism 1b) "a system in which goods are owned in common and are available to all as needed."
That sounds very much like what the Free Software (beer & speech) idea stands for. And take specifically the example given earlier about the SCSI driver. With free (speech, not beer) software, we are encouraged to fix bugs and make the fix "available to all as needed."
Communism doesn't require totalitarianism or dictatorship (but see definitions 2a-d at m-w.com).
Communism as well a capitalism are both ideologies founded on the concept of material ownership, while Open Source (or Free Software) is based on the immaterial properties of software, which enables me to use my neighbor's program *without* taking it away from him an thereby excluding him from using it. Therefor (without the artificial framework of copyright including its enforcement) software can neither serve as a power-preserving means of production (whose governmental control communism is demanding), nor as a commercial medium of exchange in the capitalist sense.
While OSS opposes the artificial "materialization" of software by licensing-regulations and publicly enforced copy protection which are dominating the software industry for the last 20 years, its support for the universal availability of "means of production" (i.e. sourcecode, compilers, etc.) is in direct opposition to Marxism, which demands their total control by the proletarian government, which would likewise require a "materialization" through artificial copy-regulations. (the registration of typewriters, copiers, printing presses, etc. which is common in most communist states, illustrates this practice in the field of non-computational "software")
A comprehensive political and economic system, which extends the Open Source gift-culture to "real world" affairs, im IMHO impossible unless, of course, someone finds a cheap means to losslessly copy material goods (replicators, anyone?). Until then, comparing the OSS phenomenon to communism or capitalism is trying to answer the wrong question.
I hate to say this, but your rate on Marxist-Leninist ideology is 'non-satisfactory' (the lowest BTW and you have to pass the exam again :) 1. Niether communism, nor capitalism are _ideologies_. They are political formations. 2. Marx builds his theory on definitions on property _and_ labor. In other words if you are using neighbours program without his permission, you still violate the law, because you use fruits of his labor. 3. Computer hardware still remains basic mean of production and in 'proletarian state' it could be available, although not to everyone and through govt regulations, whereas OSS doesn't provide the movement with hardware of any kind. (Sometimes I regret there's no national/global body issuing computer licenses- some kiddies are fscking annoying :) But I completely agree with you that we can not compare political formations with movements and initiatives of any kind. -- Edward V. POPKOV Independent Developer
Marx is shuddering (Score:1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 10, @12:17PM EDT (#63)
at Barbrook's piss-poor understanding of what he [Marx] thought. Look at his obvious confusion of work and labour, for example. Marx did, after all, write The German Ideology for a reason. Too bad Barbrook missed it.
Add to that all the nonsense about the "Americans" doing this (Does that mean USAmericans only, or does it include their OpenBSD comrades de la revolution in Canada and the GNOME compatriot in Mexico and the Window Maker brother-in-arms in Brazil? Does that mean the Germanic KDE isn't part of the movement? Does that....).
I used to be a religious Linux user. I use FreeBSD now. One of the primary reasons I looked elsewhere was because I became disenchanted with the Linux community. I know not all Linux users are like this, but it seems like MANY are either socialists or outright communists. There is a constant undercurrent of anti-capitalism, anti-big business, and believe it or not, anti-religion. That may be a non issue to a lot of people, but to me it was an issue. I became uncomfortable being associated with the Linux crowd as a whole. Let me reiterate, I know there are a lot of great people out there using Linux, but the most vocal aspects seem to hold contempt for my political and religious convictions. I am not the only one who thinks this either. I have spoken to several people who have distanced themselves from the Linux community, either due to the anti-capitalism/anti-religion tone, or because so many Linux users behave so badly in defending their operating system that they dont want to be associated with that crowd. The saddest thing is that politics is even an issue with an operating system. I have other things to worry about.
If hackers were truly communist, they would choose to write programs "for the greater good". Instead, most tend to write programs they are interested in. In this, open source programming is no less a selfish activity then programming for a "capitalist" boss. The only difference is that in one the coin of the realm is cool software while in the other it is cash.
People work with systems like Linux because for most of them, this is the easiest they can work on on the sorts of projects they want to work on. If they love what they do, this, in and of itself, is the motivating factor. Money doesn't enter into it.
The giving away of the software afterwords is a sort of global deal that allows hackers to work on such projects. No single hacker could build an OS. A bunch of them together can. If your goal is to build an OS, and you don't have a job at Microsoft, pretty much the only way is to share code with your buddies.
That's what drives open source, not altruism. And in that, it is as fully "greed" oriented as capitalism. Which is, of course, why it works while communist systems, relying on altruism, mostly fail.
In software there is no cost to the owner to give it away. People like the above author don't understand this and thus confuse it for communism.
Points to be made... (Score:0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 10, @12:21PM EDT (#68)
There are NO true communist or TRUE democratic nations anywhere. Everything is a mixed economy. So Free software is 'communist' (If you wish to use such a vague term for anything) only in theory. Jeremy Allen jallen@idminc.com --To lazy to create a login..
The world is a sick place, many of us are dependant on our computers, (Some, because they are too lazy to do their work by hand. Some, like myself, don't know much else besides computers. Plus, I'm lazy) and computers, contrary to popular belief, are not necessary to survive. If there are no computers, we would still be able to buy food, drive to the store, fly across the world, etc. Computers are just a convenience. (Another reason Y2k is stupid) We could easily live without them. (At least everyone but regular slashdot readers. :) Let's rephrase that to, the human race could go on without them. Any day we wanted to, we could say, "I don't think I'll use my computer anymore. I want to be [a mercenary; a farmer; Robin Hood; a poet; a stud muffin], and M$ would no longer have any hold over us. That's the weakness of most any capitalistic institution. The consumer has the power. If you don't buy the product, the business cannot survive. However, the consumer usually thinks that he depends on the provider for life, and never tries to wield that power. Free software is simply the people taking things into their own hands once again. Giving back to the community. Friends are more important than money. What can power bring you? Sure, world domination may be fun at first, but if everyone hates you, what have you accomplished? Do you think Gates has any friends? Sure, he has plenty of execs kissing up to him, but do they want to hang out with him? Do they want to watch the game with him? Do they want to talk with him? What does he really have? The American dream is a lie. You can never be happy. The US used to stand for freedom. Right now it stands for greed. There is nothing free in America. It's time for things to change.
Do you think it's just a coincidence that the Hat is Red?
Seriously though, before KM cooked up Communism, he invented Dialectical Materialism, which analyzes systems in the context of their transitions. Capitalism will bring about its own downfall because it is a stage in the evolution of our social system, just like feudalism, monarchy, and state capitalism (aka Communism).
While it should be obvious that Capitalism will have to evolve into (or be replaced by) something else, the nonobvious parts are how and when. KM had no idea that the computer was coming along. He understood what happens when human labor can be abstracted into a machine, but what happens when the machine is abstracted into software?
Have a good weekend. A bus station is where a bus stops. A train station is where a train stops. So now you know why they call this a workstation.
A friend of mine wrote a paper partially touching on the "communism" of the net:
http://demiforce.parodius.com/zen/demizen.html (note, I recommend going to demiforce.parodius.com/ and following the links to get the full effect of the site...)
Anyways, it speaks of how since things can be copied indefinately the net is the one place where communism could work... Read if you're interested, else, umm, don't
Really, seems like Mr. Barbrook has just picked up a couple of phrases here and several words there.... 1. SU has never had a priority goal in IT/CS. There were '3 whales': ideology, military strength and space program. Everything that could help 'the whales', was blessed by the govt. And certainly we were good at it. Just compare how many SU cosmonauts and US astronauts have _actually_ been to space. Technical education in SU was rather classical and based on heavy math. These days mathematicians from different defsnse and space program help out with poor COBOL design to fix Y2K in software produced in US and used there and sold to Russia. Soviet nuclear weaponry doesn't suffer from this problem. 2. R.B. insists that US weapons are unbeatable and all that. There's no such a weapon by definition. Also, this depends too much on the hand that pushes the button. And he could pay more attention to 'independent' press on Kosovo massacre held out by NATO. I mean media in countries not directly involved in the conflict (Asia, Africa, there's the whole world around us, really) 3. This part I 'loved' the most and couldn't get past it: "Managers and other professionals".... Oh boy.... Please, get me right. I grown up in SU and know about it probably more than anyone other in /. I don't idealize it, in no way.... -- Edward V. POPKOV Independent Developer
... the first area where the idea of free information sharing, peer review and freedom to use and improve on the work of other is used. Millennium of natural science research comes to mind. Somehow I would hesitate to label my fellow physicists - "communists" for giving public access to the data from our experiment. Open Source movement is not different. It is just applying the principle developed by generation of scientists to a new area of human knowledge.
It's 1999, and some of us are STILL trying to use the term "Communism" as some sort of epiphet.
Bah, I say! My parents were driven out of Cuba because Fidel Castro, a self-styled Communist, managed to take power. You won't find a more anti-communist environment than South Florida (were many of the older generation still refer to themselves as "in exile"). Whether what goes on in Cuba would be what Marx called Communism is another matter.I spent the first 27 years of my life hearing about the evils of Communism, and seeing its effects on those who made it here. I certainly am no friend of Communism as it has been implemented in the real world. You'd think I'd automatically end up a foaming-at-the-mouth anti-communist. Guess what...
Let's get this straight once and for all: Communism is a political ideology. It is NOT synonymous with "evil" or "baby killer" or whatever the hell else people want to label it as so as to better hitch their ideological little red wagons to.
You disagree with someone's politics? Fine. Just don't be so lazy as to throw the term "communism" around as a substitute for rational thought. The only "Evil Empire" we face today is Darth Vader's. Rational people of good conscience should be able to discuss politics (even as heretical a concept as "capitalism has flaws") in a civilized manner. We shouldn't settle for less.
Yes. It is a political ideology. One that doesn't work. The reason it doesn't work has nothing to do with implementation but more with human character. One of the most powerfull forces driving people is greed ( very powerfull and constructive force at that .) Communism tries to modify this natural behavior which is basically impossible task.
I admit it: I'm an optimist. The way I see it, the reason that greed is seen as such a powerful force is that it is an expression of an even more primal and powerful 'force': fear. Think about it, if you weren't afraid of running out of stuff (food, shelter, software), or afraid that someone or something would take your stuff from you, would greed make any sense?
I hope for a day when the human race stops being afraid, and puts aside the many evils that stem from it.
I do hope it won't happen. Otherwise people will stop innovating. If you have no powerfull motivation forcing you to behave certain way, you will not push yourself to achieve more.
There are other powerful motivating forces out there (within us?) besides greed or fear. Curiosity, for one. Some of us push ourselves to achieve more for the sake of the sense of accomplishment we get when we reach our goals. Frankly, if the only reason the human race can find to get out of bed in the morning is fear, perhaps we should just climb back into the trees and forget the whole thing.
Free Software is NOT communism, although one supposes it could be viewed from that angle.
Marxist communism is not just an economic theory, but an entire cosmology. I also see a lot of people comparing the USSR with Marxism - this is wrong. Marxism is quite fantastic (as in fantasy) and rather bizarre, and very few people here seem to have any grasp of what it is.
That said, he does make some good points - Free Software is extremely anti-capitalistic: it is anarchic, but I fail to see anything to do with Marxism in it. Free Software is more like Bakunin's ideal rather than Marx's.
Just because libertarians such as ESR desire to filter everything through their special Rand-glasses doesn't mean egoism is the only angle. We've been beaten with this egoistic crap from day one ... I find Stallman's "free speech" approach far more refreshing than the usual libertarian appeals to capitalism and other free market nonsense.
"If evolution is outlawed only outlaws will evolve"
I agree with the posters who are saying that open source software isn't communism, because communism is a mechanism for deciding how to distribute scarce resources, and that just doesn't apply to software which can be duplicated indefinitely.
I think the open source movement is really a parallel of Pacific Northwest Indian culture before the Europeans arrived. Food and raw materials were so plentiful and easy to get that you didn't have to work that hard to survive. Instead they held great polatches, feasted, and tried to outdo each other giving incredible presents. The culture was impressed by what you gave away, not by what you had - because just having was too easy.
Anyone in a position to really benefit from and appreciate open source software is usually in the same position: there is huge demand for the kind of work that we do, we generally don't need to worry about making enough money to eat or to live a decent life. We also all know how random and capricious the big money is - from the rise of Microsoft to the latest IPO, we all know that people aren't neccesarily getting rich through merit alone.
Giving away our skill and our time, and in such a way that other people within our little hacker sub-culture can be impressed with what we've done - that is what drives open source software. Because there is little else that does impress our peers.
This may be just my cynical take on human nature, but I think this pursuit of status is much closer to the true spirit of open source than any sort of uber-communism or desire to sacrifice ourselves for the good of others.(Not that this is a bad thing - using an innate human drive in a productive way for society is great, the same way capitalism mostly manages to use greed in a good way.)
Hardly Communism (Score:0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 10, @12:45PM EDT (#95)
Let's see...
a) The Market has had various software OS offerings available (Windows, UNIX, MacOS). None of these offerings have had all of the features that certain software developers need. So, they set out to write they're own - and they did. GNU / Linux competes on the very same Market as these other products in the real world, and quite effectively I might add. Free Software helps people make money - just like a hammer helps a carpenter make money. And developers release it GPL to ensure that it continues to evolve and improve over time without needless restrictions and roadblocks. Seems pretty Free Market-spirited to me!
b) Free Software authors do not write Open code out of some altruistic or collectivist notion. They do it because they want Software that Doesn't Suck(TM), and they want the notoriety that goes along with having written said non-sucking software. Individualism, creativity, and genius are rewarded in turn - not 'the public interest'. If the 'public' benefits from good software tools, then great - but nothing says they have to. The Public is nothing more than a gob of individuals who are free to accept or reject Free Software at their whim.
c) Unlike Statist Communism, GNU GPL, BSD, QPL, NPL, etc. are NON-COERSIVE agreements between free entities. No one says that you HAVE TO FREE YOUR CODE. As a developer, you can choose to because you perceive the POTENTIAL FOR BENEFIT TO YOU AND YOUR PEERS IS HIGHEST if you do. No one is forced to release their software GPL. You can just as easily draft a EULA-type license. And all these licenses, technical models, and business models can compete on the Free Market exchange of services, products, and ideas - with no coersive agencies whatsoever.
Also, from a user standpoint, you are free to reject any license you wish. Nobody's making you use Free Software either. If it sucked, I sure as hell wouldn't use it! I would use Windows NT for everything if it were the best solution for my needs!
Don't try and convince me that Linus, RMS, and ESR are Marxists! I just don't buy it. In fact, they're very selfish. ; ) They want the best software free people, allowed to express their creativity and genius, can produce.
This is not 'communism', nor even 'consumerism'. This is 'producerism', if that's a word. ; )
"He who writes the code picks the license." -Linus
They are not Marxists, of course. Linus and ESR have no idea how to run profitable business ( I don't think Linus cares about that much anyway.) ESR likes to present himself as sort of business advisor for people and companies new to GPL. He is all about theory and not much about practice. RMS is , on the other hand, quite dangerous. If he got his way we would all be forced to use GPL (copyright completely eliminated) and that is just plain madness on the same level as Marxism, Communism.
Very good. But the key is what you typed in bold, "NON-COERSIVE." That is the test that proves that free software or OSS is neither communism nor its subsuming category, fascism.
rm -rf microsoft*
Where the Communism is (Score:2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 10, @12:55PM EDT (#98)
Free Software is not Communism as it stands now, but the idea that a person who has not earned it has a “right” to software written by somebody else is espoused by Richard Stallman, and is communistic. His GNU philosophy page suggests that the GPL is only a compromise, an interim solution, so that his system can be realized in part while copyright law is still in force. But his ultimate aim, he explains, is to eliminate copyright law altogether. The world that would be created by such a change presents quite a different picture from the way things are now.
As the GPL is now, people are asked to place their programs under it voluntarily. Some people can afford to, and they like to show off their programs, so they do. As long as that voluntary spirit continues, no one’s rights are violated — not those of authors, not those of users, not even those of businesses, who have no right to stop competition of any kind (and if they have any confidence in their own abilities, they don’t ask for any). It’s all rather benevolent, in fact; competition is in the spirit of play.
But when Richard Stallman says that copyright law should be eliminated, he’s saying that programmers should not have any choice about how to make money from their coding — or, more accurately, that they should have only one: “write Free code, or do not write at all.” Some people could code anyway, the same way they do now, but there would be a difference: their choice to do so would now be meaningless.
Also, all the most popular non-free software would vanish, and John Carmack would be out of a job... and any job he could get would pay much less. By what right do people ask this of him — but worse, by what right do they dare take it without asking?
If copyright is eliminated, what becomes of the rights of people who create software in the first place? Suddenly anybody who sees code can copy it. So coders have to code in secret, so nobody steals their work in progress; they have to make it arcane, so they can charge for teaching about it; they have to find rich sponsors who are willing to pay all in advance, lest someone steal their work in progress, complete it, and present it for the same payment before they do... and how rich will these patrons be, considering that much of the riches of this century were made selling proprietary software! Thus, software publishers and their writers are “sacrificed for the public good.”
Remember, the communists sought to establish “freedom,” too, in their own way, by sacrificing certain other individual rights in the name of the public good. But the public good cannot be achieved through sacrificing some people to others. There is no right to take the fruits of someone else’s labor. It is beside the point whether those “fruits” really are fruits, or durable goods, or intellectual goods (which are the most durable of all). You have to have the owners’ consent to use his property. If other people don’t need your consent to take the fruits of your labor — then you’re their slave. And the idea of a “right to enslave” makes a mockery of the idea of natural, equal, inalienable rights.
As things are now, no one has any right to stop you from giving away the software that you wrote, based on your own ideas. Because of that, Open Source software is here to stay, and it will always present powerful competition for any would-be monopolists who want to set arbitrarily high prices and restrictions. (Just like anybody else who offers lower prices and fewer restrictions.) However, no one has any right to force you to give your work away, either. And that is the way it should stay!
If you want to sell licenses for money, and you think you can beat the risk of Free Software writing a clone (which actually isn't too hard, considering how many commercial programs there are that still haven’t been cloned), go ahead. When that right dies, the real Free Software that everybody knows and loves dies with it.
— An Ayn-onymous Coward
Pagination (Score:0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 10, @01:06PM EDT (#108)
Chopped off the last three words and the byline... ouch!
a theory advocating elimination of private property
a system in which goods are owned in common and are available to all as needed
a totalitarian system of government in which a single authoritarian party controls state-owned means of production
a final stage of society in Marxist theory in which the state has withered away and economic goods are distributed equitably
Emphasis mine. I've only snipped irrelevent definitions.
So, in short, there are a few aspects of Communism which the Free Software movement shares. But by and large, we're the diametric opposite of Communists: we hate central authority and control, we like owning our own computers and choosing which OSes we run, and we don't like serving other people. We serve ourselves. We code for ourselves.
In stark contrast:
2 a : a person who upholds the principles of absolute and unrestricted liberty especially of thought and action
I think that describes us pretty well. It's the definition of Libertarian.
I have a theory about the reason that Open Source is succeeding and also attracting a sizable libertarian contingient. Your points about dislike of central control are certainly on the mark. However, it is very simple once stated. The net has made possible an interesting phenomenon. It has lowered the cost of sharing work in a collaborative way. The marginal cost to me of one more person downloading something I put on the net is negligible. At the same time, it has slightly raised the marginal benefit of having additional users by making it easier for them so contribute (bug reports or fixes, etc.). Suddenly, for all sort of projects that could not be cost effectively done this way, the impediments are gone.
Exactly. It all loops back to people being happier when they're working for their own good in collaboration with others. The others serve as a check on errors (bugs), and it's really easy to get them involved - but the primary purpose of any open-source project is to get the damned thing done, and make it the best it can be.
The open source movement exists because people want better software.
Some people say that communism as a theory and communism as it was practiced by Lennon, Stalin, Mao, etc. are two different things -- that pure communism is a wonderful, but possibly impractical, idea that has never been put into practice. But, eliminating private property and having the state own the means of production don't seem like such nice ideas to me, even if they were practical. If Webster's definition is correct, there are fundamental problems with communism as an ideology, not just with the way it has been practiced.
Some of RMS' statements do hint at mild communism. For example, he said in a magazine interview that he didn't care whether proprietary software went away, or was banned by law. Well, I certainly do care! Banning proprietary software (a form of private property, I believe) would be a form of communism. Also, I think I read somewhere that RMS once proposed a hardware tax, with the profits going to support free software development. Presumably the government or some quasi-gonvernmental body would control the means of such software production.
I do not, however, uphold the principles of absolute and unrestricted liberty. Promoting the virtue of liberty above all others, including life and community, just doesn't make sense. Justice requires more of a balancing act.
Pure capitalism does not provide an adequate program for society, either. Fortunately, it has probablly never been practiced in its pure form. Capitalism needs to be augmented with citizens who have a sense of civic duty, and private institutions to support charitable activity. The government can encourage this activity up to a point, but if the government conducts too much of this activity itself, it takes away people's freedom for meaningful communal activity, and often botches the job.
Giving away software is one such activity -- meaningful when you do it on your own initiative, restrictive when everyone is forced to do it.
There are a lot of problems with the discussion of "Communism" taking place here, a major one is that the participants have only very sketchy knowledge of what Communism is (a trait they share with the author of the Salon article). I'd like to commend you for at least attempting to introduce definitions. However, the dictionary definitions are inadequate. Communism has actually been quite diverse, especially considering attempts by totalitarian leaders to enforce absolute ideological control. Communism in Hungary, Tito's Yugoslavia, and Hoxha's Albania were all quite different, and the philosophies and policies were definitely far removed from those of Communist political leaders in Western countries (where these parties still endure, and can sometimes have decisive influence over coalition governments, such as in Italy). In the past Communism was even adopted philosophically by some late 19th and early 20th-century Anarchists. So, at one time at least there was a strain of Communist thought that did not depend on central, dictatorial control. As far as Marx goes, I see aspects of his analysis which are quite interesting to apply to the Open Source movement (esp. regarding the nature of production and exchange). But that doesn't make Open Source "Communist". And just because it is not "Communist" does not mean that it is "Capitalist" either. It does function within a so-called "free market" system, but so do chess tournaments, squaredances and addiction support groups. Are they Capitalist? Libertarian? And the trait of self-reliance ("we code for ourselves") is not necessarily inherently Libertarian either. Self-reliance is a personality trait.
So here is his summary of the similarities between Soviet Communism and Open Source, with my comments interspersed:
Although the Soviet Union has long disappeared, the proponents of the Californian ideology are still appropriating the theoretical legacy of Stalinist communism:
vanguard party digerati
I don't know about the rest of you, but I don't take anyone who uses the term "digerati" seriously.
The Five-Year Plan The New Paradigm
What New Paradigm? Five-Year Plans were made from above and imposed from above. The whole idea of paradigm shifts is that good ideas stand on their own merits. They out-perform the competition.
boy-meets-tractor nerd-meets-Net
Geek laughs out loud!
Third International Third Wave
Third generation language? Come on, the coincidence of the word "third" is not enough to prove a connection.
Moscow Silicon Valley
There are always places where interesting things are happening. With Open Source, they include Finland, Cambridge MA, and a few thousand others. It is decentralized. That was hardly true of Soviet Communism. It takes advantage of and values local knowledge. It gives power to any individual who wants it to control his own computing and share the benefits if he decides to.
Pravda Wired
Except that there was no room for Pravda to be superceded by anything. Slashdot has surplanted Wired in many respects.
party line unique thought
Oh yeah. I can see how authoritarian dictatorship and individual freedom are really just the same thing. ;-)
Soviet democracy electronic town halls
'Scuse me? I wasn't aware we were passing the power over to an online democratic authority any more than we do in the physical world.
Lysenkoism memetics
I can't refute this one. I'm not sure what he is getting at.
society-as-factory society-as-hive
Oh yeah. A factory produces many of the same thing over and over again. Society-as-hive doesn't fit open source. Certainly, we're collaborative. But it isn't the interchangibility of individuals that is stressed. Instead it is the sum of the many unique contributions we make.
New Soviet Man post-humans
Okay, idealists of all stripes have believed that their ideals would improve the lot of mankind.
Stakhanovite norm-busting overworked contract labour
Every change is a change. Every revolution is a rejection of the status quo. Wanting something different does not make someone the same as everyone else who has ever wanted something different.
purges downsizing
When has an Open Source project downsized anyone?
Russian nationalism Californian chauvinism
Oh yeah, everyone I know in the Open Source movement is in California or wants to be.
He has confused Open Source and corporate empires built around software businesses. After mixing the two and calling them one, he wants to equate disparate features of both with Soviet communism. This shows a lack of understanding of the subject.
Does this article not remind you of the gadfly ivory tower pinhead debate scene in _Cryptonomicon_?
Communism is no more applicable to Internet culture of free information than capitalism is. Both of those socio-economic models are outdated crap based on Malthus' original fallacy of scarcity - the idea that there is only so much stuff to go around, so we must all fight each other for our share. Rather than looting the threadbare intellectual corpses of Karl Marx and Adam Smith, they should try reading something *relevant*, like R. Buckminster Fuller's _The Critical Path_.
Ivory tower leftists declaring victory on the 'net is as irrelevant and silly as Wall Street capitalists declaring victory. Neither side won - WE won. They just don't know it yet. --- Ex-Windows users are rude, because they never learned friendliness, stability, maturity, or expressiveness.
As a modest contributor of Open Source (cpuburn http://users.ev1.net/~redelm ), I must strongly disagree with Mr Leonard.
I wrote code, and decided to release it GPL. I know exactly why I did this, and "the good of the masses" was very far down the list. First, the foregone income was negligible. Second, I wanted help improving my code. Third, I wanted some praise. Fourth, the effort of publication was minimal. Fifth, I wanted to give back to the OS community that had given me so much.
Note that communism in practice always requires heavy compulsion to redistribute goods. OS uses none. Had anyone tried any, my code would be in the bitbucket. Perhaps the OS world looks utopian, but it has nothing to do with "to each according to his needs, from each according to his abilities".
Many people admit that Communism is dead, but they often say they'd like it if it weren't tied to that totalitarian government it always seems bundled with.
But Communism can't come without that totalitarian government, much as Exploder can't come without Windows. The system does not work without a state to enforce it (much as Exploder wouldn't own the browser market if it weren't bundled with Windows; pardon the stretched analogy).
Communism requires people to work for the good of each other, not for themselves. Capitalism requires people to work for themselves to survive. This is the simple, straightforward difference between the two systems, but many people have a hard time grasping it.
Would you trust other people to harvest the raw materials that'll put food on your table? Or would you rather do it yourself?
Most people, including myself, answer "Give me the plowshare!" to the above. Once I'm done feeding myself, I've got no problem helping my neighbor harvest his crop, but only after I've got a full stomach. So, in Communist nations, the Government sticks a gun to your back while you harvest your neighbor's crop.
Linux wasn't created like this. People wrote software for themselves - whether they were just creating utilities for their own use, or they got a "natural high" from helping other people, they had their own interests at heart. And they hate central authority.
We're anarcho-libertarians. The exact opposite of Communists.
I think that Marx assumed that an economy (thanks to capitalism) capable of basically taking care of everyone would be a neccesary precursor to Communism. So you would need a culture of abundance, not scarcity. So I'm not sure that your argument applies.
I think when we are really free, then we can gradually afford to be generous and willingly give away the products of our minds and efforts. But this process will develop naturally, has to be entirely voluntary and can't be forced in any way. This is where all the so-called communists dictators got it wrong.
We're anarcho-libertarians. The exact same thing as Communists.
We're anarcho-libertarians. The exact same thing as Communists.
Sorry. This is a stretch. "Communist" contains the word "Commune", or a group of people who all work to create software for each others' computers, and not voluntarily at that. I and other "techno-literate libertarians" write my own software, and (because it doesn't hurt me) give it away as an afterthought.
"Communist" contains the word "Commune", or a group of people who all work to create software for each others' computers, and not voluntarily at that.
Where do you get that? That's not implied in 'pure' (whatever that means) Communism at all. And I think your modern use of commune and semantic definition of communism kind of miss the point.
But I agree that attitude or intention is important, if you will. And I don't think that most people give software away just as an afterthought. I think its actually motivating and nice to be able to just give something away, knowing that other people will find it useful, don't you think. Perhaps some people really do just realease freeware as an afterthought, but for a lot of folks its a real statement, not just of alturism, but ideals.
In any case, it does take some of you rtime and energy to give software away. Even if its just to ftp it somewhere, that's some effort that you're putting in that is providing no incremental benefit to you at all! In reality, you probably put more care and features into it knowing that other people will see and use it.
IMO, a lot of people have taken Ayn Rand, who had a lot of good things to say so much to heart that they're ideoligcally offended by basic genoristy. I don't think this is or should be the real libertarian ideal.
I don't really understand what all the fuss is about. From what I remember of economic analysis - to my mind at least - the whole idea of open/free software makes good sense economically. It is generally accepted that in some situations trying to charge people to use some good/service is quite wasteful. For example a park. The park itself is worth quite a bit of money and it's not all that cheap to run either. However trying to charge everyone who uses the park (with all it's entrances etc) would be quite expensive - far far more than the additional maintenance cost due to having just one more visitor. By drawing a few funky little micro economic graphs you can actually prove that this is a very waste full solution. A better solution it to make the park what economists call a "public good". Bascially, it's much more efficient to pay for the thing with a little extra tax (simply add 0.5% to the tax rate) and then let everyone enjoy the thing! The very expensive task of collecting thousands of tiny payments for each person walking into the park is now no longer required. I see open source software as being in the same category - in fact I think it's an even more extreme example of something that should be a public good as in this case the additional cost of one more consumer of the product is extremely close to zero. click click down load .. all done! In the long run, charging for something like a browser simply doesn't make economic sense. Products which are very niche however are a completely different story. Then it's much more efficient to charge the 20 or so people who actually want to use the thing. So how's this for a proposal - perhaps taxes should help fund (in a small way) the development of open source software as it's really for the good of *all society* that we have it freely available. For a small cost we are all much richer.
And what if people don't use open source software, should they have to pay taxes too? What percentage of the taxes would have to pay for committies and departments to make sure that the money was distributed correctly? Do you really trust the government to handle the money for you? Why not just cut out the middleman? Storm Shadow
The vast majority of open source projects have nothing to do with gifts, communism, or helping others. They have more to do with destroying microsoft, or boosting one's ego. Getting "fame". Trying to use open-source as an example of Marxism that works is merely a bait-and-switch game. Most of the people developing open-source are not using it to feed themselves, and if OSS was really determining these coders' ability to pay rent, we'd see how "generous" they really are with their time. The fundamental "scarce" resource managed by a modern capitalist system is not MATERIAL used to build products, but HUMAN TIME. This is especially true in service-dominated economies. Human time is is scarce. Marxism can only be imposed by government force. Even the "socialist" European states amount to little more than a capitalist system with government redistribution used to pay for a few programs. If that's Marxism, then the US is Marxist for having public education and roads. I still see plenty of Canadian and European millionaires and billionaires. I see stock markets abuzz, and startup companies with venture investment. In short, capital based economics with classes. Marxist economics is a failure both in the real world, and in the cyberworld. A great example is the "warez" culture, or cracker culture, where warez and hacks are traded as currency, as well as personal reputation capital. But the open-source ego cultural is another example of good ole fashion human selfishness put to work for the benefit of others. Sorry to burst the feel good bubble amount the Marx groupies, but the internet has not changed the world's economy and OSS is not going to change the world. Grow up.
The vast majority of open source projects have nothing to do with gifts, communism, or helping others.
They have more to do with destroying microsoft, or boosting one's ego. Getting "fame".
Trying to use open-source as an example of Marxism that works is merely a bait-and-switch game. Most of the people developing open-source are not using it to feed themselves, and if OSS was really determining these coders' ability to pay rent, we'd see how "generous" they really are with their time.
The fundamental "scarce" resource managed by a modern capitalist system is not MATERIAL used to build products, but HUMAN TIME. This is especially true in service-dominated economies. Human time is is scarce.
Marxism can only be imposed by government force. Even the "socialist" European states amount to little more than a capitalist system with government redistribution used to pay for a few programs. If that's Marxism, then the US is Marxist for having public education and roads.
I still see plenty of Canadian and European millionaires and billionaires. I see stock markets abuzz, and startup companies with venture investment. In short, capital based economics with classes. Marxist economics is a failure both in the real world, and in the cyberworld.
A great example is the "warez" culture, or cracker culture, where warez and hacks are traded as currency, as well as personal reputation capital.
But the open-source ego cultural is another example of good ole fashion human selfishness put to work for the benefit of others.
Sorry to burst the feel good bubble amount the Marx groupies, but the internet has not changed the world's economy and OSS is not going to change the world. Grow up.
The open source community that is giving away its hard work is not an indication of some internet based marxist revolution. Essentially it is an extension of the basic notions of charity which exist in current culture.
Why do we give to charity? Because it makes us feel good. Because it makes us look cooler amongst our peers. Because it makes our company look like it cares (although usually a marketing gimic). It is the same thing here. Some people decide that they will use their hacker talents to create software only for the satisfaction of doing so.
Overall this in not changing the fundamental economic model, it is just shifting it slightly. Now companies are looking to give away code and sell the support, or are selling proprietary closed solutions that make use of the underlying open software.
This is not the revolution, just the evolution...
--- What would happen if there were no hypothetical situations?
Open Source software relies on people who do other things for money. Most of these people write code for money. The fact that they don't need to be paid for everything they do in no way detracts from the fact that they need to be paid. How can participants in the capitalist system kill that system?
OSS exists outside the political spectrum. You could have it in a communist system, a capitalist system, or complete anarchy. But in each of these, the participants need a means to feed themselves first, or they won't feel so giving.
Using Microsoft software is like having unprotected sex. Sooner or later, you get infected.
this gentleman is quite a stirring writer,as seen by the threads so far.however,i find it to seem like ranting held up by a framework of fuzzy research.my first clue was the innacurate history of tom jefferson. granted,he was a slave owner.in a time when the country was new,land needed heavy clearing and many to farm it,the slaves were here anyway with no end to their import in sight. it is easy to see tom meant that he abhorred slavery when you understand that his slaves were treated far better than their contemporaries. it was more a case of a "schindlers list"scenario.but that doesnt make good copy for todays media.read the history.dont be a victim of the P.C.(pollitically correct) so when you are called communist slave-owning elitests bent on anarchy by a rant and roll star at salon,dont take it too personally. wonder instead,what motivation salon has in stirring up the open source community. now relax,stop by http://www.subgenius.com and get right with Bob before the conspiracy takes all your slack.
No matter how much some of you would like to equate the two, it won't happen. As previously commented -
Democracy assists in the preservation of freedom, but doesn't not ensure it
The US is already stepping in the direction of mob rule. More politicians are concerned with various issues rathen than be concerned with the most fundamental issue of all - the preservation of individual freedoms.
It drives me absolutely friggin' nuts when I see people say things like "It's not communist; it's democratic" and vice versa.
Communism is an *economic* system, like capitalism. Democracy is a political system, like totalitarianism.
That said, I have problems with any comparison of a "gift culture" to communism. One of the basic tenets of communicsm is "From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs." It's a two-way street, and a gift, by definition, is a one-way deal. Nobody is making sure that writers of open-source software are given *anything* in return, and that's where any comparison to communism will fall apart. -- Remember when a firewall was a car part?
I don't know what you call the free software movement. The problem with labeling it as an -ism is that there are too many assumptions made with the various -isms. So to avoid obvious bias, let's not call the free software movement any -ism, okay?
But another question I have is if the free software movement should be labeled as an -ism? I mean it is arguable at best to describe the free software movement an economic system. And I truly doubt it is political.
Software is a unique product where there is infinite supply and the total cost is research and development. So it is basicly create once copy forever. I don't think there is an economic system that deals with this. Most economic systems assume there is finite supply and sale is because of necessity. If you can't copy it freely you need to charge for it because not everyone can own the same product at once.
I think that software should developed by people who get paid by the government because the software benefits everyone else.
-- Think twice or not at all
RED hat (Score:1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 10, @02:33PM EDT (#175)
come on people RED hat .. RED!! think about it!! red hat is a communist operation thats only a plague on us americans!!
I wrote an article on this before... This is just a sticking point with me ;-) http://linuxtoday.com/stories/9052.html Linux... The inevitable defeat of inferior companies like Microsoft is living proof that the laws of natural selection still are effective
"From each according to his abilities to each according to his work." (trotsky) - how is this different to open source stuff - those who can code it do it, those who can't download it.
I suspect that we will only realise what a revolutionary period we are living in at some point in the future.
I think that the logical extension of free softwear isfree beer. And the logical extension os that is free everything :-)
It'll dawn on everybody at some point that the best way to organise society is for everybody to do what ever they want - that is true communism. It's FA to do with the USSR or any of that shit.
The argument against that is "who will empty the bins or clean the sewers" - it's simple if nobody> want's to do it then just throw enought resources against it and have robtic bins which empty themselves.
Open source software is the very interesting in as much as it seems to be to be the only example of the free association of the producers and consumers which has ever come about under capitalism.
the revolution will not be televised... it'll be live
damn, i must remember not to post when pissed, and to spell check and that kind of stuff, it's not work it's ability:
To characterize the Communist society, Marx employed the famous formula: "From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs." The two parts of this formula are inseparable. "From each according to his abilities," in the Communist, not the capitalist, sense, means: Work has now ceased to be an obligation, and has become an individual need; society has no further use for any compulsion. Only sick and abnormal persons will refuse to work. Working "according to their ability" -- that is, in accord with their physical and psychic powers, without any violence to themselves -- the members of the commune will, thanks to a high technique, sufficiently fill up the stores of society so that society can generously endow each and all "according to their needs," without humiliating control. This two-sided but indivisible formula of communism thus assumes abundance, equality, an all-sided development of personality, and a high cultural discipline.
OSS is capitalism, there are the suckers who treat it like communism and give it out freely. Then there are those who live in reality and make millions off of the sucker's work. Thousands work for free and make a few extremely wealthy. Thats capitalism!
I think we miss a big point in these arguments when we compare the *ideal* of communism to the reality. Most dicussions involving communism that I get into end up along the lines of,
a) "Communism is evil, cf: Russia, Stalin, Cuba"
b) "Communism is impossible, cf: The Former USSR, Cuba, China, human nature."
c) "Communism is unnatural, like sodomy and oral sex" (this one I won't even go into...)
But hold on - aren't all these examples the result of an abuse of power? What people are referring to in these cases is not a failure of the ideal of communism, but a failure of the implementation of it - one reason why I think Marxism leaves a lot to be desired. You can't change people's philosophy by kicking them in the pants.
I'm not fond of the idea that capitalism *is* "human nature", and I'm sure many of you share that opinion - which is why I think the OSS movement has such wonderful anti-capitalist propensities.
If you don't share that opinion, and believe capitalism is the be-all and end-all of human freedom (and that OSS is simply an extension of that freedom), think carefully:
Under capitalism, how can the freedoms of the community be reconciled by the overpowering freedom of the individual? Can they?
I don't think so. Free sofware is about freedom. Many companies make a good bit of money off of free software in a totally democractic way. Free Software just makes sure that others have the freedom to do what they want with it. It is also the freedom of information that is sought by free software. If it wasn't for open source software, what would young computer scientists look to for real world examples. Freedom of information and freedom to customize what you own doesn't sound like a communistic ideal. In fact, the last I checked, freedom of information was something communism tried to suffocate. Plus, it is voluntary. When was the last time a communist dictator politely asked the people if he could volunteer to run their lives?
_________________________ Words of Wisdom: Never pet a burning dog.
Communism is simple, perfect, and not doable in the real world. The theory is great, but people's greed never allows it to work. It will work for awhile, and then crumble. (Cross reference USSR, communes, etc.) But in software, where it costs noone any money to duplicate software, it can work. But people don't want to call GNU, *BSD, Linux, etc "Software Communism," because of the connotations of the word "communism." But think: It is the efforts of all going to help all, ie, Alan Cox makes a SCSI driver. Now every one has access to that SCSI driver; it has gone into the collective pool. Now in physical communism, the pool grows and shrinks, depending on how many people add work, food, money, etc, and how many people take these things out. But in software, the pool can only grow. So when I download a SCSI driver, it doesn't prevent anyone else from downloading the same driver.
http://www.bombcar.com It's where it is at. -D__SMP__
The point of the matter here is the word freedom. Linus himself has even said that the Free in Free Software also means Freedom. Communism does not support freedom. All of the nice growing pools and stuff don't count for much against that. Perhaps people have forgotten what all of this is about. People volunteer for this. If Alax Cox writes a SCSI driver, I have the freedom to choose to help with that or go write something else, or even write my own SCSI driver. In communism, you are told what you will do. No freedom there. Just because people don't usually ask for money, that doesn't make it communism. _________________________ Words of Wisdom: Never pet a burning dog.
Re:It is communism (Score:0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 10, @11:45AM EDT (#18)
Why should I do something for others and not expect payment of some sort in return? That's the problem too many of communistic proponents have. They think that you should work and donate your output to an economy even though there are those within that same economy who choose not to work. This is why I always hated "teams" in school. You get assigned a project and then assigned a team to work in. It always worked out that I did all the work and everyone else in the "team" stole my work and profited from it(receiving a team score of grade A etc)
> This is why I always hated "teams" in school. >You get assigned a project and then assigned a team to work in. >It always worked out that I did all the work and everyone else > in the "team" stole my work and profited from it(receiving a team score of grade A etc).
Your writing seems to indicate that you consider monetary compensation the only reward for a contribution to a larger project. Group projects can be lop-sided in school. However, once you are a professional in the real world, I think you will grow to realize that effort for others without obvious compensation can in fact be very valuable. This is a difficult thing to clearly describe, but in short, what goes around, comes around.
I do happen to work in the real world. I am not in a position to expect any sort of compensation other than monetary. So, I guess thats all I can understand with relevance to my position.
There are other sorts of compensation besides monetary, even in the "real world." The satisfaction of a job well done, the respect of your colleagues, etc. Have you ever given to someone without expecting something in return?
It has been my experience that life is not a zero-sum game: if one wins, it is not automatic that someone else loses. Likewise, one can "win" in all sorts of ways that don't result in more money in your pocket.
Perhaps you forgot the donation part. GPL does not have people go out and take other's rights away. If I write a cool piece of software, I can DONATE it to GPL if I wish. Or, I can sell it. Or, I can sell it and make the source available to others I wish. Tell me how that involves communism. _________________________ Words of Wisdom: Never pet a burning dog.
Actually you are still the copywrite holder of the software. The GPL isn't like releasing something into the public domain (which by doing you actually do lose all rights). You can release the same version of the same software with another license. If somebody else takes your GPL'ed code they must release under the GPL(this is the virus like nature of it), but you don't have to. Your next version could be under the WSL(warmi Software Lisence). You do surrender some rights, but you should probably know exactly what your rights under any software lisence you use.
That's true. But once something is GPL, everybody can benefit from my work, regardless of their contribution to the "system". This is precisely why communism doesn't work.
That's true. But once something is GPL, everybody can benefit from my work, regardless of their contribution to the "system". This is precisely why communism doesn't work.
I'm confused. I haven't written any Linux code, and I am certainly benefitting from it. And yet, open source software certainly seems to be working. As far as communism goes, I thought the idea was that everyone contributes, and everyone gains (at least in the ideal). That sounds pretty good to me. Mind you, the attempts at practical implementation have been disappointing (to say the least).
The idea is quite nice but unfortunately unworkable. In this scenario the main driving force , greed, is gone and people being what they are, there will be extremely large surplus of those who want to benefit without contributing anything to the system. Right now it works because most of the free software is being financed by old fashioned proprietary businesses (really, most of the programmers involved in writing various open source projects have daily jobs working for commercial entities and therefore can afford writing free software.)
Bullshit. Natural science research involves sharing ideas in the same fashion as the Open Source software and it has nothing to do with communism and, I would claim, is quite succesful in the last few centuries. You can get a scientific journal and develop an idea introduced by somebody else without any permissions whatsoever. That coexists quite happily with proprietory technology development. The same with software, now there is common "science" part, and "technology" proprietory part. Principles of knowledge sharing and peer review are much older than communism. That's how human culture works.
No they don't yet. But, according to RMS, ultimate goal is to do away with copyright laws and thus forcing everybody to release under GPL. Read his stuff, if you don't belive me.
I am probably gonna get flamed for this... I don't believe that Free Software is about Freedom. Freedom is a very, very important word to be used for anything materialistic , i.e. redundant (think of it this way: would you rather live without software or without freedom?).
Having said that, I thingk that Free Software makes sense; it ultimately brings the good engineering practices of other specialties (mechanical, electrical engineering, etc) to software. Case in point: if Mr. Benz (one of the earliest internal combustion engine makers) made his first engines in such a way that the mechanics were hidden from the outside, would we have the same level of automotive technology today? I doubt it. Free Software allows software engineers to adapt other people's work to their own, much like 'hardware' engineers can...
By extending this one step further though, you can argue that Free Software is ultimately capitalistic: it levels the playing field for any newcomer to adapt existing technological infrastructure and enter the market succesfully (and, most importantly profit personally from it).
OTOH, a software monopoly, like MS's is much more like communism: a central, 'benevolent' authority distributes the same service/goods to everybody, making everybody 'equal', making the quality of the services/good irrelevant.
In one word, as someone else posted, hogwash...
engineers never lie; we just approximate the truth.
Not to rain on parades here, but freedom of information is nearly an ideal of communism. Albeit a roundabout way, no one really "owns" information if it is in the general public. Communism (True communism I should say) does not allow anyone to own property, thus the root word commune, or communal.
Take this a step further and if we (at least our govt.) says people can own ideas (IP Law...) then in a communistic sense, no one can claim ownership of ideas, thus if ideas are in the general public, they are free.
The problem with Americans (in general, cause I am an American and I have learned what communism is about) is that they look at the great socialist experiment that took place in the former Soviet Union (United Soviet Socialist Republic, anyone see that???) and mislabel it since generally Lenin was a Communist reformer. Unfortunately, Stalin wasn't, and we all see where that led Trotsky (a red fellow of Lenin's).
Now, furthermore, I have never found a communist dictator in history.
To share my own opinion about the article, personally I have to agree with the previously stated post that this community works more in the nepotistic sense (check that previous post for full details). We take in those who can, pardon the expression, hack it and generally exclude those who choose not to. How many articles have we read where the focus is usability, not cool gizmos, being the key to domination? How many "But can my mom use it...?" articles?
The sheer truth is that even though we may pride ourselves (and why Barbrook picks up the term???) as a gift community, we actually work to comprise strict division lines like "Oh, you use Windows..." and look down upon them. My fellow CS majors think I'm crazy (since our school is primarily on an NT network) cause I don't have a single box that does windows. They even dual boot. So obviously, there is some line that is drawn between us, even though I don't recall being an OS bigot and putting it there.
So, in all honesty, it's a big in-joke. We get it, people like Barbrook try to get it (and sometimes Katz can fall in that category), and then there's the people who don't even try. They don't care.
Plain and simple, it's not communist because the community is not truly inclusive of the whole population, not even the whole population of computer users.
Now, furthermore, I have never found a communist dictator in history.
Well, no, they are contradictory terms. However, as Orwell is so adept at pointing out, this has a way of taking shape.
Stalin used Marxist ideas as a means of having absolute control (dictator), which by all means, he did have.
The thing behind communism (not necesarily Marxism) is that there does need to be a revolution by the people. However, there needs to be a leader... then, there needs to be a system (government) put in place that will implement the seeds of Marxism, until government is no longer necesary and a true anarchy reigns.
My point is, is that almost all dictators throughout history have risen to power sporting Marxist ideals. They are doing this to over throw the tyranical government, in order to give the *people* power. In order to accomplish these goals, they argue the need for absolute control! These contradictions/double-think are the largest problems with communism.
"When does communist == dictator? Communism had nothing to do with fascism, until Lenin came along that is!!"
When does dictatorship == facism? Marx called for a time when a dictatorship is necessary, until everyone "gets with the program" (if I recall my Marxist Thought class correctly). Unless you are talking about some form of non-Marxist communism.
Just more evidence that Al Gore is the father of the internet !!!
Hogwash. (Score:0) by Stormbringer on Friday September 10, @11:33AM EDT (#10) (User Info)
It's as capitalist as the Gillette safety razor, as American as barn-raising.
One other little distinction: communism, instituted by force, failed wherever it was tried. Open-source, appealing to rational self-interest, is winning.
Countless numbers of people use substandard software in a futile attempt at making themselves appear smarter than everyone else, because the software itself is inherently difficult to use. They also contribute to a "group" project(In the form of drivers etc) and expect nothing in return for their efforts,, now that IS NOT rational!!
There is nothing inherently capitalist or American about the open-source movement. To me, freely contributing for the good of the greater community smacks of socialism; focusing on one's own preservation, productivity, and success seems more aligned with capitalist ideologies.
What it comes down to is this: open-source contibutors write code for different reasons. Some do it for personal satisfaction, name recognition, or because it is a challenge. Others decide to use their skills to help those who aren't as well trained or gifted, or because the enjoy being part of a massive revolutionary movement. This combination of self-satisfaction combined with actively participating in a interdependent social structure does not fall very neatly into either the socialist/communist or capitalist paradigms. And it definately is not unique to America or its people.
Re:It is communism (Score:0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 10, @11:49AM EDT (#29)
GPL is pretty communist. :D The BSD-style licensing love great OSes. Think about it (seriously) Code licensed under the BSD-style license can be used to improve every OS. Isn't that what you people want? _EVERYONE_ to run a good OS? Your Free OS gets improved. The commerical OS gets improved. Win-win, no? plus noone develops for a GPL'd project that doesn't believe in free software: so there isn't any more of a fear of abandonment.
MS Haters use Linux. Good OS lovers use FreeBSD
(posted by a regular user who has to worry about karma) _I DO NOT REPRESENT ANYONE BUT MYSELF_
Let's see... exactly how does the popularity of free and open source software equate to mass ownership and control of the means of production?
What are the means of production in this case? The programming languages? The compilers? The hardware? The knowledge and experience of programmers, documentation writers, designers, and software engineers? A $20/month Internet connection? MAE-East? Cisco?
If he'd framed his thoughts in the "Intellectual Property vs. Human Achievement" debate, perhaps he'd have some modicum of a point.
Otherwise, you're stuck on the slippery slope that says that derivation and trigonometry tables are communism, self-help books are communism, do-it-yourself videos are communism....
I think the moral of this story is: Just because you aren't getting paid or receiving other benefits from open source/free software doesn't mean that no one else is -- or that everyone else would turn it down out of political or economic principles.
I've come to believe that some people have so much hatred for capitalism that they're willing to see positives in communism where they don't even exist.
Open source is no more "communist" in nature than recipe exchanges are. On the contrary, I see it as quite the capitalist venture.
The reason these open source projects come about is because there is demand for them, and demand begets supply.
Some people, though, don't require the return on their investment to necessarily be money. If you gain a tool that takes care of a job you need to do, then you've gotten your value. Open source allows you to get that value by gaining access to the work of others. If you're going to go this route, however, you are expected to help the movement along in some way.
Better products at a lower price. That's capitalism at its finest.
Of course, open source is hardly the only way you can go. That's another great thing about the capitalist system. Communists don't need choices :)
Of course, I'm willing to pay for good software. That's why I spent good money on OS/2 and OS/2 applications as long as it met my needs. The good software, though, is now available at a better price. I can get it free.
Microsoft, on the other hand, is making software that doesn't quite measure up to my needs, is problematic for many of my needs, is very hard to configure for my needs, and costs hundreds or even thousands of dollars to purchase the software needed to meet my needs.
Anyone who has seen what communism and other controlled economy simulations can do to a country can see that M$ is easily the best choice for communists :)
The actual political system to which we should be comparing free software is Marxism (Karl Marx), Communism is the term used for the Marxist-based-Dictatorships we see in places like China or the old USSR. In communism, everybody is equal, except the ruling class who get special privilidges.
In Marxism everybody is equal. period. There is no special treatment or President-for-Life, just honest working people who contribute specialized skills or products to society in exchange for the basic necessities of life, and then some.
As for contribiting and not being paid.. First of all: Isn't the fact that you're making the world a better place payment enough? Secondly: If nobody contribited then you wouldn't have that CD-ROM driver your using on your Linux box, you gotta give to get.
If this was satire, I'm afraid you forgot that there's lots of people who hold this exact opinion in all seriousness. As Usenet discovered long ago, you can't parody the real loonies.
If you actually meant it... well, there's not much I can say to a blithering bigot like that.
Posted by Hemos on Friday September 10, @03:11PM EDT
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