That's 'supersede', dude.
( defined in Playboys' Unabashed Dictionary as "Clark Kent's sperm" ).

It's massively annoying, what can I say? But it sells to shallow people who like to prove how deep they are.

Doc Hopper

• "What's that watermelon doing there?"
• "I'll tell you later."
• --Buckaroo Banzai, Across the 8th Dimension/L

I knew there was something snobby about those Mexican school children...

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.

Agreed.

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?

Remove the obvious in my sig to e-mail me.

That that is is that that is not is not.

Remove the obvious in my sig to e-mail me.

That that is is that that is not is not.

This isn't quite what Marx said, is it? Open Source is only communist towards the developers, not the users.

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.

Maybe the revolution will be televised after all.

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.)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I'm not saying it is, just getting annoyed of the (mandatory) communism-bashing..

(From a European)

Justin justo@linuxstart.com

Neither of them fit very well to describe what is happening in the free software world. It's sharing, and voluntary, so it's really its own thing.

It's not even really anarchist, as there is a legal structure (copyright) that enforces what you can and cannot do with source code.

Sort of libertarian or communitarian, maybe. The important point is that it's voluntary, at the individual level.

--
Interested in XFMail? New XFMail home page
KOffice project needs you!

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.

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.

So free software is antithetical to competition, therefore socialism is great?

I must have missed the part where Gosplan cancelled Gnome in favor of KDE, or ordered the people working on FreeBSD and the Hurd to switch to Linux.

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).